Expelled!

Raised in a so-called Christian home marked with near-daily explosive abuse of multiple flavors--sexual, physical, and emotion, I was an attendee, but not engaged participant, in Methodist and Baptist churches in my early years, I found no sense in the sermons of the ministers who were often more interested in tangible things than in holy deeds, no examples set by the deacons who were often bedding the wives of their friends, and no love of God in the raspberry-bush switches wielded by my parents that demanded their few ounces of blood every Sunday before we marched into church as a model family. God, to me, was a fantasy, created by evil-doers to make themselves feel better.

When given a chance at the age of 16 to preach the Youth Sunday sermon, the topic of which was “The Christian Home,” I pointed out all of these things, to the great discomfort of the congregation. I concluded that sermon with the suggestion that considerable thought be given to the advantages of raising a child without hypocrisy, i.e. in an atheistic environment. From where came the audacity of a child to make such statements from a pulpit? I don’t really know. Perhaps I envied the lives of my peers who were not abused each and every day and in resentment needed to point out something wrong with their lives, too. Perhaps I had expected the church community to step in and rescue my siblings and me from our physical and sexual tormentors and blamed the people in the community when no one stepped forward. Perhaps the rage in which I was raised crimson-colored all the emotions of my childhood.

In any event, that sermon ended my churchgoing days. My family had been asked to leave the church, and I had not been punished in any way. I suspect that my parents had feared that after such a sermon, were they to have hurt me as a result, I would have flounced into church with that announcement as well, completely destroying their reputations. Or perhaps their sense of the awfulness of what I had done paralyzed them into inaction. In any event, there being no other church within reasonable travel distance, I had spent the rest of my growing-up and adult years in the atheistic environment I had exalted.

My parents never lost their faith as a result of their excommunication, but they never again talked much about it in front of me. We no longer were forced to say grace at meals. Bibles disappeared from our bedsides onto the crowded bookshelves in our library. Although they never mentioned anything to me, looking back, I imagine that my parents felt that something became very broken in their lives that Sunday morning. At the core of their lives festered a desperate need to be respected by the community, perhaps fostered by childhoods in which neither had experienced much respect. Dad’s unusually high level of intelligence brought him only a sense of disappointment and failure when, in order to support his parents and five younger siblings during the Great Depression, he had to leave school in eighth grade and take a job as a shoe cutter, a trade he plied, along with farming, his entire life. Ma had always been the little doll of her family, if my great-aunt’s assessment is accurate, but had found herself rejected and ridiculed by classmates while her brother, who was in the same class, served as class president. As adults, my parents became community leaders, my father serving on the school board and my mother becoming actively involved in one social cause after another, looking for approbation from peers long ago grown up. We children suffered their anger when we failed to make up for their dissatisfaction with their own lives and their sense of underachievement, Dad intellectually and Ma socially. Their church activities provided them the lifeline with which they had clung to the community respect that they so desperately desired. I had cut that lifeline with one sermon.

As for me, I felt that something got fixed in my life that morning. No more hypocrisy. No more pretending to be a pew-filling, perfect family. No more Sunday morning races when I would refuse to get dressed for church, Dad would want to beat me into compliance, and I would run.

As young as the age of eight, I could outrun Dad. I could also run far. Neighbors passing by en route to church pretended not to see the two of us running—around the front yard, across the street, through the tall grass, and into the nearby woods, my long hair flying straight back into the wind and my father flailing a switch, usually broken off from a raspberry bush with healthy thorns for ripping flesh. I could feel the wind brushing past my face, the adrenalin coursing through my veins from fear of the whip and nerve endings on fire with the thrill of the race, my legs fueled by competing thoughts: the stubbornness to do what I wanted, the fear of a dire outcome should I slow down or stumble long enough to be caught, and exhilaration at the thought that just perhaps I could run away from all of it, from the switchings, from the name calling, from the hypocrisy of pretending that we were the picture-perfect family, and especially from pretending to love and obey a God who for me did not exist and whom my parents used as a threat. Only when my father lost the switch and was too spent to care any more about hitting me would I run home. Running back into the “burning house,” as my future brother-in-law would later call it, was the only option that ever entered my head for any neighbor in New England of those days would have brought me back to my parents.

Having run home, I always ended up in church. There, sitting in a pew, watching Dad and Ma acting in a devout manner and being viewed by the church community as ideal parents, my anger toward them would reach a full but quiet zenith. After the church service concluded, my parents would accept the sympathetic comments of my friends’ parents, especially those who happened to catch a glimpse of our Sunday morning marathons. These people would knowingly smile, nod, and assent as to how difficult I must be to raise—and my rising anger and frustration at the unfairness of it all made me want to run again—far away from my parents, the church, and the complacent people in the church pews. I resented being abused, and I trapped the church and its people in the web of angry emotions that encompassed my teenage years. I never asked how others in my family felt about being alienated from the church. I did not care. I had been freed.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

My Friend's Dark Days

My friend, Jean, was the instrument through which God nudged me (well, more accurately, pulled and pushed me) back into the flock, beginning with a very clear conk on the head. So, I was used to going to Jean for spiritual advice and help.

Help, though, was something I was called upon, surprisingly, to do for Jean not long after she had helped me so remarkably. The need to help Jean unnerved me at first. I had depended upon her insights and guidance up until that point. Now she needed me, and I was not sure that I was ready. There was, however, no choice. I had to be ready.

Jean handily worked in my building, so she often dropped by after work, and we would grab a bite to eat, talk, or do something together. One evening, as I was working late, Jean burst into my office, eyes large and frightened. “Beth,” she exclaimed. “I think the Evil One is after me!”

I had never heard Jean or anyone else mention evil in those terms before, so I was taken aback at first. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I suddenly feel estranged from God,” she replied. “I feel like I am being pushed to do things that I would not normally do and that God would not want me to do.”

“Such as what?” I asked. She would not tell. She said that she was ashamed of the urges. I understood that they were related to selfish acts, wantonness, cavalier treatment of family members, and other characteristics that just were not Jean’s. We prayed together, and she left in a calmer state.

This one session, however, was not to be the end. She came by nearly every evening, and we prayed. Always for the same thing: to bring Jean back to where she had been spiritually, to eliminate this negative influence, to be in compliance with God’s will. Although it seems that I am unceasingly praying, given my history and idiosyncrasy, when I petition God for specific help, I usually ask only once, assuming that God heard and trusting God to respond in the way that is best for the situation or person about whom I am praying. With Jean, though, it was different. It seemed that just as soon as Jean leaped over one hurdle, another was placed in front of her. Just as soon as one prayer seemed to have been answered, the need for another prayer appeared. Just as soon as her faith reared its head, it was stomped into the dust again by something she kept referring to as evil. I even saw her do things that I found incomprehensible. Those acts were not in keeping with Jean’s character as I knew it to be.

I began praying for her every day, for hours. I also read St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. It seemed to speak to some of what Jean was experiencing, but not all. I thought that if she read the book, it might help. Although Jean seemed lost and desperate and to a point depressed, she was unwilling to read the book. She felt that it would make her feel more, not less, trapped.

I, too, became desperate. At one point, I recall marching around the mission grounds in the small town where I live and proclaiming that I would not pray about anything else until God brought sunshine to end the darkness that Jean was enduring. In all, I spent more than 20 hours in petition for Jean.

In the midst of all this petitioning, one not-so-fine evening, I asked God to allow me to feel what Jean was feeling so that I could understand better. Immediately, the Presence departed from me. No matter how much I tried to communicate, I could not feel the presence of God. I felt lost and alone. I had not realized how much God had become an every-minute part of my life. Irony of ironies, I desperately wanted back the Presence that I had earlier tried so hard to evade. “Where are you?” I asked again and again that evening. I received no answer.

When I awoke the next morning, the Presence was back. Thank God! From that brief disappearance of the Presence, I understood that this was akin to what Jean was experiencing. Now I know how terribly depressing that experience can be. I also understood that what got me through that night was faith without spirituality. Clearly, God had been spoiling me, granting me spirituality, not forcing me to walk in faith alone. Since that experience, I have often wondered if I am capable of living by faith alone. I knew at the time that I did not want to have to try. “Please, God, don’t do that again!” I implored. “I am too weak for that. I don’t like it when I cannot feel Your presence.” If the purpose of the dark night of the soul, as some have suggested, is to create great longing for God, I can attest to its effectiveness after just a few hours.

Two weeks later, having emerged into daylight, Jean told me that 18 years earlier, she had met someone she thought was her guardian angel. Among other things that person had said to her was the following: “Some day you may experience temptation and trial. Should that ever happen to you, I hope that you will have someone at your side to help you.”

She did. Ironically, Jean, who had served as God’s instrument to shepherd me back to the flock, had me at her side. Even though I did not know what to do or what I was doing when I was doing it, I had God to guide me. So, Jean, though she did not know it, could not feel it, and even at times did not believe it, had God at her side throughout her ordeal. I was clearly little more than a conduit through which God pulled Jean back from the forces of darkness that were dragging her away and deposited her once again in the light. I like to think, though, that I was the person Jean's guardian angel had hoped that she would have 18 years earlier.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Poverty-Proofed

It was in college that I would first have to fight a seemingly unbeatable foe. At home, in the hands of highly abusive parents, I nonetheless knew I would ultimately win whatever battles befell me. I was small, but I was a “spitfire,” as many of my relatives called me. When I got bigger, I fought back vigorously and physically. When I was a teenager, I saw a light at the end of my tunnel: college. The foe was beatable.

Now, though, there was, indeed, an unbeatable foe: the college financial aid office. When I first applied to colleges, I knew that financing an education would be a problem. Poverty had greeted me at birth and, like a frightened but swaggering Chihuahua attempting to bolster his own self-confidence, had nipped at my heels most of my life. Nonetheless, being an incurable optimist, I assumed that college funding would appear from somewhere. It did. As a result of my SAT scores and my having been selected for Who’s Who Among American High School Students, the University of New Hampshire wrote to me and promised me four years of education, fully covered by scholarship, if I would come there. I considered that possibility, but it would keep me near home. That was not an acceptable option because it would keep me near home. More than anything else in going to college, I was looking for an escape from home. That was the reason why I had applied to Penn State University even though the entrance requirements for out-of-state students were extremely rigorous (top 10% of the incoming student body) and out-of-state tuition way out of reach. Penn State had accepted me but had not yet responded about the possibility of financial aid. At the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I sent Penn State a copy of the letter from the University of New Hampshire. Someone from the Penn State financial aid office wrote back to me and told me not to worry, that all my education would be paid through a combination of scholarships, loans, and work study. Soon thereafter, the financial aid office put together a package that took care of my first year in full, with the indication that subsequent years would be similar—but they weren’t.

From a financial aid point of view, I made the catastrophic error of getting married my sophomore year. The young and probably not highly knowledgeable financial aid officer at Penn State who told me that being married would not make a difference was wrong. It did make a difference. While my marriage has lasted 38 years, my scholarship petered out in far less than 38 weeks. “Giving scholarships to married women,” Mr. Z, the older, male financial officer who had taken over my account, said, “is a waste of money. They just sit at home, doing nothing with their lives but living off men. So, go home and take care of your husband.”

I went home all right but not to take care of Charles. He seemed to be handling that well enough on his own. Rather, I assessed my situation, looking for an out-of-the-box solution to the dilemma of having only a few weeks of financial aid left and two years of courses to complete. The answer came quickly—I have trouble thinking in the box; actually, I have trouble even finding the box!—so it did not take long to figure out that the 78 semester hours I still needed in order to graduate would break easily into 39 semester hours during each of the following two quarters, both of which were paid for by already-granted aid, That meant I had to take triple the maximum course load each quarter. Thanks to an advisor who paid little attention to students with A averages, considering them skilled enough to make their own decisions, a non-computerized course tracking system at the time, and a secretary who was willing to file my 3-page grade reports rather than turn them over to my advisor, I was able to tiptoe under and past the radar and graduate two quarters later.

My mother’s mother (my father’s mother had died when I was only six, so all I remember of her was a photograph with me on her lap as a toddler) gave me a small “loan.” With that and income from cocktail waitressing in the evening and go-go dancing at night, I even had enough money to fund the first quarter of graduate school.

“Don’t pay the loan back,” Gram said. “Pass it on.” I have done that on many occasions in my life, passing along as well the philosophy of not paying back but passing on whatever kindness is shown.

Gram was quite unlike Ma, and sadly Ma did not return Gram’s affection until a few days before Gram died many years later. A woman of hefty proportions and traditional haircut, Gram was a matriarch. There was no doubt about that. When she spoke, one obeyed. The liberating thing for me, though, was that she did not hit. Moreover, she listened, and when she spoke, she had fun ways of expressing herself, like looking for something “all over hell’s kitchen.” Throughout my preschool years, she fascinated me with nursery rhymes that she never tired of telling over and over and, when I was older, with an old gramophone that we wound up to play records that would gradually slow down, turning the singer’s peppy voice into a drawn-out wail, as the winding ran out. The games, songs, and rhymes that Gram taught me are ones that I now find myself teaching to my own grandson. When Ma would call me her “plain Jane,” Gram would respond, “Pretty is as pretty does.” During my penny-starved early college days, Gram would write to me every couple of weeks and include a package of dentyne gum under whose wrapper she had inserted a five-dollar bill. So, it was not surprising to me that Gram was the one who would come to my rescue when I had fallen on the petard of the financial aid officer. Gram came to my rescue years later, too, moving in after Shane was born and doing my housework for a month. “No one should come home from the hospital the day after a baby is born,” she scolded. “You play with the baby; that is your job now. I will take care of the house, the other kids, and your house work.” And she did.

Ironically, I might not have attended graduate school, had I not lost my undergraduate scholarship. Had I taken the slow route through school, Charles, a forestry major, would have finished significantly ahead of me and taken me to Montana from where his first job with the U. S. Forest Service beckoned. By graduating nearly a year and a half early, I had to wait for him for three quarters. During that time, I took all my master’s courses, this time only doubling the course load. My teachers, advisor, and department chair all understood my financial dilemma and did their best to help me by letting me finish as many of the requirements each quarter as I could handle. I passed the German reading exam required of German-Russian comparative literature majors the second quarter and the dreaded-by-all master’s comprehensive exams the third.

As soon as my exams were completed, I left for Montana with Charles, with only my master’s thesis left to complete. Talk about getting the last laugh on the financial aid office! I would end up paying tuition only one more time after that. That was for only one semester hour in order to be enrolled for the quarter in which I graduated. When I received my M.A. diploma, I exulted that the foe had been conquered again!

The Chihuahua had not disappeared, however. Although I did beat it from time to time, I never vanquished it. By the time I became a special needs parent for the third time — this time with Shura, the dying child artist I took in from Siberia — poverty and I had become old friends.

Poverty and I had, in fact, become sputniki (traveling companions) early in life for the 8-pack had been raised in poverty. For us, though, poverty itself was meaningless. It fell very low on the discomfort ladder, with physical beatings far outranking any other potentially significant contribution to our unhappiness. Moreover, while we did not have the brand-name clothes and the fancy “things” that our classmates from the city did, we had everything we truly needed. There was food after the move to the farm, and there was clothing because my grandparents worked at a textile mill. I, too, worked there as a teenager. We girls learned to make our own clothes, and some of our creations even became popular styles at school. Ma taught us the basics, but I especially liked to try new creations, such as patchwork dresses. All of us learned to harvest crops, preserve food, make butter and ice cream, and cook. As soon as we could reach the pedals, we learned to drive a tractor and took turns mowing and raking hay. We also learned how to yoke the oxen and use them to plough the fields in the spring. In the summer and fall, as soon as we were old enough to recognize the difference between a ripe vegetable and berry and an immature one, we were put into the fields, both our own and those of neighbors who hired us to work at three cents a pound of harvested peas, beans, blueberries. Thus, we acquired good skills and a strong work ethic.

In this respect, in spite of gifting us with a generally violent childhood, our parents did well by the 8-pack for they poverty-proofed us. One can never be truly impoverished if one has skills, talents, and diligence—and, as the Russians say, 100 friends.

As a poverty-proofed adult, I have rarely felt an overwhelming need for money. Surprisingly and heartening, however, whenever I have truly needed money, it has fallen into my lap. Even when I did not ask anyone for it, even when I did not know that there was Anyone to whom we could turn, the money to stave off potentially dire consequences has appeared from unexpected sources and often in the nick of time.

Thanks to intervention after intervention, our old foe would grow weary at times and lay down to rest, allowing us to do the same.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Where the Brave Dare Not Go

With my shoes winged with foreign languages, I have slipped right into the land of the enemy on multiple occasions. I did not fear to run where the brave dare not go for I was well armed. I had clearly been given the gift of words, and ultimately I could speak them in 17 languages. So, it did not matter that over time, the enemy differed. I spent the Cold War with the Russians and Czechs and the more recent hot one with the Arabs on both sides of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf and both sides of the Red Sea. I deftly intertwined myself with the culture and committed myself to helping all of them improve their educational systems. During a ten-year career stint in international educational consulting, I brought the knowledge of the Americans to Russia, the knowledge of the Russians to Brazil, the knowledge of the Brazilians to Bahrain, the knowledge of the Bahraini to Cambodia, the knowledge of the Cambodians to Austria, and so on through 24 nations.

What I brought and how I helped varied by country. In Uzbekistan, for example, I helped build a state-of-the-art English language program in Tashkent. I trained K-12 teachers in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara, traveling across the country on the old silk route from China, a road lined with winter-bare mulberry trees, their crotches cocooned in silk. The driver assigned to me and I shared the road with camels, donkey carts, 1930-style bicycles, motorcycles, modern cars, and oil tankers. Sometimes we had right-of-way, but more often, they did. In Samarkand, I lectured to the faculties of mathematics and foreign languages at Samarkand State University. In Bukhara, I explained to a teenage tour guide with limited experience in silk processing how silk is woven (I quickly saw the parallels with weaving wool; something I was familiar with from my summers of textile-mill work). During my days in Uzbekistan, I worried along with new-found friends that the further drying up of the Aral Sea, graphically represented by the unused irrigation canals in Samarkand, would reduce the cotton harvest and undermine the Uzbek economy. On the positive side, I shared pride in the poetry of Alisher Navoi, who published his works 300 years before Shakespeare. Among my most interesting work was assisting the Ministry of Education in developing programs that would later facilitate the re-establishing of Uzbek as a national language. At a federal workshop on the topic, attended by the regional ministers of education, I was the workshop leader and, of course, conducted the sessions in Russian, with a translator standing by to translate the comments and questions of the regional ministers from Uzbek into Russian. I was expected to make a few remarks at the opening session, which was broadcast on national television. I had a friend translate my words from Russian into Uzbek, and I practiced saying them until even the Uzbek janitor could understand me. When I had finished speaking at the opening session, Dr. Yoldashev, then Minister of Education and a bear of a man, stepped over a divider, walked over to the podium, and wrapped me in a bear hug.

In Brazil, I conferred with volunteers working to get 50,000 (!) children with lost interest in school off the streets and into learner-centered programs. In this process, I met a living angel, Dagmar, who founded Casa do Zezhino (Little Joe’s House) to give an alternative future to the children of drug dealers in the favellas (Brazilian-style ghettoes). She, though, was unwilling to be called an angel. She said one had to die for that! On one of my many trips to Brazil, I commiserated with friends when they were robbed in their own home at gunpoint, an all-too-frequent occurrence in the cities that boasted millions of residents for they “boasted” a high crime rate as well. My native language served me well throughout Brazil, as did my cross-cultural flexibility, genuine interest in other ways of thinking and doing, and ability to acquire new languages quickly. I provided seminars to English language programs in a dozen cities, from the Amazon in the North to the capital city of Brasilia in the heartland to the high mountains in the South. In Belem, at the northern tip of the Rain Forest, I learned to tell time not by the clock but by minutes and hours after the daily early afternoon deluge. In exotic Bahia in the East, I wandered through the under-the-city catacombs with an interpreter who knew only one language: Portuguese. In the South, I taught Russian at the Universidad de Rio Grande do Sul. In Rio de Janeiro, I participated in discussions in Portuguese to establish a national language policy, and using both English and Portuguese, I brainstormed with the staff of the Saõ Paulo superintendent of schools on ways to reduce violence in the schools.

In most countries, I appeared on radio or television and gave interviews to newspaper reporters to help publicize the work of one local organization or government agency or another. Along the way, I developed networks of people to help each other — and often that help extended into areas unrelated to education, such as putting together a physicist from Samarkand with a White-House-sponsored organization that could help him, asking a vice-rector at a Russian university to serve as evaluator of an American government assessment of Soviet foreign-language teaching, and, of course, there was the child artist from Siberia who became part of my family.

Going where the brave dare not go was not without its disconcerting moments. I was abandoned in more than one country when plans for pick-up fell through. Always, though, an unexpected rescuer appeared, sometimes in the most unforgettable way. For example, on one flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, I sat beside a young businessman named Eddie from Campinas, a town about an hour outside Sao Paolo and ironically the town to which I was headed. When I arrived, the embassy escort was no where to be seen. A call to the embassy’s weekend duty officer brought no elucidation or assistance. I would have to get to Campinas on my own, figure out what hotel I was supposed to be at, and track down the director of the institute I was supposed to be helping — all on a Sunday afternoon and with no contact information. I had only the office phone number of the embassy officer responsible for my trip — and Eddie’s home phone. A little reconnaissance at the airport turned up a bus service to Campinas. Upon arrival, I called Eddie, who was surprised to hear from me so soon but gamely picked me up at the bus station and brought me to his home for dinner with his wife and daughter, where I spent a more delightful evening than I would have spent alone at a hotel. Later in the evening, we called the information number at the institute where I would be working the next day and got the home phone of the director from the recording. Once we called the director, everything was back on course.

Going where the brave dare not go has also not been without moments of danger. Being mugged in Moscow and Amman and even in quiet Urabana, Illinois, where I was tazered by a purse snatcher, made that evident. Fortunately, in all cases, I was not harmed and I had almost no money in the purse — four cents is all the Illinois purse snatcher earned for his efforts. On the positive side, my traumatic experiences earned me a glimpse at police stations and police processes in Russia and Jordan — cross-cultural information I would not otherwise have learned. Interestingly, the small-town Illinois police were far less successful at tracking down the perpetrator, let alone getting my things back, than were the Moscow militsiya (police force) in a city of 13 million.

(Note: As you read this post, I am working on being prepared for my next risk, to take place in a month or so, the details of which I will share with you after the fact, for reasons of safety.)

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Lost Ticket

Eight years after spending wintry days in Akademgorodok, home to the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences, where, as a doctoral candidate, I researched Siberian dialects under the tutelage of the director of the Institute of Philology, I found myself in Krasnoyarsk, another Siberian city, lecturing to administrators and teachers at the request of the Siberian Ministry of Education, which hoped to make some radical changes in its educational system. Krasnoyarsk, an industrialized city with a population of one million people, located an hour south of the famous Divnegorsk hydroelectric dam on the Yeneisei River, east of the Ob, and in the northern taiga, contrasted vividly with the 8-block town of Akademgorodok. The people, though, were the same sort of warm, kind, and supportive colleagues, and I was able to establish a working bond that lasted over a period of several years of come-and-go lecturing (and more) there.

At one point, I was given a choice of conducting a seminar in Krasnoyarsk, St. Petersburg, or Moscow. I chose Krasnoyarsk, and when I arrived there in the middle of the winter without gloves, having forgotten about the tens-of-degrees-below-zero temperatures, one of my friends who met me at the airport pulled the mittens of her hands and handed them to me, saying, “We knew you would choose Siberia. Your heart is here.”

Of course, she was right — and why not? Any Siberian I know will hand you the mittens off his or her hands in the middle of the winter!

More frequently than with any other institution in Russia, I worked with Universe School. Headed by Dr. Isak Frumin, now a leader in the Moscow branch of the World Bank and an unusually innovative school principal, Universe School was a K-12 laboratory school for the University of Krasnoyarsk, overseen by the Department of Educational Psychology, where I had upon occasion lectured to the faculty.

Isak turned out to be a lifesaver. On my first trip to Krasnoyarsk, which I made jointly with a colleague, I ended up in Moscow with two huge boxes of books and handouts for the seminars that a colleague and I were to conduct there. At Domodedovo Airport, the domestic airport serving Siberia and the southern cities of the former Soviet Union, I found to my horror that nowhere did I have my ticket to Krasnoyarsk. It had either been left at the counter when I checked in for the Moscow flight in London or I had forgotten it at home. Computerization of ticketing was not a feature of airlines in Moscow at the time. Since I had no way to prove I had a ticket, I would have to purchase a new ticket, as well as pay overweight charges for the books. The total amount was high. My colleague and I put our resources together. It was enough either to purchase a round-trip ticket or to pay for the books and purchase a one-way ticket. My colleague wanted to leave the books behind. I was comfortable with taking my chances on being able to get out of Siberia. I chose the second option. We took the books, and I went to Siberia on a one-way ticket.

(I seemed to make a habit of going to Siberia on one-way tickets. The research stay described above had been the result of my accepting a one-way ticket -- with Lizzie in tow -- to Siberia, confident that I would somehow be able to get a return ticket although I had been told none were available at the time; they weren't available later, either, so, oops!, I had to overstay my visa. A few years after my trip to Krasnoyarsk, I was at a conference in Kemerovo, a Siberian mining town, with Lizzie’s younger brother, Shane, and was quite pleased to have a round-trip ticket for each of us in hand. When we got to the Kemerovo Airport, I bragged to Shane, “This is the first time I have been in Siberia on a round-trip ticket.”

A stickler for details, 15-year-old Shane looked carefully at our tickets, then up at me. “Don’t be so sure, Mom,” he said. “This ticket is for yesterday.”

As usual, Someone watched over us, and we made it out of Kemerovo even though we did not have everything we needed in our possession. In this case, because there was a child involved, the airline waived its rules and let us fly space available on the next plane out. Even officials in Russia make special cases when children are involved.)

In Krasnoyarsk, the only “child” involved was a rather large and rather old one — me. Nonetheless, as anticipated, I was rescued. When Isak learned of the situation, he purchased a return ticket for me with Universe School funds. That was not quite fair in my mind, and so I made a deal. Instead of returning the ruble or dollar amount of the ticket later, I would find an equivalent amount of hard-to-acquire Western books that he needed for the school library and send them to him. This was definitely a win-win situation, especially since I found many of the books at library sales and was able to purchase nearly ten times the value of the ticket in books for an amount equivalent to the cost of the ticket. More than that, when people heard what I was doing, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and even libraries donated books, resulting in a treasure trove for Universe School. Seeing how so many people benefited — the school children from the books and the donors from a sense of contributing to a worthy cause — how lucky I was to have lost that ticket!

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Seventy-Five Kilometers on Nine Rubles

Working at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Science (SO AN) is one of the most fascinating and rewarding things I have done. The academicians were stellar researchers, and I was in awe of their contributions to the field. When I finished my time there, I had to give a 45-minute report to the collective body of academicians and invited professors from the university. In presenting the research I had completed on their dialect, I found myself in an unnerving position in spite of all their kindnesses to me while I was working there. Their treatment of me like any junior Russian academician, a treatment that has little in common with the manner in which American academics relate to each other, made the awkwardness worse. My presentation was followed by questions from all those in attendance. The questions fell like pelting rain from a cloudburst, one after the other in rapid-fire order, some of them piercing, others insightful, few of them easy. That discussion was followed by a 45-minute very supportive public evaluation of my report by Aleksandr Ilich, who later sent me a written evaluation of my performance to pass along to my supervisor (not that I had a supervisor who could read it since it was written in Russian). If nothing else, the time there did much to help me build a bond with the people and land of Siberia and, equally important, improve my Russian language skills.

The need for speaking Russian saddened Aleksandr Ilich, the elderly and highly intelligent director of the Institute of Philolophy at SO AN. When we went to his home for lunch and dinner, nearly every day, he would spend our walking time chatting in English. He had learned English during WWII from reading technical manuals for the American airplanes he was flying as a navigator. Once at his home, of course, we spoke Russian with his wife, Natalya Timofeevna, herself a highly respected dialectologist and academician. At the Academy, we also spoke Russian even though all the academicians used English books in their research. Aleksandr Ilich would chide them on missing the opportunity of a lifetime: to speak English with a native speaker.

One of the senior academicians put the problem into clear perspective. “One native speaker in our lifetime shows up here, and you think we could possibly speak English to her? No, this is not only beyond my capacity but also beyond importance for once she leaves, we will not hear English again.” Such were the conditions of the Cold War that he was right. It would take the dissolution of the Soviet Union before Americans and other Westerners would begin to show up in Akademgorodok.

Akademgorodok turned out to be a breath of fresh air after constant KGB surveillance in Moscow. There, I often wished that there was some way for academics to play the game that military attachés had played for years, if not decades, with their KGB tails. An attaché would be very careful not to lose his tail—something that Lizzie and I never learned for we were very skilled at losing anyone following us, some of it through scatterbrained approaches to learning our way around the byways of Moscow and some of it through real skill when it was important that we not be followed for fear of getting a friend or a helpful colleague into trouble. In gratitude for always being able to follow the attaché without difficulty, the KGB agent would give the attaché an occasional “day off.” The day was designated by the attaché walking slowly along the street and when no one was looking, placing a bottle of vodka or cognac on the sidewalk. If the KGB agent picked up the bottle, the next day would be the day off. Each departing attaché would tell his replacement, and so the game continued, at least until the end of the Cold War.

So, when Lizzie and I first walked down Morskoi Prospect, the 6-block-long main street in Akademgorodok with which intersected Prospekt Lavrenteva, named after Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentyev, the first Chairman of the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences (called, in short, SO RAN), and location of the Institute of Philology of SO RAN, we immediately felt the influence of Moscow. We saw, for example, the high-rise apartment buildings that were slanting slightly to the left or right, as the concrete slabs they had been built on absorbed the warmth of the typical 70-plus-degree heating of the apartments and melted the permafrost.

We especially quickly spied the elevated militia posts on poles at the beginning and end of the street, but they were unmanned. People talked freely about anything they desired. Surprised, I asked Aleksandr Ilich about this.

“What can the Soviet government do to us here in Akademgorodok?” he asked. “Exile us to Siberia? We are already here!”

Dear Aleksandr Ilich! He had helped us so much. He became our best friend in Siberia — my research advisor, father figure, and teacher. What I learned about Siberian language and culture had come first from his books, which I had read at Lenin Library. Then, in person, he filled in many missing pieces for me, providing a foundation that I would build on for years and am still building on.

He was like most Siberians that way. In a land where everyone has to fight against the harshness of the climate, being one’s brother’s keeper takes on a literal meaning—and action. Even strangers would help us out. One taxi driver, in particular, I remember with intense gratitude.

Lizzie and I had been in Akademgorodok for a while when I realized that we had better go the airport, the only place we could get a return ticket to Moscow. Our visas would run out soon, and we had come on those one-way tickets proffered by Inotdel. With the airport 75 kilometers away, we would have to go by bus. Of the two buses in town, one went to Novosibirsk, originally named Novonikolayevsk after Tsar Nicholas II, the third largest city in the Soviet Union. The other went to the Novosibirsk/Tolmachevo Airport. Both cost 75 kopecks for me and 25 kopecks for Lizzie, exactly one ruble all told. That was good. I had only 10 rubles left to my name. I had traveler’s checks, but the bank in Akademgorodok was unable to cash them. I was hoping that I would be able to do that at the airport since the airlines would take them for ticket purchase. I obtained the departure schedule for the bus and set off with Lizzie for the airport.

At the airport, getting the tickets was not as easy as I thought. All tickets to Moscow were sold out until after our visas expired, and there was no way to extend a visa while in Akademgorodok. Well, what we were to do? Purchase the tickets for the earliest day possible and worry about the visas later. (When we got back Aleksandr Ilich told us not to worry about the visas; no one would be checking—and besides, what would they do? Send us to Siberia? Like everyone else in Akademgorodok, we were already there! And so we overstayed our visas, with no questions ever asked.)

Once we had purchased the tickets, we returned to the bus stop. It was not there. The stand where the bus had pulled up earlier was a drop-off spot only. There was no pick up. I checked out all the other bus stops; at a tiny airport like Novosibirsk/Tolmachevo, there aren’t many. One bus driver noticed my obvious confusion and opened his door,

“Kuda khotite?” (Where are you looking to go?)

“V Akademgorodok.” (To Akademgorodok.)

“Akh, nu, avtobusa netu.” (I see, well, there is no bus.)

“Dolzhen byt’. My syuda na avtobuse iz Akademgorodka priekhali.” (There has to be! We came here by bus from Akademgorodok.)

“Da. Syuda priezhaet, no tuda ne vozvrashchaetsya.” (Yes, the bus comes here from there, but it does not return there.)

Along about that time, the driver of a taxi parked nearby came over and asked if he could help. I explained our dilemma: we had come to the airport on bus from Akademgorodok, never dreaming that there would not be a bus back. He offered to take us. I would have agreed with alacrity. However, all I had to my name was nine rubles. Certainly, a 75-kilometer-trip would cost at least 30. I hesitated, then explained my dilemma to him. He smiled and said that he would take us for nine rubles. (Obviously, I had forgotten about Lizzie being with me; most Russians will do anything to help children.)

Taking us to Akademgorodok along the road between Tolmachevo and Novosibirsk and then along the Ob River was a long trip in and of itself. When we came across unexpectedly derailed cars from the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which crossed the Ob two blocks from our dormitory at Novosibirsk State University then sped eastward across the open steppe, the trip became considerably longer. We had to turn around, go back to the airport, and find back roads to Akademgorodok. The trip wound through the woods and passed a Strategic Rocket Forces airbase that we were not supposed to know about, especially in the days of the Cold War, as we wended our way back to Akademgorodok for more than two hours.

Along the way, Lizzie and I chatted in English. Surprised to hear a foreign language, the taxicab driver asked us, “Are you speaking Czech?”

We said no and admitted that we were Americans, speaking English. The trip immediately became more interesting to him. He had never met an American before and was full of questions — just as many questions as the Soviet media was at that time full of propaganda. The driver’s good deed turned out to be very educational for him. He turned back the meter to its starting point three times, and when we reached our dorm at Novosibirsk State University, he proudly announced that the meter read nine rubles. We handed him nine rubles, along with a pack of American cigarettes that we often carried as a bribe, Russian cigarettes being distasteful and unhealthily unfiltered. To that, we added American coins for his nephew and a few other pieces of Americana that we happened to have on us. He was pleased. We were pleased. The Russian Good Samaritan may have lost 20 rubles, but he gained much that day that he has probably never forgotten.

At the time, I told Lizzie that we were really lucky to come across this particular taxi driver. Now I wonder if we really owed our rescue only to Lady Luck leading us to one kind Siberian Samaritan.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

The Burning House

I have written much here and in my other blogs about aspects of my brutal childhood at the hands of parents who should not have had children. My brother-in-law, William Smith, however, has described that childhood much more succinctly and eloquently than I. With his permission, I published his poem below in my book, Blest Atheist, and I have posted it permanently on the Clan of Mahlou blog that I maintain about family members and events. Perhaps readers of Mahlou Musings will enjoy it as well.

The Burning House

I dreamed a dream of a burning house
With brothers and sisters and a cold bitter spouse.
The halls were all crooked, the doors were ajar.
I heard all their cries from the road in my car.

I put on the brakes and came to a stop
While an old jackrabbit went hippity hop.
I looked back again, and the house was ablaze.
The people inside just looked in a daze.

The curtains were tattered, the roof was not straight.
The hinges were knocked off the broken front gate.
The paint was all weathered, and the shutters hung loose.
A shadow on the barn door looked like a noose.

A kid outside shouted, "There's a fire there, you see".
But Mama kept screaming, "Come back here to me".
"No, I cannot, ‘cause your house is on fire".
But nobody listened as the flames grew still higher.

Once in a while a child would run out,
But Mama and Papa would just scream and shout.
The kid in the yard would utter a scream
As a child ran back in as if in a dream.

Soon the house burned right to the ground.
The kid in the yard made not a sound.
I opened the door, and she sat on the seat.
She didn't look back because of the heat.

I stepped on the gas, and we sped away.
I opened my mouth, but what can you say?
"They had to go back," was her soft reply.
All of them chose their way to die.

I turned on the light; she was just seventeen.
She was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen.
I'll never forget the night I stopped there,
‘Cause I married that girl with the long, flowing hair.

- William Smith

Carol and I

I grew up in a neighborhood where racial prejudice was pervasive. Actual discrimination rarely occurred, however, because the entire town was white until Carol’s family moved there. Carol’s first day in my second-grade classroom caused a stir. She was short, like me, but unlike me, black. The teacher put her in a front-row seat across from me. Everyone was quietly contemplating this situation — one African-American among 25 of us Anglo-Saxon children — when Larry, the boy who sat in the seat behind Carol, arrived late to school. He walked over to his desk, glanced around, then stared at the new occupant of the desk in front of him, and exclaimed, “A nigger!”

Classroom discipline immediately broke down. While the teacher restored order, I looked over at Carol and smiled. She smiled back. At that moment, I became angry with Larry for his cruel words, and Carol instantly became my new best friend. She was different from the rest of us, and I was intrigued by differences. Thinking about differences gave me a chance to understand myself better through the comparison and allowed me to see things from new perspectives. The latter appealed to me because the perspective I saw on a daily basis was brutal.

For the rest of the year, Carol and I were a “pair.” I was popular enough among my classmates to get away with befriending a non-white child. In fact, much of the antipathy toward Carol that could have appeared in our second-grade classroom did not. However, the community was a different story, and I lost my best friend by the end of the year when her parents, unable to tolerate the rampant prejudice of the 1950s in white America, moved away.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

On the Wings of Serendipity

The first part of this story was posted eons ago here: Siberia on an Easter Morning. You can click and read and return to read Part Two (II), or, for ease, I have re-posted it under Part One (I) below. If you remember it, you might just want to skip to II.

I

“Khristos voskres” (Christ is risen). One person after another greeted me with these words as I climbed the stairs of the little, wooden church in Akademgorodok, a tiny town at the end of the man-made Ob Sea, bejeweling the Siberian steppe 45 minutes south of the city of Novosibirsk. The intertwining snow-covered birch and kedr (Siberian pine) trees created an illusion of a land of fantasy, made more so in the late evenings by the moon reflecting off the naked silver-white birch bark onto the dark red-brown trunks and evergreen branches of the pines. This was not yet the inhospitable taiga; it was somewhat south for that, but nonetheless the birch and kedr trees stood closely side-by-side like brothers-in-arms against a hostile white and cold universe.

“Voistinu voskres” (truly, He is risen). If my words of response rang hollow, there was a reason. They came from the lips of a bona fide atheist, convinced that religious congregations were delusional. Certainly, they contained well-meaning folks, ones often with great compassion, but nonetheless, in my opinion at that time, delusional. Raised in a so-called Christian home and an attendee, but not engaged participant, in Methodist and Baptist churches in my early years, I found no sense in the sermons of the ministers who were often more interested in tangible things than in holy deeds, no examples set by the deacons who were often bedding the wives of their friends, and no love of God in the raspberry-bush switches wielded by my parents that demanded their few ounces of blood every Sunday before we marched into church as a model family. God, to me, was a fantasy, created by evil-doers to make themselves feel better. When given a chance at the age of 16 to preach the Youth Sunday sermon, the topic of which was “The Christian Home,” I pointed out all of these things, to the great discomfort of the congregation. I concluded that sermon with the suggestion that considerable thought be given to the advantages of raising a child without hypocrisy, i.e. in an atheistic environment. From where came the audacity of a child to make such statements from a pulpit? I don’t really know. Perhaps I envied the lives of my peers who were not abused each and every day and in resentment needed to point out something wrong with their lives, too. Perhaps I had expected the church community to step in and rescue my siblings and me from our physical and sexual tormentors and blamed the people in the community when no one stepped forward. Perhaps the rage in which I was raised crimson-colored all the emotions of my childhood. In any event, that sermon ended my churchgoing days. My family had been asked to leave the church, and I had not been punished in any way. I suspect that my parents had feared that after such a sermon, were they to have hurt me as a result, I would have flounced into church with that announcement as well, completely destroying their reputations. Or perhaps their sense of the awfulness of what I had done paralyzed them into inaction. In any event, there being no other church within reasonable travel distance, I had spent the rest of my growing-up and adult years in the atheistic environment I had exalted.

My parents never lost their faith as a result of their excommunication, but they never again talked much about it in front of me. We no longer were forced to say grace at meals. Bibles disappeared from our bedsides onto the crowded bookshelves in our library. Although they never mentioned anything to me, looking back, I imagine that my parents felt that something became very broken in their lives that Sunday morning. At the core of their lives festered a desperate need to be respected by the community, perhaps fostered by childhoods in which neither had experienced much respect. Dad’s unusually high level of intelligence brought him only a sense of disappointment and failure when, in order to support his parents and five younger siblings during the Great Depression, he had to leave school in eighth grade and take a job as a shoe cutter, a trade he plied, along with farming, his entire life. Ma had always been the little doll of her family, if my great-aunt’s assessment is accurate, but had found herself rejected and ridiculed by classmates while her brother, who was in the same class, served as class president. As adults, my parents became community leaders, my father serving on the school board and my mother becoming actively involved in one social cause after another, looking for approbation from peers long ago grown up. We children suffered their anger when we failed to make up for their dissatisfaction with their own lives and their sense of underachievement, Dad intellectually and Ma socially. Their church activities provided them the lifeline with which they had clung to the community respect that they so desperately desired. I had cut that lifeline with one sermon.

As for me, I felt that something got fixed in my life that morning. No more hypocrisy. No more pretending to be a pew-filling, perfect family. No more Sunday morning races when I would refuse to get dressed for church, Dad would want to beat me into compliance, and I would run. As young as the age of eight, I could outrun Dad. I could also run far. Neighbors passing by enroute to church pretended not to see the two of us running—around the front yard, across the street, through the tall grass, and into the nearby woods, my long hair flying straight back into the wind and my father flailing a switch, usually broken off from a raspberry bush with healthy thorns for ripping flesh. I could feel the wind brushing past my face, the adrenalin coursing through my veins from fear of the whip and nerve endings on fire with the thrill of the race, my legs fueled by competing thoughts: the stubbornness to do what I wanted, the fear of a dire outcome should I slow down or stumble long enough to be caught, and exhilaration at the thought that just perhaps I could run away from all of it, from the switchings, from the name calling, from the hypocrisy of pretending that we were the picture-perfect family, and especially from pretending to love and obey a God who for me did not exist and whom my parents used as a threat. Only when my father lost the switch and was too spent to care any more about hitting me would I run home. Running back into the “burning house,” as my future brother-in-law would later call it, was the only option that ever entered my head for any neighbor in New England of those days would have brought me back to my parents. Having run home, I always ended up in church. There, sitting in a pew, watching Dad and Ma acting in a devout manner and being viewed by the church community as ideal parents, my anger toward them would reach a full but quiet zenith. After the church service concluded, my parents would accept the sympathetic comments of my friends’ parents, especially those who happened to catch a glimpse of our Sunday morning marathons. These people would knowingly smile, nod, and assent as to how difficult I must be to raise—and my rising anger and frustration at the unfairness of it all made me want to run again—far away from my parents, the church, and the complacent people in the church pews. I resented being abused, and I trapped the church and its people in the web of angry emotions that encompassed my teenage years. I never asked how others in my family felt about being alienated from the church. I did not care. I had been freed.

Until now. Now I was about to address another church congregation. It was the first time in 30 years I would speak to such a gathering.

Uttering the expected words of greeting as I mounted the steps to the vestibule of the church was not uncomfortable. They were, after all, meaningless to me. While I would have preferred another form of greeting, I had somehow managed to end up at this impressively humble Russian Orthodox Church on Easter morning. So, the greetings were to be anticipated.

As I reached the top of the stairs, a priest extended his hand. As I had been taught in advance to do, I kissed it. The priest smiled and said, “There is no need to follow our customs. I have been told that you are an atheist. I’m Father Grigoriy, and I am very happy to meet you at long last. I do need, though, to find some way to introduce you to the congregation. I have given this some thought and wonder if I may introduce you as a Good Samaritan?”

I knew the parable. Is there anyone who does not? It was one that we learned at school and at church although all too infrequently had I seen the people who thought it a wonderful story follow the example themselves.

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"

He answered: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

"You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

In reply, Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.

So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'

"Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?"

The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him."

Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

I agreed with Father Grigoriy that my introduction as a Good Samaritan would be appropriate. Apparently, others had passed through this remote village in Siberia, had even met young Aleksandr Ivanovich, affectionately referred to as Shura, a teenage artist dying from complications of spina bifida (a congenital malformation in which the spine does not fully close during the first six weeks of gestation). These passers-through had expressed a desire to help him, but for whatever reason had not done so or simply had not been able to do so. they did nothing. They were like the beaten man’s countrymen who passed him by. Perhaps they thought they could not help. Perhaps they initially thought that they could help but ultimately could not. Most were from Russia, and Russia in the early 1990s, just emerging from 70 years of a failed experiment in communism, was an impoverished nation — except, of course, for the oligarchy and the mafia (often an intermixed group) that held the purse strings and power in the new “democracy.” Others were from foreign countries, and perhaps the complicated immigration laws gave them pause. The only fact that matters, though, is that they did not help, and not helping, regardless of circumstances, in my opinion at that time and now, is a choice. One can choose to pass by those who need help with the excuse that one does not have the needed resources, whether those be money, time, or skills, or one can stop and try to help, looking for the resources when they may not be in hand. I chose to stop. And now here I was at Shura’s church with him to share his recently rescued life with his neighbors on the day known as the Resurrection.

On wobbling prostheses, which he had not yet learned to control completely, and clinging to the railing, Shura, the pride of this tiny community, had triumphantly followed me up the stairs of the wooden church, his church. There he had been raised in a faith that carried him through the torments of childhood, the agony of waxing and waning hope that he would be able to come to the United States for treatment as he lay dying in a Siberian hospital, and the difficult decision, with which he was required to concur prior to surgery at Virginia State Hospital, to amputate both gangrenous legs and replace them with prostheses. It had been the kind of life that could challenge the faith of a saint. Yet, he was but a teenage boy, one with resilient faith that God would find someone to help him.

And now we both stood in front of a hushed crowd of Russian Orthodox believers. Father Grigoriy had just introduced me as the Good Samaritan who had rescued their Shura, the young man they loved and for whom they had despaired and now hoped. The crowd looked at me in eager anticipation. What was an atheist to say to this expectant gathering of believers?

II

Shura represented a significant challenge to anyone who chose to stop. Already a teenager, he had been hospitalized over and over at the local hospital in Akademgorodok. Well-educated by his mother, he had never been able to attend school, but he did play with the neighborhood children, many of whom taunted him for his inability to walk, to combat which he would resort to fisticuffs, developing a strong sense of self-determination and just a tinge of pugilism. The sac that contained the end of his spine had never been repaired, and his legs, which would eventually have to be amputated, were constantly threatening his life with gangrene. At the same time, he was a talented artist. At the age of 12, he had already had his first exhibit at Dom uchenykh, (the famous, government-supported House of Scientists that was part of the Academy of Sciences). By the age of 15, he had published both his art and his poetry, had had yet another exhibit at the House of Scientists, and had appeared in a television documentary about his unique talent and life. Also by the age of 15, it was clear that he would not survive without better medical assistance.

The question as to why I was the one who should help him is fairly clear. Who better to provide that assistance than a mother of another spina bifida child, who knew how to care for such children at home and also knew doctors who could help? Who better to pry a visa out of the U. S. Embassy in Moscow than a former State Department language program supervisor who had trained many of the diplomats working at the embassy? Who better to provide assistance to a speaker of Russian than someone who spoke Russian? Who better to help a child of the cold Siberian winter assimilate into California sunshine than a grown child of the cold Maine winters living in California? Who better to help a child from the wooded steppe than an American researcher who had lived and worked in the same steppe, loved the steppe and its people, and knew its literature and its culture? The number of instances of coincidence between what was needed and what I had learned or experienced in my life up until that point was truly amazing. Or was it so amazing?

Looking back, I cannot dispute the contention that my life has been filled with what I called amazing coincidences and what others called miracles. Some even say that coincidences are those times that God chooses to remain anonymous. That God was willing to use an atheist to help create miracles is a miracle in itself. Why God would so bless an atheist only the Almighty knows. How it was done was on the wings of serendipity—the ride of a lifetime.

Standing nervously in front of the expectant gathering at the little wooden church in Akademgorodok on that Easter morning after Shura’s first surgeries, I should not have worried about what to say. The minute I began to speak, an awed “ona govorit po-russki” (“she speaks Russian”) ran through the crowd. My ability to use the language effortlessly, thanks to earning my Ph.D. in Russia, along with my willingness to stop and help rescue Shura, predisposed all standing there to like me, regardless of whether or not I shared their faith. I shared their language and their love—of things Russian, of this young man, of Siberia—and that was enough.

So, I told them the story of Shura in America. To me, it was a great story of serendipity. To them, it was a story of a great miracle. Over time, I have come to realize that it is both.

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This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

My Friend, Sveta

Thanks to my friend, Svetlana (Sveta), I knew what to do to get my daughter, Lizzie, into school when I took her with me on a study year in Moscow. Thanks to Sveta, Lizzie was adequately prepared for school once we got past the first few weeks of filling out all the paperwork and receiving all the permissions (not easy in the days of the Soviet Union -- American kids simply did not "transfer" to Soviet schools, and approving anomalies did not come easy to USSR bureaucrats). Thanks to Sveta, I grew to know Soviet society and, more important, Soviet people very well.

Sveta and I had become acquainted two years earlier. When I showed up in 1984 in Moscow with Lizzie in tow, Sveta already knew who she was and eagerly awaited the opportunity to meet her and introduce her to children’s life in the Soviet Union. To Sveta’s delight, while waiting to get Lizzie enrolled in school, I still had to go to my own classes at the University of Moscow, where I was taking a graduate course in dialectology. Concurrently, I was conducting research for my dissertation at Dissertatsionyj zal (the dissertation archives) at Biblioteka imeni Lenina (Lenin Library) downtown. So, Lizzie would have been alone for long periods of time had not Sveta, a graduate student in the field of philosophy, watched out for her. Sveta also gave Lizzie indirect lessons in Russian that stood her in good stead in her early days in School #77. Sveta knew no English so all communication was in Russian, and Lizzie picked up the language by necessity. When she started attending school, Lizzie already had a comfort level in communicating and sufficient tolerance of ambiguity in the language not to panic when she did not understand.

Sveta and I were bonded by our daughters, Sonya and Noelle, and her brother, who lived in the same "sektor" (dorm area) of the university that we did. Although I never met Sonya, who had moved back to Krasnodar to live with her father shortly before I became acquainted with Sveta, I felt like I knew her because she, like Noelle, suffered from hydrocephalus, colloquially known as water-on-the-brain. Although Sveta never met Noelle, she felt like she knew her because both her brother and Noelle coped daily with paraplegia. Until I showed up with Lizzie, we had only pictures through which to share our families. Now I had a real child with me, Noelle’s sister, Lizzie. Sveta promised to bring her real McCoy, Sonya, from Krasnodar so the children could play together. Like most graduate students, we had great plans for ourselves and for our children.

The three of us had not spent many hours together, however, before Sveta was diagnosed with tuberculosis. I urged her to stay in Moscow where the medical care was more advanced and where I could keep an eye on her. Her husband demanded that she return to Krasnodar where he could take care of her and she could be with her daughter. She returned to Krasnodar, begging me to come visit her there. I had no visa for Krasnodar and no hope at that time for getting one because I would have had to indicate that I was planning to visit a friend—at a time when Russians were not supposed to be friends with Americans.

“No problem,” said Sveta. “Just jump on the train and come without a visa. No one will know you are not Russian.” Well, perhaps my generic appearance and my Russian-language skills would allow me to pass for a Russian. The Ministry of Education of Ukraine proved that hypothesis to be true ten years later when it bought me a Russian ticket, not a foreigner ticket, through Simferopol to Sudak in the Crimea on the Black Sea. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s grey eyes, auburn hair, dimples, and freckles would not pass, in spite of her school uniform, for the features of a Russian child. So, I did not go—that time.

Two years later, when I came back to Moscow to provide consultation to the American ambassador on language programs, I applied for a visa to Krasnodar and sent a telegram to Sveta, telling her my plans. (This was, of course, before the days of Internet, cell phones, and other marvelous forms of instant communication.) Sveta, upon learning that I was in Moscow and doubting that I would be able to get a visa for Krasnodar, hopped immediately onto a plane and flew to meet me in Moscow, but she never informed me that she was coming. In the interim, I did get a visa for Krasnodar, and off I went to Domodedovo Airport to fly to the land of the Kuban, the middle land of European Russia. The plane from Krasnodar had landed, and in a spurt of efficiency, the airline officials had us already lined up to load onto the plane as the last of the passengers from Krasnodar were disembarking. Like in the plot of a B-rated movie, as I shuffled behind the other passengers to get onto the plane, through a window in the panel that separated embarking from disembarking passengers, I caught a glimpse of Sveta. I stopped and pounded on the window. She turned and rushed over.

“I’ll fly back,” she mouthed. “Meet me tonight at the town square.” That was all she was able to get out before we were both pushed away from each other by the stream of passengers behind us, pushing us forward.

Sveta did not make it back to Krasnodar that evening. For hours, I waited in vain at the town square. At least, the weather was not severe. Over the next few days, I became acquainted with Krasnodar, a city that represented the mix that could be seen throughout Russia: a modern Intourist hotel for visiting foreigners and houses without plumbing for residents. I remembered Sveta telling me how she had to go to the end of the street to pump water for use at home. Now, Sveta was in Moscow, and I was in her town. I sent a telegram to Zina, a mutual friend living in the outskirts of Moscow to whom Sveta had introduced me in 1982. I knew that Sveta would have checked in with her. In the telegram, I asked them both to meet me at Arbat Restaurant in the center of town at 7:00 on Friday. I flew back to Moscow on Friday, and once again found myself waiting for hours for Sveta. Finally, around 9:00, I called Zina at home. She answered the phone.

“We just got the telegram,” she explained, “only ten minutes ago. We are coming. We will be there in an hour.”

“I sent the telegram three days ago,” I remarked, but my remark should not have been in surprise.

“Yeah,” said Zina. “That might be, but you know the KGB has to read it first and then would try to deliver it at a time that could be said it was delivered but late enough that you would miss meeting with us. It is good that you called.”

We did meet. It was to be the last time I would see Sveta. Only then, I had no inkling of how ill she was. The call from Zina, telling me that Sveta had died, came in the middle of the night two years later. There was nothing strange about the time. There is an 11-hour difference in time zones between Moscow and California. Nonetheless, given that the call came in the middle of the night and carried such tragic news, I was certain for days that I had dreamed it. Unfortunately, it was no dream.

I have written poems in Russian for Sveta on several occasions: when she was dying and on the anniversaries of her death. Recently, I wrote one on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of her death. How young she died, and how many years have passed! More important and more unbelievably, so much has changed in those twenty years that one would not today recognize Sveta’s rodina (motherland) as the same country. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has reverted to Old Russia with many, many new elements, making it a New Russia. The worries we suffered are now only a dim memory from the social history of the former Soviet Union.

[If you do not read Russian, skip forward to the English translation.]

Не «прощай», Света, а «пока»!

На 20-ую годовщину смерти
Моей молодой подруги советской.

Ох, как я помню московские вечера
И наши чувства, как будьто все прошло вчера.
Под громкой музыкой радио шептали,
Недопустимые мысли выражали.

Ох, как я помню наши поделившие
Идеи и надежды на будущее,
На дружбу вечную, жизнь удачную,
И работу и степень кандидатскую.

И помню как мы сидели с ее братом
Живущем в блоке с нами рядом.
Талантливым, он был, и безумно милым,
Жизнерадостным, жизнелюбивым, мирным.

А сейчас призасыпанный землей лежит
Из-за бессмысленной смерти—перитонит.
И помню неутещающие слезы
И вечно повторяющие вопросы:

Почему? Как? Чем объяснить? Чем утешить?
Ну, сегодня же что значит перитонит?
Вопросы никак неотвечаемые.
Ответы никак непонимаемые.

Я помню как мы все теснее сближились,
Как мы, русская с американкой, дружились.
При холодной войне кто это подумал бы?
Но у нас больше смерти общего, увы!

Она родила дочь, а я сразу за ней.
Головная водянка у наших дочерей
И парализированные ноги.
К тому же у обеих и припадки.

Помню как Света от горя с ума сошла.
Я не могла помогать. Я была в США.
Я помню как от тюберкулеза она,
До своего времени, увы, умерла.

О Свет, все изменилось после распада!
Скрывать дружбу как мы скрывали не надо.
И не надо бояться как мы боялись.
Создать открытое общество старались.

Но сейчас на том свете, не на этом, ты.
Туда пошли подряд, друзья мои, все вы.
В то время была я в далекой стране,
Справляясь только матом о суровой судьбе.

Но настоящая дружба не умирает,
Только организм приятеля изчезает.
Твой дух, который жил, все еще живет
У меня в сердце и мыслях и даже расстет.

Ветераны мы холодной войны.
Ветераны мы жестокой судьбы.
Но надо иметь ввиду с другой стороны
Что уникальную дружбу имели мы.

(Translation: “Not Good-Bye, Sveta, Just Ciao for Now.” On the 20th anniversary of the death of my young Soviet friend. Oh, how I remember the Moscow evenings and our feelings, as if everything had happened yesterday, how we turned up the radio and whispered disallowed ideas into each others’ ears. Oh, how I remember our shared thoughts and hopes for the future, for eternal friendship, a successful life, and for jobs and our doctorates. I remember how we sat with her brother who lived in the dorm room next to us. Talented he was and really kind, filled with the joy of living, the love of life, a peaceful mind. And now he lies buried under a mound of earth because of a senseless death—peritonitis. I remember uncomforted tears and eternally repeating cries: Why? How? For what reason? How to keep on going? After all, how fatal is peritonitis today? Questions that had no answers. Answers that could be understood no way. I remember how we grew closer, how we, Russian and American, celebrated friendship. During the Cold War, who would have thought this? Alas, we had more than death in common. She gave birth to a daughter, and so did I. Both daughters had water-on-the-brain, and both suffered from seizures; my daughter was moreover paraplegic. I remember how Sveta went crazy with grief. I could not help. I was in the USA. I remember how tuberculosis took her life, alas, prematurely. Oh, Svet’ everything has changed since communism’s fall. One no longer has to hide a friendship as we did. One no longer has to fear as we did. An open society is appearing. But now you are in that world, not this. You, my friends, went there one after another. I was in a faraway land, and only cursing helped me cope with a cruel fate. But true friendship does not die. Only the body we no longer see. Your spirit, which lived then, lives now in my heart and in my mind and even grows. Veterans of the Cold War were we. Victims of a cruel fate were we. But one must hold to another view: we had a unique friendship, so true.)

My poems about Sveta were not without effect on others. A teacher, whom I shall call Elena and with whom I was working at the time, had not seen a close personal friend in many years and had the opportunity to meet her in Bulgaria. This was a bit risky when the Soviet empire reigned since Bulgaria was held closely in check by the USSR. Still, both Easterners and Westerners could travel there, making Bulgaria about the only crossroads available for those who wanted to meet. Elena confided in me where she was going and whom she was going to meet in case something happened. She gave me her phone numbers and other ways to reach her if she did not show up at work at the end of her scheduled annual leave.

“I would never have dared to take such a risk without you,” she told me. “I am a refusenik [someone who defied the Soviet government] and am here in the US as a refugee. For my own safety, I should not go to Bulgaria, but after listening to your poems about Sveta, I realize that friendship has a sacred character to it. We do not come by true friends easily, and we should not abandon them under any circumstances. I will go and see my friend, see how and if I can help her, and I will rely on God to take care of me and bring me back.”

She returned on time. Her decision, she said, had been the right one.

Once again, something bad -— the death of my friend —- had been turned into something good -— Elena’s courage to see her friend before it was too late. This has been a theme in my life: bad turning into good, into a chance for one person to help another, even for one person to help many.

----------------

This excerpt is adapted from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009).

Stealing Doah

Yesterday, by request, I posted an excerpt from my book, Blest Atheist, on the Clan of Mahlou site about how many years ago Doah was dying at Renboro Hospital (name changed) and with Doah's pediatricians' implicit consent (not explicit -- he would not have been able to give that kind of encouragement), Donnie and I literally stole Doah from the hospital in a very dramatic, made-for-the-movies episode in our lives. It's a story that Doah never tires of hearing. Here are the first paragraphs. If you are interested, you can read the whole story, including how once again God was able to bad into good, at the Clan of Mahlou site. (Sorry about the repeat for those of you who are followers at that site; there is a few followers who overlap, but most do not so, since followers here have come to know Doah a little through the excerpts from his book, I figured information about this posting might be interesting.

Told by doctors at Renboro Hospital that Doah would die for certain, the trail ahead of us to bring him into adulthood seemed hopeless and far, indeed — except that I simply have no idea what the word, hopeless, means. To me, where there is life, there is hope. Clearly, though, to maintain that hope, we would have to do something about the attitude of the doctors and hospital in which Doah was being followed.

We did not have to think long. Matters quickly came to a head at Renboro Children’s Hospital. Our knock-down-drag-out fights with doctors there pitted parent against doctor in a war that was not going to serve Doah well. In June 1980, that cold war heated up rapidly. I refused to sign papers for a fundoplication, an operation that would repair Doah’s hiatal hernia at the risk of losing him because of his breathing difficulties from a subglottic stenosis (narrowing of the trachea) that were treated by a tracheotomy. (Nowadays children's with tracheotomies have decent survival rates; back then, most of the children died.) Doah’s pediatrician, Dr. Paul, was one of our strongest supporters. He would come to the hospital, mediate disputes, and provide me with his medical opinion. Dr. Paul researched the surgical procedure. He learned that the operation (in 1980) had only a 25% survival rate in cases like Doah’s and, if the patient survived, there was only a 50/50 chance that the surgery would take care of the problem. In any event, the surgery would have to be repeated every few years. (Over the years, the surgery success rate and survival rate has approached nearly 100%, but the surgery does still have to be repeated every five years.) Given these statistics, the pediatrician agreed with us that surgery was not wise.

Bent on what we assumed was their pursuit of medical training and the chance to do what was then a relatively new procedure, the doctors insisted that Doah have the surgery. Part of me wondered whether they just assumed he was going to die, anyway, and therefore he was a good candidate for “training” surgeons on a new procedure. In any event, the doctors did not accept my refusal to sign papers authorizing surgery and took the case to court, requesting that the court grant custody of Doah to Renboro Children’s Hospital so that they could do the surgery. We were not told about this court proceeding; apparently, we were going to be deprived of the opportunity even to be in courtroom and defend our rights as his parents. Shades of American democracy as it sometimes perverted by evil forces! I found out about this intention because I read promiscuously —- books and journals and articles and medical records: all Doah’s surgical reports, all the nurses’ notes, all the medical entries of any sort. And that is where I found it. In Doah’s four-inch-thick file was a scrawled note about our being unfit parents because we would not sign for the surgery and the date of the court proceeding. The date was only two days away.

What to do? A daring plan entered my mind: steal Doah from Renboro Children’s Hospital and take him out of state to Beanton Children’s Hospital where Noelle had been treated for her spina bifida and related birth defects three years earlier. I trusted the doctors because they listened to me. The doctors I knew there even liked me. I quickly found out more about Noelle’s former urologist, Dr. Colodny, and learned that while he was at that time specializing in lower GI problems, he had at one time worked in the area of upper GI problems. He could be Doah’s doctor, I reasoned. That thought comforted me, but we still had to get to Beanton.

We developed a step-by-step plan to steal Doah from his hospital room. I shared the plan, but not the details or the timing, with the pediatrician. He looked at me thoughtfully. Then he said, “I cannot condone what you propose. However, if you do happen to end up in Beanton, please be aware that Bob, the son of my partner, is an intern there. He can provide the link back to us and make the transition of records and information smooth.” He disappeared from the room and came back in a couple of minutes with Bob’s phone number. The pediatrician’s implicit encouragement was all that I needed to put our plan into action.

The next day, the doctors were in court, and we were at the curb outside the hospital. Charles kept the car running in a “standing only” zone. What I was about to do would not, could not, take a long time, we reasoned.

Click here to read what I did: continuation of Stealing Doah.

A Moment of Joy

For me, in dark moments, moments of grief, I am helped by focusing on moments of joy for the past, knowing that life is a balance of both. As we await the pulling of the plug and the formal end of Ray's life, with the understanding that he really died a week ago and has been artificially kept alive thanks to marvelous modern technology, I think back to something that happened a few years ago and which I describe at the end of my book, Blest Atheist.

Even if there are difficulties ahead, there will be help and protection. There will also be rewards. There always are. With God, the rewards are unanticipated and unusual. The simplest among them are the greatest.

One evening last December, the thought came into my head that I should take my evening walk around the mission grounds early. Normally I walk there around 9:00 p.m., and it was only 6:00 when I felt the push to go outside for my walk.

No, I thought. Why would I want to go now? Even though the eventide falls around 5:30 on December nights in San Ignatio, I still prefer to go later—after dinner and dishes and before retiring for the night. It is a marvelously restful way to end the day. Walking brings out the happy endorphins, and just being at the mission provides great encouragement toward prayer.

No, I’ll go later, I thought and began cleaning the kitchen in preparation for dinner. Then the impulse came again. The “argument” went back and forth a couple of times until I approached Donnie, who usually accompanies me on these walks.

“Donnie, how do you feel about taking our evening walk early tonight?” I asked.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know why,” I answered. “I just feel like we should go early.”

Donnie acquiesced and quickly assembled his pipe tools. (He likes to sit and smoke while I walk.) We opened the door and stepped out under the night sky. And there it was, spread across the heavens: a breathtaking lunar ice halo.

Ice halos are rings of light that surround the sun, moon, or other sources of light, such as street lamps. The ones in the heavens are caused by millions of ice crystals in thin, cold, cirrus clouds floating in the troposphere reflecting and refracting light. This particular ice halo was circumhorizonal, a rare phenomenon for which adequately descriptive words, other than scientific ones, are even rarer. Refracted light from the moon spread in a 360-degree circle all around the sky on the same level as the moon yet at the same time touching the horizon wherever we turned—or so it seemed although in actuality the circle of light was parallel to the horizon and not lying upon it. The halo filled the whole sky, with the full moon in its zenith filtering a stream of light through a gossamer foramen in the firmament onto the mission grounds below.

I could almost hear the proud words, “Look what I did!” The hymn of Isaac Waats came to mind instantly: “The moon shines full at His command, and all the stars obey.”

On the mission grounds canopied by the horizon-to-horizon crystal glow, I walked, my arms extended. Irrepressible joy spread past my fingertips, riding on the splendor of light toward the horizon.

Then it was gone. Had I come at my usual time, I would have missed it.

These then are the things that have been seen and experienced by the blest atheist. All the events reported herein [in the book] have enriched my life, but the greatest of these was God sharing with me the lunar ice halo: “Look what I have done!” The hound of Heaven had finally caught me and then had shown me what I had been missing: “Look what I have done!” Indeed, I could almost hear those words and a few more: “Look at what I have done—for you, for all people, because I love you whether or not you even believe that I exist.”

All the miracles that God has done in my life and in the lives of others through me have been wondrous, but pulling me outside to view the ice halo stands out above them all as the most affirming act of God’s love. The miracles were about healing and turning bad into good. They have been important, of course. Viewing the ice halo, however, was about relationship: God’s relationship with me, God’s relationship with all of us. When God called me from my house onto the street and into the field at the mission, I understood that I was special—not special out of many, but special among many, special like all people are special to God.

On an individual level, I was and am at best only a Good Samaritan, and still God wanted a relationship with me. In so many ways, I was and am but a child who finds the adults who can help a sick child artist, a crying lady, a boy in white, or an orphan dying from brain tumors. Like a child, I have no burning desire for financial gain, material possessions, or fame and power. Those desires were beaten out of me in my youth. Although many of these things have appeared unbidden in my life, my true treasure is the people who have come into my life from all continents of the world. There is where my heart is. I want to “pass on” the good that God has brought into my life by using my linguistic proficiency, cultural acumen, and multi-domain knowledge gained from living in the land of splat! to connect people who need help with people who have the ability to give help, no matter where they live or what language they speak. For what good is money if it cannot be used to help those in need? What good are material things unless they make this world a friendlier place: a blanket to warm a homeless man, food for a hungry family, clothes for those burned out of a home? What good is power if not used to empower the powerless to be free to flourish? What good, too, is dreaming an impossible dream if it does not kindle the dreams of others? What good is reaching an unreachable star if it does not sprinkle light onto a dark existence? What good is happiness if it does not splash joy onto dispirited ground, inspiriting the life within to sprout and reach for the heavens? If, indeed, as I have found, helping those in need, making the world a friendlier place, empowering the powerless, kindling dreams, lighting the dark, and splashing joy across the land is what a Good Samaritan does, then I want to be a Good Samaritan for life. To my delight, God seems willing to use me in that capacity. For certain, God knows my heart and what I treasure.

God has many Good Samaritans. Some, like me, are blessed to help a few wounded souls in intensive ways. Others are blessed to help many people in more extensive, but less intensive, ways. Some God leads with their full knowledge. Others, like me for so many years, God leads through their hearts alone. In return, God gives them a treasure far greater than money, honor, power, or prestige: they know a perfect joy that nothing else can give.

I am sure that others saw the ice halo that night for God encourages all people to step bravely out of the grey boxes in which they are cowering and stride buoyantly forth into a divine world resplendent with color, love, and joy. In our tiny town, though, I was the only one who showed up at the mission to see the splendor on that particular winter evening. Others may have showed up elsewhere for the ice halo could be seen for miles. Perhaps even more were called to behold it but were not listening. Those who did listen experienced an unrelenting tug to come outside and witness an awe-inspiring manifestation of God’s loving caress ephemerally spread against the heavens and permanently imprinted in the mind and on the heart.


Note: Concurrently published on all Mahlou blogs.

Angel of Beirut

Were I to have had any doubt about God protecting me, one incident in the Middle East would have dispelled it. I had traveled on university business from Jordan to Lebanon (a trip that put me on the “search her on every leg of every trip,” i.e. “randomly selected for search” list at airports worldwide for a while).

One morning in Beirut I started down a ghetto-looking street, devoid of vegetation or people, wondering if I had somehow misunderstood the instructions that the hotel clerk had given me in French. (French and Arabic are the two lingua francas in Lebanon. Of these, I chose to speak French. My mastery of French was greater than my capacity to communicate in Arabic, and I certainly looked more European than Arab although when I donned hijab — a headscarf — I could surprisingly pass for a Middle Easterner in looks.)

The stone buildings on the Beirut street stood stoically silent as if on guard, comrades of mixed color and size, humbly displaying the wounds of past wars for any accidental passerby. Some had chipped corners and broken stairs. Most were bullet-ridden.

As I walked down the street, a man suddenly appeared. Where had he come from? He looked directly at me and called out to me.

“You are not from Beirut, are you?” he asked in excellent English although his countenance was definitely Arab. He then commented, “You look Western.”

“I am a Westerner,” I answered cautiously, careful not to mention my American heritage. In the Middle East, I was always honest but never candid. If, in any given situation, I could pass for European or, as more often happened, a Russian, I did so. It was safer, given the war in Iraq and highly emotional reactions to Americans in the Middle East in general.

In response to my admission, the man replied, “In that case, you don’t want to be walking down this street. It would not be safe for you. Where are you trying to go?”

I crossed the street to where he was standing so that we did not have to continue to shout. He waited patiently, without moving. Coming up to him, I explained that I was looking for an ATM. He directed me to another street. I thanked him and walked away.

I thought he had remained at the spot where we had spoken, but as I was passing through the intersection only seconds later, I turned and saw that the spot was empty. How fortunate, I thought at the time, that he was in the right place at the right time to protect me. Later, I wondered how he could have disappeared so quickly?

But who was he? As Ashley Siferd wrote in her guest blog on this site last week, there is someone watching out for me. Wish I worthy of it! No, I don't deserve it, but I do love it!!

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Adapted excerpt from Blest Atheist. Double-posted on my other blog, Blest Atheist, for convenience of readers of that blog, who tend to differ from readers here.

For more angel stories on the Blest Atheist blog, click here and for ones on this blog, click here and here.

Beth Niquette maintains a blog of angel stories that you might like to read, and I would point out that Sr. Lorraine is looking for angel stories for a book should you have any to share.

In conclusion, may you always be watched over by angels!