I brought Maria some tulips the other day and she brought them up into the bedroom so the sun would shine on them when it rose, and that’s what happened. It was a very nice thing to see when I opened my eyes.
We both needed to get out so we’re headed to Jean’s for breakfast.
We brought the Blue Birdbath out of the barn and into the garden. Minnie was right on it, taking her morning drink there. The photographer is happy to see it, the Blue Birdbath adds some nice color, which is much appreciated.
Emma sent me a barrage of fresh Robin photos, it seems like months since I saw her in Brooklyn just a few weeks ago. I see a lot in her eyes, humor, curiosity and also confidence. She is very sure of herself, and seems to study the world with a detachment familiar to me.
I don’t know when I will see Robin next, perhaps the summer. I wonder if she will love a donkey.
(Maria and Gus)
I’ve often wondered in the past few years why it is that some people are able to show mercy to people in need and others are not. The cruelty and indifference I sometimes see online and in our political dialogues is sometimes hard to bear.
A friend of mine is a devout Christian and he struggles to make sense of the news.”I am a Christian,” he says. “I welcome people, I care for people, I reach out to the needy and the vulnerable. That is what a Christian does.”
Maybe, I said, that’s what some Christians do, but it is not what all Christians or many people do, including so many of our political representatives.
I got a message today about old people. Mercy is not in fashion in our time.
The sender was complaining that old people – like the ones fighting for their flowers and birds in Virginia – “are always complaining, they are lucky if you look at how old people throughout the world have to live. These people in Virginia have shelter and food and nice houses and apartments to live in. Why don’t they stop whining and give thanks for what they have?”
I wondered why I had so much empathy for them, and he had so little. Was there something off about me? And why do I have trouble showing mercy for the merciless?
Don’t the people who don’t know mercy and can’t feel it need it more than anyone? Are we only merciful to the nice?
A few months ago, a local woman jeered at me on her Facebook Page wondering why I was always raising money for the older people in the Mansion. “Why doesn’t he use his own money?,” she asked about me. “Why should I give him mine?
The only thing I could think of to say was I don’t have much money.
Why, I wonder, do so many people intuitively feel mercy for people. Where does it come from?
I thought about it, and I felt foolish that I didn’t see it sooner. I sometimes see the world upside down, perhaps that’s a part of my Dyslexia.
I realize that mercy is felt only by the people who have needed it.
Put another way, only the man or woman who has suffered despair and helplessness is absolutely certain that people might need or deserve mercy. It depends so much about what has happened to us and shaped us.
It is better to find God or awakening on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency [and obliviousness] that has never felt a need for forgiveness. I have needed forgiveness so often and felt despair so frequently that it is natural for me to feel it for others.
It has been said that I feel too much of it, and that was not a compliment.
I have learned that a life without problems is not a perfect life, or a compassionate life. I have never wanted a perfect life, nothing could seem more shallow and empty to me. A life without problems has always seemed to me to be far more hopeless than one that has experienced disappointment and despair.
I have always learned more from the dark side than the bright.
Even though people with real problems are excluded from running for public office and succeeding, (no mistakes are allowed in our unforgiving process), I think people who have not known pain and despair should be the ones excluded from public life. How could they understand mercy or preach it, or help the needy?
I have come to embrace the reality that I am learning to live for others, not just for myself. This is not a selfless or noble position. Living for others means that I can face and accept my own limitations and faults and mistakes. My own many deficiencies torture me less and less.
Nothing can be said about me that I have no said about myself, I have no secrets, I am free. Like Beavis and Butthead, because I am stupid I am free. Because I never learned how to think, I can think.
When I live more and more for others, I realize that I don’t need to be perfect, I don’t need to be a saint, I can accept the unacceptable parts of me. It is like removing a 500 pound rock off of my shoulders, and a weight off of my soul.
It is because of these broken pieces and flaws that I need others, and that others need me.
I am a broken piece of a puzzle and I compliment and supplement the other broken pieces of the puzzle, we are all flawed in different ways, but we are flawed, each one making up in him and herself for the other.
I think that awakening is where mercy comes from. I am no better than anyone, and no one is better than me.
Do not let anyone tell you that 84-year-old women in wheelchairs are not powerful forces to be reckoned with.
Yesterday, Kathryn Bell, the manager of Joseph’s Dream, the facility whose residents are battling for their birds and flowers, asked me to call her in her office, which I did.
Ms. Bell was courteous, she said she was a reader of my books and asked me for my autograph. I am subject to flattery, of course but I was a reporter for too long to melt after one compliment.
She asked me if I would interveme with Cynthia Daniello, my new friend and a new blogger (TheNeverEndingStory), who is battling the management of her independent living residence in Bedford Va., it’s called Joseph’s Dream after the company’s founder.
Cynthia is one cool woman, she is an author, a poet, and a life-long lover of animals.
Joseph’s son, Joseph Moore, runs, Metropolitan Properties in several southern states. His e-mail is [email protected]. I wrote him again this afternoon.
The company has issued a number of recent edicts which have terrified the elderly residents of this low-income property an hour west of Roanoke, Va.
First, all bird feeders, even hummingbird feeders must be removed by the end of this week or the residents will be “written up” by the inspectors who are coming to examine their homes. Three strikes and you are out.
Feeding a feral cat is one strike, having an independent, individual garden is another violation, having any kind of bird feeder is now another strike.
This has always been the rule, Kathryn Bell told me, but nobody enforced it until this week.
Cynthia has been one of the few residents to dare to speak up, many others already tore up their beloved gardens this week. “I have nowhere else to go,” one of them told Cynthia.
“I have to do what they say.”
Her apartment is crowded day and night by frightened and angry residents, many afraid to speak for themselves on behalf of their beloved birds and gardens. She has been forbidden to feed a feral cat or keep her warm “cottage” for the cat on her porch.
Ms.Bell said the company offered a “compromise,” a garden club could be formed to approve everyone’s garden choices with the power to turn down flowers that weren’t uniform. No way, said Cynthia, who seems to be leading the resistance there.
Kathryn Bell said she is eager to talk with the residents and reason with them, and she asked me several times to reason with Cynthia and get her to back down. That was te purpose of her call, not negotiating or changing these suffocating rules. Cynthia is not backing down, the company is kidding themselves if they think she can be manipulated.
She sent this e-mail to Joseph Moore last night:
I told Kathryn Bell I would intervene with Cynthia if the company suspended its insensitive and Draconian rules and agreed to a genuine – not pretend – dialogue with the residents. I said I was sure Cynthia would agree also. She is eminently reasonable and approachable, she is not looking for trouble.
I told her I had called and e-mailed a dozen Virginia columnists, TV stations and newspapers and was just getting started. I will not stop until someone responds.
I got the sense the people in management do not know Cynthia, she has justice and wisdom on her side. It is hard for me to fathom, but neither do they understand the true needs of the elderly – dignity, pride and purpose.
This is no way to treat older people, they are needy and vulnerable, they are entitled to their tiny gardens and bird feeders at the very lease. These are things to encourage, not banish. They matter.
She hemmed and hawed about the negotiations. It was not up to her, she said, it was up the management.
Well, she said, nobody was coming to rip up people’s gardens. But people are already ripping up their own gardens, I said, frightened by the news that inspector are coming to their houses to decide if they are following all of the rules. The company wants every garden to look exactly alike and be of the same exact height.
And even though there is no evidence of any rodent or other infestation around the existing bird feeders – people have had them for years without objection, and even though hummingbird feeders have no seeds and do not attract pests, they all must be taken down. And soon, this week.
People, once again fearing the inspectors – they were just told there will be inspections three times a year – have already started taking down their feeders. One 80-year-old resident has been crying in her house ever since. This is happening right now.
One 83-year-old woman had a humming-bird who visited her feeder every year, and now, she says, he will not know where to go.
Frightening people with rigid and unfeeling regulations – and little or no preparation or discussion – is not compromise. Nobody is listening to these people, everyone is just trying to silence and manipulate them. Everyone knows how vulnerable they are.
Cynthia knows what the people running elder care facilities should know. People in their 80’s with few places to go desperately need to feel they have choices and outlets for their individuality and creativity. They are not all alike, their gardens do not need to be all alike.
One resident was devastated today as she pulled up the beautiful garden she has been cultivating for years so that the “inspectors” could she was accepting the company’s Orwellian gardens, which must be the same in every home. There’s a big hole in the ground where her garden was.
How this might improve the lives and fortunes of the elderly is beyond my comprehension. It is almost a caricature of bureaucratic rigidity and obliviousness.
I will not ask Cynthia to cool things off and calm things down. That would be patronizing and insulting. She knows just what she is doing.
She is correct to be angry and so are the residents, and I hope a journalist there will grasp the cruelty of what is happening to this powerless people and make some noise about it. I know I would have.
If you can, please send a message to Joseph Moore – [email protected] – and tell him what you think of these rules. Ask him to suspend this nasty crusade before more gardens and feeders are destroyed, and until someone sits down with the residents for more than a few minutes and tries to truly understand why they are so upset.
People at the edge of life do not need to be upset by the very people they are dependent on for shelter and security. Please, Mr. Moore, rescind these foolishly rigid rules immediately, and then I will be happy to talk to Cynthia about it.
She doesn’t need me to tell her what to think. She will, of course, make up her own mind. She always does. [email protected].
