Agitators

And . . . I still haven't finished the Lusseyran book.

Maybe it's because I spend too much time on Mormon blogs.

Right now, the hot topic is ordaining women to the priesthood. It springs from an interview President Hinckley did with Mike Wallace years ago, in which he explained that Mormon women are happy. They have plenty of leadership and service opportunities. They aren't agitating to get the priesthood.

To which a few women have said, "Oh yeah? Well, we do want it. We've wanted it for years. And we start agitating now."

My thoughts on the matter?

1) It's a mistake for men to proclaim what women want, or what they like, or what fulfills their dreams. Ask the women.

2) It's not a mistake to ask questions about why things are the way they are or to ask God if they could be different. But if He says no, if He says A and B can change but C has to stay the way it is, we have to accept the answer. To do otherwise is apostasy, and Mormonism has always been about rejecting apostasy.

3) If He says yes to C, well then, cheers to you for your forward thinking.

4) I adore a rousing online discussion, where people are free to say what they think. I love finding out that I'm not the only one bugged by A and B, even if I'm not with you on C.

5) I don't long to perform blessings or ordinances or rituals. Ritual embarrasses me. But I am also embarrassed by people who call you names for wanting the priesthood. No, wait. Not embarrassed. Amused.

6) You tell me equality has a certain formula. You have read thinkers who say that anyone who doesn't agree with the formula is an agent of her own oppression. Thanks, but I'll decide how oppressed I am. If it's a mistake for men to tell me what I should want, it's also a mistake for strangers to tell me how to be and what trade-offs to make.

7) Otherwise, carry on. Your stories about what you have had to put up with in your lives embolden me and a few thousand others to not put up with the same. That effects some mighty change right there.

Now, let's bake bread:

Ranch French Bread

The Week of the Clenched Stomach

It started when I stayed up late last Sunday, reading some doom and gloom on the internet. Fortified by visions of a dire future, I trudged into a week in which:

Bombs went off. Chemicals exploded. The daughter crashed her car. Tech problems up-ended the husband's workweek. A friend's mom died. Thunder crashed. Streams flooded. The toddler got defiant. And finally, PMS.

You'd think I would appreciate a gentle book like And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. But I avoided it. If it had been a book where bombs went off and thunder crashed, I probably couldn't have put it down.

Lusseyran grew up in Paris. He lost his sight in a childhood accident. After the initial shock and pain, he found himself endowed with something he described as "light." He gained a heightened sense of the objects around him, their smells, sounds, even the very pressure from the space they took up. His parents rose to the occasion, securing an education that fit him for the larger world. His friends held his arm and guided him along on their adventures. In short, God did not abandon Lusseyran to bleakness.

But I still felt no compulsion to read. His "light" was an intangible thing, harder to describe than smell. Really, how would you convey the scent of a carnation or of campfire smoke to someone who had never experienced it? If it's tough to describe, it's tough to read.

I've stuck with him now up to age eleven. I'll keep trying. World War II and his days in the French Resistance lie ahead, so surely I will stumble into suspense and adventure soon.

Look at me, wishing suspense and adventure on people in book-world, but not on people in real-world.

And furthermore, why don't stress-riven characters in books snitch Peanutty Chocolate Cookies, like I did all week?

Oops, Mom and Dad, I Lost Her

Somebody in my writing group keeps handing us chapters of her novel about a family broken up by a fatal car accident. The narrator girl and her father struggle through the year after losing Mom and Big Brother. We get a lot of silence-at-breakfast scenes, losing-ourselves-in-competitive-swimming scenes and re-entering-teen-life-with-a-birthday-party-at-the-country-club scenes. (Where, naturally, a hunky boy appears. With an Aussie accent. And he's a swimmer, how handy!)

As she perfects her book, I'm tempted to suggest a look at Francine Prose's Goldengrove. I would mean it as a helpful gesture. I just don't know if it would be taken that way.

Basically, Prose already wrote the same story. Two sisters laze about in a canoe on the lake beside their rustic upstate New York home. The older one jumps out, as if to swim ashore. The younger one rows to the dock. In the house, the parents ask, "Where is your sister?" The answer is not good.

Prose walks us through the next year, as this family struggles up from the depths of loss. The book jacket promises a "risky relationship" between the thirteen-year-old surviving girl and her sister's boyfriend.

Oh, great! I thought, a bunch of unwarranted, highly anatomical sex scenes. And if anyone complains, they are told, 'Teenagers have sex these days. Get over it.'"

But no, Prose keeps it less about sex and more about head-games. It all rang quite true to me. I found this grieving family utterly captivating.

Not so for the next book I picked up. Brunonia Berry's Lace Reader is a tale about moms and aunts who can tell fortunes by looking at -- you guessed it -- lace. The story bolted out of the gate with a whole lotta characters (way quirky, of course)and a whole lotta details about nothin' that I quickly suspected I had fallen prey to an amateur author. When she finally introduced me to the second aunt, who greets the protagonist with a hug and acts quite normal given the family death they have all just experienced, I pictured a quite normal woman who, I found out a page or two later, is brain damaged.

"Foul!" I cried. "Game over."

Seriously, the Amazon reviews made far better reading.

Maybe somebody in Berry's writing group should have handed her an already-published masterpiece about fortune-telling women who come together after a death in the family and . . . oh never mind!

Anyway, to finish up with our Tex-Mex series, you can celebrate warmer weather with:

Tex-Mex Chicken Salad

Go Home, Young Man

I once had an English professor who wrote a book on postmodern trends in fiction in which he proclaimed that many of us find the open road, and its escape from our hometowns, appealing. But ultimately, we have to re-embrace our past. We may be happier far away but, especially if we are writers, we have to return or we choke off the headwaters that feed us.

Plainly, I have resisted this notion of his. But then, my hometown lacks the spicy, Wild West past of his native Dodge City, Kansas.

However, the professor took his own advice. Succumbing to nostalgia about the dusty landscape from which he came, he has now published his memoir, Dragging Wyatt Earp.

Author Robert Rebein grew up as one of seven closely-packed boys in a Catholic family. His father was one of those handy sorts who had a hard time resisting major renovation projects on the house. He drew plans for new kitchens, or bricking the exterior, on some handy envelope and, before long, had the family camping in the basement, eating chicken noodle soup on rice for days on end.

For years, the father owned an auto salvage yard, providing a richly imaginative playground for the young Rob, not to mention a cast of hired help that limped and swore and came in late after sleeping one off.

Later, Dad Rebein sold the salvage yard and bought a ranch.

In Rebein's classes, he occasionally mentioned his Kansas-ranch past. I always wondered if his family regarded him as a fiddlehead who writes useless stuff, we have no idea what, and goes nutty for poetry. But when Rebein describes the chores he mastered, everything from repairing the sprinkler system to pouring concrete to herding cattle, I gotta admit, his family probably respects him, whatever they think of his profession.

His life-journey from fenced fields to bookshelf-lined professor's office reminds me of Black Earth and Ivory Tower, a book of essays written by former farm kids who ended up teaching at universities. Each essay muses on the tyranny of the agricultural life and the wide gulf between the parents who met its demands and the children for whom it holds no future.

For those I know in Kansas (and their book-clubbing friends) Rebein will appear at the Leawood Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, April 10th, at 7 p.m.

Since you'll be busy reading Rebein's absorbing recollections, you may look up sometime around dinner and panic over what to fix your crew. If you froze last week's Chicken Starter, you'll be well on your way to a meal of:

Tex-Mex Chicken Pasta

Mormons As They Really Are

How did you feel when you read your first Mormon novel? Did you read about sacrament meeting and Dad being the bishop and look over your shoulder and wonder, "Can we talk about this stuff?" Or was the romance so hokey, the conversion plot-line so ham-handed, that you wanted to round up and burn every copy before outsiders could get a peek at it and decide we're all even weirder than they previously thought?

Well, thank goodness Mormon literature seems to be growing up a little, offering characters that feel as real as the folks who sit beside you at the driver's license bureau. One good example of credible Mormon fiction is Death of a Disco Dancer by David Clark. Clark's people play pranks with ripe oranges. They tell ghost stories at the scout camp-out. They quake under the commands of their cruel gym teachers and they try to figure out whether their older brother's warnings about junior high are credible, or just so much leg-pulling.

And they deal with Grandma. Like too many grandmas, she's not all there, but she has come to live in their house. She often visits Dancer's protagonist, Todd Whitman, in his bedroom in the middle of the night. She totes along a Saturday Night Fever album cover and speaks cryptically of "The Dancer" from her past. Grandma's nocturnal visits are the least credible part of Clark's story, but I played along anyway. He seemed to need the plot device. And anyway, it wasn't too long before we got back to that older brother, whose mind games against Todd raise the spectre of Fred Savage's Wonder Years siblings.

And let me just put in a word for Dancer's publisher, Zarahemla Books.

Judging by Mormon comment boards on the Twilight series, some Mormons don't want to read anything riskier than a conference anecdote and others long for a Mormon tale that's at least as interesting as the most middling book on their library shelves. What we need are readers that understand that the pulpit and the reading chair needn't cancel each other out. One is a place to talk about how we should be. The other is a place to reveal how we are right now, which is messy, mistake-prone, capable of monumental selfishness, but capable of great nobility, too.

Zarahemla and similar publishers (Parables, Covenant) offer Mormon fiction for those who have tried it elsewhere and found it not worth their time or their money.

All publishing houses struggle, but those who cater to whisker-thin niche markets like us Mormons, live a special kind of hand-to-mouth existence. If they topple, Mormon writers have nowhere to send their stuff.

So check 'em out on Amazon. See if they've got something that piques your interest.

Now, since Dancer is set in Arizona, let's go Tex-Mex.

Tex-Mex Chicken Starter

Use this chicken mix for Tex-Mex Chicken Fajitas. 

More ideas for using up the Chicken Starter in future posts.

Official Misinformation

I don't suppose you want to gaze at pictures of the burning twin towers. One sickening run-through (with endless repeats for the next week or two) might have been plenty for you. But one day, I was at the library trying to get useful things done and my eye kept wandering over to a book on the shelf, 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. "The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers." It's a subject tantalizing enough to keep you from getting useful things done at the library, I tell ya.

I don't know about you, but my curiosity about what happened to everybody that day has not spent itself.

Even the ones that survived had no idea what happened. Something went boom. The building swayed. Smoke blew in through the vents. That it was a commercial airliner -- well, how inconceivable is that?

Some had a bad feeling, found the nearest stairway and got out. Some were trapped above the impact zone, spending that 102 minutes calling the fire department, relatives, anybody who could help. Some started down the stairs, then their supervisors told them to go back to their desks and wait for evacuation instructions. And they believed what they were told.

That's the scariest part of this story. We live in a highly interdependent society. We can't possibly know what we're doing all the time. So we turn to the experts. But when the unthinkable happens, how much do the experts really know?

Sure, they tell you there's a flotation device under your airplane seat, but is that thing really going to do you any good? If we land on water, aren't we all toast anyway? (And soggy toast at that!)

Sure, we're all storing our pictures and documents in the cloud now, but what if the elves who maintain that cloud somehow lose track of it? If a simple laptop can crash, how much more can go wrong with a satellite?

Makes me hope that any trouble I get into isn't groundbreakingly new. May the trains I ride and the germs I swallow all be known quantities so that when the experts tell me what to do, it's not the equivalent of curing cancer with leeches.

I'm striking quite a cheery note tonight, am I not?

Why don't I just recommend a strange little dish that I didn't expect to like? It features cabbage, the frumpiest crop on this planet. The only thing weirder would be kale, but kale has somehow gotten itself some hipster glasses and a fedora hat, and now it hangs out in coffeehouses and independent bookstores. Poor old cabbage is still the vegetable of oppressed peoples.

I just happen to like it, especially this mildly pepper-y version.

Pork Cabbage Saute

Ephemera

This post violates the format of Bye-Bye Nesquik, because I failed to read much this week. I also failed to cook, unless we can count pouring green milk on my Lucky Charms this morning.

No, this week has been a rarity, sorting through dusty boxes of old pants, picking through stuffed scrapbooks of family pictures, weighing the value of old VHS tapes, marriage certificates and other little evidences that people leave behind.

What to save? What to let go? This is how my sisters and I spent the week. We read bits of letters out loud, uncovering new clues, raising new questions. Do you think those childhood radium treatments are what gave our sister the cancer that killed her? Do you think the run on the grocery stores at the start of the Korean War was what pushed our mother overboard on food storage?

To clean out a person's house after they are gone is to discover what they were. Mother was a person who clung. She clung to the many skeins of yarn, fodder for more projects than she could ever complete. She clung to church talks, believing she would listen to them again on reel-to-reel tape. She clung to letters, organizing them by writer and year written, making it easier for us make sense of their sheer volume. She clung to her money ("Is there enough? I'm sure I'm running out"), her ideas (some useful, some not), and especially to her house. We tried to take her away from it, but she refused to go.

Now, the house that was built so cleverly to suit her needs stands empty of the personality that made its rules and ran its routines. When she was there, farm dirt never crossed the threshold and grandkids never got more than one toy at a time out of the closet. When she was gone, we snacked in the living room and tossed pictures of her school chums, all while looking uneasily over our shoulders.

It's not that I visited her house often. Nor do I regret staying away so much. I just want to remember an era that is already long-gone. I want to know how the family corn roasts and the odd years when Uncle Such-and-Such found work in Alaska fit into the bigger picture. My people can look at the larger world, at its wars, its top-40 tunes and its ceaseless press of people reaching for something better, and regard it all as something that doesn't touch them. But it does. It buffets them about just as much it buffets people in Ottawa and Orlando.

And so, as the letters and pictures passed through my hands this week, I plucked up ephemera to take away with me. I will want to remember that Mother stood at the stove like that. I will want to remember the rocky wasteland where Dad grew up. I will want to remember how Aunt So-and-So sounded before it all went wrong.

Didn't I come here, resolved to sort and dump and take nothing away? Oh, no, can't weigh down the suitcase. Uh-uh, no way could I ship that thing home. Then what am I doing at the post office, sealing all this ephemera in boxes and handing over my credit card?

I think we have more than one woman who clings.