Through Mama’s Eyes

Standing fully in the present moment, there are times when you can touch the past and the future, all at once and at the same time. You can even feel eternity sliding through your fingers.

And sometimes it happens through someone else’s eyes.

I see my mama’s eyes in a black and white photo of her when she was six, maybe seven years old--- about 85 years ago now. She’s standing next to her mom somewhere out there on the Oklahoma prairie with the Great Depression swirling around them.

 Mom’s wearing a simple calico dress and beige stockings. Her short cropped hair and straight trimmed bangs appear utilitarian: easy to wash and dry.

Her mom, my grandmother, is clutching her purse in her right hand while her left is resting peacefully on my mom’s back. Grandmother’s bonnet is pulled down low, casting a shadow over her eyes, now worn down by time, fading them, hiding them from my view, preventing me from seeing what they might be saying.   

But I can clearly see mama’s little girl eyes. And they seem to look into mine, peering at me as if to say, “When will you arrive in my future, little boy?”

And then, “Where are you going, young man?”

Now, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life, since you’re past the half century mark?”

Those little girl eyes see right through me in this moment, then  back to yesterday, and forward into tomorrow.

It happens all at once and at the same time.

Her eyes are accompanied by a half grin that strikes me as vaguely familiar. “Yes,” I smile to myself, “those are the eyes of my oldest daughter.” And now those eyes---the eyes of my little girl daughter, six maybe seven years old---stare through the glass door of our house, waiting for my arrival. “Can we go for a drive, Daddy? Please?”

And then my little six maybe seven year old girl is a young lady, glancing back one more time in my direction as she passes through airport security for departing flights. And she’s gone---gone far away to her big city.

It happens all at once and at the same time.

Now, in Mom’s little girl eyes, I see my older brothers, Mark and Lowell. Mom snaps her fingers, watching us boys through her horned rimmed glasses, commanding us to settle down there in the back of the station wagon, for it’s a long way from Altus, Oklahoma to Disneyland in  California, and through Mom’s eyes, squinting with the threat of discipline, I can hear Lowell holding something called a transistor radio, tuned in to KOMA AM radio, listening to Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.” And Mark is warning Lowell not to drop the radio from the station wagon’s back window because Lowell is letting the transistor dangle dangerously from his wrist.

I look again and see Mom’s little girl eyes arriving in Fletcher, Oklahoma, where she, now 19 years old, meets my future daddy’s eyes, and both, in that past moment, lock eyes in a forever gaze.

And I can see in those little girl eyes the grief, the joy, and the thrill of living: the death of a son in a car wreck, Mom herself graduating from college once her boys had their diplomas, her travels to Africa, India, Arabia, and Central America.

The serious expression on the  little girl’s face breaks into joyful celebrations of  life in her poems, her collectibles, and her friends, bestowing favor upon my dad, who needs her, beaming with pride in sons, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And then quite abruptly the little girl eyes bring me to the recent past:  Mom and Dad’s 70^th wedding anniversary, where her eyes, now in their 92^nd year, look to me for help as she grasps my arm, taking tiny steps on the way to the car.

“I love you boys more than you will ever know,” she reminds me. And I know she means it.

But now, I don’t want to look into those eyes—fearful that they may be worn down by time, the years having cast their shadow over them, fading them, blurring them so I can no longer see what they might be saying.

.

I choose instead to ponder the little girl’s eyes.

And through them touch now and forever in this present moment.

When you can’t care enough to care

You can often see it in their eyes, if you take the time to look: That far away gaze tells you they are somewhere else---maybe in the future or the past but not the present.

Or sometimes their eyes dart this way and that, like those of a trapped animal searching for an escape route.

And if you have occasion to be with them for very long, you’ll notice a restlessness---an inability to move forward with any kind of fruitfulness---even though they might exhibit workaholic tendencies or conversely, extreme lethargy.

I’m not referring to someone afflicted with ADHD or Lyme disease or mononucleosis.

Then, what is it?

If, like a “Jeopardy!” contestant, you've just said, “What is acedia?” you should be hearing Alex Trebek saying, “Right you are.”

This is no recent phenomenon. Acedia  (pronounced uh-SEE-dee-uh) was first described by a fourth century monk named Evagrius of Ponticus. The Greek root of the word literally means “without care.” It’s a complex condition that defies a simple definition.

 It’s a spiritual lethargy---an extreme kind of indifference: the awareness that you don’t care, but you can’t seem to care that you don’t care, even though your apathy weighs on you, crushing your spirit.

Evagrius described it as the “noonday demon,” perhaps because it’s bold enough to attack in the middle of the day instead of sneaking in late at night, or maybe because that’s when the intensity of the sun begins to wear on us, and the drag of the day creeps in as the freshness of the morning evaporates, leaving us languishing with the staleness of the afternoon’s work awaiting us.

Acedia can be dangerous because it is subtly attractive.  Kathleen Norris, who has struggled with acedia for much of her life and written extensively about it, describes it as “spiritual morphine.”

Disconnecting from people, God, and yourself can be seductive because there are times when we grow weary of them all. Like someone teetering between being comfortably numb and inebriated, we stare at the world as it passes by.  Soon, cynicism sets in: We criticize ourselves and others but have no desire to make improvements; we watch TV shows we dislike but are too enervated to pick up the remote and change the channel.

No wonder, as Norris notes, Aldous Huxley called acedia the primary affliction of his age. “Its baleful influence still sours our relationships to society, politics, and our families,” she said.

Maybe John Plotz, Professor of English at Brandeis University, is right: “It takes an acediac to know acedia.” If he’s right, I can’t say I know acedia, except as an occasional minor affliction, an unwelcome guest that’s bothersome but not permanent. And yet, like the winter cold that seems to keep hanging around, when you've got it, you wonder if it will it will ever go away.

The cure for acedia is not as easy as repeating a few positive statements, as Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) did in the movie, “What About Bob?” “I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful... I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful... I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful...” Bob rehearses to himself each morning in an effort to conquer his neuroses.

The Egyptian monk and early Desert Father of the fifth century, Abba Poemen, knew something about overcoming acedia. He admonished his disciples to recognize it for what it is: a temptation to despair. Naming it is at least a beginning to finding peace when the noonday demon strikes. Again, Abba Poeman said, “Teach your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.”

I've learned to speak to acedia as I would to any seemingly insurmountable mountain in life. “Greater is the Spirit that is in me than the spirit that is in the world,” I say to myself, paraphrasing I John 4:4.

Another Desert Father, John Cassian, advised patience, prayer, and manual labor as the way through acedia. And Norris suggests such practical actions as memorizing Scripture, finding community, shoveling manure, washing dishes, dusting the bookshelf, and being kind to one another as ways of coping with acedia.

Since we are in control of our thoughts, we don’t have to be dominated by acedia or any temptation. We may not be able to avoid it, since it is part of the human condition, but we can respond to it in positive ways. As the reformer of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther is supposed to have said, “You can’t help it if a bird flies over your head, but you don’t need to let him make a nest in your hair.”

The challenge of course, when it comes to acedia, is caring enough to wave the bird away.

Despite other paramours, I’m still in love with my computer

Maybe it’s a part of the yearning for a slower, simpler world, a less digitized world when others--- including the National Security Agency---didn’t have instant access to our privacy. Or perhaps it’s more a desire to touch and embrace an older vehicle for communicating.

It could be both.

I’m referring to the return of the typewriter.

Even high school students are learning the joys and frustrations of tap tap tapping away on what many consider an anachronistic way of communicating.

Ryan Adney, a high school English teacher, has his students doing almost all their writing on typewriters these days.  In an interview with NBC’s Stephanie Gosk, Adney said 20 years ago only eccentrics used a typewriter. But that’s changing. People across the country are utilizing the typewriter. That would include the high profile users like Pope Francis I; the famous collectors, like Tom Hanks (he owns 12 of the old printing machines); and the modern day enthusiasts, like Mike McGeddigan, who organized a “type-in.” McGeddigan prefers typewriters because they are finely crafted, are not meant to be obsolete, and are intended to do only one thing: type.

It’s the simplicity of that “one thing” that apparently appeals to so many, even among some of the younger generation. “They help you concentrate more because on a computer there’s other distractions,” said Jessica Duren, one of Adney’s students. Because typewriters have no backspace, spell check, or auto correct, mistakes are more permanent. “You gotta know what you’re gonna say and make sure it makes sense,” said another student, Sonia Aldana.

Adney believes the machines have helped his students improve their writing skills because they have to be more cognizant of their word choices, and slowing down has facilitated their creativity, he maintains.

And then the nostalgia of using a typewriter can create enthusiasm for writing: “When you’re sitting at one, you almost feel like you could be like…Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac,” said student Matthew Scidoni.

“Now that’s what I need,” I mused as I read about the return of the typewriter. I pictured myself with my hands on an old Smith-Corona, channeling Jack London or Ray Bradbury as I pecked away. “The perfect vaccine to any possible invasion of the writer’s block virus,” I thought. “I’ll be perpetually energized.”

But then something woke me to reality and sent me running to hug my beloved laptop: It was the memory of my typewriting class in high school.

I had learned the keyboard with relative ease, but then came the more technical aspect of the course: the correct layout for a business letter, proper form for footnotes, the simple office memo---details I figured I’d never use. Then my guidance counselor informed in a by the way moment that I had already accumulated enough credits to graduate. “Just wondering, why did you add the typing class?” he asked.

 Good question. I promptly dropped that first hour typing class and slept an extra hour each day.

A few months later I graduated and merrily went along my way without much use for a typewriter. I had one (an item, along with my 1974 Chevy Camaro, I now wish I had kept) but rarely used it. I wrote in longhand and either had a friend type my research papers or paid a typist. Although I wish I were more proficient on my laptop keyboard, corrections are easily made with a computer.

Granted, the computer invites distractions. Stopping to check email or facebook messages can be deadly to meeting deadlines.  

But the typewriter isn’t the perfect antidote to the problem, at least not for everyone.

Shelby Foote, author of the massive three volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative, refuses to use even a typewriter. In an interview for The Academy of Achievement, Foote said, “I don’t want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter.” The clatter of the typewriter and the turning of the drum backward to make corrections is “a kind of interruption” Foote can’t stand. He even refuses to use a fountain pen, opting instead for the old-fashioned dip pen, preferring it for the same reason some like a typewriter: The dip pen forces him to slow down and think before writing each word.

But a pen can be frustrating too. Novelist Stephen King likes to write in longhand. “The only problem,” he says, “is that, once I get jazzed, I can’t keep up with the lines forming in my head and I get frazzled.”

Precisely. King’s problem reminded me why I started using the laptop in the first place. And that brings me back to my love affair with my writer-friendly computer, to whom I pledge my everlasting loyalty.

At least until a more efficient writing companion comes along.

Listening to Dad

I still call my dad most every morning. While I’m driving to work, he’s slowly but surely making his way to breakfast in the retirement facility where Dad and Mom now live.

I sometimes have difficulty communicating on the phone with Dad since his hearing is not what it used to be. (Dad just turned 89.) So, I was encouraged when Dad told me he was getting new hearing aids; I thought that would make our conversations easier.

“I just got my new hearing aids,” he proudly announced one morning not long ago.

“Great,” I responded, “how are they working?”

“What? What did you say?” he asked.

I’ve learned to repeat what I’m saying and let Dad talk over me. I figure he deserves it; after all, not so long ago, I was the know-it-all teenager who once ignored his wisdom and tried to talk over his words.

Our most frequent morning topic is the weather: what it is where he lives in Lubbock, Texas, and what we are having here in Kentucky.

“It’s damp here,” I informed him one morning.

Apparently misunderstanding the word “damp,” for “camp,” Dad launched into a story of how he attended camp when he was 11 or 12 years old. 

I dared not redirect him: It was a story worth hearing.

Dad told of being at church camp in the early 1930s. The place was Falls Creek Baptist Assembly, located in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma. Dad’s uncle, Kenneth Harrell, had volunteered to take several boys from Fletcher Baptist Church to Falls Creek. Falls Creek Assembly would grow to become the largest youth encampment in the United States. When Dad attended, they actually camped outside in tents and bathed in a reservoir.

One warm, sultry night, at the close of one of those camp meetings in the large outdoor tabernacle, the camp evangelist called for the young people to make a decision for Christ. “Step forward and make public your decision,” he admonished the young people. Dad wanted to walk down the aisle to the front of the assembly but was hesitant and a little afraid. An observant camp counselor, seeing the anguish in Dad’s face, came and stood next to Dad and offered to walk forward with him if that’s what Dad wanted to do. He did, and that marked the beginning of my father’s walk with Jesus Christ.

After Dad had told me the story, I was dumbfounded. Here was one of the most important events in my Dad’s life, and I’d never heard it. All those years when Dad’s hearing was as all but perfect, I’d never stopped long enough to inquire about how he had come to his faith, and Dad was on the move too. He has always been a doer. What I knew of his faith I learned mostly by observation: his prayer before meals, his church attendance anytime the doors were open, and his volunteering as a dentist to do mission work in third world countries.

But that day, listening to Dad, I felt like I had gotten to the heart of the matter--- the place where it had all begun. And I’d learned of it because of his hearing loss and his misunderstanding of one simple word.

And now I have a story I will forever treasure, one I will pass on to my kids.

That’s just what I’ll do, maybe this Father’s Day--- before I grow forgetful and hard of hearing.

God in the storm

I grew up in Tornado Alley. Tornadoes were more of an event I enjoyed than a threat I feared, so invincible did I think I was as a child and teenager. As we gathered in the Shively’s storm shelter with other neighbors, I rather enjoyed the social gathering and naively hoped the twister would somehow be bad enough to cancel school but not destructive enough to hurt anyone.

Questions of why, an inevitable response to suffering, weren’t in my purview, at least not then.

And so I managed to survive my first eighteen years, waltzing through the annual threat of tornado season but not really being affected by any single one of them.

Then I drove home from college for Easter, 1979. Wichita Falls, Texas had been hit by a devastating tornado a few days earlier. In Wichita Falls, they still refer to that day as Terrible Tuesday. A swarm of twisters had slammed the region, killing 42 people in Wichita Falls and 11 in Vernon, Texas, Vernon being just 40 miles from where I grew up in Altus, Oklahoma.

Wichita Falls looked much like a war zone: buildings had been flattened, homes destroyed, debris was strewn everywhere.

I was shocked. “This is terrible, just horrible,” I remember saying over and over. “Why here? Why not out there in one of those wheat fields?”

Tornadoes were no longer something I anticipated with an adrenalin rush; they were something I dreaded and feared.

Turning on the news on the day the tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, Monday, May 20, 2013, I found myself speaking the same words I did back in 1979: “This is terrible, just horrible.”

My wife’s sister, Lisa, lives in the path the tornado took that day. My brother and his wife just happened to be in Oklahoma City as Joy was undergoing medical tests for her recently diagnosed breast cancer.

Lori and I waited anxiously for news of their safety.

As the reporter told of the Plaza Towers Elementary School that had been leveled while children were still inside, I choked back tears.  

“Couldn’t God have at least directed it around that school?” Lori said to herself aloud.

It was an automatic response, a gut reaction---a question that’s not really a question, but more of a wish---a desire that what we were seeing wasn’t really happening.

It’s the same kind of question I had as I drove through Wichita Falls in 1979.

It’s a desire for a world we don’t live in, a world that doesn’t operate according to natural laws, a place where a Someone intervenes every time there’s danger.

It’s a world where there is no pain or suffering or tears. The Bible calls this place heaven. We aren’t there yet.

We can blame God for this world we live in, filled as it is with contrasts of calming breezes and destructive tornadoes, peaceful waters and powerful hurricanes, life giving rains and devastating floods.

Or we can blame others---maybe even ourselves and our forbears for creating the fossil fuels that warmed the ocean that helped create an environment that seems ever more prone to wild storms.

We can blame the victims, as does Reverend Pat Robertson. In trying to defend God, Robertson asked the people of Moore, Oklahoma: “Why did you build houses where tornadoes were apt to happen?”

Such callousness ignores the possibility of danger everywhere: the East Coast and the Gulf, where there is the possibility of hurricanes, California where the danger is earthquakes, the entire Southwest, where there is drought, the northern states, where ice and snow may kill innocent victims, or the highways, where more deaths occur than in all the storms combined. Why step outside your house, for that matter?

During the Oklahoma tornado, Shayla Taylor was in the Moore Medical Center, ready to give birth to a baby boy. She already had his name picked out: Braeden Immanuel. Aware of the storm, she checked the weather app on her cell phone, only to discover the hospital was in line for a direct hit from the tornado. The nurses took Shayla to a safer room, one without windows. Shayla closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she could clearly see I-35 and the Warren Theatre where there was once a wall. She later delivered her son at a hospital a few miles away. Reflecting on the name of her son,” ‘Immanuel” which means, "God is with us," she said, “I had it picked out for months. And now I know why I did, because God was with us that day.”

Maybe in another world God would have created humans without a free will that allowed them to build a school where a tornado would one day deliver a death notice, a different place where God would constantly be suspending the laws of nature, prohibiting any kind of pain and suffering. Instead he formed this world, the one we live in, the one he lives in too, the one where we find him in the midst of our pain and suffering, here in the storms of life, where he is “Immanuel,” the God who is with us, the One who never leaves us.

There is no one to blame in that.

How I became a tree hugger

“What are you doing, Dad?” my son asked when he called me on his cell phone.

I was sitting on our back patio, admiring the work I’d done, having just planted the first third of my garden with the non-genetically modified seeds I had oh-so carefully selected. I wanted to come as close as I could to having an organic garden.

Then just as I as I leaned back to relax, I stood up straight, squinting at the tractor spraying the field behind my house. It was coming closer and closer to my garden.

“Well,” I told Dave in answer to his question, “I’m thinking about all the time and money I spent making sure I had non-GMO seeds so I could watch them get sprayed with pesticides.”

A few minutes later, while I was in the garage transplanting some of my tomato plants and placing them back in my miniature green house, I heard Lori scream: “He’s right up against the fence now.”

There are several responses to a perceived environmental threat.

There’s the “Oh well, surely they know what they’re doing” response. I like that one because it avoids confrontation. But unfortunately, it ignores potential danger.

 For years, crop dusters in Southwest Oklahoma, where I grew up, sprayed DDT and other pesticides. Some of the pesticides many crop dusters used have been linked as possible causes of certain cancers, like the one my oldest brother now fights, mantle cell lymphoma. Two of his high school friends have died from that cancer.

As award winning author Pete Daniel notes in his book, Toxic Drift, Pesticides and Health in the Post- WWII South, “After World War II, scientists failed to investigate the long term possibilities of toxic drift but instead focused on inventions and new products. They were willing to allow the future to take care of itself.”

Then there’s the more radical response reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street. I could set up a tent in the field, call it Occupy the Farm, and phone some lonely newspaper reporter in hopes that someone would take my picture standing in front of my tent while I’m holding my sign, “I have a say: no more chemical spray.”

Maybe there’s another way. I simply wanted to know if the spray was potentially harmful and what my options would be if it were. In the words of Jean Rostand, as quoted in Rachel Carson’s classic work, Silent Spring, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”

“Yes,” I said, “I surely have a right to know.” So in that instant, I made a decision and gently placing my tomato seedling back in the green house,  I marched like Don Quixote across my back yard, convinced I could simply hail the sprayer like I would a taxi and casually inquire, “What’s in that stuff?”

I never made it past my own yard.

The barbed wire fence grabbed me, holding me captive like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. So there I was, instead of defending my garden, lying lamely in the fence with the seat of my pants and the front legs ripped apart. What’s more, I could hear the hum of the sprayer approaching, and I envisioned him dousing me with chemicals while cackling, “Serves ya right, ya puny little tree hugger.”

Instead he suddenly turned in the opposite direction, and sensing my opportunity to break for it, I pulled myself out of the barbed wire and dashed to my car.

“Where on earth are you going?” Lori hollered as I drove in the direction of the sprayer’s barn.

 “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know,” I shouted as I sped away.

She looked puzzled.

Afraid to expose my back side with my torn pants hopelessly exposing my underwear, I stood face to face with the sprayers. We had an amiable conversation. They had waited until the wind had died down to avoid any potential drift of the herbicide they were spraying.  Having expressed my concerns, we shook hands, and I scooted home to treat my barbed wire wounds.

Later, a County Extension Agent informed me that their spray was most likely one of the more benign herbicides, essentially a form of Round-Up. And the common law in most states is that neither farmers nor neighbors are obligated to inform others what they are spraying.

But I still wonder about potential toxic drift: If it can harm plants, do I really want to eat them once they’ve been exposed to the chemicals? And how do I know it won’t harm me sometime in the future? Or am I just being paranoid and over reactive?

Some states, I learned, have laws stipulating that herbicides and pesticides cannot be sprayed in the vicinity of a school.

“Aha,” I thought.  I could see a school next to my garden: “The Whitlock Academy of Safe Gardening.”

First course: “Tree Hugging 101.”

Are you the bad neighbor?

Will there be fences in heaven?

That’s another way of asking, will your bothersome neighbor’s heavenly mansion be next to yours? Before you petition heaven’s city council for a privacy fence or request that your bad neighbor be confined to the eternal promised land’s back forty, make sure you yourself aren’t unwittingly the neighbor from hell who somehow slipped under the pearly gates unnoticed while St. Peter was distracted by a game of heavenly baseball.

It is possible that you might be the neighbor who simply doesn’t get it. Could you be the annoying neighbor?

Take the case of Barry Alan Swegle, who as of last week has some new neighbors: his cellmates in the Clallam County jail in Washington. Swegle faces felony charges of malicious mischief. Mr. Swegle didn’t like the fact that a neighbor had placed a fence in a disputed area of Swegle’s property line, preventing him from moving his heavy equipment on and off his property. One such piece of equipment was a bulldozer.

So, Swegle decided to put the bulldozer to good use. Before it was all over, he had bulldozed four of his neighbors’ homes, a boat, a truck, a tractor, and had brought down a 70 foot electricity pole.

Maybe you’ve at least fantasized about doing something like Barry did. Perhaps your weapon of revenge isn’t a bulldozer but nails under the tires of that pesky neighbor’s car, or a snake in their mailbox, or a parrot that repeats obscenities to them.  All these retaliatory scenarios have actually been utilized by one neighbor against another.

I wouldn’t know how to drive a bulldozer. But I can ring a doorbell.

And that’s what I did to one of my neighbors, late one night, years ago.

The doorbell rang Doris’ apartment. She lived next to my wife and me when I was in graduate school. Doris would apparently fall asleep and leave her TV blaring. The paper thin walls of the apartment complex were no match for the volume of Doris’ TV.  I could easily hear the 11 o’clock news, followed by the midnight sports summary, followed by the 1am sneak preview of the next day’s weather. Sometimes it went on all night.

I tried the polite route. “Doris, would you please turn down your TV before you fall asleep?”

When that approach failed, I tried persistence, while remaining patient and polite. “Doris, we can still hear your TV. Would you please turn it down?”

 Finally I lost patience, and with the patience went my politeness. Only the persistence remained, which I applied to the doorbell.

Storming down the stairs, I rang Doris’ doorbell again and again and again until she finally appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair pulled up above her head like a warrior’s headdress, her facial night cream looking like war paint, and with her tightly folded arms resting across her chest and her feet firmly planted at hips width distance, she had the appearance of a matriarchal chieftain ready to defend her throne.

But with my index finger still on her doorbell, I too was ready for battle.

“If I turn down my TV, I won’t be able to hear it,” she argued.  

“Tell you what,” I rejoined, “if you can’t hear it in your bedroom, just step into ours, and you can hear every word just fine.”

She slammed her door. By then, other tenants were peeking out in curiosity.

Taking my finger off the doorbell, I retreated.

Not even the landlord’s intervention would quell Doris’ TV. We didn’t get a reprieve from the late night news until Doris moved out.

I later wondered if there was there something about me Doris just didn’t like. Could it have been that I annoyed her? Was she retaliating against me? Was the loud TV her bulldozer?

It’s comforting to believe that in heaven we will have perfect neighbors, so we won’t need fences to keep someone’s pets from pooping on our heavenly lawns, or sound proof walls to silence a neighbor’s rock n roll, or bulldozers to adjust our property lines.

Robert Frost’s line from his poem, “Mending Wall,” is often quoted as a reason for having fences: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The irony is that Frost was challenging the very wisdom of that phrase.

We can’t have heaven on this earth where we are often too closely meshed together. But maybe we would do better in approximating it if we would take a closer look at ourselves and ask how we might mend a wall rather than building one.

Or bulldozing it.