Some Reflections on Creating Fragrance-Free Space

In recent years, both the Friends General Conference summer gathering, and the FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering have been working toward becoming fragrance-free spaces. This is a tricky process; creating fragrance- and chemical-free spaces depend on the individual daily decisions of hundreds or thousands of people. Every time someone washes their hands, gels their hair, applies deodorant, washes their clothes, cleans a mirror, shampoos the lobby rug, paints a wall, applies sunscreen, wears their favorite lipstick, lights a candle, launders the sheets in a conference center, pops the cap off a marker to make notes on newsprint or a white board, or does the lunch-time washing-up, they are faced with a choice about using a product that contains fragrance.

(In this post, I'm going to say "fragrance." But I hope we call all remember that this is a short-hand for actual fragrance and other problematic chemicals that can also trigger headaches, asthma, skin rashes and hives, neurological problems, and other symptoms in the approximately 20% of the population--according to one study I read whose citation I will try to find and insert later--who are sensitive to them. I'm also going to say "fragrance" because that is what these two Quaker conferences have been emphasizing in their ongoing work on these issues.)

This got really long, so I have included headings. It has four parts: The Challenges, which provides some background information; The Strategy, which talks about some of what these organizations have done to create fragrance-free gatherings; The Point: Some New Questions, which you may want to scroll down to if you are familiar with FGC and FLGBTQC conferences; and The Epilogue.

THE CHALLENGES

You can imagine the many challenges involved in trying to create what the FGC Gathering is trying to become: a traveling conference of 1500 or so people, all of whom will make the fragrance-free choice each time.

The first challenge is that many people don't know that they are making a choice about fragrance. It is so ubiquitous in the products we use that it comes to seem a natural part of our environment; the proverbial water the fish are swimming in. Why would people who don't have sensitivities think about this on their own? You'd be astonished if they did. So it's necessary to, first, let people know that there's a problem.

This leads directly to the second challenge: a lot of people--perhaps most people hearing about this for the first time, if my experience is any indication--don't believe there's a problem even once they're told about it. I don't, in general, blame people for this. If they've never known anyone who was affected, they probably have no idea how bad it can be. I have sometimes been tempted to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me, I need to leave now, but I wanted to let you know before I go that your decision to wear perfume to this event not only excludes me from it but means that I will probably be sick until next Thursday." But hardly anyone has ever received that shoulder tap, from me or anyone else. So they've never enountered a sufferer in the wild.

Even if they believe there's a problem, and that for some people it can be quite bad, they're inclined to assume that these folks are very rare. The first time I brought up the issue of fragrance at the summer gathering, many years ago, the person I spoke to assumed that I was the only one affected, and that the problem of one person was not sufficient to merit asking 1500 people to change their behavior. In other words, the problem might be real, but it's the job of the sufferers to manage it.

One friend told me that she met a woman at the gathering two years ago who was ranting about the FF policy. She thought it was just another pointless PC thing. My friend told her about me, about how hard gatherings had always been for me, and how much my experience had improved since the FF policy had started to get some traction. The woman was surprised and moved. She'd had no idea this actually mattered to anybody.

I also suspect that many of us progressive types suffer from issue fatigue. We've gotten on board with "Column A: The Essential Social Issues." However imperfectly, we've embraced racial justice; gender equality; the gay and lesbian rights movement; physical accessibility for people who use wheelchairs, scooters, canes, and walkers. In addition, each of us has probably also chosen to prioritize some or all of the "optional" social issues in Column B as well: factory farming, a struggling educational system, the dismantling of voter rights, conditions for workers in overseas factories, animal rights, over-reliance on petroleum fuels, global warming, the environment, the existence of bisexuals, the bottled water industry, invasive species, and whatever else I can't think of off the top of my head.

It can be very frustrating when you try to introduce the fragrance issue to the very people you think will be most open to it, and instead they resist. But I do think that resistance often comes from folks feeling like they have enough on their plate and they don't have the energy to take on one more thing.

I also wonder if some of the resistance might come from a desire not to seem even more like whacked-out troublemakers than we already do. I can imagine--and this is entirely my imagination, not anything I have any knowledge of--but I can imagine the person whose job it is to talk to universities or retreat centers about our needs ranting, "I already have to tell their cafeteria staff that they have to learn to cook vegan food, turn off the ice cream machines at Wednesday's lunch, and get us re-usable cups instead of the paper ones they usually have at the beverage station. And I need to tell the facilities people that we need some of the bathrooms re-designated from Male and Female to Gender-Neutral. Now I'm supposed to tell them, what? That we want them to switch out all the bathroom soap for fragrance-free, and that they can't use their usual cleaning products in the bedrooms? Well, I sure look forward to that conversation!"

Even once people decide they'd like to make some personal changes to help with this problem, there are challenges. They might not know where to find FF products for instance--though this has gotten much easier in recent years. I used to be able to use only Clinique makeup, for instance--$15 for a lipstick!--but a few years ago, when I needed to buy makeup for the first time in years for a choir concert, I was able to get cheap FF lipstick, blush, foundation, eyeshadow, and mascara at my corner Rite Aid.

But people who haven't looked before may not know that somewhere in that wall of shaving cream is one brand whose "extra sensitive" product is fragrance-free, or that Common Brand Of Lotion makes a FF moisturizer you just have to read the fine print to find. It can be disorienting and overwhelming.

People might also be concerned that FF products won't work as well as what they're used to. And that might indeed happen. Sometimes that's a trade-off people should just resign themselves to making (are your perfect hair and blinding-white gym socks really that important?), and sometimes it's a trade-off they can't make. I had some things to say about this previously in a post called The Hierarchy of Harm.

THE STRATEGY

The approach that the FGC Gathering took, beginning a few years ago, and which FLGBTQC has also adopted, is to make the transition easier for people. As well as providing information and a list of fragrance-free products on their website, the FGC Gathering has provided bars of FF soap participants can pick up at registration, and a table of product samples. Somebody on the staff walks around campus, goes into the public bathrooms in every building we're going to use, puts a "please don't use this" sign on the soap dispenser, and leaves a supply of FF liquid soap on the counter.

At the most recent FLGBQTC Midwinter, we arrived to find that the Gathering Committee had not only provided FF products in the public bathrooms, but had stocked each private bathroom with a dispenser of FF soap.

I don't know the rationale that was used when the decision to do this things was made. I've always assumed it was to provide education and support. Perhaps also to make switching to fragrance-free easy enough that people would have no excuse not to do it.

So, that's where we're at. The fragrance-free policies have been, in my experience, very successful at both these conferences. It took a few years, especially at FGC Gathering, for the reality to catch up with our intentions, but the last couple of years have been a transformed experience for me. I think it was only four years ago that I sprinted out of the shower half-rinsed, and down the hall to my room half-naked, because, even though I was on a "fragrance free" floor in the dorm, someone had come in and cracked open the World's Most Toxic Body Wash in the stall next to me. But year before last, I only had a single exposure all week, and that one in a public place where I was able to move away. And last year, much the same. Instead of resigning myself to partial participation, to enjoying myself despite the headache and dizziness, to several days of recovery once I get home, I've simply enjoyed myself.

For this, I thank everyone who worked on this policy, who put out the new soap in the public bathrooms, who was willing to try a new deodorant, who bought FF dryer sheets, who was willing to be educated to be compassionate, to be moved instead of entrenched in their ideas, to put themselves to some small trouble and inconvenience for me and my ilk.

THE POINT: SOME NEW QUESTIONS

Which brings us to the point of this blog post: For how long is it productive to provide this level of support to attenders? When, and how, can responsibility be shifted from the organizers to the community--to the individuals who make up the community?

This came up during a conversation I had with some friends at the FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering in February. Apparently the organizing committee had discussed this, with regard to providing every attender FF soap in their bathrooms.

It was clear to everyone that providing FF soap in the public bathrooms was the responsibllity of the organizing committee. But it wasn't so clear that providing soap for the private bathrooms was. And it's not clear to me that it is either, or that FGC should continue providing bars of soap at check-in.

Providing toiletries for people's personal use strikes me as problematic for several reasons.

First, it is an extra expense, and extra work, for organizers who have a very long to-do list and a very limited budget. Maybe this is a relatively small concern; after all, these committees take on all kinds of additional tasks when the community decides it matteres enough. If being fragrance-free is important to the community, perhaps the organizers are simply acting to reflect that value.

But--second--I think this extra work reflects the organizers' commitment, but may paper over a lack of clarity in the community. We might end up with a majority of attenders using FF soap in the shower, while only a minority are actually committed to creating a FF conference. Is this a problem, if the goal is, by and large, met? I think it is, for a few reasons.

One is that it can create a false sense that a problem has been solved, and close down conversation and educationi prematurely. Maybe. This is me being hypothetical. Do Quakers ever stop talking about anything? OK, this argument strikes me as a bit weak.

But what message does it send on an individual level? For some people, the FF soap at registration may serve as a reminder that their other products should be FF as well. For others, it may suggest that there's nothing more they need to do. If soap is important enough that the conference provides it for everyone, then is shampoo less important? Deodorant? Lotion? Hair gel?

Is providing soap an effective way to reduce environmenal fragrance at conferences? Honestly, I doubt it. If you asked me, I'd say that soap, which people use in the shower and which doesn't necessarily have a strong residual odor once they're dried and dressed, wouldn't be my first priority. Lotion, which is often strongly perfumed and which people feel comfortable putting on in public, repeatedly, throughout the day, is a much bigger problem for me. Likewise sunscreen and lip balm. If I were asked "What grooming products would make the most difference to you if everyone were to switch to the fragrance-free version?" I'm not sure the soap people use in the shower, or to wash their hands in their own bathroom, would make the top 10.

At the Conference Run By Me In The World Which I Am Also Completely In Charge Of, I probably wouldn't provide folks with soap. But I would search their belongings--especially purses and day packs--for little bottles of stinky lotion, and do a tube-for-tube swap. People whose lotion was already fragrance-free would be eligible for door prizes.

(Public restroom liquid handsoap is also a major offender. Once Raider forgot and washed his hands with the soap in a rest area bathroom when we were on a trip, and I almost left him by the road somewhere in Iowa. When I talk about "soap," I'm not talking about the public restroom soap, which I hope and expect organizers will continue to provide an alternative for. This is a big deal.)

Finally, by providing soap for a number of years in a row, we create an expectation in people that soap will be provided. They start to feel entitled to their free soap. This is a problem, in my view, because it means they aren't pushed to take responsibilty for their own choices. They aren't being asked to actively commit to the fragrance-free policy. They aren't being expected to remember from year to year not only that they'll want to bring a fan for their dorm room, but that they'll need to come ready to bathe and groom themselves with products that aren't harmful to their beloved Friends.

By "they" I mean "we"--in a Quaker context, there is such a fine line between organizer and attender that they are often the same person in different years, or even the same person in the same year. There's no great divide, and I don't mean to imply or create an us-vs-them dichotomy here. I can attest to this sense of entitlement because even I, a person who uses only fragrance-free products for personal grooming and has for years, feel entitled to my bar of FGC soap. I use liquid soap at home, and some years I forget to buy bar soap for the trip. That's OK, I think; I'll take Raider's bar soap. But his bar soap is round and doesn't fit in the rectangular travel soap box. Faced with the impossibility of fitting a round soap into a square box, I shrug and say, "Oh, well. I'll just pick up a bar of soap at registration."

At what point do we expect people to have internalized this community expectation around accessibility, to take full responsibility for doing their part? I want each person to understand that this is their job. And they may not understand that as long as someone else keeps doing it.

THE EPILOGUE

I wrote this for my friend Racy (not her real name. Part of an anagram of her real name. A good part). When we had a short conversation about this issue and she asked if I would write about it, I wasn't sure I had strong feelings either way. Yet I seem to have written myself into some strong feelings. I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself. It's possible that if someone else had promised to wear a black t-shirt if I would write a piece about how important it is for FGC and FLGBTQC to keep providing soap to people, I'd be working myself into a froth about that.

(Ha! Soap...froth. I didn't even do that on purpose. But it makes me sad I never worked "soapbox" in somewhere.)

I don't have time to proof. The children are hungry, I have no idea what I'm going to feed them, the kitchen is a mess, and the laundry needs folding so that we can pack for a short trip we're leaving on in the morning. Very early in the morning. You do me a kindness if you drop me a note about any typos you spot.

Unchurched: Six Months On

It's been about six months since I laid down my membership in my Quaker meeting. I haven't been to worship on a Sunday since, not in a Quaker meeting or anyplace else. I miss it. I really enjoyed the Vespers service at the Festival of Faith & Writing for giving me a chance to worship, and I'm looking forward to next Saturday's bat mitzvah for the same reason. But I'm not feeling led to go to weekly worship, despite missing it. I thought I would. I left my Quaker meeting with an optimistic sense that I was going to find a new religious community, and imagined myself visiting around on Sunday mornings for awhile until something clicked.

And then I didn't do that.

"I'm just not ready to date yet," I said. And this feels true. It's a big commitment to join a community, and there's a lot of work to be done. Getting to know people, learning the norms, taking the risk that you'll invest your time and energy and it won't work out. Once in a conversation with some friends, I said that if my relationship with Raider ended, I'd probably just choose to be single. I love my relationship with Raider, it's the foundation for everything else in my life, but let's not kid ourselves: it has taken a lot of work. I sometimes doubt I'd be willing to take on that work again.

Maybe I'm not willing to take on the work of joining a religious community, either, even though I know that the payoff can make it worthwhile.

Also, I'm still a Quaker. This felt very clear to me when I was at the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering. So, it's not that I'm completely uncommitted and ready to be snapped up by any attractive faith that comes along. I'm a Quaker without a monthly meeting, and that feels different. It has held me back from visiting congregations that I might like but never feel I could commit fully to.

I've also been lukewarm about the obvious churches I might visit, the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. One of my points of friction with my monthly meeting was our tendency to be talky, self-satisfied, affluent liberals, and I can't see the UU or the UCC improving much on that.

At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I had the opportunity to get to know a friend-of-a-friend, and listening to her talk about her church, I got excited for the first time. She is part of a United Methodist congregation in Brighton, Michigan (about 40 minutes from where I live) that decided to be a "missional" church. Their mission statement is "transformed by God to transform the world," and they try to do this by taking concrete action in their community and in the world. They feed the homeless in Detroit and house them in Brighton; they support a local dental clinic for low-income people, and a hospital in Haiti. They do work projects locally, in Appalachia, in North Dakota, and sometimes in the Czech Republic, where they also financially support a sister church. They throw a birthday party every month at a long-term care facility. Look at this list!

Quakers think of ourselves as activists, but in my experience our activism tends toward writing letters, writing "minutes" that we send to legislators and organizations, and demonstrating. It's not that I think a faithful witness like maintaining a weekly vigil for peace for over a decade of war is something to be derided. But I have often longed to be able to do something more concrete. I have always admired the Baby Pantry my friend Julie's church maintains, for instance. I hoped that when my monthly meeting built a meetinghouse, we'd be able to do something like that, something that would let us, on a regular basis, do something concrete and good for a real person standing in front of us.

But the meetinghouse we built doesn't have enough storage space to do that kind of thing (I was, for years, a big booster of the building project. But I remember the moment that changed for me, when I came to feel that we were spending too much money to build a building that would be too small for our needs as soon as we moved in. I know that many people love that meetinghouse, and it is a beautiful little building to worship in. But some of the doors that I hoped would open once we stopped renting space weren't able to open because of space constraints).

Anyway, I found myself seriously attracted to Suzy's church. It felt restful to imagine a church where, perhaps, I wouldn't be asked to do a lot of thinking and talking so much as I would be invited to show up to make sandwiches, to celebrate a birthday, to hammer a nail, to get some diapers or a new crib to a foster family. Perhaps part of what I was attracted to was Suzy's undiluted enthusiasm for the projects her church does. Sure, you'd expect that of her--she's the Director of Missions and Outreach. And she seems like a pretty enthusiastic person in general. I expect that many other people who meet her like her as much as I did. But it also made me aware of one reason I haven't gone church-shopping. After 20 years of practicing the Quakerly endurance test of sitting still, I am strongly drawn to the idea of specific action.

Hmmm. This isn't what I meant to talk about. I was going to talk about the many secular, familial, personal, and professional opportunities that have opened up. Laying down my membership cleared my calendar and settled my mind. But I will save that for another day.

So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish

I have really wrestled with this post. When I'm not actually writing, I can feel it taking shape in my mind and it seems like it's all there, ready to write down. But when I sit down to write, I can't find my way into it. But I'm tired of carrying it around so I am going to finish it this time even if it doesn't come out right.

I have laid down my membership in my monthly meeting.

That's the short version, and there have been recent days when I thought about just plopping that onto my Facebook wall as a status update and getting it over with. But among the people who already know this, some have asked me to talk about why and how this happened, so I will now attempt the long version.

*stares out window, taps fingers on table for awhile*

The long version is hard.

I'm not interested in talking about any of the specific ways my Friends meeting has been hard for me, or laying out the various problems I see in contemporary unprogrammed Quakerism. I've been wrestling with both of those things for several years, and one of the nice things about finally making the break is that I don't have to keep thinking about them. It's quite a relief, honestly; an end to a long, hard struggle.

Besides, I could just as easily write a long thing about what I think works in Quakerism, and the many ways my monthly meeting is awesome--because it is. This is less a drama than a quiet breakup, like when those two nice people you thought would be together forever announce that they are divorcing but plan to remain friends.

It really does feel like a breakup. Like the breakups I've been through before, the final decision was less in response to a single event or problem and more a moment of clarity after a long period of trying really hard to fix things.

I think the breakup comes now because I have entered a period of lots of movement in my life. For most of the past year, I was feeling stuck and discouraged, wanting to make changes and not feeling able to. But in the last few months, suddently those changes have been not only possible, but easy and joyful. This is one of those changes, I think, a time of movement after being stuck for a long time: annoyed by the same things, hurt by the same things, frustrated by not finding answers to the same tired questions. I felt blocked with Quakerism, not able to find a way forward when something in me was straining at the leash. But I also felt trapped in Quakerism, unable to move away from it because I could not imagine that there was any other spiritual home for me. I assumed that liberal Quakerism was the best fit I would I find, that any other group of religious people would only be a worse fit.

But "she's the best I can hope for" is a bad reason to stay with someone. I have become optimistic about the possibility that there may actually be a spiritual community somewhere else that will serve me better in this new time in my life. There's a point during the ending of a relationship when you start to get excited about the possibilities that open up if the relationship ends. All the opportunities that have been forclosed by the success of that relationship open back up again.

I have been reminded, too, that it is better to be single than to stay in a bad relationship. I'm feeling willing to live with either of those options, open to the kind of changes that worshipping in a new way might bring me, and open to the possibility, too, that I'll wind up unchurched.

I don't quite know what my next step is. Laying down my membership has been a mental and emotional relief, and boy howdy has it cleared my calendar! I'm not sure if I should turn right around and head off to church on Sunday morning, or wait awhile before I start dating. Honestly, the search feels kind of exhausting: it's a lot of work to find your way into a community, and that's after the work of finding one you might want to be part of. I don't know if I'm ready to start yet. On the other hand, I feel eager to find out what's next, and may be too restless to sit around home too many Sundays in a row.

A small group of us began weekday morning worship at the meetinghouse two weeks ago, and I've been going every morning despite this decision. I don't feel quite sure about it; sometimes a clean break is best, for both parties. I've laid down all my responsiblities to the meeting, and maybe it will send a mixed message that I'm still worshipping there five mornings a week. But I don't have a strong feeling that it's wrong for me to be there, so I may wear that sword as long as I am able. It may help with the transition, or it may turn out to be too awkward, or it may ultimately prove to be something that is holding me back. But I like it and I think I'm going to keep doing it for now.

I plan to stay involved with FLGBTQC as well; everyone should plan to see me and the kids in Wisconsin next February for the midwinter gathering. I'm less sure about summer gatherings; we may not be able to afford the summer gathering without the generous stipend my monthly meeting gives to children who are attending. Time will tell.

This is not a bad thing, this breakup. It's a necessary thing. It feels right, like it is the answer to many painful questions I've been carrying for too long. Of course, I've traded those for a whole new set of questions, but I like these new ones.

As usual, our friend Walt Whitman has some words that speak to my condition. This is from section 46 of Song of Myself:

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

***

Sit awhile dear son,
Here are bisuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Red Cedar's Experiment with Fragrance-Free Seating

My Quaker meeting is working on accessibility issues related to fragrances, which some people (like me) have sensitivities to and which can also trigger or exacerbate migraines and asthma. It's been a surprisingly vexed conversation over the last six to nine months, and there are a lot of tender feelings. At our last business meeting, we talked about the issue for a long time, and I and at least two other people with sensitivities spoke. That was my first surprise: I hadn't realized I wasn't alone in this. It was so good to hear other people talk about having the same kinds of experiences I did, like being pulled out of worship to wonder if you'll have to move when a late-comer seems likely to sit near you. Or how hard it can be to address this issue in personal relationships. But how had I not known? Had I not been listening?

We clearly had other failures of communication as well. Toward the end of that conversation, one member said that this was the first time it had occurred to him that we were actually discussing a health issue. I guess he thought we'd been talking about preferences, or a more general wish to be environmental, to be as clean and toxin-free as possible. I was glad that people heard things that shifted their perspective, but I said to David later, "Where have we failed in talking about this if this is the first time people figured out it was about people's well-being?" It surprised me to learn that we had been, at least to some extent, talking past each other. No wonder feelings were hurt and progress was not made. I wonder if we have more clarity now and that will help us move forward.

Anyway, one thing we're experimenting with is designationg one-fourth of the meeting room as fragrance-free seating. This was a hard decision to make; it was actually minuted back in December and then held back from implementation because of strong concerns raised later. My concerns were pretty pragmatic: I'm not sure our meeting room is large enough for designated seating to be effective, and I was worried that people would think that FF seating solved the problem, so nothing more had to be thought about or done. I also was concerend about partial access--even if FF seating made worship accessible to me, what about the hallway, the library, the social hall, the classrooms?

Others' concerns were more spiritual; one Friend put it very well when he said he was not comfortable with having different Friends seated in different parts of the room, with setting off a separate group. Quakers have always been one body, he said, one community. He said it better; it was moving, and I thought he was not wrong. Another Friend was concerned that saying that only people who were FF could be in this seating area sent the message that some people were "pure" enough to be there and some people weren't.

We eventually decided to go ahead with FF seating, in a spirit of experimentation, and to discuss it again in about six months, after we've lived with it for awhile. This is not the only action we've taken. The Building & Grounds committee has been very pro-active, providing FF hand soap and informational signs in the bathrooms (I commended one member of the committee on the wording of the signs, and she looked at me funny and said, "Well, good. We got it from a link you sent us"). I'm attending a yearly meeting event at the meetinghouse this Saturday and was heartened to see that the organizers were asked to include a note about fragrance and accessibility at the Meetinghouse in their materials.

I sat in the FF seating for the first time on Sunday. I will say that, after one trial, it felt pretty crappy. On the one hand, it was the first time I've ever been in worship at the meetinghouse (which is 13 months old) and not had an exposure, so yay for that. On the other hand, for about the first 15 or 20 minutes (maybe not that long; maybe it just felt long), I was the only one in the FF seating. The other three-fourths of the meetinghouse was pretty well populated. I felt isolated and conspicuous; I also felt discouraged that there was not one other person in that room who had taken our conversations about fragrance so much to heart that they had stopped using scented products on Sunday mornings. It hurt my feelings. In my whole life, nobody but David and Scott, who are the two people besides my children who love me the most in all the world, has ever gone fragrance-free in support of my well-being. I don't know why. I do know that it would be like the best present I ever got times 10 if somebody did.

Eventually, two other women who are also sensitive to fragrances came in and sat in the FF seating with me, and I felt less alone and conspicuous but still set apart and visible in an uncomfortable way. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying THESE WOMEN HAVE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES! I had optimistically imagined myself camouflaged among some number of non-sensitive folks who were nonetheless fragrance-free. Alas, no. (One of the women's partners joined us at the rise of meeting; she'd been in another part of the meetinghouse during worship.)

That's just one day. I agreed to the experiment and I'll stick with it. It may get easier as I get used to it. Maybe we'll have a slow migration into FF seating as people experiment with unscented products, and it will get easier that way. It certainly seemed successful from the perspective of exposure and illness. Maybe even if I don't become emotionally comfortable sitting there I'll decide the trade-off is worth it; if I can't have both physical well-being and emotional comfort in worship, maybe physical well-being is the better part. Maybe it's good not to be too comfortable, and my discomfort will bear unexpected fruit. It remains to be seen.

This is not the blog post I sat down to write. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Belatedly Snow-Bound with John Greenleaf Whittier

Last week, right before the big snowstorm, I wrote a blog post and posted it. While I was then proofing and editing it, I lost most of it in one of those computer things that happens, and I thought it was gone forever. But it turns out that the people who get e-mail notifications when I post something get the entire post as an e-mail message, so my friend Joann was able to send it to me. It's about ten days late, but here it is:

Everybody's getting all hunkered down for the blizzard, though we seem to still be on the first trailing edge of it; nothing too dramatic seems to have happened outside, snow-wise. I have kind of a holiday feeling, knowing we're going to be snugged into the house tomorrow. I don't know why this feels different from any ordinary day; the kids and I spent the day at home today, after all, for no good reason but that we had nowhere to go. But it does feel different.

I can't help thinking about John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Snow-Bound, which you might have heard of in school but probably haven't read. Does anybody read Whittier anymore? I recently did a little reading project on him in preparation to teach some of his poetry in Adult Religious Education at my Quaker meeting (Whittier was a Quaker), and was amused that even scholars who were interested enough to write a whole book about him don't claim he was a great poet. In fact, they are inclined to say, "Whittier was by no means a great poet," in so many words. Often more than once. They claim "competence," instead, or cultural significance, since he was such a popular poet in his day. Time was every schoolchild could recite "Blessings on thee, little man / barefoot boy with cheek of tan." Not so much anymore.

I find I could say a lot about Whittier, and Snow-Bound. I was just going to pop in to say that the poem is a nostalgic remembrance of being snowed-in with his family at Haverhill, the farm the Whittiers had lived on since at least 1647. He wrote Snow-Bound in 1866, when he was almost 60 years old, and as well as being about nostalgia for a lost boyhood, it also takes its place in a culture that was very conscious of the past slipping away. Technological changes were affecting the way people lived, their mobility, their family relations, and it was frightening. The central images of Snow-Bound are about the family gathered around the hearth:

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

One of the technological changes taking place in the 19th Century was that stoves were replacing hearths as the primary way of heating homes. They were more efficient and more effective, but commentators feared the decay of family life, which had so often centered around the hearth in the evenings. Who can gather around a stove? And why would they have to, if the stove can make the whole room warm? Their homes heated by stoves, what could there be to keep families together? It's all sort of quaint and hilarious, but also familiar, if you read excerpts from some of these writings (and I'm sorry I don't have some for you; it's in my brain from some old piece of criticism I read a long time ago). It seems there is always something threatening to atomize the nuclear family. A few years ago I read a book about the Schoolroom Poets of the 19th and early 20th century (appropriately enough, the book is called Schoolroom Poets). One of the arguments of the book is that the notion that an educated child ought to be able to recite poetry by heart is one of the things that paved the way for free verse to become the dominant poetic form in the 20th century. Whittier was a prominent Schoolroom Poet, along with Lowell, Longfellow, and some other guys I don't remember right now. Their poetry was perfect for memorization: strongly rhythmical and tightly rhymed. No assonance for these boys, by golly! Here's Longfellow. Listen to the absolutely inflexible marching rhythm here; and is there any rhyme more pure than the single syllables he ends all these lines with?

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
are strong as iron bands.

(Why do I know that? Does Laura's little sister Carrie Ingalls recite it at the school exhibition in whichever Little House book that is? Some book I read over and over as a child featured a character saying those first four lines nervously over and over. In any case, can't you just see some cute little 8-year-old standing by her desk reciting that?)

Anyway, I have often seen the rise of free verse attributed to Whitman, who pretty much invented it and showed what it could do (free verse does not have to have either rhyme or meter, though our former poet laureate Robert Pinsky argues in The Sounds of Poetry that the iambic pentameter is so fundamental to the poetic line in English that it permeates even free verse in unexpected ways. Still: free verse, no set rhyme or meter). But the author of Schoolroom Poets argues that the imposition of memorization on children created in the generation that came of age in the 20th century an association of strong rhyme and meter with immaturity. So poets and readers turned away from childish-seeming metrical verse, to something that seemed more mature, and more modern. Again, we get the theme of a time and a culture passing away, though this time it's a deliberate turning forward and away from the past, away from a poet like Whittier who is associated with childhood schoolrooms and who is a bridge to an even earlier time that looks ever more benighted to the modern sensibility. Hence, free verse.

Ten years ago, I wrote a good paper on Walt Whitman and thought about turning it into a master's thesis. But then I had a baby, and got kind of busy and didn't do that. Another reason I didn't do it is my advisor wanted me to do Whittier, too, and I just never loved Whittier. I should have listened to my advisor, though, because when I did some reading on Whittier for this ARE program, a kind of interesting guy emerged. The poetry is still pedestrian; the word "doggerel" wants to force itself upon one's consciousness as one reads. But Whittier the man: very interesting. His biographers believe he was celibate his whole life and died a virgin. And yet he had many flirtations with women, and was known for stringing them along and taking gifts from them, leading them to believe something might happen which never did. One biographer kept saying, "If he were a woman, they'd have called him a coquette." Look at this face: a flirt, really? A coquette? So hard to believe. And yet so they say. Whittier was also tirelessly politically active. He was an ardent abolitionist (in this, we modern Quakers can embrace him, whereas we have to bear our disappointment in our beloved Walt Whitman, he of the so-very-superior poetry and the distressingly retrograde opinions on abolition and equality between the races). Whittier was deeply involved in politics, often exerting a great deal of influence from behind the scenes; he worked tirelessly to elect abolitionist candidates and served in the legislature himself. Here's a broadside he wrote for the cause: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

This is all probably much more than you ever wanted to know about John Greenleaf Whittier (though if you come to ARE at Red Cedar Friends Meeting on February 27 you will learn more! Or maybe you'll just hear all this again. But we'll read more of his poetry). But I will end by saying that sometimes, in his poems about Quakerism, he gets at something that rises above doggerel and feels like he is saying something I recognize, putting an experience into words. His poem The Meeting is about bringing a friend to Quaker worship; I like the friend's palpable relief when the silent worship ends, and his incredulous questions. "What part have you," his friend asks, "in these dull rites of drowsy-head?" "Dull rites of drowsy-head" indeed; who has not dozed during Quaker meeting?

I like Whittier's answer. It's long, but listen to this little excerpt. This is the very essence of Quaker worship, I think:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

(note: I was being hyperbolic when I said "no assonance for these guys." The not-quite-rhyme of "come" and "room" is an example of slant, or half, rhyme. Which is not assonance, per se, since assonance depends on the vowel sounds, but is still not perfect rhyme, either.)

Anticipation

I'm really excited about leading my Song of Myself workshop at the FGC Gathering next week. This will be the fourth time I've done it; twice previously at Gathering and once for a group in my monthly meeting. I love reading the poem again--it's like a favorite old movie, I find myself all excited thinking about when we get that that part--and that other part--and then the one part that....

It's also a mystery, doing this. My system is to simply read the poem together; we read it aloud, stopping at the ends of the 52 numbered sections, and then discussing what we've read, asking and answering questions. It's a big poem and the whole world is in there (dinosaurs, even!), and what rises to the top for any group depends on who's there. One year, I had someone very versed in scripture, for instance, and from him we got a lot of insight into scriptural echoes. Or there might be someone who knows a lot of 19th-century or Civil War history, or who is familiar with other poetry written during the same era, or who knows more about Whitman's biography than I do, or who knows very well the Eastern religious texts that had recently been translated for the first time and were lighting Western thinkers on fire.

Much also depends on what happens in the room as we read, which is always unpredictable. One year, my group got to the end of section 45 and was so moved to be at that place that we stopped and re-read the section chorally, in unison, and then just sat there in stunned, emotional, worshipful silence together. Here's some of it:

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,

The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,

The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

Gives me shivers.

So the next time I led the workshop, I couldn't wait until we got to this piece! And people would be amazed and moved! I quivered with anticipation.

And the group blew right past it. It just didn't particularly speak to their condition.

That group, on the other hand, went nutso for the sex parts (this was also the group that really went deep into the scriptural references--what a great week that was. My ignorance of scripture is vast, so I learned a lot). They thought section 28, in which the poet's "other senses" abandon their sentry posts and leave him at the mercy of "villain touch" was absolutely the best description of sexual abandon and orgasm they'd ever heard, and they really wanted to talk about it:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

"Unclench your floodgates," indeed. Walt, you sexy old guy.

There's always a day when we end in the darkest part of the poem, where the poet has let himself get caught up in the contemplation of evil, and feels lost, degraded, hopeless. He sees himself imprisoned, impoverished, ill to the verge of death; he feels himself united in every sufferer:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side,

(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

I don't plan for us to end a day's session at that point, but somehow we always do. And as the group shuffles out, discouraged, cloud-covered, hag-ridden, I call out after them desperately, "It gets better! We're not stuck here! Trust me!" The next morning, they are impatient to get started, to hear the poet's next words:

Enough! Enough! Enough!

I think it's good to break there; it's only 10 lines from the poet as degraded beggar to the resurrection ("the grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves/ corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me."), and it's possible to come up for air too quickly, to dash past the dark place the poet has led us to. It's good to carry it for an afternoon and evening.

I could go on and on--about 85% of the poem falls into "OMG I love this part!" territory for me. And that's really why I lead the workshop, because it's a chance to inveigle 20 or so people into listening to the poem, to all the parts I love so much, and I get to see them fall in love with it, too (and get angry at it and frustrated at Walt and suffer from bafflement and all the other things that always happen alongside the loving it part), and sometimes--always, at some point during the week--the thing they fall in the love with and the ways they love it illuminate the poem in a new way for me, and it becomes a new poem and I love it even more.

Stop this day and night with me [says our Walt] and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Broke, But Not Really

I know I talk about this a lot, and while I suppose that will fade in time, I also think that our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather will remain one of the defining events of my life.

One of the ways it's the gift that keeps on giving right now is that, 14 months after the appeals court finally ruled in our favor, we're still paying the bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Some of our debt pre-dates the adoption, but most of the debt we're carrying is from the fairly modest amount we borrowed to pay adoption agency fees and then, when C. showed up, to pay the lawyer. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then, finally, when she called to say the birthfather had filed an appeal, to not borrow any more because we couldn't--we were tapped out. I told the lawyer then, "I don't know how we'll pay for this, or when. But I promise we will."

We initially thought this adoption would cost about $14,000. That was revised upward by a couple thou after we paid birthmother expenses for a woman who decided to parent. And a little bit more when problems with our home study stranded me and Yehva in Illinois while we got them fixed. But still in the range of about $18,000--a lot of money, but nothing to panic about.

Until the custody fight, and the endless months of our lawyer filing papers and responding to the other side's filed papers and attending hearings.

By the time the dust settled, the adoption had cost us something close to $65,000. A number that makes me either laugh or cry every time I say it out loud. I laugh because it is so completely ridiculous and unbelievable, or I cry because the effect on our family of incurring that kind of debt could so easily have been catastrophic.

It's been hard. We have so many payments that by the time I pay the bills, and we put gas in the cars, and we buy groceries, it's pretty common for us to have almost nothing left to get through the week. I can't tell you how many times I've cried when I thought I had the pay period all figured out and then was reminded that we had a $40 prescription to refill, or opened the mail to find a bill I hadn't expected, or had a sick cat, or something broken on the car.

I never thought I'd pay my mortgage late. I can't tell you how many times I've paid my mortgage late over the last three years. A year ago, we took a forbearance for 90 days because we got behind and realized we would never be able to catch up.

I've needed a new pair of sneakers for six months, and every month I say I'm going to get them, but by the time I sort out the more urgent bills and set aside the mortgage money, there never seems to be any extra. I'm still wearing my post-surgical bras from my breast reduction last November because there are always better things to spend my cash on than new bras--though we're getting close to the crisis point, undergarment-wise, and it will have to be a priority soon enough. The kids' birthday presents come from craigslist and the local consignment shops; David and I just didn't give each other presents for birthdays or Christmas last year.

I had promised myself a new dress for Joann and Carolyn's wedding in May. Back in January, I was sure that sometime in the next three or four months, there'd be a little extra for me. But as the date approached, it became clear that there was not going to be any extra, and I would not be able to buy a dress. (Let alone the new bras, dress, slip, and shoes I had originally envisioned. What was I thinking? I pay the bills. I know where the money goes and exactly how much is left every week.)

And this is where my story turns happy. Because I e-mailed my friends Adrianne and Carla, and asked if I could root around in their closets for something to wear to the wedding. They both dress professionally for jobs, and I was sure I'd be able to put together some flowing pants and a dressy top, maybe not a perfect fit, maybe not in my colors, but nice. Good. More than good enough.

But they e-mailed me back and said they had talked it over and, while they'd be happy to let me into their closets, they wanted to buy me a dress instead.

So I had a beautiful new red dress for the wedding, because my friends bought it for me. (I wore an old bra, no slip, and old shoes...it doesn't seem to have ruined the wedding.)

Our version of broke is a pretty good one. We've never been without food, only, sometimes, without a favorite or a treat. We've more than once eaten the pantry and freezer to the bare walls while waiting for a paycheck, but we've always had the pantry and freezer to turn to. David doesn't have an Xbox 360, and I don't have an iPod Touch, and Yehva won't go to preschool this fall even though I know she would love it, and Eric doesn't get to take a summer class at the science museum this year, and Carl...well, I can't think of anything Carl wants and doesn't have right now. Carl's good.

We're all good. The stuff we do without is stuff most people do just fine without anyway.

And there's a lot of stuff we haven't had to do without, and I want to say why. It's because so many other people have been pouring money into our household. Not just the hundred dollars for a dress. The kids and I haven't missed a summer gathering, because my monthly meeting pays for the kids to go, and FGC itself gives me scholarship funds, and FLGBTQC helps out with travel funds. This winter, we were able to attend the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering because one friend just flat out wrote me a check for half the kids' cost, and the friend we traveled with paid for gas and our meals (though writing that I am reminded that I still owe her for hotels). Just last week, I got to go out for a really nice dinner with a fancy appetizer, because a friend treated me. Friends have treated me a lot. Adrianne even invited me and all three of my kids out to dinner the other week, which has got to be the very picture of generosity.

Two families in my monthly meeting, independently, were led to send us $1000 each to help with lawyer bills, "or for any need," as one put it. My monthly meeting helped us through the Fund for Sufferings, as did FLGBTQC. My parents lent us $10,000 and then forgave the debt, and then a year later sent us a check for another $10,000 when the birthfather appealed. Without my parents' generosity, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we would have had to choose between paying the lawyer and keeping our house.

I'm thinking of all this now, because I just asked my monthly meeting to help with travel expenses for the summer gathering. I didn't think I'd have to--between my discount for leading a workshop, and my meeting's Connecting Kids to Quakers money for Eric, Carl, and Yehva, and the gathering being only two hours from my house, I only needed to come up with $307 plus two tanks of gas. I was sure I could do this. I even have an excel spreadsheet showing that, on paper at least, that money could be squeezed out of the budget.

But it turns out that, like the money for my dress and the money for Yehva's preschool and the money for every other thing I thought we'd surely be able to pay for in another few months, that $307 doesn't exist. So somebody else is picking up the slack for me, one more time.

There is an endpoint: in June of 2011, we pay off a loan whose payment is $525 a month. And then the rest of them drop like dominoes month by month, until (knocking wood) by the end of 2011 we have somewhere between $950 and $1100 every month that we don't have right now. When I look ahead, I'm amazed by how suddenly we're free of the whole thing: a matter of a few months. Like snapping your fingers, once we get there.

And then, as I e-mailed some friends this morning, we'll be wallowing in money like pigs in shit, frolicking through meadows tossing dollar bills like rose petals, lighting our cigars with $20 bills.

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to write a blog post about this, other than to invite others to boggle at the numbers, to laugh or cry with me about it as led. Or to get my perpetual fretting about money out of my head and onto paper so I could let go of it for awhile. Or to explain to the world why I asked my Friends meeting for $200--again!--to do something as arguably self-indulgent as attend the gathering. Or to remind myself to stop complaining because we really have nothing to complain about.

Oh, I remember--I think it's worth knowing, for those of you who haven't been through anything catastrophic like this, that when push comes to shove you have a lot more to rely on than just your own resources. That people love to help. That sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor by letting them write you a check. That they can surprise you by choosing compassion over judgment. I used to hate to ask for help, and usually turned it down when it was offered. Turns out, it's not so bad, being humbled. It's been one of the unexpected gifts of the custody fight, this whole mess of help coming our way, when we asked for it and when we didn't ask for it, whether we wanted it or not.

We're so damn broke. But so much goodness came to us out of this mess that I honestly would not wish for it to be different.

I kid you not, come January 2012, I'm lighting a cigar with a $20 bill. And then we're re-starting our savings, and catching up all the deferred maintenance on the house, and giving money to charity again, and, yes, buying poor David his Xbox 360. And looking around for opportunities to pass on a little of what we've been given in such abundance.

A couple of more things about my meeting

I am loving how many comments I've gotten on my last post, and a few private e-mails as well. I want to be clear about something, though, which is that my monthly meeting is actually a splendid one. We are very good at listening to each other and holding our differences lovingly. For instance, year before last the Adult Religious Ed committee held a retreat at which we talked about our different relationships to Quakerism. It began in the morning with a panel of Friends describing their paths, and in the afternoon we did this great exercise where the leader would read a statement, such as, "I have a personal relationship with God," and then we would place ourselves along a continuum based on how true it felt for us.

The discussions then of why people places themselves where they did were deep, loving, and at times hilarious. Sometimes a person listening to someone else speak would move a few places down the continuum; once the people on the opposite ends of the continuum decided that they were talking about exactly the same thing using different words and that we should more properly therefore form a circle. It was great.

And I want to say, too, that during our almost-two-year custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, my meeting's support for us was incredible. The meeting helped us financially through the fund for sufferings; two different families in the meeting were independently led to send us large checks to help out with legal fees; the meeting convened a support committee for us; and, more than any of that, I could feel how deeply people in the meeting were entering with us into our fear of losing her and our deep love for her. People's sympathy for our situation seemed to go so deep that I felt like some members of the meeting, at least--and not always the people I'd had the closest or best relationships with--were feeling it all with us.

That my hiatus from meeting began only two months after the appeals court finally settled the case in our favor once and for all sometimes makes me feel, as I told David recently, like the guy whose wife puts him through med school, and then he dumps her for a younger woman right after graduation.

But, you know, it is what it is. God told me to leave my meeting for awhile, in one of the clearest messages I've ever gotten in meeting for worship. I'm just a little cranky that the next step hasn't been made so clear.

Still Thinking About My Quaker Meeting & Me

A few months ago, our Ministry & Outreach committee was working on a pamphlet that might give a brief introduction to Quaker faith & practice to people attending an open house at our new meetinghouse. They brought a draft to business meeting that included something like our usual, "Quakers believe in that of God or Spirit in everyone." We usually say "or Spirit" because some people aren't comfortable with the word "God," and treating "God" and "Spirit" as roughly equivalent is something we've gotten used to over time.

This draft pamphlet, though, added "or goodness" as a third option. This was the first time I'd ever seen "goodness" used in this context, although, interestingly, I have seen it again since then on some Quaker blogs.

I've been struggling with my meeting for a couple of years now, and although I have been making efforts to return in recent weeks, have been on hiatus--not attending worship--since May of 09. Every week lately, as I've been trying to return, there has been some barrier to me attending meeting for worship, either at home or at the meetinghouse: I've been sick, the aforementioned patchouli-drenched hippy has sat down near me and I've had to leave the room, I'm so raw that a minor crankiness between me and a beloved Friend has led to a big emotional explosion on my part, or Yehva has fussed so persistently that I've decided to take her home.

I think most of these things would hardly be obstacles if I were more sure about my need and desire to be there. I think it is a sign of how fragile my intention is that a pebble in my path ends up feeling more like a military roadblock, complete with snarling dogs, circling helicopters with searchlights, and sarcastic immigration officers sneering, "And just what brings you to this part of town, girly?"

So, anyway, the committee brings this pamphlet draft that says Quakers believe in "that of God, or Spirit, or goodness, in everyone," and my heart sinks. One of my struggles with Quakerism is what I see as its secularization; I want to be part of a religion, not an affiliation of nice people with good intentions. The person presenting the draft asked the meeting for approval to print the pamphlet, and the immediate response was a number of voices saying, "Go ahead!" and "Good job!" and "Roll the presses!" and such like.

I thought that if it was really OK with my meeting to have a pamphlet published that equated "God" and "goodness," then I was definitely in the wrong place. And I also felt that I did not have it in me to be the lone voice of dissent; I really, in that moment, intended to let them go ahead and publish that pamphlet. And then, I thought, I would go home and write my letter withdrawing my membership.

"I'll stand aside," I said, which, many of you know, is that a Quaker does when she cannot unite with a decision of the meeting but recognizes that the meeting is otherwise in unity.

And the clerk accepted that. She was ready to move on, except that over the next couple of minutes, other people raised concerns as well. I don't remember about what, exactly; not the same as mine, I don't think. The M&O committee felt time pressure; they needed to get a pamphlet approved in time to have it printed for the open house. And the clerk, I think, felt time pressure, too--we used to have business meeting before our 12:30 p.m. meeting for worship, and that created a fixed end time. This was, if I recall correctly, our first business meeting in the new meetinghouse, and our first one on the new schedule: starting business meeting at 12:30 or so, after morning worship and the social hour, with nothing to force an ending on us if we ran long. And we were running long. Oh, so long.

Time pressure has got to be the number one cause of bad practice among Friends.

So, a few people raised concerns, but the clerk tried to move us along. "I heard a lot of approval in the room," she said, "and Su has agreed to stand aside..."

And damn if God didn't give me a word to speak in that moment.

I don't remember it very well--I often find that when what I have said is spirit-led is that I don't remember much of it afterward. But I said, "I may have been hasty," and then I went on to say something about "goodness" being a weak word, a word that seems to me to be almost completely about a human quality. God is not all about goodness, I said. God is a big dark hard mystery that we wrestle with, and it is a disservice to reduce God to this single quality. I said...I don't know what I said. But I was eloquent! Damn. And I felt as I said it that I was saying exactly what I meant, exactly what I needed to say. And I felt that it came inwardly from God.

We went on to have a good discussion. A couple of non-theist Friends spoke, and in hearing them I found raised up in me a concern for non-theist Friends in my meeting. I found myself wondering whether "we believe in that of God in everyone" has become an empty phrase we mouth, if half of us don't even believe in God; I found myself concerned that we were asking non-theist Friends to accommodate themselves too much; I went away musing about why we continue, as our first answer to the question of what Quakers are, to assert a question of belief as a defining thing when Quakers do not in fact share a unifying belief; and then I found myself wondering what, if not a belief in That of God in Everyone, does make us Quakers.

We were eventually able to unify around language for the pamphlet, much to the relief of the M&O committee. The woman who had presented it thanked us, and said, "I move every time we have this conversation," which felt true to me as well. This, to me, is the thing Quakers do better than anybody else I've ever encountered, this deep listening to each other (and, yes, to the Divine), and coming to a decision that respects all those voices. I felt pretty good after that meeting, actually, which was quite a change from "the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is write my anti-membership letter!"

And since then... *sigh.*

Yesterday I was at the meetinghouse for a committee meeting, and I found myself standing on the porch gazing at our sign, which is leaning against the wall there. "Red Cedar Friends Meeting," it says, and then the Quaker testimonies, based on the SPICE acronym: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality.

I have always hated that acronym, without really thinking about why, beyond, "Oh, isn't that adorable, how my whole big messy deep religion can be summed up a cute little five-letter word?" (But I just googled for the SPICE acronym and found that I am not the only Quaker who doesn't love it.)

Yesterday, that word "integrity" really jumped out at me. This is a word we use in place of Truth, as in Publishers of Truth, the term early Quakers used to describe themselves. What truth? God's truth, as revealed to Quakerism's founder, George Fox.

Now, Quakers don't necessarily think there's one Truth for everybody (two people praying about whether they should take a certain action may well get different answers) and we have never claimed to posses the whole Truth. And some of what God revealed to Fox seems downright nutty to us now. But we have believed that seeking the Truth would lead to an increased measure of it, and that as our measures grew, we would find ourselves more and more in accord with each other. (Big generalizations there, many of which could be contested. It will do for now.)

"Integrity," though--there's another one of those human words. For a person to have integrity, her words and actions should be in accord with each other. But integrity does not require a person's words and actions to be in accord with God's will as they understand it.

Truth, on the other hand, calls us to consider not only our own human wishes and actions but God's. A person of integrity is not necessarily a person of God. A good person is not necessarily a person of God.

I want to be a person of God. I want my faith community to aid me in becoming a person of God. I want, in my faith community, to be able to use the word "God" without someone immediately following up with a comment about how uncomfortable they are with that word.

I do not like listing our testimonies as a way of defining ourselves. I don't like the SPICE acronym. And I don't like suggesting that what we strive for is personal integrity rather than Truth. Might as well put up a sign, I thought, reading: "Red Cedar Friends Meeting: We're Nice People."

Now, I recognize first, that this is getting really long and probably nobody is going to read it. But second, I recognize that there is probably no congregation of any religious body anywhere in which everybody is all heated up about discussing God and God's will. When my friend Julie and I were at the Festival of Faith & Writing in April, we both talked about how good it felt to be among people who wanted to wrestle with the questions we like to wrestle with. That festival draws on people from all kinds of Christian denominations, probably most of whom also don't have a whole lot people in their home church who meet their need for questioning and examining every last little thing. If we all had that at home, there'd be no need for the conference.

So I know that it is unreasonable for me to expect my monthly meeting to meet my every religious need, and I don't expect that. And I know that when I speak honestly about my concerns and interests there, I am heard with sympathy and respect. And I take very much to heart Friend Martin Kelly's point in the blog post I linked to above, that "comfort is not necessarily what God has in mind for us," so I wince when I hear myself wanting to be more comfortable in my monthly meeting.

And yet...

I thought it was time for me to go back to worship, but every time I go to the meetinghouse, there's a pebble in my way that feels like a wall.

More About, Of All Things, Perfume And Race. Ranty!

My friend Julie commented in my post about the Black student who was removed from her class by a teacher because of the hair products she was using and I wrote such a long ranty and profane reply I decided to edit it for profanity and turn it into its own post. (Profanity not aimed at Julie...more about strength of feeling).

Here's what Julie, very reasonably, said about a time some years ago at a Quaker conference when I did not move my seat when a Black man wearing cologne sat down next to me, for fear of him thinking I had moved because he was Black:

My two cents is, just move when you have to move, and don't worry about what anyone else is thinking. You're responsible for taking care of your needs, not their potential or imagined reaction.

Julie is not wrong. But this is what I found myself writing in response:

The "just move" thing is a little hard for me, Julie. There are very few Black people at FGC Gathering most years, and I have heard some Black men in particular tell stories about women clutching purses or otherwise seeming wary when a Black man comes into the room or gets behind them in line at the cafeteria. I don't know how much of that is perception and how much is reality. I'm not a big fan of mind-reading in general, assuming you know somebody's motive, so when I hear "this white woman clutched her purse because she was afraid of me," I reserve judgment. I don't assume that's an accurate perception of what that woman did and why. On the other hand, I would like the Gathering to be a place where people of color feel welcome, like a part of the community. And having heard those stories, I just wasn't easy standing up and walking away.

As far as telling the man why I was moving--it can be so hard. One thing that happens with a perfume exposure, for me, is emotionality--I think emotion welling up is part of my body's response to the chemicals or whatever I'm reactive to, and part of it is just plain old weary, "I just want to sit here and worship God and all you damn people coming to morning worship straight from your showers with your hair still stinking-shampoo wet and your lotion freshly applied and your hairspray and deodorant are making it really hard for me to do that." So it's easy to imagine, sitting here, a really calm and rational response (and I have gotten better at this with practice, to be sure, because it's been a lot of years now) but it can be well-nigh impossible to do in the moment, especially if I forgot to be prepared for the possibility and am taken by surprise.

Perfume exposures in worship are about the worst for me. Not only do they mean that I have to get up and leave worship but I've of course been sitting there trying to get as open as possible. It's hard to open yourself up to Spirit while simultaneously keeping your guard up against the possibility of some patchouli-loving hippy sitting down in the next seat and wrecking half your week.

Here's an experience I had once with a Black woman at the downtown post office in Lansing, probably close to 20 years ago now. I was waiting in a long slow line, and this woman a couple of people ahead of me was wearing a really beautiful dress that just draped on her wonderfully. She was about my size, and I was lost in a reverie of thinking about how beautiful she looked and idly wondering how a dress like that might look on me.

And all of a sudden, she flew out at me. "What the fuck are you looking at? You got a problem with Black people? You got a problem with me?" I was so taken aback I couldn't say anything, let alone tell her that I hadn't meant to be staring at her but if I was it was because I thought she was beautiful.

That idea just doesn't seem to have been available to her, that a strange white woman in a public place would be staring at her in absent-minded admiration.

Sometimes I have an over-strong reaction to somebody wearing perfume not just because they're wearing perfume but because they're the 100th damn person this week who has made me give up a good seat in a movie theater or leave a restaurant before my dessert or drop out of the line at the grocery store or walk out of a kitschy little shop I wanted to browse in for awhile longer or go home and change my clothes even though my shirt was clean out of the wash two hours ago because the damn stink is all over me now just from standing five feet away in an aisle at Target. Or go back into my own house and close the windows instead of enjoying my yard because the neighbor's dryer sheets are so toxic and the wind is blowing my way. Or get out of the shower half-rinsed and run down the hall to my dorm room mostly naked because the person who just got into the shower next to me apparently doesn't understand what it means to agree to room on a fragrance-free floor and I value my ability to keep breathing over being clean and maintaining my dignity.

I told David the other day that I've had so many little aggravations lately that it's like I'm carrying this "Fuck you" around inside me right now and it's going to pop out at some, I don't know, perfectly nice lady at the grocery store who's doing nothing worse than moving too slow in the pasta aisle when all I need to do is dash in there and grab a box of rotini. That's how I feel if I've had a lot of perfume exposures, too, like I could just strangle some poor woman emitting a light and airy citrus scent because it's not just the light and airy citrus scent, it's that the light and airy citrus scent is the straw, baby, and citrus woman is the camel's back and I am so gonna break her.

So, this man who sat next to me was the metaphorical citrus woman, you see? And in the post office, I was the citrus woman. But I did not want to be the 100th person that week to do something that might or might not be a racist reaction to a Black man coming into the room or joining the line or sitting down to worship. I did not want to be his citrus woman. I wanted to be his Friend.

Maybe we need to remember that irritants are the progenitor of pearls

My Monthly Meeting's April business meeting was a big one for me. I came out with so much to think about. There's a whole big thing I'll need to write about how we describe ourselves and why, what unites us as Quakers, belief versus action, and big stuff like that. But today I get to write about something a little smaller.

Anybody who knows me in real life or reads my blog knows I've been struggling with my place in my meeting for awhile, and have been on hiatus since last May, though I have attended business meetings because I have continued as meeting treasurer.

Our meeting begins business meeting with worship sharing, during which we explore a query. Usually they're the queries from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Faith & Practice, and in April we took on #4: Care for the Meeting Community, which includes questions like, "Do I recognize and face disagreements and other situations that put me in conflict with others?" and "Are avenues for exploring differences kept open? To what extent does our meeting ignore differences in order to avoid possible conflicts?"

One of our members spoke to the query. She started out by describing herself as a "combative" person; I would not have used that word about her, but I recognized in her description my own perception of her as very direct and not afraid of conflict (I know a few people like this, two in particular in my meeting. I admire them, even though they intimidate me a little). But she went on to say that she thinks sometimes we fall into a mistaken belief that every little disagreement is something that has to be addressed and solved, but we might be better off recognizing that these little disconnects and differing perspectives are something we can just accept and live with.

"Hmmm," I said to myself. I have Big Religious Reasons for my hiatus from my Friends meeting; I also have Petty Little Personal Reasons, and, honestly, it is the petty little personal stuff that makes being there hardest, that blindsides me when I've been happily chugging along through the social hour, that leaves me uncertain how to proceed: do I need to bring this up with this person? Or is it best to let it be? If I don't bring it up, am I being accepting and peaceful, or cowardly? If I speak to it, am I bringing Truth or fomenting discord?

So this Friend's words spoke directly to questions I've been wrestling with.

A few days later, I went to the Festival of Faith & Writing. The festival opened with a talk by Scott Cairns, which I found a bit rambly and hard-to-follow, maybe because I was tired. But he said a few things that seemed like they were speaking right to me.

One was that he talked about alienation from church as "an ongoing failure." He sees isolated spirituality as lacking in an essential collective quality, as being unsupported and, in need, unsupportive. "Faith cannot be both solitary and healthy," he said. "Somehow or other, these beloveds must find their way home."

I know he said these things, in these words, because they spoke so directly to me that I wrote them down.

He then went on to talk about God as being an essential witness in conflict. God's witness, he said, has freed him from the need to make every offender aware of their offense. Practicing the awareness of the presence of God, and trusting in God as a loving witness, led, he says, to forgiveness being an almost-automatic process for him. He found that he was no longer an angry person who needed every person to be called to task for every transgression, no matter how small.

I was not challenged by this at all because I could see it had nothing to do with me, and my problems in my Quaker meeting. Thank goodness! Because I really want to cling to the belief that the problem is not with me, but with my meeting, and the other people in it, and that the solution is for me to find a way to speak Truth to them and change them. So many times in the past, the solution to a conflict, whether between me and David, me and one of my kids, me and a friend, me and my mother, or me and people in my Meeting, has turned out to be a change in my own attitudes and behavior. That's not gonna happen this time! No matter how much my Friend's comments in worship-sharing began to move me, or how convicted I felt by Cairns.

Am I convincing you? Because I'm trying really hard to convince myself.

The cherry on top of this sundae: the other day, on the way home from taking the kids to the park, I passed a church that had this message on its letter board (actually, this isn't the exact message. In my memory, it's got this profanity, but I'm sure there was actually a different word outside the church):

Stop bitching about your church. If it were perfect, they wouldn't let you in.

It's so true. I know for a fact that other people in my meeting are made uncomfortable by others' actions and opinions, too--and that I am one of those others. For instance, a year or two ago, one member spoke in worship-sharing about how troubled she is by how many families in our meeting homeschool. She has a concern that families that choose to homeschool are abandoning school systems in which they would be an asset, and improve the quality of the school for other children. She feels this so deeply that she was near tears talking about it.

Now, one reaction I have to this is that I've heard this argument before, many times, and rejected it. I have all kinds of reasons why I think this is a weak anti-homeschooling argument. And it would be kind of fun to run through those again.

But that's not the point. The point is, this woman feels a concern for disadvantaged kids and their educations, and she worries that parents pulling their kids out of public schools leaves behind the most vulnerable children and makes their learning environment worse. She may be right or wrong about whether my family's, or any other homeschooling family's, involvement would be an asset for a public school. But what she feels cannot be denied. And the number of families homeschooling in our meeting reminds her of her concerns, and that is distressing to her.

I've also heard one mom in our meeting say, half-jokingly, that she wishes there weren't so many of us in the meeting homeschooling, because she thinks her kids would be better off homeschooled and it's just not an option for them, and we homeschooling families are a constant reminder.

My point is, if there are choices people in my meeting make that remind me of my own concerns and fears, or are very different from my own carefully-considered choices, and are therefore painful or irritating to me, well, I'm performing that same service for others in the meeting. I am also a source of discomfort. Probably I am a source of discomfort in ways I don't know about, because people have not chosen to make me aware of my every transgression.

I tried for a neat little conclusion here, but I don't have one. So I'm just going to toss this all out there. It's what I've been thinking about. It feels like movement. God only knows where it will lead.

FGC First-Timer's Tips for Parents

Last year, a couple of moms from my monthly meeting went to FGC Gathering with their kids for the first time. I take my kids most years, and these moms kept saying to me, tiredly, "How do you do this?" and suggesting I write up tips telling moms how to make it look easy and fun, like I apparently do. This year, the Gathering is a mere two hours from us, and I hope and expect more families will take advantage of that to attend, so I thought I maybe I would try to write something.

Sadly, I'm not sure that what works for me and my kids, and makes Gathering one of our favorite parts of the year, applies to anyone else. For instance, I had attended Yearly Meeting, FGC Gathering, and FLGBTQC events for years before I started having kids. This meant that by the time Eric and I attended Gathering together when he was about 14 months old, I had many friends and acquaintances. For me, having lots of people to say hello to, even just passing on the path, means I don't end up feeling isolated because caring for kids keeps me away from some activities.

Having attended in the past means that not only do you know people, but you know the Gathering, its basic offerings and schedule, and don't have to waste energy on figuring out how it works. Your kids, having been there several times, also know the check-in routine, and they know how much they have to look forward to, which makes the dull arrival-check-in-and-unpacking part more manageable for them. So my first piece of advice would be, "Go back in time and attend on your own a half-dozen times first; it really helps."

If that's not practical, there are usually many Red Cedar Friends around. So the first piece of advice I would give any parent attending for this first time is: Don't be afraid to ask for help. People from my meeting have sometimes watched my kids for an hour or two so I can grab a nap, or helped the kids fetch their food at meals (the cafeteria can be the most challenging part of the Gathering), or invited my kids to their table so I can eat my lunch in peace.

I have gotten so good at asking for help that, especially in the cafeteria, I have almost no qualms about asking complete strangers for small favors. Friendly strangers have refilled our drink glasses, sat with one kid while I ran another to the bathroom, and bussed our table. Usually they seem happy to be asked, and to help. Only once did the person I asked seem the least bit taken aback, but even that person collected himself and said he was more than happy.

I had to learn the asking-for-help lesson the hard way over several years--I used to be so invested in seeming capable I would say "No, thank you" even when I was juggling two cafeteria trays, my toddler had just disappeared behind the drinks station, and my older kid was sitting cross-legged in the line of traffic declaring that he would not eat anything at all if they didn't have grilled cheese sandwiches. The day Carl threw up on me in a very crowded and public place got me over my misplaced sense of self-sufficiency, but you don't need to wait for that extreme. Don't make things harder for yourself than they have to be, please. Ask for help with small things before you even think you need it, and it will help preserve your energy and sanity.

You will be housed near other families with kids, and can request to be near families you know from home. Even if you don't know the parents nearby, be friendly and get to know them. Leave the door to your room open and say hello when they pass by. If you and your kids are going out to ride bikes or throw a ball around after lunch, invite the kids from down the hall, too. Then, when that family is playing frisbee the next day, they'll invite your kids, and you can have a little quiet, or take a nap.

My third piece of advice would be to take your kids' needs, and yours, seriously. Until this last year, we missed a lot of activities because too much time with people can just be overwhelming for Eric the Introvert, and so we usually chose to spend our afternoons either quietly in our room or doing something together just as a family, like taking a walk or riding bikes. We missed out on Family Center activities like story time, we never got to play capture the flag, and we've never been on a field trip. But we didn't go insane from over-scheduling, which is important for us. (Last year, eight-year-old Eric surprised me by being much better able to handle the groups, and choosing to spend even our available free time with his friends instead of having down time.)

We also usually prioritize getting enough sleep, which means that no matter how interested I am in the plenaries, I probably can't hope to get to more than one, or at the very most two. This was true even before I had kids, and is even more true now that I do.

I'm also the person who, last year, rolled my own fridge into the dorm on a hand truck, and I'll do it again this year, because being able to have an occasional lunch in our room instead of going to the cafeteria can give us a really welcome break. This is how seriously I take the idea of making sure we can get our needs met. (Also, having a cold can of sparkling water to offer other moms near the end of the their rope does wonders for building relationships.)

My third piece of advice applies to anyone, really, and it is: Accept that you can't do everything. There is great stuff happening at the Gathering starting with 7 a.m. yoga and ending with contra dancing until midnight. It helps me to start thinking even before I arrive about what I want to prioritize. This year, I'm leading a workshop, so being fresh for that is important, and that probably means no late nights. There's a field trip I'd like to take the kids on, so that may mean planning a quiet afternoon the day before so they're up for it. I used to try always to attend FLGBTQC worship, but it ends at 5:30. Last summer I discovered that if the kids and I go to dinner when the cafeteria first opens at 5, it's much less crowded and we cope much better. (Not everyone is as bothered by the cafeteria as we are; as a group, we're awfully sensitive to noise and crowds.) So getting to the cafeteria at 5 became a higher priority for me than worship, at least on most days.

My fourth piece of advice is to not be too discouraged by the rough moments. I have learned, from many years now of traveling with my kids to the yearly meeting, FLGBTQC Midwinters, and the summer gathering, that a low point for me is right after arrival time, when the kids are wired and wild from being in the car, and I'm worn out from driving, and the unloading seems impossible. It is very common for me to think, "Why did we come? This is not going to be any fun at all. I don't know why I put us through this year after year." Your moments of discouragement may be different, but it's a long conference and there are likely to be low points. Don't make too much of them, and ask for help when they come along.

Just in case anybody thinks I'm super-good at this and never lose it, I'll tell a story from the Gathering in 2008. Yehva was not quite a year old, and it was my first Gathering with all three kids. The cafeteria at that Gathering was the worst ever in terms of crowding, noise, and horrible traffic flow between the six different stations you had to go to for the various parts of your meal (I saw a woman from my meeting who didn't even have kids almost reduced to tears by that cafeteria, if that tells you anything). In addition, I'd injured my knee and couldn't walk distances. Was that also the year I'd had emergency oral surgery the day before we left? Yes, I think it was. So...challenging.

The dorm they put FLGBTQC folks in was charming--one of the best we've had for group hanging-out space close to the bedrooms, so parents could put kids to bed and then go down and visit with grownups. But the walls were like paper--you could hear conversations two rooms away as if the people were standing next to you. Since all the families with kids were in one hallway, this made getting your kids settled challenging.

One day, about halfway through the week, I was trying to do something impossible like get Yehva down for a nap, and Eric was "stuck." When Eric gets stuck, it means that none of the available options are acceptable to him, and he can't accept new ideas. He has lost all flexibility and is demanding, loud, whiny, weepy. I was tired, cranky, out of clever peaceful parenting ideas, and right on the verge of losing it, when there was a knock on our door. It was our friend Jude, from a few rooms down the hall. "Hi!" she said. "The girls and I were just thinking of taking a walk and wondered if Eric and Carl wanted to come with us!" "Yes! Yes, they do!" I said, and pushed them firmly out the door.

I don't know for sure whether Jude and her daughters were really just thinking of going for a walk and thought the boys might like to go along, or whether she heard the escalating noise and thought, "I'd better get in there right now, or Su's going to end up smacking one of those kids," but either way, she saved me from a regrettable thing. Single-parenting your kids at the Gathering is not the easiest thing you'll ever do, perhaps. But, for us, it's always been worth it, and we always want to go back.

Which brings me to my final piece of advice: Make a habit of it if you can. For me, the Gathering got better and better the more times I went; my first Gathering was only OK, and wouldn't have been compelling to me if I hadn't happened to be in a workshop that was a very good fit for me and from which I was learning many exciting new things. But over the years, for me, more and more pieces of it are worthwhile. Two years ago was the first time I had a workshop that just didn't speak to me, but it was more than made up for by the great time I had with kids that year (not just my own), and with my adult friends, and singing Sacred Harp.

For the boys, too, attending over the years has made the Gathering better. They are used to the things that are hard or tiring about it, and ever-more-excited about the stuff they like. They have old friends both among the adults and the kids, though especially among the kids, and both Carl and Eric will talk excitedly about looking forward to seeing certain friends again.

I know the Gathering is expensive; if it weren't so close to home, and if I weren't getting a cost reduction for leading a workshop, and if my Quaker meeting weren't contributing $720 for my kids to attend, we wouldn't be able to go this year. We'd go a lot less often if I weren't a stay-at-home mom, but had a job with limited vacation time, or if we had family out-of-state and needed to save vacation time and money for visiting them, as I know some families in our meeting do.

But it is worth it, in my experience. As well as deepening your own relationship to Quakerism, exposing you to Quakers from outside your own monthly meeting with all their quirks and different points of view, and giving you the opportunity to get together with possibly the only 12 liberal unprogrammed Friends who share some interest or concern with you, getting your children out into the wider Quaker world can be life-changing for them.

Edited to add:

Don't be shy about asking for financial help. Even though FGC does everything they can to keep costs down, like offering a family rate for registrations, letting the little kids eat for free, this year even experimenting with making the Gathering one day shorter, the cost really adds up. Your monthly meeting may have travel funds, and FGC offers scholarship assistance. The last couple of years, our family has been experiencing tight cash flow, and we've been helped by FGC scholarship funds. Don't be shy about asking for it; that's what it's there for. Someday when you have a little extra, you can offer it to the scholarship fund as a contribution when you register. This year, I didn't need to ask for scholarship help; next year, I hope we can contribute a little to the fund when we register.