Dear Folks, It’s Christmas afternoon, about 3:30. A sunny warm day has just dissolved into scenic snow flurries. I’m sitting in my study by the woodstove, with a cup of tea on my desk and carols coming from the radio. The smell of roasting turkey is beginning to overwhelm the house. Anna’s kids and kids-in-law are outside energetically stacking into the shed the big pile of firewood Don cut last week. Basil is on the back porch barking to be let into the delicious-smelling kitchen (there, someone just let him in). The living room is a shambles of wrappings and presents strewn around a beautiful tree.
Don, Sylvia, and Heather are off at her mother’s on Long Island for Christmas. Three of Anna’s four grown-up children are here, plus a husband of one of them, a friend of another, and two friends of Anna. The joint is jumping with a Czechoslovakian Christmas. Last night we put Baby Jesus in the creche and sang him a lullaby before we had a supper featuring a 7-pound fresh salmon (in Eastern Europe it would have been a carp, but who’s complaining?). The tree had real candles and even sparklers on it. We had the best carol-sing this house has ever heard, during my tenure here, anyway.
Last Christmas was such a low point for me that I approached this one with no preparations and no expectations. I think that’s the key to Christmas — no expectations. I went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings every day this week, knowing what a terrible time Christmas is for addicts of all kinds, especially sugar addicts like me. My one goal this Christmas was to stay abstinent, in a house filled with more cookies than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life (and I’ve seen a lot of cookies!). I bought no presents, mailed no cards, put up no decorations. I didn’t have it in me to do anything obligated by the season. I waited to see what the season would ask of me and bring to me.
What it brought was joy that this house could enfold and warm so many people unknown to me — it seems to be what this house is for — and that those people could so fill the place and me with love and light. What it asked of me was to help my friends in OA, who have been calling or coming by to talk, struggling for serenity and sanity at this crazy time of year.
Through their experience and my own I’m beginning to understand how much psychological turbulence underlies Christmas, as families come together and snap into long-practiced dysfunctional patterns. My OA friends talk about their “enablers”, family members who equate food with love, or overprotect, or ignore, or criticize, or withdraw, or argue, or drink, or create some kind of tension, to which an addict responds by escaping into the numbness of the drug of choice. My friends see themselves repeating the same patterns with their children. I suppose there are some families somewhere that don’t play these games, but I don’t know of one. There’s no real fault, no one in the drama can help it, but for a person who’s resolved to break the pattern, to stay serene, to speak the truth, to feel the feelings, and NOT to give in to the addiction, some real support is necessary. So I’ve been listening to friends, getting tremendous support myself in the process.
It’s just amazing how well OA works. I’ve had a lovely Christmas, I’ve been abstinent, I’ve enjoyed getting to know Anna’s interesting family, and, having had no expectations, I have been more than fulfilled.
It was a peaceful conclusion to a trying month. The Foundation Farm Family has been through virus, fire and flood together, and I’ve added to that the tension of deadlines and contract disputes.
The virus was the One Going Around, which we all got simultaneously, coughing and sneezing in a chorus. I almost never get these things, and I’m out of practice. It had the strange effect of charging me up with energy (I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was getting great ideas in the middle of the night). At the low point of our exhaustion the temperature went down to 7 below zero and at five one morning Don and Sylvia discovered their house was on fire. Fortunately, they were awake and up — having a baby gets one up at that hour.
The fire was in the reinforcing roof timbers around the metal-bestos chimney of their woodstove, which had never been installed according to standard (so the fireman told us afterward). It has probably been charring up there for years. Sylvia came to get me and by the time I rushed out there Don had put the flames out with an extinguisher and was hacking away at the embers, trying to be sure they were out. We didn’t call the volunteer fire department until it was all over. Then we asked the fire chief to come by and tell us how to fix the damage so it wouldn’t happen again.
The Spains moved into the main house for a week. Don repaired everything and re-installed the stove, correctly this time. I was impressed by how well everyone adapted to a difficult and scary situation. At dinner that night all we felt was gratitude that it hadn’t been worse, that no one was hurt, that the damage could be fixed.
The next day it warmed up and a frozen pipe in the heating system up in the new attic bedroom let loose a flood. I was at work, sweating a book deadline, and Anna handled this one, with her usual aplomb. She called Dennis to figure out how to shut off the water, mopped up, called the plumber. A hundred miles away, keeping touch by telephone, Dennis got to savor the joys of living in a modern condominium instead of a 160-year-old farmhouse.
I was spending that week trying to get one, just one, chapter of the book ready for the Annenberg review, which will happen in January. This review of the chapter and accompanying TV show (on waste) will decide Annenberg’s final approval of the funding for the whole project, so it’s a little tense. What made me more tense was the certainty that the book can never be done in time to make the air date. In fact as of this moment I have still not quite finished even that one chapter.
The problem came to a head when WGBH sent contracts to me and my writing colleagues (we have been working for 6 months without contracts). The contracts were unsignable for many reasons, but especially because of the schedule. So we had a summit meeting in Boston, three days after the fire, two days after the flood, and with the virus still in full swing, to figure out what to do.
It was as good a meeting as I could have imagined, though I was too tired to appreciate it at the time. We figured out an ingenious scheme to get me more help, some “pre-writers”, experts in the various fields to write either draft chapters or extended outlines, to give me a head start on each of the remaining chapters. It’s a great relief to me. It’s in fact what we should have done from the beginning. Frankly, I think it’s too late now; I think a good textbook just can’t be written this fast, even with all the help in the world. But I’m willing to give it a try, knowing that the book will get done sometime, that this good team can produce an outstanding product, and that things will work out as they work out. I just have to do my best; it’s all I can do.
Maybe the show will go on in September 1990 without the book (with another, already-published, traditional textbook). Maybe the show will be delayed. You will hear what happens as it goes along. I’m sure this isn’t the last crisis.
So I now spend six days a week writing ten or twelve hours a day. I did say I wanted to free up more time for writing, didn’t I? I got someone else to teach my winter term course, and I’m just digging in. I treasure Saturdays, the day I get to do fun and different things like vacuuming and loading firewood and cooking and cleaning the basement.
As you see, the column keeps going somehow. Werner Erhard says all you need to do to put your problem in perspective is to get a bigger problem. With the book in my life, the column, which used to take a major part of my time and attention, is now an offhand thing, which I do in a few hours on Sunday afternoon or Wednesday morning. I don’t think it’s any worse, either, for the relative neglect. (If you do, please tell me!) Though I spend no time selling it, sales are about steady, and rising in the bigger papers. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has taken several columns lately, and the LA Times just took not only the special on pesticides I wrote for them (enclosed), but even one of my regular columns — the first time they’ve done that.
I get strange and wonderful reactions from the columns — they enrich and sometimes mystify my life. After the one I wrote on the people in the nuclear weapons business, an ex-missile-launcher from North Dakota called me just to unburden his shame and guilt. He stood ready, for three years, to launch a nuclear missile, and now he finds that history hard to live with. It was a moving call. It had both me and him in tears. At his request I set him up to give speeches for Physicians for Social Responsibility, describing the thinking and training of missile-launchers. It should help him expiate his guilt — and put a proper fear in his audiences. If you think those silos in North Dakota are full of mature, thoughtful, responsible people, always on alert to Preserve Our Way of Life, you should hear his description of what goes on there.
After the columns on plastic I got several calls from people in the plastics industry. You’d think they might be hostile — I wasn’t too nice to the industry in the column, but in fact they were panicked. Bans on nonbiodegradable plastic are coming at them from state after state. One man asked me, plaintively, if I could give him a good definition of “biodegradable”. The new bans give no legal specification of what that means. I told him about Bill Rathje who digs up 20-year-old newspapers from landfills and finds them so intact he can still read them. If newspapers don’t biodegrade in dumps, plastics never will. I learned a lot from these callers. (For example, polyethylene is made from natural gas, not, as I had claimed, from oil. Another thing I learned is how specialized the industry is. All sorts of little factories buy polyethylene pellets from Dow; one presses it into sheets of plastic wrap, one into newspaper wrappers, one molds it into bottles, etc.)
The most hostile call I’ve gotten recently was from Los Angeles, right after the column on being Number One (enclosed) came out. The caller objected to the sentence about the Austrians being more niggardly about foreign aid than we are. “That’s an ugly, awful word,” he said. “You should never use that word. It ruined your whole article.”
I was dumbfounded. It took a minute before I got the connection. “Are you thinking that’s a racist word?” I asked. “Are you thinking it’s related to the word ‘nigger’? It’s completely unrelated. It’s not even spelled the same.” Well, that was what was bothering him, and no explanation I could give him about the Latin derivation of the word “negro” and the Norse derivation of the word “niggard” could satisfy him. It’s an ugly word, he kept insisting.
The more I talked to him, the more I thought he was right. It isn’t the same word. It isn’t even related. But it looks kind of the same and it sounds the same. The word “nigger” (derived from “negro”, which is just the Spanish word for “black”) has been so imbued with hatred and contempt that the people who were on the receiving end of it for so many generations will not permit its use again, nor any word that even sounds like it. More power to them. If we lose the perfectly good word “niggard” along the way, well there are substitutes (cheapskate, miser, skinflint, tightwad, scrooge, meany). I’ll never use either “nigger’ or “niggardly” again, except to talk about them as I just have. I said that to the man who called and thanked him for making me more sensitive.
It’s humbling, how many souls with different and valid experiences I’m communicating with. I keep praying for the worthiness to do this job.
Well, the days are getting longer now, though that will be hard to believe until about the end of February. So far it has been the worst kind of winter, very cold and no snow. We need a deep snow layer to insulate plant roots from the cold. The horses have a hard time walking on the iron-like ground. The sheep are happy, though — with their winter coats they look like fuzzy blimps, and they’re oblivious to all kinds of weather. They’re just out there chewing their cuds and making babies.
In the living room I have two red azaleas in bloom and two pink cyclamen and a red Christmas cactus and a bunch of paper-white narcissus. The whole place stinks of narcissus. I couldn’t get through a winter without them.
Next weekend we’ll do the Seed Order, an important ritual for me, the real launch of the New Year.
May it be a happy New Year, for all of you.
Love, Dana
