Category Archives: Stories – From Life & Elsewhere

Survival & Revival: The Day The Smiles Are Well-Earned

This commemoration, while very personal, was not only about closure in Christine’s life. The fact that many women unknown to Christine or any of us showed up to join in as part of their own survival and revival, and underlining the fact of domestic violence as an ongoing issue in U.S. military culture.
And the 2007 event was not the end. Many more awful cases of domestic violence surfaced at and around Fort Bragg in my remaining years there (til November 2012). And the members of the Fayetteville NOW chapter, who had worked on this issue for man-years, and were powerfully moved by Christine’s witness, decided to make an annual event of laying a wreath at Beryl; Mitchell’s grave. They settled on early December, on or close to the day she was murdered.

And so they have. Each year since, in rain, in sleet, or cloudy and chill wind, they have gathered, sometimes few, sometimes more, and laid a wreath and taken both comfort and strength from this quiet ritual.

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Memorial Minute for Katharine “Kat” Royal

In Lumberton NC they lived near a trailer park populated by people of modest circumstances. Kat made friends with many residents there, including a woman named Lori and her daughter Christie. One day in late 2006 or 2007, Christie knocked at the door to say a dying dog had been abandoned nearby. The animal was bloody, with cuts around its neck and ears, and so weak it couldn’t stand up.

What had happened? In the area around Lumberton, dog-fighting is widely practiced, and it appeared this dog had been bred to fight, but refused to do so; hence the abuse and abandonment. We can’t keep it, the neighbor explained: the landlord won’t stand for it. But he’s so sweet: will you take him?

Kat had already purchased a young German Shepherd, hoping to train it as a service dog; and their trailer was small. But she took in the nearly comatose canine anyway.

Among their other neighbors was an Iraqi family, refugees from the wars there. They were devout Muslims, and the woman of the house was studying to become a veterinary technician. Hearing of Kat’s new dog and its desperate condition, she came by and spent many hours helping save its life and nurse it back to health, all while steadfastly refusing any payment.

Kat often told this story in her sermons, or when she heard other so-called Christians bashing Muslims: here was a Muslim practicing their faith as kindness, Kat said, and providing a more representative example of it that the violent stereotypes fed to the American public day after day.

Thus arrived in their lives the dog many of us know as Isaiah, or Zay-Zay as Kat often called him. And as Isaiah recovered, a surprising pattern developed: the German Shepherd, which Kat was working to train, paid no attention to the commands she repeated and repeated. But soon, Isaiah did start following them, unbidden, and began to take up the role the shepherd so adamantly refused. Before long the shepherd had been passed on to a new home, and Isaiah had found a new family, in which he had a vital place.

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The Day I Didn’t Help Bury Bobby Kennedy

When the others came back, hours later, I felt no regrets. The photographers, they said, were crammed onto a platform, where the scene was like an ongoing brawl. The veterans pushed, shoved & swore nonstop, wielding the huge long lenses of their Nikons like weapons, weaving this way & that to get better views as the family & dignitaries sweated in the heat and sleepwalked through their steps and genuflections a few dozen yards away.

All my colleagues were disgusted by the whole scene, and repeated their stories for my tape recorder.

Then we turned on the music, not quite as loud, and I was ready to hear the records all again.

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Arguing With God: Quaker House & My 9-11 Story

Back home in Pennsylvania, I struggled through the next days, like everyone else, to make sense of what had happened. Only one thing about the aftermath seemed clear to me: the U.S would soon be at war. Where and when were obscure, but this had seemed to me a bottom-line certainty even before we finally rose and left Arla alone with her smoking television screen that morning.

This certainty was not a sign of any prophetic gift. It came, I think, more from my roots in a military family. Many of the reflexes of that culture were ingrained: You (whoever “you” were, we still weren’t sure) don’t get away with attacking the Pentagon, the nerve center of all the US military. Somebody will soon face some heavy payback from the armed men and women whose center and stronghold is in that building.

And chances were very good that when this war started, there would be many more of the innocent killed in their frenzied, fiery search for the guilty. U.S. revenge would be painted on some part of the world in a very broad brush of death.

And me? What would I do in the face of this impending war? The attacks had shaken me, truly, but had not undermined my basic Quaker pacifist convictions. I had just seen murder, on a huge scale. But more murder was not an answer to murder. That was my conviction on September 10; it remained so on September 12th. And I also sensed that I would have some small part in struggling to frame and lift up some voice for an alternative. Hell, any serious Quaker (or Christian?) would. Right?
But what alternative? And how to raise it?

I didn’t know. But Quakers in circumstances like these are taught to wait for “way to open.” Our spirituality is that if we are properly attentive, we will be given “leadings,” which will point us in the way to go.

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