G is for Grandmothers

Some of my maternal grandmother's prize-winning embroidery
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2011

Glorious weather for November 11, on this, the day World War I ended in the centenary year of the start of the conflict. I wish my grandmother were alive to be here —my maternal one, as I barely knew my paternal one, who died when I was three. (In fact, my maternal grandmother’s reminiscence of her opposite number as “a kind lady and so cruelly and unfairly poor, whom I always pitied as she carried cans of kerosene down the road” forms the only information from my adolescence that I have of her other than what my father and his siblings said.) I have been thinking about my mother’s mother for several weeks, ever since I started looking into the family’s rather tenuous Scottish connection in the run-up to the referendum in Scotland a few weeks ago. She was the only one of my recent ancestors to be born with a Scottish surname, and although the thought of locating anything with a tartan on it probably never crossed her mind —at least in her married life— she made sure her children knew about it.

The area where I now live in Ontario, while partially settled by Mennonites and others from Pennsylvania, was the recipient of waves of Scottish emigration, from the early nineteenth century well into living memory.  The town down the road from us, Fergus, was named for its Scottish founder and hosts an annual  Scottish festival and holds a yearly “wear your tartan” day. A shop in town does a thriving business in British foods and Scottish clothes and memorabilia and will order anything in any tartan directly from Edinburgh. I went in there in mid-September and ordered the dress tartan version of the scarf with the assurance that I would have it by Remembrance Day, which is what Armistice Day, the American Veterans’ Day, is called in Canada and the UK.

Why would I want the tartan of my grandmother’s branch of the family in time for Remembrance Day? I am one of those Friends who views the red poppy, ubiquitous in these parts, as the equivalent to William Penn’s sword, but I wanted to wear something that might be relevant, however remotely, to a family member alive at the time of World War I. Every year I read Wilfred Owen’s poems “Schoolmistress” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” to my unsuspecting Latin students, explaining how jingoistic interpretations of poems by the Roman writer Horace (himself a hired mouthpiece of Caesar Augustus, who chafed at the bit only sotto voce) were part of a large-scale use of the Roman Empire as part of the propaganda for the empires on both sides in World War I. I would then say something to the effect of, regardless of what people thought about the war —and Owen, loyal to his men after being invalided out to the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers and writing such scathing poetry, returned to the front and died there a week before the armistice— they needed to consider the colossal loss of life and the consequences of World War I on the twentieth century and down to the twenty-first. Because of the enduring significance of ancient Greece and Rome for politicians in the last century, those who have studied any aspect of those cultures had a special responsibility to the debate.

My grandmother would have had a smattering of high school Latin; her husband, trained in theology at a reputable university, would have studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. But those facts were only tangential to my idea of acquiring some scrap of the tartan to wear to class around Remembrance Day. When I consider in what way World War I was relevant to my family, I think of my maternal grandmother, for whom that period set the tone for the rest of her long and complex life.  It was of seminal importance to my maternal grandfather, too; for reasons of his own (no one in the family belonged to a historic peace church) he was publicly and bitterly opposed to it and all other wars and managed to get out of going before a draft board primarily because the war was over shortly after a man well into his thirties was made eligible for the draft. (As far as I can determine, it was not a major factor in the line of my father’s family from which I am directly descended; my paternal grandfather was just a tad too young to serve.) Nevertheless, my grandmother became front and center of my thoughts because she in many ways was caught in the cross-hairs (so to speak) of the family events as affected by the larger situation. The fact the she and my grandfather married in 1913, at a time that looked reasonably auspicious for both herself and the world at large, despite some storm clouds on the horizon that eventually enveloped all, only added to its significance.

By mid-October, the tartan had not turned up. The story might have ended there except for one evening after work, when, caught in heavy traffic, I missed the turn-off to the expressway and ended up driving through the village of St. Jacobs, a community which, ironically, I tend to avoid because of traffic. There, on the south side of the road, was the St. Jacobs Scottish shop. I had been there several times, usually with my mother, but had never found anything relevant to us to buy. Since I was having to replace part of my wardrobe after the episode on the ladder (see my recent posts under “D” and “F”), it might be worth checking again to see what they had. I held out little hope of success, as my grandmother’s maiden name is not one of the more common Scottish surnames and the only time I had ever seen more than a swatch of the tartan occurred when I purchased a couple yards of its white dress version in Edinburgh in 1978.

About a week after my detour through St. Jacobs, I walked into the shop. In the middle of the store, immediately in the line of sight of any potential customer walking through the door,  hung the hunting version of the scarf in question. Although the surname is not in the middle of the alphabet (the scarves were alphabetized), for some reason it was in the front in the center of the display, as if someone had deliberately placed it there for me.

So I had the tartan. Two days ago, mindful of the fact that I would need to read Owen’s poems on Monday if at all (Remembrance Day is Tuesday this year, and I am teaching MWF this semester), I sat in Meeting for Worship, thinking of my grandmother and what I knew of her life during that period. Because she died when I was an undergraduate, there is much that I might have asked her in more recent years; still, I knew a great deal.

My knowledge fell into three categories: the consequences that my grandfather’s beliefs about the war and many other matters held for his career and family relationships, and the deaths of two family members: my grandparents’ first-born child (the only uncle I never met) the day after Christmas in 1917 and my grandmother’s next-oldest sister from the influenza pandemic that followed in the wake of World War I and which was even more lethal than the war itself.

Just before Christmas in 1917, my grandmother went by train with her three young children to the home of her parents. Unlike the rest of my immediate ancestors, who hailed from Vermont and New Hampshire, that grandmother was a native of a small town in another northeastern state. (She and my grandfather met when he was serving a nearby parish as a Universalist minister.) Trips home were an expensive and rare luxury, and the young family intended to make the most of it. Disaster struck on Christmas Day: her three-year-old son collapsed from spinal meningitis and died on December 26, before my grandfather was able to reach his bedside. My grandparents had lost their first child and at that time their only son; my great-grandparents had lost their first grandchild and their only grandson. Although the two daughters who were alive on that occasion both lived into their eighties, and despite having other children, including two more sons, all of whom became productive adults, my grandparents never completely got over the loss of their first-born. When my grandmother was asked in later years how many children she had, she invariably gave two numbers. Sometimes she added, “And he (the oldest) was the brightest of the lot,” looking around at whatever other family members who might be present, because these, the living descendants, were invariably dissecting the problems of the world as armchair Presidents while she spoke. Then, looking still more deeply at those around her, she would continue quietly, “I really should remember that my others all survived, when so many children in those days did not.”

 

Spirited, but generally respectful political discussions and a love of teacups:
a happier family legacy from my grandmother
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2015

At the end of 1917, however, my grandmother’s triumphs as a parent —in particular, her push to get her surviving children and even one of her sons-in-law into higher education, against the wishes of a husband who was not interested in his progeny benefitting from the advantages he himself had had— could not be foreseen. That was perhaps just as well, because the financial disasters that befell the family in the 1920’s and 1930’s were also just beginning at that time, and they might have appeared unendurable.

Ultimately, my grandparents and my two little aunts stayed with my great-grandparents for about a month, during which time all hell (to use the term advisedly) broke loose. “He and Grandpa (the children’s grandpa) argued for days about the Bolshevik Revolution,” my grandmother later said of her husband, referring to the Russian Revolution that had occurred a few weeks before their visit. “He was in favor of it, of course, being a socialist as well as a pacifist, while my father definitely was not. I kept expecting them to tell us to leave. I still find it hard to believe that they didn’t, particularly Grandpa.”

More difficulties were to come. My grandfather, who left his job as a minister after World War I broke out in Europe but before the United States became involved, was increasingly dissatisfied with his second and equally suitable career choice, teaching. Like the revolutionaries in Europe, he turned against the whole “capitalist system,” but with a much less secure financial basis. Later, he was to set up a small publishing and itinerant bookselling business and even sent himself and his family south as migrant farm laborers on several occasions. None of these enterprises did more than keep the ever-increasing brood of children from starving to death. My great-grandfather, foreseeing at least some of the impending debacle, lambasted him during the 1917-18 visit because of his financial irresponsibility. (We have independent confirmation of this in a letter from the older man to his son-in-law that down to my mother’s immediately older sister, which she self-published a decade or so ago in a book about my grandfather.)

After a month of incessant disputes, my grandparents and aunts returned to Vermont. Among the sorrows that my grandmother could not have foreseen was the fact that she was never to see the next oldest of her four younger sisters again.

There is one extant photograph of my grandmother and her four sisters, all younger than she. (There was only one boy, who died in infancy.) My mother’s younger sister has provided framed copies of it for the entire family, and it is on my shelves in front of scholarly commentaries on Euripides’ domestic dramas, a fitting location, I suppose, but one chosen —at least consciously— for convenience. It is a studio portrait; all of the young ladies are dressed in white. Taken around the time my grandmother got married and left home, she appears confident and mature. She is on the left in the rear. The next sister, strikingly tall, is to her right. In front of them are the three younger ones: on the left, the one who ended up with an adoring and adored husband and no children, and on the right, the one who later fell —hard— for two difficult men in succession. In the center is the cosseted youngest, a little girl with her hair swept up in an Edwardian bow. Imagine the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, with my youngest great-aunt taking the place of the Tsarevich Alexei, and anyone can have a pretty good idea of this portrait. (Because my family has requested that I not provide photographs on the Internet, the picture of the children of Tsar Nicholas II —minus the parents and making the appropriate substitution of the fifth daughter for the young son— will have to do.)

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife and children in 1914
photo via Wikimedia Commons

The second daughter, the one in the upper right, is the one who was to lose her life in the influenza pandemic. Like most the victims of this disaster, she was in the prime of life: in her case, in her mid-twenties, with a husband and toddler daughter. Although her husband remarried and had a number of other children, they all kept in touch with my grandmother. I met the daughter in question, at the time a middle-aged woman, when she came up to Vermont to visit her aunt, my grandmother. She also stopped to see her cousins, especially the one of my aunts who was within days of her in age.

When I think of the connections between my family and World War I, it is the great-aunt who died of the “Spanish” flu who comes most closely to mind. Although World War I did not “cause” this outbreak, if it had not been for the war and its disruption, the consequences would have been much less serious. It is entirely possible that my great-aunt might otherwise have lived to the same age as the rest of her sisters, i.e., from their late seventies to their nineties. Rightly or not, I consider her a casualty of the war. Because the pandemic raged for three years (in the US, late 1917 to 1920), I was interested in exactly when in the outbreak she contracted the virus.

For this reason, after Meeting for Worship two days ago I decided to go on line to try to retrieve the year of my great-aunt’s death. I figured, correctly, that it would not be difficult, especially as my quick search for my grandmother’s Scottish link took me directly to the digitized inventory of the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. I googled her first name, maiden name, and married name. The first hit was, indeed, the cemetery, where there were several people with my grandmother’s surname but not her. Although some of these tombstones looked interesting and one in particular was worth a greater look, I first scrolled down to find the data on my great-aunt. She was listed under her married name along with the death date of 1919. 

The digital tombstone contained a bit of a surprise: the first name under which we all knew my great-aunt was in fact her middle name. A quick electronic detour confirmed that the first initial was from the same first name as her mother, which in turn explained why she was called by her middle name. This was news to me. Even more to the point, I wondered if it would be news to my own immediately older first cousin on that side, who was named for our great-grandmother. Her older brother, who is now deceased, had uploaded the descendants of the line leading through my grandmother’s mother (our great-grandmother) onto a genealogical forum about twenty years ago, but the file is not user-friendly. Even if that initial is available, it is hard to get to. In any event, thanks to my computer-geek cousin’s diligence and the abundance of freely available digitized data from that period, before the evening was over I was to find that my immediately older cousin was the fourth woman with that name.

The night, however, was still young. About an hour into my search, I decided to go back to that other tombstone that intrigued me, and maybe some others with the same surname if I had time. Although I had learned a great deal from my grandmother about her life, I was never able to get her to divulge a lot of information about her family in her home town other than her sisters, parents, and to some extent her grandparents (my own great-greats via her own mother). There was one occasion when I was about twelve when I asked her about her extended family in that very small town, but I conspicuously got nowhere. The discussion slammed shut at World War I —not surprisingly, given what I already knew about the toxicity of the dates in question.  I also got nowhere with one of her younger sisters, although she had already developed some dementia by that time.

What I found on that unfamiliar tombstone record with the all-too-familiar surname was the first and middle name of a young man, the complete listing of a US infantry affiliation, and a death date in the summer of 1918. The record of the tombstone immediately above it in the online cemetery listing contained the first and last names  and dates of another man and a woman with the same surname, along with the words “father” and “mother.” Surely the young man was related to my grandmother. There are only a few hundred people living in that village, even now.

An hour later I had more information than I had bargained for. By tracing on-line military records from World War I, I was able to ascertain, despite “incomplete” data on that file, that the fellow in question was originally part of his state’s national guard and that he was “grievously wounded” with the US forces in Europe after initially having been listed as missing in action.

He was also two years younger than my grandmother and her first cousin. That became incontrovertibly clear almost immediately from the census records of a generation prior, which showed my great-grandfather and the man listed as “father” on the other tombstone described as little boys a year apart in age. (As it happens, this information was not on the on-line records of my computer-literate cousin. While my computer-literate cousin might have had access to that information —in due course I will probably find out, his own on-line submission contained information through our great-grandmother’s line all the way down to him, his sister, and me, but not —crucially— to this cousin of my grandmother, who was related to us through our great-grandfather.)

The death of my grandmother’s cousin as a result of injuries sustained in World War I might have explained why I hit a brick wall when I asked her about her extended family more than forty years ago, but I will never know. I would like to be able to say that whatever details existed of that conversation came flooding back to me once I learned the facts. When confronted with the data on the screen, I seem to recall the conversation turning back at a point around the time of the war at which someone had died — and that the person involved was probably not one of the two relatives I already knew about. But that was more than four decades ago, and my grandmother immediately slammed the door shut on the discussion, never to resume it, despite promises to the contrary to someday tell me more about her home town.

Numerous relatives on various sides of my family have returned, sometimes miraculously so, from battlefields around the world since the time of the American Revolution. We have also had several who opposed all wars, including an uncle who was a conscientious objector in World War II. I had heard of no one, however, who had died as a result of combat, even in the US Civil War. In this respect, until two days ago I had assumed that our family was unusual; given the cumulative number of combatants, one would have expected casualties.

Why did my grandmother remain silent? Surely I was the one kept in the dark —perhaps because of my own anti-war convictions— and my mother’s generation knew. Surely my computer-literate cousin must have shared the relevant information with his younger sister. Surely my aunt who wrote a biography of my maternal grandmother must have come across it.

I made a quick Facebook text message to that younger sister, that namesake cousin who is the same number of years older than I as my grandmother was to her own cousin. No, she had no idea about any of it —least of all about the fact that she was the fourth woman on that side of the family with the same name.

Yesterday morning I phoned my aunt, making a point of reaching her before I strode into class to read the Wilfred Owen poems. Inexplicably, she knew nothing about her mother having a cousin who perished from his wounds in World War I. She had spent years going through a veritable roomful of family documents (admittedly before the widespread digitization that made the facts almost literally drop into my lap), but still she had no information. Since she had unearthed the correspondence confirming what we knew about the arguments between my great-grandfather and grandfather, perhaps she could at least speculate about whether the opposite opinions that my grandfather and his father-in-law had had about the war was the reason for my grandmother’s rather conspicuous reticence.

At least as a first impression, my aunt believed that the dispute was not a big factor, if at all, in the absence of information. By the time even the oldest surviving children were old enough to understand family discussions, the event was more than a decade in the past. Visits were rare. Conversations would have centered on the people who were alive at the time, particularly the children in the generation after World War I. (My grandparents, with their large family, had children spread out over two full decades.) Would my great-grandfather have thundered to my grandfather when he next saw or corresponded with him with a speech like, “I have a nephew who fought on the battlefields of Europe and now has died as a result, and you, you pusillanimous jackass, you won’t even get an ordinarily civilian job?” Probably not even that, my aunt averred. Even at the time, the untimely demise of the other two people we knew about —not to mention my grandparents’ impending financial ruin— were more pressing concerns. In other words, my grandmother’s silence might not have been some sort of unwarranted damnatio memoriae but rather an oversight. If so, the conversational brick wall I encountered with my grandmother would have been the result of my age when we spoke.

My aunt and I agreed, though, that the loss of my grandmother’s cousin must have been extremely painful when she heard about it.

I have not given up on the possibility, however remote, that I can shake the family tree for more information. That particular aunt was by far my best hope, but not the only one. In the interim, though, that might not be the most important consideration. What remains is the reality that two men —my great-grandfather and his brother a year younger— each lost a child in the third decade of life and buried them in the same cemetery a year apart, decades before they were to end up there themselves. The younger brother lost a son whom many might have considered a hero, and whom a few might have viewed as a tragic victim of the vile cud (to borrow two of Wilfred Owen’s words) of circumstances that never should have arisen. The older brother lost a daughter as a result of illness spread globally by that conflict. And finally, there was my grandmother, related to all of them and married to a man of lofty ideals but with an inability to carry them out to the benefit of herself and their children. She was left to live her life in another small town in Vermont, far away from the cemetery with the fateful tales to tell.

And I was left to secure the tartan around my neck, to read to my Latin students Wilfred Owen’s account of the gas attack and “the Old Lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is fine and fitting to die for one’s country”).  After that, all that remained was to e-mail my other cousin one more time. Not only is she named for our great-grandmother, she herself is a grandmother. Her grandchildren are my first cousins twice removed on the younger side, the mirror image of relationship to me as the young soldier, who was my first cousin twice removed on the older side. As if to bring the family story full circle, her first-born grandson is named for the preschooler who died in December of 1917. No one we know, regardless of religious belief or political affiliation, wants him or his siblings —or anyone else, for that matter— to suffer the fate of his antecedent nearly a century ago.  “Lest we forget” must mean “never again, not to anyone.”

Author’s note: because of my older (and late) cousin’s uploading of some family information on a genealogical forum, and because my aunt self-published her own research, a reader with plenty of time on his or her hands could corroborate the information in this account, complete with names and dates. However, I felt it best for me not to. Instead, I would like to thank those relatives —my aunt, my immediately older cousin, and her late brother— who made parts of this report possible, and those others whom I have no doubt driven batty in the last day talking about it.

 

Aluminum luncheon pail inscribed on the top with the initials and surname name of my great-grandfather
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014

F is for Fashion

signatories on waterfall monument depicting the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments

Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, New York

Let us beware of this, of separating or looking upon ourselves to be more holy, than in deed and in truth we are. . .Away with these whimsical, narrow imaginations, and let the spirit of God which he hath given us, lead us and guide us; and let us stand fast in that liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. . .This narrowness and strictness is entering in, that many cannot tell what to do, or not to do. Poor Friends is mangled in their minds, that they know not what to do; for one Friend says one way, and another, another. But Christ Jesus saith, that we must take no thought what we shall eat, or what we shall drink, or what we shall put on; but bids us consider the lilies how they grow in more royalty than Solomon. But contrary to this, they say we must look at no colours, nor make anything that is changeable colours as the hills are, nor sell them nor wear them. But we must be all in one dress, and one colour. This is a silly poor Gospel. It is more fit for us to be covered with God's eternal spirit, and clothed with his eternal Light, which leads us and guides us into righteousness and to live righteously and justly and holily in this present evil world.  —Margaret Fox, Epistle against Uniform Quaker costume, 1700

Failure.... black and blue is the new black. I was thinking more of failure than of fashion while sitting in the wheelchair waiting for an x-ray after falling off a ladder in the garden on October 28. The fact that I was wearing grungy yoga pants and the shirt I had used the previous summer while painting our daughter’s room —not to mention the reality that I was covered with dirt and scratches from rose bushes and blackberry prickles— was the farthest from my mind. I was just glad that the pruning clippers hadn’t hit me in the face when I went down. When I asked the neighbor who took me to the emergency ward to retrieve my tablet computer for me, I did not bother requesting a change of clothes. I didn’t know if I could easily get out of what I was wearing and into something else —or at least that was the story I told the people at the hospital.

In the end, I missed as much work time due to the computer problem that arose the next morning as I did from the accident. Even the computer was fixed in a day. But that still raised the issue of how to look professional while walking on crutches. More to the point, can one look both Quakerly and professional while hobbling around a classroom on crutches?

Friends have always had an awkward relationship to fashion. This has been true throughout our history, for people of all ages, genders, and orientations. Margaret Fox, in making a stand for personal privacy in dress against the nascent tide of the dull-colored Quaker “uniform” worn among most members of our Religious Society between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, was swimming against a powerful riptide. She might as well have been sporting a bikini in the age of the bloomers —and even the bloomers were radical for their era. Likewise, Elizabeth Fry’s husband Joseph loved the opera, another activity verboten among Friends of his day; he kept a set of non-Quaker street clothes in order to indulge his passion incognito. All in all, in the first two hundred years of Quaker history, Friends anticipated the late twentieth century dictum “the personal is political:” if not gender neutral, Quaker attire had equally severe restrictions on both men and women. It was designed with the testimony of equality in mind, although Friendly lore has it that there was substantial inequality in the cut and quality of fabrics. Traditional Friends’ attire also aimed at discouraging the use of clothing as a means of sexual attraction. Finally, utilizing fashion as a tool in boycotts was popular among some sectors of our Religious Society in the time of Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), who advocated the refusal to consume all products made with slave labor, whether sugar or fabric dye. (The dark gray that became ubiquitous among Friends in this period was in fact related slave labor and harsh chemicals used to produce the dye.)

To ratchet up the level of discomfort even further (are we wearing girdles or tightly fitting neckties yet, Friends?), in the present era Quaker testimonies on equality are related not only to ideas about competition for romantic partners but anxieties about winning and losing in sports; these anxieties are in turn related for many people to what physical condition they are in and what they look like. I doubt I am the only Friend to have received a “mercy pass” in high school physical education (no exaggeration: we were permitted to take PE modules as often as we wanted, and I passed badminton on three occasions without ever making legitimate contact with the shuttlecock more than ten per cent of the time). Likewise, I doubt that I am the only one to treat it as a badge of honor.

As a convinced Friend, I seem to have gone in cycles when it comes to simplicity in dress. When I became interested in Quakerism as a teenager, I emulated the peasant look of the “back to the landers” ten or fifteen years my senior, without, however, acquiring their hard-earned skills in gardening —a fact I was to rue as I fell from the ladder that morning years later. I became so good at copying that trend that I had my own bottle of lighter fluid to get bicycle chain grease out of my long dresses. My parents refused to let me own torn or patched jeans but otherwise despaired until I made an abrupt volte-face just before I sent in my applications for my undergraduate years. My mother claimed later on, “I tried to get you to take a healthy interest in your attire, but nothing changed until you met those rich bitches at (that university).”

I was in a protracted downward cycle in regard to fashion, though, in the morning of the ladder episode. The glory days of ending last in a 10-k. foot race were sufficiently far in the past that I had decided that going to the gym was yet another activity at which I could not succeed. Admittedly, I had learned that wearing contact lenses allowed me to whack a squash ball a modest percentage of the time, but that raised my “mercy pass” from the days of doing battle with the high school shuttlecock to maybe a C- if I was generous with myself. There were other illnesses and setbacks. The only area in which I had absolutely refused to capitulate was at the hairdresser, where I laid down the rule of no gray, Quaker or otherwise. For my pains I earned at least 123 comments —I hereby confess to having stopped reading at that number— on the Facebook page of the Association of Bad Friends (an ostensibly humorous place where some Quakers openly indulge in being good Friends) when I posted from the hairdresser about restoring my original hair color.

And then, there I was, on the ground, faced with the choice of signing an armistice with the local ER physician, physiotherapist, gym owner, and athletic trainer or else risk never walking properly again. I also had to look presentable at work in all of this —and truth be told, the situation once I opened the doors of the closet in the master bedroom was not what I would have liked, using any metric at my disposal. I signed the armistice.

On the other hand, at least I could take comfort in one fashion trend: perhaps as a response to the Scottish referendum, I found plaids in style. I had collected a few among my scarves over the years, and maybe I could acquire some others if they weren’t too expensive. The tartan representing my maternal grandmother’s family name might also make a good choice of scarf if I could order one in, and in the interim, I could buy a red shirt and echo the days I had almost forgotten, when I had the habit of wearing a red Stuart kilt to a Friends Meeting in England, earning a partially tongue-and-cheek eldering from the clerk about the colour.

Whatever was going to happen, I was sick of black. Gray looked good only to balance something more vivid. On the other hand, some of those trendy leggings I kept eyeing at the mall, when paired with the shorter skirts long ago tucked away at the back of the closet, might keep my clothes from getting tangled up in the crutches. (I look dismal in slacks, in case the reader is wondering why they are not part of my workday attire, and I have only just gotten to the point of being able to put on hose.) I would manage the problem of shoes. If the only footwear that could handle my swollen foot with any degree of panache was more than I had ever paid for shoes or boots, I would just have to “deal with it.”

I am tired of wearing black. I don’t care whether The Law of Black Clothing was approved by the Friends World Committee on Consultation or Anna Wintour of Vogue. And, if the august members of the Association of Bad Friends want to come and get me, here I am: I have once again engaged in my monthly ritual at the hairdresser, and my stylist (who happens not to be a Quaker) has not yet used William Penn’s sword to cut my hair or stir the dye.

Note the Quaker attire on some of the figures,
and read here on the Quaker influence of the early women’s rights movement

E is for Elections (and Referendums)

Cell phone photo taken in front of the Church of Our Lady
and the Guelph Civic Museum, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
in the run-up to the June 2014 provincial election.
Front: Conservative (blue), New Democrat (orange and blue)
Back: Green (green), Liberal (red and white).
Photograph ©Kristin O. Lord 2014

Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, the western islands, the border regions, and many other places: up to and during September 18, the people of Scotland lined up to vote on their future. As an American currently living in Canada, whose two-year sojourn in the United Kingdom was spent primarily in southern England, I watched the events at a distance of both time and space. People who knew that I had lived on that side of “the Pond” occasionally asked me what I thought. Unless my interlocutor was a family member or a close friend, I replied that I would discuss the matter after the polls closed and that my opinion was not an informed one. The decision was the Scots’ own business. Not that I didn’t have an opinion, of course. That would be unthinkable.

My viewpoint might be summarized by comparison to the way I felt about purchasing the new book The Morning After: the 1995 Quebec Referndum and the Day that Almost Was, written by the Quebec journalist Chantal Hébert with Jean Lapierre, which was brought out to high publicity in Canada just before the Scottish referendum. Hébert’s book is the result of interviews with politicians and other public figures on all sides of the referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1995 and focuses, as the title suggests, on what might have happened if the “Yes” vote had succeeded. (The referendum was staged on a “50 per cent plus one” for victory for either side; the “No” side narrowly prevailed at 50.58 per cent to 49.42 per cent.) I began the book with great anticipation, having opinions that could at best be described as conflicted. As a Vermonter who grew up just south of the Quebec border and who has cousins and friends among the descendants of the Quebec francophone diaspora, I had a basic understanding of the grievances. Quebec was  also—and to a great extent remains— my favorite part of Canada. On the other hand, as an adult who worked in western Canada between 1989 and 1991, I had become annoyed at acquaintances and colleagues in that part of the country who had never visited la belle province, had no desire to do so despite having sufficient time and resources, seem to give little thought for the million or so Canadian Francophones outside of Quebec (a shortsightedness shared, to be fair, by those with many other viewpoints), and saw the lack of geographical contiguity among the Anglophone or bilingual provinces as the only significant consequence of a potential Quebec separation.

To cut closer to home, however, I remembered how my husband and I had sat in our house in Ontario awaiting the results, nervous in the knowledge that the mortgage on the home we had owned for about six months was due for renewal the very next day. If we renewed our mortgage on a six-month fluctuating rate as we had originally planned, we would do well if the “No” forces were to prevail, as mortgage rates were gradually declining internationally at that time. If, however, the “Yes” forces prevailed, we were advised to lock in what we had for several years in order to ride out the turbulence. Our bank manager at the time, a bilingual native of the Montreal area, was savvy enough not to say what he or his family thought about the referendum. He set us up with the floating rate and then gave us a complicated set of prompts to follow on the phone if we needed to lock the rate in. Finally, he tried to reassure us: “I think cooler heads will prevail.”

It might seem petty for one household to be thinking of mortgage rates when the future of the nation was at stake, but compromising the ability of millions of people to pay their debts in a period of uncertainty would not be petty in the least. (I will leave aside the question of whether trying to guess how rates might go and acting accordingly is a violation of Friends’ testimony against gambling.) The issue for the Quebeckers was whether the immediate risks were worth the benefit; all the rest of the country could to was wait and hope that the power brokers on all sides knew what they were doing. 

The vaguely worded nature of the Quebec referendum question (in English, “Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the Bill respecting the future of Québec and of the agreement signed on 12 June 1995?") did not give grounds for comfort. If Hébert’s meticulous research and interviews are correct —and I see no reason to believe that they are not— then the overall level of preparation inside Quebec was no better than the quality of the question. Neither the voters nor sovereignist leaders had an adequate blueprint for what a “Yes” vote would entail.

Since then, the government of Canada has tried to specify how any future Quebec referendum would have to be worded  and what level of support would be needed (the criteria in the resulting Clarity Act have reasonable clarity, so to speak, on the process and the wording of the question, but the majority needed has not been specified. At the moment, support for Quebec sovereignty is low; indeed, the mere whiff of a possible referendum was the single biggest factor in the Parti Québecois losing last year’s provincial election.

I naturally brought my feelings about Quebec to bear when I started to read up on what was going on in Scotland. Like many in this neck of the woods, I was uncertain as to whether the advice given by Canadians on each side of the Quebec sovereignty issue would be good, and whether it would be heeded if it was.

To be sure, those involved in the Scottish referendum question had learned from the ambiguities of the Canadian experience by setting up a simple question to be decided by a simple majority. But as events unfolded, I was not merely waiting for whether the Scottish “No” supporters would have the same belated response to the crisis on their side as did former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his associates. Despite receiving advice from their Canadian counterparts, they did, in fact, nearly fall into the same trap until Gordon Brown took the stage. Nor, for that matter, was I fundamentally interested in the minutiae of the legal or even the practical positions of the Scottish nationalists, as fascinating as I found them.

As crucial as these events were for the outcome, I ultimately wanted to see how the Scots handled the democratic aspects of the referendum and what we in other English-speaking countries could learn from them. I did not have to wait long to see our lesson in democratic process —a lesson many of us sorely need to learn. The Scots took pride in registering everyone, including teenagers aged sixteen and seventeen, and encouraging maximum participation. We Americans in particular could benefit from that. Secondly, although there were some problems with civility, by and large outsiders heard about exemplary behavior among the Scots. As a prime example, both the winning and the losing leaders held their remarks until they had had some time to sleep. There was no Jacques Parizeau, one of the Quebec sovereignist leaders from 1995, claiming that “we lost to money and the ethnic vote.”

Best of all, at least from this perch on the other side of “the pond,” have been the attempts by cultural and religious leaders in Scotland to keep the differences that had been brought out into the open from festering. Religious leaders, including Friends, have taken a major role. Time will tell whether these attempts in Scotland will be successful, but the history of both Quebec and Ontario over the past nineteen years might have been quite different had there been a major cohort of leaders (political, social, or economic) in the late 1990’s whose main goal was reconciliation. More than a decade passed before Jack Layton, a Canadian social democratic politician with roots in both Ontario and Quebec, was able to bring to the electorate a vision that could appeal emotionally and intellectually to a significant range of voters in all parts of the country. Layton sadly died of cancer not long after his greatest electoral success in the spring of 2011, but he left a legacy of respect on the part of many Canadians for each other, regardless of how they felt about the policies of his party.

Speaking as a Quaker, I am convinced that the greatest gift we as Friends can have in the electoral process is one of seeing that of God in one’s political opponent. William Penn, a consummate politician as well as a competent theologian, famously claimed that “love is the hardest lesson in Christianity.” It is an equally hard lesson in the secular political sphere, as many voters in Toronto were able to attest when they saw Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s controversial tenure in office come to a tragic conclusion after his diagnosis with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. (Rob Ford’s brother Doug ran for mayor in his place and came second in last week’s election; Rob Ford himself was reelected to city council and will take office if his health permits.)

It may be detrimental to the political process for Friends to proclaimthat our business practices are “beyond democracy;” they are, at least in some respects, but Quaker business meetings do not involve millions of people making a decision at the same time. In particular, we need to remind ourselves —and that includes yours truly— that the Religious Society of Friends is a Religious Society that has members and attenders from many political parties, and from none. This is true in all countries in which I have known Friends and attenders. There are Friends whom I have known for years whose voting preferences are unknown to me. In the United States, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a non-partisan Quaker lobbying organization, has performed a particular service in this area with its annual Edward F. Snyder Peace Award. Winners have come from both political parties (in fact, one winner, Senator James Jeffords, later became an independent) and have won the prize for a wide variety of reasons. The winners have not always acted consistently with Friends’ concerns in other areas, but FCNL has wisely emphasized the courageous decisions taken when they have.

Some queries for those contemplating Friends and the political process of democracy (written on the morning of the 2014 US midterm elections, they day after my own absentee ballot was safely ensconced in the ballot box in my home town in Vermont):

1. Do you cherish all people who run for public office as children of God? If you are fortunate to live in countries in which politicians from major parties are not Nazis, fascists, Maoists, Stalinists, and others of similar descriptions, can you refrain from inappropriate language and comparisons and encourage others to do likewise? Do you show gratitude for the public service of others, even if we disagree with them?

2. Do you take the time to become informed in the political process at all relevant levels of government, and to vote if you are eligible to do so? Are you able to articulate our own positions thoughtfully? Do you consider the effects that your vote may have on others, especially those whose life circumstances differ from your own, and on the environment and economy of both the relevant jurisdiction(s) and the world at large? Do you help others exercise their right to vote? Can you consider appropriate ways to support candidates or parties if the circumstances arise? Do you take the risks of voter disenfranchisement seriously and work to prevent them, particularly when these risks are the result of a history or patterns of discrimination?

3. What can you do to encourage qualified citizens from all walks of life to run for public office? Do you see the gifts of the quiet, methodical “servant leader” or “retail politician” who is able to achieve lasting results by building coalitions in the same light as the charismatic speaker with more obvious political talents? Both types of leaders are needed, as are the individuals who do not feel qualified to run for office themselves but who develop ideas and run the infrastructure of campaigns.

4. Are you realistic about  the fact that even politicians and parties whose policies are generally compatible with your own, will not agree with you all of the time? How much do you feel that you have to agree with a politician or a party in order to cast your vote in that direction? In particular, to what extent can or should you expect political figures and parties in a secular context to support Friends’ concerns about peace, gender issues, social and economic equality, and the environment? Can you respect the viewpoints of family and friends, including others in our own Religious Society, who come to different conclusions on these points?

5. Are you able, whether as individuals or a Religious Society, to deal with both the strengths and weaknesses of coalition building?

6. Do you do what you can to reduce the excessive influence of money (whether individual or from corporations), connections, and family dynasties on the political process? In what ways do you work to ensure that people running for office all have a fair opportunity to be heard, regardless of family background, ethnicity, access to advanced education, gender, age, or orientation?

7. Do you have a good layperson’s understanding of how your government works? If the choice were up to you, would you as a Friend make any changes to the type of representative bodies and how they are elected? In what ways would any changes benefit the full range of members of society? What unintended consequences might there be if changes were made?

8. If your preferred party or political leaders lose an election, can you reach out appropriately to the winners? What if the situation is reversed? Do you treat the decisions and decision-making processes of other voters with respect, regardless of your own views?

Photo taken (but never posted) in contemplation of a request in the New York Times
for voters to show their polling places for the 2008 US Presidential primaries.
A number of American expatriate voters uploaded photos of mailboxes and homes from around the world.
Here I set up my dining room table as a polling place.
In Vermont absentee ballots are often now sent out electronically
(although they must be returned in hard copy).
photograph ©Kristin O. Lord 2008

D is for Disabilities

photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014

The dog days of late August have been a memory for the past two years due to unseasonably cool and wet weather in the northeastern provinces and states.  As we headed into Labor Day weekend, I saw no reason not to spend my last free morning taking down some overgrown foundation shrubs from a four-foot painter’s ladder, especially when routine yard work usually costs more to hire than I get paid.  “Let’s just clip the tops to my height and then saw off the base,” I thought. The first one went down quickly. No reason at all to hesitate on the three others I had in my sights, at least not until I was three feet in the air and heard a “snap” emanating from my right knee. After a few minutes of excruciating pain, I was relieved to walking toward the shed, the clippers in one hand and the ladder in the other.

Before five more minutes had elapsed, I was on the ground twice more. The ladder had long since spiraled off to the left, while the clippers narrowly missed my head. One of the neighbors, hearing my torrent of Anglo-Saxon expletives, came running and grabbed my cell phone for me from the car, while a second neighbor offered to drive me to the hospital. I was down a third time before she could get me there. On the proverbial pain scale of 1 to 10, these four falls were each at least a 9. The only way to get through this was not to fall again.

The x-ray showed nothing broken, which left me with a provisional diagnosis of a soft tissue injury. “Can I drive?” I asked the attending ER physician. “I’d play that one by ear, since you have hurt your right knee. Press down on the foot rest on the wheelchair and see how you feel.” “The foot rest is broken.” “Then try the edge of the foot rest.” “Thanks.” For once, there was no pain. I’d play it by ear, I thought, literally and figuratively. If I could press down on that malfunctioning wheelchair part, then I could probably use the piano pedal. If I could manage the piano, then I could probably drive, and if I could drive, I could work. It also followed that there was no reason to make more than minor changes at the office. Indeed, I had already solved one problem while waiting for the x-ray. I asked the ER physician for a physiotherapy requisition, got fitted with crutches, and phoned our neighbor to come get me. Meanwhile, my husband would pick up our daughter from her own work.

I got home, made my way in through the small step at the back door, and sat down to work-related paperwork. I even managed to get upstairs to bed and downstairs the next morning.

I was going to be just fine. See?! Left to my own devices, I went out the back door on my crutches, checked my safety in the car, then drove to nearby Fergus and paid some bills.

Before I did that, however, I whacked away at more of the paperwork that was sitting on my hard drive.  Little did I know that that would be no more successful at that than attacking the sapling in the back yard the day before. The Apple gurus in Waterloo, 30 minutes away, had told me a month before that I was unlikely to need any more work on my computer, but if I did, they would have to replace the memory board under warranty. Of course, the memory board took that moment to go haywire. And of course, the .05 per cent of my work that was not saved externally or emailed was the .05 per cent I needed for a letter of recommendation and for the start of term after Labor Day.

The folks at Apple were good at scheduling an appointment, once they had located my extended warranty. They even understood why I no longer had my hard drive hooked up to my Time Capsule (too many lightning strikes to the house —that is apparently a common problem). Although the staffers made no promises, they were optimistic that I could get the files onto my external hard drive and memory sticks, which I could then install on an older machine, and they even hopeful that I would have my “good” laptop back before I started teaching the next week.

All I had to do was drive to the Apple Store in Conestoga Mall by 7:30 that evening.

No, let me rewrite that last sentence: all I had to do was to check my privilege. There is no public transportation where I live. My ability to continue working while temporarily disabled was entirely dependent upon being able to drive and having access to a working vehicle. I also have a moderate amount of third-party coverage for physiotherapy, thanks to the fact that the other adult in the family has a job with benefits. Single-payer medical care got me through the hospital. My work is of the sort that can be managed by an employee on crutches with insignificant adjustments (one of my departmental colleagues worked from both crutches and a wheelchair at different times over many years). This matters a lot, since I did not have to worry about losing my job. It also matters because I might not have been eligible for workers’ compensation, given that contract academics are not usually paid over the summer and that the accident occurred at home in August. In sum, I was lucky that I did not have to ask about the law but rather was able to turn up for work on schedule.

Along the way, I discovered many other areas in which I could no longer take ordinary activities for granted —not just the running or the sports that I had planned to take up again but perhaps never can. (The jury is out on whether I will make a full recovery, or even whether I should have an MRI, for which there is a waiting list in Ontario.) Like most jurisdictions in O.E.C.D. countries, Ontario has legislation covering disabilities. Like most public employees in these jurisdictions, I have been required to attend a briefing on this legislation. Over the Labor Day weekend, I refreshed my memory about both the law and its limitations in a hurry, grateful at every step of the way (so to speak) that as these problems go, I was on the lower end of necessary accommodations, and that at least some of them would likely be temporary.

Both the law and best practices in many countries require “reasonable accommodation” to provide equal access to the complete gamut of venues, services, and activities for anyone who would otherwise be eligible if he or she did not have a disability. In many cases, there is a difference between the minimum required and what is truly equal access. For instance, the leader of our seminar at work gave the example of a blind student taking a survey course that had one chapter on art and architecture. “Reasonable accommodation” would at the minimum entail replacing the unit on art and architecture with a mutually acceptable alternative, such as having the student read a story or a play that made reference to art or architecture in addition to the plays already assigned for everyone else. A better approach would be to work with the student to make as much of the section on art and architecture as possible available in a format which that student could use, if necessary by getting expert assistance. The law, however, recognizes that there are practical limitations to what may be feasible.

Despite generally noble intentions, “reasonable accommodation” and universal access are easier concepts to develop on paper than to put into practice. Most communities have a large number of private houses that have been turned into businesses or semi-formal public places, and not all meet standards of accessibility, whether literally or in practical terms. Modern public facilities vary enormously in accessibility. Some are superb. The new main entrance to the library at Wilfrid Laurier University, my employer for the last decade and a half, was designed with universal access in mind (photograph below). It is also carefully engineered to fit into the rather awkward slope between the library and the surrounding ground and buildings. The planter at the front will have a community garden (unfortunately, not edible at this point), and there will be more seating. Cannon Design, the architectural firm behind the project, did a splendid job actualizing the desires of the library staff. By coincidence, it was opened a day or two before my accident, and was almost immediately put to use by yours truly.

Wilfrid Laurier University Library
Universally accessible main entrance
Architect: Cannon Design, Toronto, Ontario
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014
with thanks to Nancy Willing and Gohar Ashoughian of the WLU Library for information on the project

Conestoga Mall in Waterloo and Stone Road Mall in Guelph each have an ample supply of accessible parking. In fact, they appear to have more than the two major shopping malls in the Toronto area that we visited on consecutive weekends, despite the malls in Toronto being several times larger. On the whole, I have ended up with more problems in Toronto than that good city surely deserves. I had to cancel plans to attend a large public event held at the downtown convention center in Toronto because the nearest subway station was closed and there was no place to sit down at the function.

The most egregious example of lack of access I have seen so far turned up when I phoned the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario about my temporary accessible parking permit. The staffer at the office of the MTO nearest my home, in a building that it had occupied for no more than a decade,  rather apologetically informed me that either I or someone appointed by me would have to retrieve the application from the Ministry in person, as it was not available on line. In order to get the application processed in a timely manner, I would then have to return the form with documentation, again in person. (I am unclear as to whether I could have delegated that part of the procedure, but in any case it was moot because of scheduling issues.) Doing so locally would entail walking up and down twelve cement steps. Otherwise, I could drive 30 minutes to the village of Arthur or use the outlet near my office, 30 minutes away in a different direction but obviously more convenient for me. Unfortunately, the MTO outlet near my office had a thirty-minute wait at an off-peak time and no tag and number system allowing people to use one of the few available chairs. A kindly woman let me cut ahead of her to retrieve the form, which took a matter of seconds, but it would have been inappropriate to do the same when finalizing the document, a much longer procedure. I drove to Arthur, where I was the only client there.

What works for one person may not for another. While the manager of the local supermarket was more than happy to offer put me into a motorized cart, that may be overkill for someone with crutches or a cane. (A friend who uses two canes to get around mostly shops at smaller food stores.)

Disabilities are expensive as well as time-consuming, a point seemingly lost on many of those who set the rates for people who are on longer term disability pensions. There are noticeable increases in living expenses even for someone in a short-term and relatively straightforward situation, as shopping for groceries at the deli or on line usually costs more than going to the supermarket. (Once again, I was lucky to have family members able and willing to shop from my grocery list and to have a good and reasonably-priced deli in the area.) Modifications to vehicles and housing are unaffordable for many people who need them, even in wealthy countries, unless they have access to public or private insurance. People who cannot drive often have other impediments.

I have been fortunate to have escaped the worst of what could have happened. Despite the issues of parking and access to certain venues, I have experienced a great deal of generosity from family, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals. In particular, I racked up one of those debts that can never be repaid from a friend with a more serious disability and one of longer duration. She had invited me to join her at a restaurant for lunch before she knew of the accident. On the day we met, I could not find her vehicle in the parking lot. I must have arrived first, I thought, and so I left her the one accessible spot — but in a scene reminiscent of O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi,” she had placed her own car in such a way that the accessible spot would be left for me. In the end, neither of us took it, and we each ensured that the other made her way safely from the restaurant to her own vehicle. That same friend urged me to do everything reasonable to ensure that I could walk safely without a cane or crutches before the onset of ice and snow, lest some of my leg muscles atrophy over the winter, leaving me with more permanent damage than would otherwise be the case.

We never know when we or another person will become disabled, whether physically or intellectually. Students in one of my classes once wondered about the extra table and chairs located haphazardly at the front of the room. I replied that they were probably there in case a student came in with crutches or a wheelchair, although admittedly they should be better arranged and labeled. 

The spot was occupied for its intended purpose before lunch the same day.

Some queries for Friends and Quaker organizations: 

In what ways do we ensure that we are aware, both as individuals and as a Religious Society, of the range and types of disabilities (of all degrees and likelihood of permanence, whether visible or non-visible, including health and mobility-related, psychological, social, learning, and developmental disabilities), the status of current legislation, and our moral obligations as believers in equality? Do we get competent professional advice when we are unsure what to do?

Do Quaker-related facilities meet the highest standards of accessibility law and practice? If buildings are grandfathered in under previous law, what is being done to bring them up to code? If buildings are not accessible, do Friends’ business sessions and other decision-making meetings take place in them? What about parking and public transit routes?

What procedures do your Meeting have to ensure that all members and attenders have, to the extent possible, equal opportunities to participate in the spoken aspects of Meeting for Worship and Meeting for Business? Large Meetings may have the money and the justification to install a hearing loop, but what can be done in smaller Meetings? At the very least, agendas and supporting documents can be posted and the text of proposed minutes run by people who need a written summary. Likewise, are Meetings able to ensure that those with visual impairments are able to access minutes of Meetings for Worship for Business? Can we make it possible for those with limited mobility to participate in discussions electronically?

If Meetings for Worship are held in private homes, to what extent are those homes universally accessible (at least one entrance, toilet and sink, and suitable seating)? Do the homeowners have adequate liability insurance? Do they tell people in advance about any companion animals that may be part of their household?

Do Friends Meetings take reasonable precautions concerning ice build-up (if relevant) and fall prevention?

Is programming for sessions such as Quarterly, Half-Yearly, Area, and Yearly Meetings designed to be accessible to all?

Do Quaker children and young people with exceptionalities (whether physical, psycho-social, or intellectual) have access to the same range of Quaker-oriented programming and facilities as their peers who are not so affected? If not, what can reasonably be done to rectify the imbalance?

Do nominating committees ensure that adult Friends and attenders, regardless of disabilities, have suitable opportunities to serve the Meeting and/or larger Quaker bodies? Can Friends “think outside the box” about what might constitute ideal qualifications for a position?

Do Friends label foods brought to potlucks and other gatherings, and do they try to provide a variety of options so that everyone will have something to eat, regardless of food restrictions? (Ann Arbor Meeting, in Ann Arbor, Michigan has an excellent form that can be filled in by people contributing to potlucks.)

Are Friends aware that others, both inside and outside of the Meeting, may have chemical allergies and sensitivities that preclude being near people wearing perfume and cologne?

For many with physical disabilities, back-country hiking is beyond their wildest dreams.
A trip to the local supermarket is equivalent to running a marathon.
Johnson Canyon, Banff National Park, Alberta
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2013