in fact, it cannot grow at all. All through its life cycle, many times the lobster has to lose weight, crack its old shell, and wiggle free.
A just-molted lobster is as soft as a child’s rubber toy lobster. With no shell, the lobster is easy prey, very vulnerable. The just-molted lobster has to find a hiding place from predators, like a crevice or cave, until its new body armor arrives.
Shedding is for us humans a major part of “wising up.” My wife and I currently are in the process of stuffing many boxes with clothes and books we have decided we will never wear or read again and taking them to Goodwill. We are pulling junk from our storage areas and setting it out for the garbage trucks to haul off. We want to spare our surviving children that unnecessary ordeal.
An essential part of growing up and becoming fully human is shedding masks. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: “I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”
It is scary to open the visor of our suit of armor and expose ourselves and, like the lobster, make ourselves vulnerable for a time. But it is necessary if, as the Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, we are ever to become real.
January 19
“Why do you think people leave their bicycle locks here?” I asked three companions as we walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, Germany. Thousands of padlocks had been attached to the chain-link fence separating the pedestrian walkway from one of the world’s busiest train bridges.
A local, standing there reading the inscriptions, explained: “Lovers carve their name on a lock, lock it onto the grille, kiss, and throw the key into the Rhine. It expresses their conviction that their love is a ‘lock’ for life.” One lock read: “Daniel and Nicole 21/12/2009.” “Christiana and Willfried” was scratched crudely on another. One creative person had attached with three locks a polished brass ship under full sail, professionally engraved with two words: “Special RelationSHIP.”
Many of us did something similar in days of yore when we carved initials into a tree, like “WW + PS.”
I like the location. Bridges, like love, connect two separate or isolated entities.
I like the symbolic act of throwing away the key. In our easy-come, easy-go culture, love locks express a desire for something more, a commitment more than a connection, more tenacious than a tryst, more lasting than serial fallings into lust.
I think I can understand the cynicism of those who are disillusioned with love, even those who have taken wire cutters to the padlock. And I can understand those who argue that humans are not wired to be monogamous, or that it is a holy calling to stay celibate, or that it is morally acceptable, even superior, to choose a life devoid of romantic entanglements.
But there is also a place for love-locked souls on the Hohenzollern Bridge who resonate to Shakespeare: “Love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds / or bends with the remover to remove.”12
January 20
In 1986, The United Church of Canada formally apologized to Canada’s aborigines for all the wrongs the church inflicted on them hundreds of years earlier. The United States Senate in 2009 officially apologized for slavery. The apology came 146 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
I am trying to understand what good it does to apologize for something someone else did generations ago. Could it be mainly to make ourselves feel and look good for not having done what they did? Let me give it a try.
My grandfather’s grandfather, Joseph Willis, in his Tennessee will dated May 9, 1843, bequeathed to his wife “all the land belonging to me with all my negroes, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, and farming utensils.”
The 1810 census showed that Joseph’s father, Peter Willis, had thirteen slaves. The slaves were listed right next to “100 yards of homespun fabric made annually by the family (value $50).” In the 1820 census, Peter’s plantation was up to sixteen slaves.
In 1833, a slave belonging to Peter’s neighbor was hanged. Many slaveholders in the area, including Peter Willis, signed a petition requesting the government to reimburse Peter’s neighbor for the value of this slave. The petition does not identify the slave’s crime or name or estimated monetary value.
There! I did it. I feel better now, having apologized for the sins of my fathers.
Not really. I assume that my ancestors were just doing what those in their time and culture did, possibly never questioning whether regarding another human being as a piece of property—like a hog or a piece of fabric—was right or wrong.
There is one thing more important than apologizing for the actions of our ancestors. It should move us to ask which people our descendants will wonder how we, in our time and culture, could so blindly and ignorantly mistreat.
January 21
Seated, waiting for the announcement to begin boarding the plane, I noticed for the first time the sign. It had two arrows. One pointed the way for Elite Access, the other for General Boarding. I cracked a slight smile and made a slight groan. I would rather lie down on a bed of nails than stand in a line marked “Elite.” I confess that may reveal something deficient about me.
This economy ticket holder, seated in General Boarding three rows behind the plane’s Elite, got to observe the pampering going on up there. First, their own private steward whispered with a smile to those of us seated in the cheap seats not to use their bathroom, located just inside the elite section, but to utilize the bathroom in the back of the plane. Then she pulled a thin veil to separate them from us, and latched a rope across the entrance to their section, just in case we forgot. The elite had paid much more for their seats, procuring not just perks of wine and leg room and fluffed pillows, but separation from the riff-raff.
I have since learned that two hundred years ago the French traveled long distances in a covered vehicle called a diligence, which was a glorified stagecoach pulled by five horses. It could carry up to eighteen people. There was room for three elite in the front seat, six middle class in, of course, the middle seat, and six poor people in the back of the coach. An additional two or three— the poorest poor—could be piled on top with the baggage.
Elitism gone to seed is self-righteous arrogance, based on the fiction that money or education or power or bloodline makes us organically different from the proletariat.
I am going to stick with the old proverb that, after the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.
January 22
Some of us relish playing a game called “devil’s advocate.” Over lunch, a friend told me about an epiphany he had many years ago. A mysterious person appeared to him and charged him with a mission, the meaning of which my friend still ponders. Trading on the strength of our relationship, after listening and asking questions for a while, I ventured: “Okay, I’m going to play devil’s advocate. Couldn’t that very potent, very personal, very real visitation possibly have been a dream fabricated by your unconscious mind?”
A devil’s advocate takes a position to test the strength of someone else’s position, probing for weaknesses that might help the other person think about it more critically and clarify things more accurately, or at least consider alternative interpretations.
The
