Flash Fiction Friday #2: "My Janice"

My Janice

by D.D. Maurer


Maybe I should be more thankful.

After all, she’s still alive. Sort of.

That’s what I tell my sister-in-law, Gina. But all she does is complain about the smell. Gina also complains about how her sister has changed. And how she moans. And how I continue to keep her — my wife, Janice — locked in the basement.

I’m trying to be rational, a good husband. How can I divorce her? I can’t leave her. I made a promise. It was ‘til death do us part. Janice isn’t dead.

When I try to defend my actions, Gina has progressed to screaming out her answer, which is always the same:  "She’s a freakin’ Zombie!"

My wife is a zombie.

It’s hard to believe. I mean, it’s Janice downstairs in the basement, but, not really. Especially when I see the rotting flesh peeling from her cheeks like the rind of an overripe muskmelon. But, then, I look at her wedding ring. It was the ring I put on her finger on our wedding day. A finger now that zombie Janice has ripped off and thrown in the corner.

At least I know where the ring is.

I told Janice that the homeless guy we saw on our trip to New Orleans didn’t look normal. She told me pshaw and insisted that she give him a few bucks. She gave him five dollars. He gave her a three-inch bite wound on her shoulder.

She slathered antibiotic cream on it and we came back home to Toledo. Then she got the fever. I told her that she should go to the doctor. She made an appointment, but couldn’t get in until Thursday. By late Wednesday morning she was a zombie. I guess I’d say she went from Janice, the loving wife and mother of two, to zombie Janice, the putrefying, cataract-ridden, flesh-eating, soulless corpse, over a period of about an hour. Maybe it’s when all she could say was "Brains! Brains!"  I thought she just had a stuffy nose and was only saying my name, which is Brian. Boy, was I wrong.

Zombie Janice

The kids are scared of their mother. They agree with their Aunt Gina and think that I should quietly dispose of her. Or call the police. Or get a priest. But they don’t understand. A man has to make an effort to make a marriage work, even when the wife no longer nibbles playfully on her husband's ear, but instead tries to chomp off the nearest free appendage.

Maybe I should listen to my kids. After all, Janice has become dangerous. Last night she ate our cat. She didn’t eat the tail, though. Maybe tails are too tough to eat, even for a zombie.

I don’t know; is it murder to dispose of the undead? They’re not dead yet, but they’re not alive, either. I’ll have to ask my priest to see what he thinks. But I’ll have to ask him  the right way (so he won’t think this is what happened to us). Maybe I’ll tell him it’s a piece of fiction I’m writing for a contest and I’m doing research. Yeah, that’d work.

Well, I better go. Here come the kids with the squirrel. I had them trap it in the backyard for Janice. It’s funny in a way: she never used to like to eat game. She complained about the taste. She had to turn into a zombie to learn to appreciate the rich flavor of the bounty from the woods. Except for the tails. She spits those out.

-END-

Copyright March 2012 Synecdoche, LLC

Theology Thursday #2 - Transmogrification (what a beautiful word)

What is it like to be ordained, a leader in the church, and then become a layperson?

Exhilarating!

A person might think after what I had been through in my “downgrade”, that a person would only feel shame or remorse in “losing the stole.” But, no, quite the opposite has been the case.

No joke, I find the novelty in participating in a church as a layperson after having been a pastor is pretty fun. I’m even the chair of our Stewardship committee and I look forward to going to meetings! I don’t think the sole reason for this joy is its newness; I believe the source of the joy has to do with two things: 1) the church we attend, St. Paul Reformation, is an extraordinary, very intentional faith community that has me really excited about claiming my baptism; 2) when I was a pastor, my faith was assumed to be a “given”, and I, by extension, believed that somehow I had “earned” it and I was “done."  God has transmogrified this assumption. Like a sweet chunk of salt-water taffy, my former assumptions about identity and faith have been twisted into something new and wonderful.

I’ve gone through a radical transformation in the past year. I’ve come to a new realization: it seems that faith is not some-thing at all. What I mean is that faith is not a noun, but a continual verb. The growth is ongoing. It is never an achievement or something to be attained—hanging that certificate or diploma or confirmation of ordination doesn’t make faith “done.” Spirituality doesn’t work that way. How does it work? The spiritual life (faith) is a cyclic, daily reincarnation of trust.

What has surprised me about my journey is that I assumed that going to seminary, getting a degree, being ordained, serving a church, and being a pastor would give me spirituality. Far from it. What gave me the gift of seeing was falling down hard and rising to new life as one who “is less” to become more. Every day is a gift and spiritual growth is eternal. Those who seek to gain life will lose it. Those who lose life will gain it. It is the Infinite One's way of twisting things around. Transmogrification.

What does my experience mean for those who continue to be ordained leaders and who have always been lay people? I guess it means that the human constructs which we build up--like castles in the sand--are weak, temporary classifications. In the whole scheme of things (and that’s all there is, folks, the-whole-scheme-of-things) it doesn’t amount to anything.

Some might see my transformation as a loss. I prefer to see it as gaining something that really matters—eternal trust in a power greater than myself. It's the gift we all have in front of our noses. All it takes is a new impulse, a change in the way we see things. Who knows, maybe this column will stimulate your own transmogrification of faith.

Flash Fiction Friday: The IRS Letter

Theology Thursday #1: 103 to 93

Theology Thursday – March 21, 2012

I moved from the wide-open prairie of western North Dakota (Longitude 103) to the gentle slopes of the Mississippi River in urban St. Paul, Minnesota (Longitude 93). I never thought I would live in Minnesota again, much less in a big city. Nevertheless, here I am.

It got me to ask: does place affect the theology of communities?

When I was a pastor living in North Dakota, one of the things I found was the never-ending capacity for people who attend church to care deeply for each other. In a place where a finger wave above a steering wheel is a common sight on a prairie road and local news spreads just as quickly as a grass fire, people in the open country and little towns genuinely care for each other.

Negatively speaking, hyper-conservatism and homogeneity are cherished on the plains, to the detriment of a broader understanding of the world. North Dakota can be quite provincial. Hard work and an ethic of steadfastness are endemic, which is both refreshing and guilt inducing (especially if you like your lazy time). The sky is big and beautiful and the wind can be vicious.

St. Paul, Minnesota, in contrast, is progressive, diverse, and cosmopolitan. Every fifth person I meet in St. Paul is either an artist or a writer or has aspirations to be one. It’s surprisingly friendly here—we know all our neighbors by name—but it isn’t infrequent where I get flipped off on the interstate between St. Paul and Minneapolis. That’s okay though, because, chances are, you’ll never see that jerk again.

The wind doesn’t blow less here; trees just make it less noticeable. It’s still about as cold in the winter (save this past winter); but the humidity in the summer is sticky at best and sauna-like at its worst. There are many more ethnicities; it’s a more colorful mosaic.

North Dakota has mixed-grass prairies. Minnesota has oak savannas. North Dakota is almost in Montana. Minnesota is almost to Chicago. The Twin Cities is a virtual cornucopia of exotic dining establishments. Williston has Applebee’s. The Dakotas have great hunting. Minnesota’s fishing would make the even the disciples on the Sea of Galilee jealous. North Dakota, Republican. Minnesota, DFL.

It’s easy to see differences. It’s the similarities that interest me.

At our church we recently joined, the people are intentional about their faith and they care for each other. Many of them drive to get to church, as many parishioners drove to church in North Dakota. The scenery is just different.

At the church our family belongs to now, people care about God’s activity in the world for justice and peace. They want to know Jesus. If someone is sick, they care and pray for them. They sometimes get ticked off at their pastor’s sermon and they complain about the church budget. That’s pretty much what God’s people were about at the churches I served when I was ordained. It may come out in different ways, but people are just people.

So the conclusion I’ve come to is that place may not affect the deeper yearnings of human nature. Sure, liturgy is different. So are politics. But folks are folks and will be the beautiful, compassionate, frustratingly obstinate, neurotic people of God wherever you go.

On a personal note, I’m glad I’m in St. Paul. It fits me better.

But my time on the prairie will never rub off. The Big-Wide-Open sort of does that to you: it reminds you how small you really are.

Hope I never forget it.

Back in Black

Well, after being defunct for several years, I decided to fire this blog back up. It will have a different focus, of course. This focus will be writing. Specifically, I will be using this blog to publish online original works and to promote my two longer works.

On Thursdays I'll be posting an article about theology. This will be called Theology Thursdays.

On Fridays I'll be posting flash fiction. Peculiar, experimental, short stories falling from Dan's brain will be at your disposal to rant about or quietly ignore, according to your preference. Welcome to Flash Fiction Friday.

Updates and promotionals about my two longer pieces I'm working on I'll post from time to time. These are:

Needle & Thread, a cross-genre novel which was selected by the Loft Literary Center Master Class: The Novel. This work will be available sometime in early 2013.

Sobriety: A Graphic Novel a project I am collaborating on with Spencer Amundson, my fine graphic artist. This hopefully will be published in early 2014.

Thanks again to anyone in the ether who's been reading or following this blog. I hope to have more material very soon.

D.D. Maurer, President and Founder Synecdoche, LLC

Nature and Spirituality

Diversity within the scope of creation has piqued the interest of every human community since the beginning of time. A diverse and wonder-full ecology is what makes poets muse in the playful arrangement of words, seeking to reflect upon the place and time where creatures live and die. Fascinated by complexity, human religions stand in awe of the multiplicity of life; at the same time they often try to make sense of the universal condition of impermanence by over-simplifying and dominating nature--doing more harm than good.

However, it is diversity which makes natural systems thrive. I argue the fact that human spirituality thrives within this diversity--both in wonderment of how the Infinite One chooses to operate in existence and how human communities flourish when a mosaic of spiritual expressions make up the whole.

Conversely, when monoculture defines a natural system, the system does everything it can to return it to a diverse state. Many people can relate with this. Most have seen a bare farm field in the beginning of its growing season. The annual weeds soon rise up, armed with their peculiar root system, fighting to bring weedy diversity to the open field. The natural system will not let one plant reign supreme, much to the embitterment of farmers.

I am a Lutheran minister living on the Great Plains in the State of North Dakota. I identify myself within a particular brand of Christianity in a place that is big, wide and open. But I do not insist that everyone understand life and faith just the way I do. To do so would be the equivalent of breaking the sod on a prairie defined by its grassy variance. Variance makes the prairie beautiful and healthy. Variance makes spirituality beautiful and healthy. On top of that, just as non-native invading plants on a prairie hamper its potential and ruin its health, so, too does spirituality that conquers and bashes, insisting on its own way.

The Nature Conservancy has a vision and a goal: to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. TNC manages North Dakota's own Cross Ranch and other properties with this vision in mind. They do this down to the littlest prairie forb that shows up biennially, struggling to make its presence known in a sea of grass.

We can take a hint from Mother Nature. Spirit and Life teach us that a diverse understanding and practice encourage growth and seeing life from many facets of a jewel. Looking to the Infinite working in the finite, we place ourselves in the wide array of the diversity of life. Seeing this diversity, we are vitalized and emboldened in our uniqueness to celebrate and wonder in the mystery of life.

Sic semper tyrannis

The photo you see below is of a Marion 8750 dragline used by the Falkirk Mining Company to remove "overburden" (top layers of soil). The strip mining operation is pretty standard for what you see in much of western North Dakota. This particular mine is about fifty miles north of Bismarck, North Dakota's state capitol. It is an incredibly large machine.

I had the opportunity once to see the inside of it while it was operating. That was an awe-inspiring experience. The body housing of the machine is three times as big as a standard, two story house. Once you are inside, the experience of the machine turning one way to the other is disorienting. It's like a big office building on roller skates spinning around. It spins as the boom moves from left to right to tear away at the soil.

When you get to the operator's chamber, a person can see through a plate glass window to the huge bucket that is suspended over the prairie by long, thick cables. The boom seems to thrust out for several football-fields length, but it probably is only seventy or eighty yards out. (The sheer, mammoth proportions tend to distort how far everything is away.)

I remember my words I spit out when I saw the dragline operator, working his little joystick back and forth and felt, saw, and heard hundreds of tons of prairie soil removed in one fell swoop: "If that doesn't give you a god complex, I don't know what would..."

The State of North Dakota likes its strip mines. They provide many jobs that otherwise wouldn't be in North Dakota. The mine's operations, therefore, are a main player in the state's big game of politics.

All that coal is burnt up in power plants to feed our nation's demand for more and more juice. The mine digs it up; they burn it; you turn on your light. Simple.

But, wait a minute! After the mines dig up the coal, what happens to all that dirt that's stripped away? Does it just lay around in piles?

This is how the mines used to do it all the time. In fact, there are some piles out there that are still laying around from mining prior to 1977 in North Dakota. They are big piles of infertile earth with weeds all over them.

But now, because of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, strip mines are required to reclaim the land they have torn apart to put it back into production. In essence, it's about putting the land back the way they found it. (At least in theory, it doesn't really work out that way.) This is the process called reclamation.

You can see an article of this whole process here (Falkirk Land Reclamation).

Well aren't those mines just the greatest thing since Fleischkeuchle came in little plastic bags!?

Hold on now...

One of the things that I have always found interesting is how self-congratulatory Falkirk mine is with its land reclamation.

Several years ago I went on a tour of the mine. It was a special tour that wasn't looking at the whole operation, but at the aspects of reclamation. As the bus glided across the mine's private roads, the guide on the microphone in the front explained the wonderful native grass and wildlife communities the mine was re-establishing. An average tourist, not knowing the history behind the mining laws, would think that the mine itself came up with these great ideas. When, in fact, it was the "wacko" environmentalists of the 70s who forced the mines through legislation and regulation who were the authors of these fine plans.

What we have to remember about corporations is they are not individual human beings with moral directives.

Corporations are neither moral nor amoral. Nor are they like your greedy little brother Nicky or your stingy Uncle Jack. They are different entities entirely. Their purpose for existence is to make money. Period.

So Falkirk mine, or any other mine, would NEVER choose to reclaim land unless they were forced to do so. Because it is a lot cheaper to dig the coal out of the ground and leave all the piles around to be somebody else's problem.

However, since the mine has to go through all that inconvenient--and expensive--process of separating all the soil out and putting it back, they might as well run tour buses through and tell about what great land stewards they are. It is only good public relations to do so (which makes investors feel a little better about themselves--and makes their pocketbooks a little looser, too).

'Sic semper tyrannus' means 'thus shall tyrants always be' in Latin. It is an acknowledgment that tyrants shall always be a certain way; it's no good trying to change the way that they are.

Big corporations are here, and they are here to stay. Any denial of this fact is wistful tomfoolery.

If enlightened, ecology-minded individuals are going to try to change corporations' practices that are wasteful, polluting and lack stewardship, they first must accede to the fact corporations are not individuals like you and me. Corporations are not people that a person can convince to be right for right's sake.

Instead, if individuals want to change large corporations' practices, political activism and legislative support are paramount.

In North Dakota, one such organization is Dakota Resource Council (www.drcinfo.com). Good, ethical people seek to work with like-minded organizations to lobby support to make change happen.

No one says that this is a perfect system. But if you want things to happen, "you gotta put a little muscle behind it."

That's the way tyrants are kept in check.

Variety is More than Spice

It's been a long time coming, but I have to admit that it's true.

Diversity is a good thing.

Once in my college years I completed a business intership in a nursing home. As an intern, I was included in the daily staff meetings that the administration would have. Often, different employees would give presentations to teach us all about some new aspect of nursing home management. One day, one of the other interns passed out little plastic baggies with various nicknacks and baubles contained in them. The different items were supposed to be a teaching tool for the employees to embrace diversity in the workplace. Eye rolling and gagging gesticulations could not express strongly enough my disdain for such a display of overt political correctness.

I have changed my tune--almost completely. The political correctness still makes my eyes roll.

Diversity is actually a strengthening agent and something to be celebrated, not despised.

The problem is, much of the diversity that is out there is either seen as something subversive and damaging to the whole, or it is overlooked for wider brushstrokes on the canvas of life.

That's the problem with the Great Plains.

People view the Great Plains as "flyover states" between one coast and the other. (Cheryl Unruh has a wonderful site devoted to this very topic right here:http://www.flyoverpeople.net ). The dismissal of the Plains as only worth a small footnote in our culture is almost universally pandemic. Those of us who live here have a problem, too: we don't acknowledge and taut the rich mosaic of diversity and life that resides in and with the plains.

When you think of diversity, you generally don't come up with an "empty" grassland as the best example. We like big, action-packed things. We don't like seemingly static, empty things--even if they are full of infinite variety and diversity.

Take the dirt of the Great Plains.

The greatest resource that the Great Plains has is not its wind potential (although this is wonderful, too). It is not its hard working people or its rich cultural diversity from the first peoples who persevered in this place. It is something that is foundational to every other life system on the planet: the soil.

Soil filters water. Its nutrients allow plants to grow and root systems to mesh life together. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different chemicals and elements contained within it. The animals and people eat the plants that grow on it. They die and the nutrient cycle continues ad infinitum.

Aldo Leopold had a wonderful metaphor in 'A Sand County Almanac'. The "Round River" that flowed in a neverending circle was tended by Paul Bunyan in the folk tales of these parts. Although physics deny the literal existence of such a river, figuritively it makes a good discription of soil. The soil never runs out of stuff that makes it live and thrive! But only if the other things that are connected to that soil are healthy and thriving, too.

When a person thrusts a hand into the sod of the prairie, and rips out the top layer of soil, it is a piece of the collective life that resides there. If you put your nose up to the life in your hands and breathe deeply in, you will smell the sweet-pithy bouquet of diverse life that is there. It's more than the sum of the parts that make the whole. It is the whole itself. The soil IS alive! It's alive!
If you do the same in your front-yard monoculture of Kentucky Bluegrass, you will smell a combination of various chemicals and a slightly off, water-soaked cardboard smell. That's soil that has life in it, but it is not diverse, healthy life.

The person who taught me this is a farmer-rancher from Turtle Lake, North Dakota. Gene Goven got started a few decades ago trying to figure out how to get more cows in a parcel of land to feed on the grass without destroying the forage that was there. What he found was far more than he had planned for.

As it turns out, by mimicking the grazing patterns of Bison by the use of "cells" within different paddocks, and moving the cattle around to grind the carbon life back into the soil, the soil responds with more microbial diversity and more plant varieties. This, in turn, allows more tonnage of feed to be produced. That translates to sustainable larger herd sizes, which drives more carbon back into the soil. So the cycle of life and the sequestration of carbon creates one huge conglomerate of a life form called soil.

Gene also found out that the healthy, diverse soil was filtering water much better than the unhealty soils.

One season the Northern Plains got a proverbial "gully gusher" of a rain storm. Gene complained that all his neighbors stock ponds had filled up so quickly and their cows were all drinking already. His ponds, however, were still dry a day after the rain. (It had been a dry, hot year). Eventually, his ponds did fill up. The water, it turns out, was being filtered and used by the plants in the healthy, diverse soil. The diverse, healthy soil was 'catching more water where it fell.'

For an great read about diversity and Gene's system of rotational grazing go here: http://www.holisticmanagement.org/

Interestingly, farmers are finding that diversity is healthier for the soil, too. If you came to the plains eighty years ago, you would see the process of desertification gaining a foothold. The dust bowl happened for a reason: people didn't know the soil and its needs--that it needed diversity.

Now, many farmers (at least the ones who want to stay in business) are turning to so-called no-till farming. No-till seeks to allow residual matter on top of the soil over the winter to hold the soil in place. Instead of turning the dirt over with a plow in the spring, the farmers drill the seed directly into the stubble. The residue holds more water in place and keeps the soil from blowing into the next state. In addition to more diverse rotations and cropping, farmers have found their yields to increase four or five fold on a what a particular piece of ground would produce in the 20s and 30s. Diversity in farming has increased profits, benefitted wildlife and water retention, and just overall makes a lot more sense than turning everything over every year.

The interesting relationship between diversity and health with other life systems is uncanny. For instance: What happens when a society yearns to create a so-called pure, racially "superior" monoculture in a human nation?

You get a nightmare.

It is a twisted thing to think of Nazism as comparible to a whole field of leafy spurge on the prairie (a non-native invader destroying range land), but this is a fair comparison. Both the plant community and the Nazi society are choking the life out of their foundations. (The ironic thing about the Nazis is that even their high holy Fuehrer wasn't exactly the epitome of health, beauty and vigor to begin with.)

The prairie can teach America to claim her rich asset and empowering strength. Diversity and variety in human societies are as strengthening and healthy as thousands of different species of microbes, insects, grazers, grasses, legumes, forbs and sedges that the good Lord spreads like a mat across the land to the Rockies. We should think twice when we seek to continually change others to our way of thinking and acting.

Their differences, rather than a chink the armor or a weak link we despise, just might be enriching the whole in ways of which we never conceived.