I moved out of the house when I was 16.
As I recall, the process started sometime before then. I expressed an interest to my parents in becoming an exchange student, and once the idea had won their acceptance, we began exploring the process together.
No one really knew what the process involved, except that it started with an application. There were questions I had to answer, essays I had to write, endorsements from adults I had to procure. There were interviews I had to go through, in person and on the phone. More questions, more essays. and finally resolution: I was going to Rotorua, New Zealand, where I'd been matched with a family called the Hannahs.
At the end of the process was another process. I'd already got a passport. Now I had mere weeks to learn about New Zealand, get any necessary vaccinations for travel, buy tickets and supplies, and do whatever else I had to do to prepare my life and the people whose lives intersected it for the massive disruption that was about to ensue.
I've moved a number of times since then. Back to Pittsburgh. To college. To Haiti. To an apartment in Easton, Pa. To New Jersey. It's never as simple as going from A to B; there's always a process, there's always planning, and there's always a change in store: for me, for those who live with me, for those I move among, and for those I leave behind.
And isn't that what this season is? Advent is a moving notice. God is moving into the empty apartment next door. He hopes his parties don't get too loud, but if they do, please come knock on his door and let him know.
God's from a far-off country, but he's been dreaming for years of coming to town and being neighbors with us. Which pubs serve the best beer for thirsty people, cook the best food for hungry people, and provide the best place for strangers to meet?
When you're new in town, what's a good place to go for a walk? Where can you go to unwind?
The first advent ended, we're told, when God got a lease with some working-class newlyweds who taught him the local language, set him up with a trade, and helped him for a while to keep a low profile and blend in. That move-in, we are told, turned the world on its ear.
And now in the season in which we celebrate that first Advent, we wait for the second one, harder to see because it's by faith, when the move will be permanent, and the glory will be unhidden.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Never again: Remembering is our responsibility
I never thought I'd be here again, but the river has many twists and turns, and it's surprising at times where life will bring us back.
In 2003 I was the managing editor of the Cranford Eagle. One day my reporter, Josh Salt, came back from an outing he'd been on with a group of Cranford High School students. As part of their education on the Holocaust, the students had all been to see "The Pianist," a movie set during World War II and focused on a Jewish concert pianist's efforts to avoid capture and stay alive during this time.
The movie affected its teen audience, and Josh had found it well done.
"You should see it," he said.
"No thanks," I said. "I'm good."
We'd worked side by side for months, kabbitzed about life outside the newsroom, and generally got along well. My reaction caught him off-guard.
"Why not?" he asked, so I explained.
I had read "Night" in the dawning months of 1989, in one of my religion classes at college, and I had been so shaken to the core by Elie Wiesel's account of the Shoah that I think I cried for three days. At one point, he writes of his arrival at Auschwitz, "I will never forget that first night in the camp." I wasn't there, but I will never forget either.
That same class we saw "Night and Holocaust," a black-and-white documentary of Nazi atrocities, filmed around the Nuremberg hearings. There were piles of hair shaved from the heads of Jewish prisoners, snippets of film where Jews at the camps were shot for entertainment, and more horror presented matter-of-factly. I was so upset by that one I couldn't eat.
"We keep saying 'Never forget,'" I told him. "I won't."
Josh nodded thoughtfully and accepted my explanation.
"Fair enough," he said.
Yet here we are, and here I am. In the past four years we've seen a groundswell of racism and anti-Semitism in the country and around the world. Four years ago, Donald Trump linked Hillary Clinton to the imaginary cabal of Jews running the world economy; more recently he's repeated the tired calumny that America can't count on her Jewish citizens because their first loyalty is to Israel. Our country has seen armed gunmen shooting worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and we've witnessed a parade of white supremacists marching through an American city and chanting "Jews will not replace us!" I've heard people at my church who should know better talk about George Soros and the riots and caravans of illegal immigrants he finances to destabilize America.
And let's not forget Candace Owens, who in 2019 said Hitler would have been just fine if he'd focused on making Germany great, as though foreign policy were his only flaw.
So I find myself returning to Holocaust literature deliberately for the first time in decades. Earlier this month I finished reading Wiesel's existentialist novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," set against the backdrop of the Shoah. Now I'm opening Malka Adler's "The Brothers of Auschwitz." More of these books and these stories, I am sure, lie in my reading list in the coming weeks and months.
Hitler and his fellows, it should be remembered, systematically killed six million Jews during the period of World War II, in an act we remember as the Shoah, or the Holocaust. This was not a crime against humanity; as Wiesel once argued, it was aimed at Jews specifically because they were Jews, and in the eyes of the Nazis and much of the rest of the world that made them less than human. There were others who died at the camps, but none was targeted for extermination as methodically nor as purposefully as the Jews were.
Never again. We dare not let ourselves forget.
In 2003 I was the managing editor of the Cranford Eagle. One day my reporter, Josh Salt, came back from an outing he'd been on with a group of Cranford High School students. As part of their education on the Holocaust, the students had all been to see "The Pianist," a movie set during World War II and focused on a Jewish concert pianist's efforts to avoid capture and stay alive during this time.
The movie affected its teen audience, and Josh had found it well done.
"You should see it," he said.
"No thanks," I said. "I'm good."
We'd worked side by side for months, kabbitzed about life outside the newsroom, and generally got along well. My reaction caught him off-guard.
"Why not?" he asked, so I explained.
I had read "Night" in the dawning months of 1989, in one of my religion classes at college, and I had been so shaken to the core by Elie Wiesel's account of the Shoah that I think I cried for three days. At one point, he writes of his arrival at Auschwitz, "I will never forget that first night in the camp." I wasn't there, but I will never forget either.
That same class we saw "Night and Holocaust," a black-and-white documentary of Nazi atrocities, filmed around the Nuremberg hearings. There were piles of hair shaved from the heads of Jewish prisoners, snippets of film where Jews at the camps were shot for entertainment, and more horror presented matter-of-factly. I was so upset by that one I couldn't eat.
"We keep saying 'Never forget,'" I told him. "I won't."
Josh nodded thoughtfully and accepted my explanation.
"Fair enough," he said.
Yet here we are, and here I am. In the past four years we've seen a groundswell of racism and anti-Semitism in the country and around the world. Four years ago, Donald Trump linked Hillary Clinton to the imaginary cabal of Jews running the world economy; more recently he's repeated the tired calumny that America can't count on her Jewish citizens because their first loyalty is to Israel. Our country has seen armed gunmen shooting worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and we've witnessed a parade of white supremacists marching through an American city and chanting "Jews will not replace us!" I've heard people at my church who should know better talk about George Soros and the riots and caravans of illegal immigrants he finances to destabilize America.
And let's not forget Candace Owens, who in 2019 said Hitler would have been just fine if he'd focused on making Germany great, as though foreign policy were his only flaw.
So I find myself returning to Holocaust literature deliberately for the first time in decades. Earlier this month I finished reading Wiesel's existentialist novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," set against the backdrop of the Shoah. Now I'm opening Malka Adler's "The Brothers of Auschwitz." More of these books and these stories, I am sure, lie in my reading list in the coming weeks and months.
Hitler and his fellows, it should be remembered, systematically killed six million Jews during the period of World War II, in an act we remember as the Shoah, or the Holocaust. This was not a crime against humanity; as Wiesel once argued, it was aimed at Jews specifically because they were Jews, and in the eyes of the Nazis and much of the rest of the world that made them less than human. There were others who died at the camps, but none was targeted for extermination as methodically nor as purposefully as the Jews were.
Never again. We dare not let ourselves forget.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
The last ride of Sir Galahad
Many children have a period marked by imaginary friends.
This is a staple of childhood and often indicate a healthy imagination.These friends help the lonely child to pass an hour in pleasant company, playing games together, running through the back yard, and even practicing social skills as they carry on conversations together. I had a few imaginary friends myself, as I recall.
My younger brother had an imaginary horse whom he called Sir Galahad.
Steve was perhaps 4 years old at the time, and he already was well on his way to developing what would become a lifelong love of horses. We were driving from our home to the middle of the state to visit our grandmother, and my brother had decided the trip would go faster if he were riding a horse.
Cars in those days had a bench seat in the front as well as in the back, including head rests for the driver and at least the main adult passenger, that could be extended to whatever height was comfortable. To our father, this head rest was at the perfect height for comfort as he drove.
To Steve, the head rest was perfect for a horse.
As we were getting loaded into the car, Steve took a jump rope and worked it under the front of our father's head rest so its two ends dangled down into the back seat like a pair of reins. Steve took them in hand and cried out "Giddyap!' and "yeehaw!" as he rode.
As the car drove down the road, my brother was in his element, riding Sir Galahad across the plains of Texas while clouds of dust trailed behind him and marked where he had been. While Route 22 carried us steadily and uneventfully eastward, a dry zephyr blew across Steve's face and he saw herds of cattle waiting to be driven through the sagebrush and ill-mannered desperadoes awaiting the justice of the frontier.
He whooped and hollered, and loved every minute of it as Sir Galahad moved like water underneath him and carried him ever onward, further up and further in to this wondrous land he had discovered.
This was all a new experience to our father, who once claimed to have been born 18 years old. He had been raised with his younger sister, in a household where children were quiet, well behaved and seen more than they were heard.
He was a good man and long on patience, but life had not prepared him to be the father of four boys all younger than 10. Nor had it suggested that one of his sons would enjoy galloping all over the Old West, using the driver's seat of the family station wagon for his horse. Life had just dropped him in that situation and told him to handle it, the way it does.
It was around the time that Steve had ridden into town to deliver the settlers from the bandits who had rustled the cattle, shot the preacher and stolen all the yellow Zingers from the snack machine that my father finally had enough.
At a traffic light, with that quiet and unspoken exasperation that fathers everywhere think they are concealing from their faces and that children everywhere know and cower from inside the nearest bedroom closet, my father turned around in his seat and grabbed the headrest with both hands. Without a single word, he yanked it violently upward. If a safety mechanism hadn't been in place, I am sure he would have pulled the entire thing from the seat entirely and thrown it into the intersection.
My brother stared in shock at Sir Galahad's broken neck. The return from his cowboy adventures to the back seat was so sudden that Steve gaped, wide-eyed, and suddenly he began to laugh. A second later, I joined in.
Within five minutes we had found a new way to annoy our parents, together. After all, imaginary friends are a lot of fun, but for some jobs only the real thing will do.
Copyright © 2001, 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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This is a staple of childhood and often indicate a healthy imagination.These friends help the lonely child to pass an hour in pleasant company, playing games together, running through the back yard, and even practicing social skills as they carry on conversations together. I had a few imaginary friends myself, as I recall.
Steve was perhaps 4 years old at the time, and he already was well on his way to developing what would become a lifelong love of horses. We were driving from our home to the middle of the state to visit our grandmother, and my brother had decided the trip would go faster if he were riding a horse.
Cars in those days had a bench seat in the front as well as in the back, including head rests for the driver and at least the main adult passenger, that could be extended to whatever height was comfortable. To our father, this head rest was at the perfect height for comfort as he drove.
To Steve, the head rest was perfect for a horse.
As we were getting loaded into the car, Steve took a jump rope and worked it under the front of our father's head rest so its two ends dangled down into the back seat like a pair of reins. Steve took them in hand and cried out "Giddyap!' and "yeehaw!" as he rode.
As the car drove down the road, my brother was in his element, riding Sir Galahad across the plains of Texas while clouds of dust trailed behind him and marked where he had been. While Route 22 carried us steadily and uneventfully eastward, a dry zephyr blew across Steve's face and he saw herds of cattle waiting to be driven through the sagebrush and ill-mannered desperadoes awaiting the justice of the frontier.
He whooped and hollered, and loved every minute of it as Sir Galahad moved like water underneath him and carried him ever onward, further up and further in to this wondrous land he had discovered.
This was all a new experience to our father, who once claimed to have been born 18 years old. He had been raised with his younger sister, in a household where children were quiet, well behaved and seen more than they were heard.
He was a good man and long on patience, but life had not prepared him to be the father of four boys all younger than 10. Nor had it suggested that one of his sons would enjoy galloping all over the Old West, using the driver's seat of the family station wagon for his horse. Life had just dropped him in that situation and told him to handle it, the way it does.
It was around the time that Steve had ridden into town to deliver the settlers from the bandits who had rustled the cattle, shot the preacher and stolen all the yellow Zingers from the snack machine that my father finally had enough.
At a traffic light, with that quiet and unspoken exasperation that fathers everywhere think they are concealing from their faces and that children everywhere know and cower from inside the nearest bedroom closet, my father turned around in his seat and grabbed the headrest with both hands. Without a single word, he yanked it violently upward. If a safety mechanism hadn't been in place, I am sure he would have pulled the entire thing from the seat entirely and thrown it into the intersection.
My brother stared in shock at Sir Galahad's broken neck. The return from his cowboy adventures to the back seat was so sudden that Steve gaped, wide-eyed, and suddenly he began to laugh. A second later, I joined in.
Within five minutes we had found a new way to annoy our parents, together. After all, imaginary friends are a lot of fun, but for some jobs only the real thing will do.
Copyright © 2001, 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Wednesday, May 06, 2020
There's a city full of the dead, and we've barely noticed
There have been 70,477 deaths from Covid-19 so far, and yet this somehow has barely entered our public consciousness.
Think about that a moment, because this isn't sinking in. Seventy thousand lives lost so far. Seventy thousand mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents and children.
The federal government estimates that by June the death toll may hit 3,000 people daily.
When I was a newspaper editor we'd have focused on the human angle to bring it home. Someone local died of covid? Give me a news story. Talk to family, create a legacy to the life cut short. Show our readers what this is doing to their community. This is history unfolding, and it's our job to chronicle it as it happens in real time, to leave a record for future generations.
Our news media have been so ravaged by layoffs the past 20 years, though, they can't really do it justice, so we're stuck with anodyne numbers and the antics of our Oompa Loompa in chief as he talks about getting light inside people's bodies and injecting them with disinfectant
70,477 in a two months is a lot. That's more than died in the Vietnam War, when the nation was moved to grief by the daily news broadcasts of soldiers' bodies coming home..We're not seeing the bodies this time, though. Instead we're seeing job openings at Walmart and we're seeing that Wendy's is out of fresh beef, and we're not making the connection
I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Our population is 56,100.
All dead.
Next door Highland Park has a population of 14,000
All dead too.
That's how serious this disease is. In the past four or five weeks, it has killed enough people to empty my city and the borough next door. Walk down George Street, stroll through our three university campuses and visit every school. It's a ghost town, because everyone is dead. Go across the Albany Street Bridge and it's the same story all over.
Three thousand deaths a day means that in another month, this devastation will repeat itself every three weeks.
If a mid-size city or two just died every two or three weeks, don't you think we might be more worried about stopping it then how soon we could get a haircut or go out to eat again? If the disease hit like that we would sit up. We would take notice. We would grieve. We wouldn't be talking about the economy, and we sure wouldn't want to listen to Trump insulting his critics and complaining about how unappreciated he is.
We would mourn the dead, and we would demand better support for our hospitals and medical workers. We would demand, better pay for people who show up at work and running the risk of dying to keep our nation's food supply lines running.
If an entire city died every three weeks, gasping for breath we would want it to stop. We would demand some common decency from people claiming that the loss of 70,000 people is no big deal.
That's what is happening, and as a nation that's not our reaction.
We. Must. Do. Better.
Please.
For all our sakes.
Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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The federal government estimates that by June the death toll may hit 3,000 people daily.
When I was a newspaper editor we'd have focused on the human angle to bring it home. Someone local died of covid? Give me a news story. Talk to family, create a legacy to the life cut short. Show our readers what this is doing to their community. This is history unfolding, and it's our job to chronicle it as it happens in real time, to leave a record for future generations.
Our news media have been so ravaged by layoffs the past 20 years, though, they can't really do it justice, so we're stuck with anodyne numbers and the antics of our Oompa Loompa in chief as he talks about getting light inside people's bodies and injecting them with disinfectant
70,477 in a two months is a lot. That's more than died in the Vietnam War, when the nation was moved to grief by the daily news broadcasts of soldiers' bodies coming home..We're not seeing the bodies this time, though. Instead we're seeing job openings at Walmart and we're seeing that Wendy's is out of fresh beef, and we're not making the connection
I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Our population is 56,100.
All dead.
Next door Highland Park has a population of 14,000
All dead too.
That's how serious this disease is. In the past four or five weeks, it has killed enough people to empty my city and the borough next door. Walk down George Street, stroll through our three university campuses and visit every school. It's a ghost town, because everyone is dead. Go across the Albany Street Bridge and it's the same story all over.
Three thousand deaths a day means that in another month, this devastation will repeat itself every three weeks.
If a mid-size city or two just died every two or three weeks, don't you think we might be more worried about stopping it then how soon we could get a haircut or go out to eat again? If the disease hit like that we would sit up. We would take notice. We would grieve. We wouldn't be talking about the economy, and we sure wouldn't want to listen to Trump insulting his critics and complaining about how unappreciated he is.
We would mourn the dead, and we would demand better support for our hospitals and medical workers. We would demand, better pay for people who show up at work and running the risk of dying to keep our nation's food supply lines running.
If an entire city died every three weeks, gasping for breath we would want it to stop. We would demand some common decency from people claiming that the loss of 70,000 people is no big deal.
That's what is happening, and as a nation that's not our reaction.
We. Must. Do. Better.
Please.
For all our sakes.
Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Ways you can help foster families
Do you have friends who are foster parents? Are you looking for easy ways to make a big difference in their lives as they shoulder the burden of caring for someone else's abused or neglected child?
The graphic on the right has a few suggestions. Here are a couple more, born of my personal experience as a foster father. Do these, and I guarantee your friends will never forget, no matter how many years pass.
The wounds we get from those we consider friends often still hurt years later. Some never heal.
Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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* Tell them you’re too busy to watch the kids so they can keep a doctor’s appointment.
* Leave them to deal with case termination on their own after promising to stick with them the whole way through.
* Drop out of their lives because you’re leaving the church they also attend.
* When they’re grieving the loss of a child you can tell them to get over it.
* Be sure to reprove them for a lack of faith.
And after all that, motherfucker, you can just go to hell. By that point it’s the most helpful thing left to do.
The wounds we get from those we consider friends often still hurt years later. Some never heal.
Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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The Ash Wednesday holocaust
It started in June with a spark.
The spark found a dry place to take shelter and it grew, and grew. And grew. Before long it was a raging fire, consuming deadwood, undergrowth and everything else combustible that it could find. No one worried at first. Fires are a part of the life cycle of forests, and the National Park Service had a policy of letting them burn themselves out.
But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.
That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.
As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.
Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.
Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.
Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.
Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.
So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.
There is a lesson here.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.
The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.
Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed us and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.
Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.
That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.
As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.
Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.
Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.
Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.
Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.
So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.
There is a lesson here.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.
The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.
Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed us and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.
Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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