The sins of the fathers may indeed be visited upon the children, and upon the children’s children, until the third and the fourth generation, but there is more to inherit than that. My grandmother, Irene, whom I grew up calling “Big Mama” was born 1902 on Dunbarton Plantation (or was it Stonewall?) in Holmes County, Mississippi, the eldest of eight daughters of a not-rich cotton planter—whom, I have been told by elders outside the family, was regarded as somehow not... Read more
One day my mother came home from the interior decorating shop where she worked, very upset about a young man who had come into the store with his mother. “You wouldn’t believe what his T-shirt said!” my mom cried. “‘Better Dead Than Red!'” I asked her what it meant. “He’s making fun of redheads, of course!” she lamented, her curly, fiery hair aflutter. “Why would anyone wear such a thing?” It was the early eighties, in the thick of the... Read more
“Good Letters” is pleased today to welcome Chris Hoke as a regular contributor. In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a desolate waste. Chaos. Smoking rubble. Like after a war. Our beginning, we Bible readers should understand, was post-apocalyptic. That’s what I tell the guys in jail, as a regular chaplain there, when someone pipes up now and then with the Genesis and evolution question. I back us up, and—depending on how... Read more
Guest post by Lisa Ampleman I hardly ever go to bars, and when I do, I tend not to drink. I don’t like the taste of beer and even a drink or two can give me insomnia. So why am I addicted to the reality show Bar Rescue? I’m not the intended audience for the show on Spike TV, a network that “knows what guys like,” as their website says. The advertisements feature starlets suggestively eating Hardees burgers and men... Read more
When I graduated from Seattle Pacific’s MFA program, I was sorely disappointed to hear Greg Wolfe announce The Brothers Karamazov as the next common reading selection. Upon returning home from my final residency at Whidbey Island, I pulled Dostoyevsky’s great novel down from the shelf as my first post-graduation self-assigned reading. It was such a decrepit old copy that it fell apart as I read, grew smaller as glue gave out and pages fell away—a visual gauge of my progress.... Read more
Continued from yesterday. On our seventh day walking El Camino de Santiago, my husband and I rose before dawn and departed O’Cebreiro, a Celtic mountaintop village with cobbled streets and numerous pallozas—round, stone houses with thatched roofs. We walked beneath the moon and stars, soon joining a group of eighteen young adults we’d met a few days before. Guided by a few pilgrim headlamps, we headed down a wooded track. It wound around the hill before descending to the hamlet... Read more
I could not accept retirement with grace. Perhaps it was because retirement was not something I sought. Quite the opposite. After eighteen years as a lawyer, I’d been teaching high school English for six, loved it better than pistachio ice cream, hoped to continue for fifteen more years. Perhaps it was because I spent a lifetime seeking education. I’d earned three graduate degrees—in law, teaching, and writing—to be the best I could in my careers. Perhaps it was because my... Read more
Somewhere along the Great Chain of Being, we all have our place. That’s an old concept, and perhaps one that doesn’t fit our times as easily as it did in the past, but there’s much of it that still holds true. From the ancients comes the idea that all things in reality can be located along a continuum—a “Great Chain,” as it were—hierarchized so that each thing possesses an attribute in addition to those that rest immediately below it, and... Read more
What a joy to be knitting something beautiful for a woman I don’t know and never will. She’s a guest at my church’s soup kitchen, where every guest gets a gift at Christmastime. The yarns are a rich red and orange wool interlaced with red-orange nylon eyelash. She’ll say “how pretty —at least I hope she will. Maybe it will become her favorite scarf, make her feel special, dressy, worthy in a way that the world doesn’t usually value her.... Read more
When news broke this summer that Sunni extremists with ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, had blown up the tomb of Jonah after capturing the Iraqi city of Mosul, the shockwaves left a piece of me in the rubble from halfway across the world in Brooklyn. Not that the trail of massacres, beheadings and forced expulsions by ISIS haven’t made for far more shocking news before and since then, as the gruesome executions of American journalists James Foley... Read more
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