Mumbling Madness

On August 20, 2022 By ednafroeseIn birds, Conversation, WordsLeave a comment

photo of robin against the sky. — *There’s never a muffled or slurred note from this fine fellow.*

Circumstances determined that I would never become a movie buff. In my childhood, movies were forbidden. That created both suspicion and heightened desire, of course, so in my young adult years, I indulged in binges of movie-watching, all the while maintaining moral scruples about content. But then came marriage and children and a limited budget, followed by years of limited time; movies thus remained in the category of the special, a rare treat, like going to see live theatre. Actually, the latter occurred more often than the former. I did anticipate that in my retirement I would finally catch up on all the movies I’d heard about that I wanted to watch.

Who would have guessed that in the meantime, mumbled lines would have become the standard of excellence? I will acknowledge that sorting out desirable conversation sounds from background noise has become more difficult for me; otherwise, though, I still have good hearing. So why was it nearly impossible to understand dialogue? It’s hard to get involved in a storyline when none of the characters speak clearly. Who cares about a romantic exchange muttered into the pillows? Heated arguments make no sense when characters speak over each other or otherwise muffle and slur their words.

According to a recent opinion piece in our local newspaper, such inarticulate dialogue has become de rigueur in the name of realism. A lot of people mumble in real life, and so, the argument goes, to be authentic, actors should also speak without moving lips or jaws or bothering to face the camera.

I readily agree that there’s lots of mumbling going on these days. Too many messages left on my phone remain unintelligible even after repeated replays; I’ve overheard conversations that might as well have been spoken in another language; lyrics of popular songs are often incoherent except perhaps for one or two phrases endlessly repeated. What’s much worse—one can select one’s entertainment, after all—I’ve struggled to understand health professionals who couldn’t be bothered to enunciate their words. In some cases, I was convinced that even if they removed their masks, I still wouldn’t have had a clue what they were saying.

The consequences of all this muttering and slurring of words should give us pause, I think. In the entertainment world, it means that the tales told are “full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing” (Shakespeare, Macbeth). Of necessity, story-lines have to be conveyed through action, which might explain the ever-increasing violence and general aggression in dramas and ever-more dramatic silliness in comedies. Characters can hardly be developed in any depth, if they never say much that can be grasped.

In the real world, in the various situations that we all negotiate—and this is my real concern—mumbling has the effect of humiliating and excluding far too many people. It is acutely embarrassing to have to ask people to repeat themselves, only to hear the same inarticulate sounds, just with greater volume. Socializing becomes difficult and those important conversations we have to understand in order to buy a license, get a prescription, hear a public speaker (minister, politician, emcee at a wedding or concert), respond to an incipient quarrel seem too daunting to attempt.

When we are also asked to cope with background music at foreground levels or urban noise or the hubbub of a larger crowd, the work of translating verbal codes into meaning is finally exhausting. Shouted mumbling is no better than quiet mumbling. The frustration of not being able to decipher the words of even those who are trying to be helpful leads inevitably to helplessness and increased withdrawal. Why bother going to the church service or the concert or the memorial or the family gathering only to sit on the sidelines, unable to participate?

Much has been said in recent years about inclusivity and the importance of meeting the needs of the vulnerable among us. I agree with that emphasis. We should be encouraged to be kind, to include, to make sure that all people have what they need and can access necessary services. So how can we begin to turn mumbling into an embarrassment for the speaker instead of for the baffled hearer?

Children pick up their speech habits from their caregivers, of course, and are unlikely to alter those without focused effort, both by them and by their teachers. Which translates into yet another obligation placed on our educators. That seems unfair. The movie industry can continue to churn out inarticulate dialogue because closed captioning is available (and is increasingly being used by ever younger populations). In the really important conversations among people who matter to us, subtitles aren’t an option. Lip-reading a mumbler isn’t a successful enterprise, either. Hearing aids amplify sounds, of course, and newer technology can help block out extraneous sounds, but no hearing aid, and no technician at the sound board of a public address system, can fix distorted sounds created by a lazy mouth.

There’s nothing else to do here, friends, other than giving our lips and tongues some much-needed exercise and learning to enunciate our words. It’s not that hard, and even if it were, wouldn’t it be worth the effort to avoid shutting people out?

photo of blue jay, peanut in beak, sitting on a bird feeder attached to a window. — *The photo may be blurred but there’s nothing out of focus in this blue jay’s shriek when there aren’t enough peanuts in the feeder!*

A Feast of Losses

On July 22, 2022November 2, 2022 By ednafroeseIn Beauty, death, family, Grief, Life1 Comment

In memory of two women friends

It would be a happier task to consider my current summer feast of gains: a wonderfully productive garden, thanks to abundant June rains; a week of splendiferous camping with family in the Rockies for the first time since 2019; more socializing in our backyard than we’ve had since before the pandemic began; long bike rides along river trails alternating with walks in the neighbourhood where we can admire creatively designed front yards and check out all the little libraries with surprising finds. It’s been a good summer already, only halfway through July.

Photo of bright red paintbrush flowers next to a dead tree.

But underneath the sheer pleasures of being able to watch dances in the park again and pick up ice cream at favourite places is the awareness of a veritable feast of losses, to use Stanley Kunitz’s poignant phrase in “The Layers.” I’m not speaking here of the temporary loss of privileges such as easy socialization, concerts, and parades, not to mention unlimited shopping and dining out, or, more seriously, a secure income. What’s in my heart is the weight of the tenuous balance between life and death, which seems these days to have dipped closer to death.

As a friend pointed out to me, during a recent, much welcomed dinner together out of doors, it’s not only that we have experienced too many deaths but that those deaths have not been properly book-ended with supportive visits and tender farewells beforehand and immediate, supported grieving through appropriate community rituals afterward. Too many have died, seemingly alone, and many more have grieved alone. That’s loss compounded with loss. We humans were not meant to function thus.

I belong to a church community—not a large one but it encompasses all age groups—which typically offers a funeral or memorial service of prayers, eulogies, visual memories, a sermon of comfort, carefully selected music, and a luncheon during which stories are told (with tears and laughter), and hugs aplenty are given. Just two months before the pandemic changed everything, I mourned a brother in just such a setting, surrounded not only by immediate family but cousins I hadn’t seen in a long time, friends of my brother whom I’d never met before, a church community whose internal cohesion felt familiar even though it was not my own church community. Death is never easy; loss always leaves a gaping hole, yet the ceremonies of farewell and support gave us strength to move on into continued living, holding our memories tenderly and viewing the world more attentively through tear-washed eyes.

But then, as the pandemic changed the world, came more painful losses, now with mourning rituals aborted, hugs absent, even personal presence too much of a risk. Alone in our home, my husband and I mourned an older friend, the kind of man whose quiet contributions made him known as a pillar of the church, a man of wisdom. It was not a surprise, hence the loss still felt like a part of the rhythms of being. But there were other deaths, too, like that of a very young friend, utterly unexpected, tragic in all ways. To watch the ceremony of mourning on a computer screen was woefully inadequate. The pain still remains sharp, the wound unhealed.

Other deaths were not directly my loss but belonged to friends who were close, so that their grief became mine as well, yet not properly shared. There were clean, dignified deaths; there were unbearable messy, humiliating deaths. All a part of life unfolding as it will. We humans are fragile and rarely as much in control as we imagine.

And then there were two women, each in her own way a mentor to me, although neither would have known that. I got to know them too late in my life to form the kind of long-lasting friendship that I would have cherished, yet even so I learned much from them and valued their presence, their gifts.

I had grown up in a small, mostly Mennonite community, a conservative, conformist community in which women knew their place and rarely challenged those limits. These two women had grown up in similar circumstances but had not remained in their place. They had resisted limits, examined beliefs, and worked through disadvantages to become women known for their courage and for their kindness and inclusionary love.

Through a writing group which I led, I learned something of the story of one woman, but not enough. Where had she learned her compassion? How had she lived through her own deep losses? How had she forged a deeper, more open faith than what she had been taught as a child? I may never know, although perhaps the mourning rituals, whenever they do take place, will offer belated answers. I should have asked her when I still had the opportunity.

The story of the other woman had come to me in tiny bits through offhand comments from those who knew her so much better than I did. She was a private woman, despite her eager, participatory presence in our church community. There was a self-effacing, confident groundedness about her that forestalled personal questions. I wish that I had known her much earlier. She could have taught me more about gracious acceptance and courage and tenacity. Her faith was rock solid, yet gentle. When the communal mourning service was finally held, her story was told by her only child, a son who clearly had absorbed his mother’s courage and generosity of spirit, not to mention honesty. There were many tears shed, all necessary for healing.

If there is something that I can take from this feast of losses, it is a renewed conviction that memorial services are for the living, not the dead. If we do not have them, we feel an additional loss. Such rituals celebrate our interconnectedness. Grief is both private and not private. It is a process that we should not try to avoid or shorten or postpone unnecessarily.

A few white, yellow-centered daisies in the midst of the remains of decayed trees.

During this summer’s blessed hiking in the mountains, I saw again the web of life and death through the beautiful new growth of things, next to and in among the dead and deteriorating. A rose is never so beautiful as when it stands next to a dead tree. A feast of losses, indeed, but then feasts are meant to be shared. They nourish, they intensify beauty, they make space for love to grow.

A few tiny wild roses in a tangle of dead branches.

Responsible Discourse

On June 25, 2022 By ednafroeseIn birds, hope, Love, poetry, promises, WordsLeave a comment

A robin on a dark wire, facing the camera so the red breast is highlighted. The rest of the photo is clear blue sky.

A robin sits on the eaves, a worm in its beak. Some foliage is visible at the edge of the photo.

This robin “with no Christian name” (see poem below) and his equally nameless mate have built a nest in the clematis vine that shields our patio from the eastern sun and from the curious gaze of passers-by in the back alley. Its density shields the nest just as well from our curious gaze. Our use of the patio will be limited until the young ones begin flying about. Until that time, our garden and lawn serve as an ever-available worm buffet for the growing robin family.

Photo of our patio, with a dense clematis vine along one side, one hanging pot of flowers and a couple of chairs and the edge of a table visible.

A robin stands on the edge of a raised bed in our garden. A worm dangles from his beak.

In a quixotic, synaptic move, my brain put together my ongoing fretting about discourse (gentle and otherwise), the happily singing robins, and a poem by W.H. Auden – “Their Lonely Betters.” Many years ago, that poem grabbed my attention and eventually prompted me to write a conference paper about language, pretentiously titled “The Morality of Grammar.” Back then, I was much exercised about the changing usage of pronouns. My students were persistently using I rather than me in all the “wrong” places, and I was busy justifying to myself, and to anyone who would listen, my belief that that change was a bad idea.

That change from me to I now seems a small issue pointlessly pursued in an innocent time, when civility in public discourse could generally be expected, and lies, when exposed, brought suitable disgrace to public figures. I had not yet even heard about disinformation nor understood the power that social media would gain in the not too distant future.

Auden’s poem, however, has not become irrelevant. If anything, it is more to the point than ever:

Their Lonely Betters

by W. H. Auden

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

1950

It’s a charming picture, is it not? – the poet relaxed in his chair in the garden. Who would not likewise enjoy listening to the sounds of the garden? And who, like the poet, has not longed for letters (or texts or emails) or for certain days to arrive? Which of us has not laughed (a kind of song without a name) or wept (a kind of disturbed inward rustling)? Seemingly alone in his garden, the poet can allude to some painful loss and yet achieve an emotional distance that allows for philosophical speculation.

What have words to do with all of this? This longing for certain days, this loneliness that is not dispelled by the desired letter (which hasn’t arrived)? It is easy to conclude at first that the poet is crying inside for his “mate” who isn’t there and might not ever be there. Some kind of promise has been made, in words, which has not been kept.

But the penultimate stanza moves the moment of reflective loneliness in the garden to a broader context. It takes words to tell a lie, and it takes words to articulate the awareness of mortality. Yes, both misinformation and death can be acknowledged through gestures, postures, facial expressions – what we revealingly call “body language.” But there’s more going on here than just emotionally registering loss, of whatever kind. Auden’s deft phrase, “with a rhythm or a rhyme assumed responsibility for time,” underscores the troublesome gift of self-consciousness that is the foundation of human language: words (the speaking aloud of the human capacity for self-awareness) are the articulation of promises.

With words, we promise not only to keep our appointments, to carry out actions, and to listen, but also to understand, to share perceptions, to honor commitments, to keep alive the community that benefits us all. Words depend on the character of their speakers for their informational power and their ability to set consequences in motion. Through words we signal “this is who I am and this is how I will act.” Without promises being kept, whether made implicitly or explicitly, there is no trust. Without trust, Auden insists, we may be still be “better” (a slippery word that here seems to mean “of higher status”) than robins, but we will be lonely. As soon as we move beyond the noise of emotions, we need words, words that can be depended on.

So let there be not only gentle discourse but what’s more, a discourse of trust. Broken promises are inevitable among fallible humans who are not always in control of their circumstances; nevertheless, we can “take responsibility” for our brokenness and seek to make amends. Words – and people – deserve at least that much.

Photo of a robin, silhouetted, perched on a chimney. The sky, which takes up most of the space, is cloudy and shades of grey.

Learning a Gentler Discourse

On June 1, 2022 By ednafroeseIn Conversation, hope, memories, Stories, WordsLeave a comment

Photo of a pond in a city garden with trees reflected in the water, stones in the foreground. Colors are muted since it was an overcast day. It's a scene made for reflection.

Who would have imagined, a mere twenty years ago, that it would become possible to speak English in two ways so different that the speaker of one would be almost incomprehensible to the speaker of another? I’m not talking about pronunciation differences here or even the accumulation of words borrowed from other languages. Those are common processes as people from different cultures interact with one another and influence one another’s languages.

No, what I’m referring to is a difference marked not by how words sound or which words are chosen. The current, unprecedented divide between two socio-political discourses has more to do with over-arching worldviews than with language, although words and their meanings have definitely been a casualty along the way.

As I’ve tried to understand what has been going on, I was reminded of experiences in my graduate student days (1989 – 1996). Going back into the classroom after an absence of some 15 years had been traumatic for me. The vocabulary of my beloved discipline of English literature had changed. The way I had once read and written about literature, almost without thought about the process, had now gained a name – “formal criticism” – and been dismissed as naïve and uninformed. Entire clans of “isms” had come to life instead: new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytical criticism, feminist criticism, queer studies, Marxist criticism, historicism and cultural studies, postcolonial and race studies, and reader response. I had no choice but to learn what felt like an entirely new language along with its assumptions about the way that the world works and a certain attitude toward writing itself.

One particular class impressed itself in my mind: two students argued heatedly about how to interpret Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a satirical novel about WW2. They offered radically different perspectives (neither of which I now recall – which seems instructive) on the Allied assault on Germany in the last stages of the war. In the manner of grad students, they wielded theoretical relativisms with great verbal skill but little discernible wisdom. The professor, tilted back in his chair as usual, listened until his patience ran out. With a crash, he righted his chair and leaned forward to declare “But Dresden did burn!” There was silence, and then sheepish acknowledgements that yes, that fact was beyond dispute. Therefore, any reading that ignored the burning of the city was invalid.

At the time, I had been appalled at what I saw as an assault on the very notion of truth. But back in that innocent time, we still had facts to fall back on, still had agreed-upon sources of information that were duly vetted before publication. We were learning to acknowledge differing perspectives; we understood that pure objectivity was an ideal only, yet we still believed that some objectivity could be approximated, given sufficient checks and balances.

That is no longer the case. Language seems as fractured and as impossible to mend as it was back in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Rebuilding the Tower is hardly an option in a world in which a brick for one side is seen as a sword by the other.

I owe that image of the Tower to an outstanding article on political and social polarization that I would strongly recommend: Jonathan Haidt’s “After Babel: Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” (The Atlantic, May 2022). Haidt’s analysis is about as balanced as it is possible to be these days; he demonstrates clearly how both the left and right sides of the divide have contributed to the current mess, and then offers suggestions for rebuilding the institutions that make civil politics workable. The tone of the article is gentler than its title might lead you to think. Haidt is interested in rebuilding democracy for the future, not in raising ire.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s., and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
Jonathan Haidt

My second recommendation is entirely different: make time to visit gardens, repeatedly.

Photo of a carefully planned and tended vegetable garden surrounded by hedges and trees. — *Vegetable gardens, forest gardens, tidy gardens, unplanned gardens – let them all be visited and loved.*

Recently, after listening to yet another disturbing newscast, I fled outside and went to sit quietly on a rock beside a haskap bush. As my body relaxed, I began to hear a magnificent chorus of bees, each visiting one small blossom after another. Neither bees nor blossoms required words. There was no animosity. Indeed, without their togetherness, there would be no berries for my future breakfasts, or for the birds.

The discourse of loveliness is fruitful and wonderful. It refuses to take sides and responds to no outrage. All that is necessary for us is to look and listen. Visit a public garden or two, either alone or with other visitors.

An elaborately designed, large city garden with mowed grass, small flower plots, ponds and fountains, and a wide walkway for pedestrians.

Walk through your neighbourhood and stop to chat with a gardener or two. Open your heart to color and scent and design. Remember that the astonishing beauty of flowers and grasses and trees is temporary, yet everlasting. Each flower will die and leave behind a seed or a thousand to become new flowers.

So too we humans will die and leave behind memories, traces of who we once were. Let our gift to the world be gentler words and quiet caring.

Photo of a cemetery with plenty of trees and shrubs and flowers. One might describe it as overgrown. — *Visit cemetery gardens – they help us think about what matters, in the end.*

Despite our human tendency to read selectively and interpret according to personal assumptions, I remain hopeful that listening to one another’s stories will help us move on from the Tower of Babel in whose wreckage we are now living. It is advisable to choose a variety of story-tellers, and we will need to be prepared to listen to stories we might not like at first. If we can privilege the stories we hear in person from story-tellers whose context we can observe and whose voice we can hear directly without the noise of social media, maybe we can salvage enough bricks to begin building institutions that bring us together. Along the way, we should never forget to grow gardens.

Pineapples and Jigsaw Puzzles

On April 21, 2022 By ednafroeseIn family, fragments, fruit, workLeave a comment

It is a serious thing

just to be alive

on this fresh morning

in the broken world. (Mary Oliver)

A kitchen table with an electric kettle just visible in the background. A large fresh pineapple sits in the foreground beside two puzzles boxes.

Cutting up pineapples is inherently messy and time-consuming. That means everyone has an opinion on how it should be done.

Two photos of a pineapple in the early stages of being cut up.

A recent observation from a guest (yes, we are beginning to have those!)—“okay, that’s neater than the way I do it, but I can do it faster”—provoked me into a defensive “and why, precisely, should I do it faster? Just so that I can get it done and then move onto something else that I will also do as fast as possible just to get it done?”

If everything I do in a day is done just to get it done, what have I done that was joyous in the doing?

Putting together jigsaw puzzles has somehow raised the same question.

I must be one of those rare people who prefer doing jigsaw puzzles alone. There’s a story that needs to be told here in self-defense. As a late-born (and therefore rather solitary) child on a farm, I didn’t have many opportunities to acquire necessary social skills. Mostly I played alone, when chores were finished. I was probably at least 13 when the first jigsaw puzzle ever came into my hands as a gift from a distant aunt.

The picture was one of those English cottages set in deep dark woods on the verge of autumn. It took me many long evenings before I got those 500 pieces into the right places. I was so absorbed I knew nothing of passing time until ordered to put out my light and get to bed. I admired the finished product for days, not wanting to take it apart, ever. Until the desire to put it together again won out.

Years later, in the family of the man who became my husband, I discovered that jigsaw puzzles were a family activity. Everybody gathered around to put pieces together. It wasn’t exactly a process I would describe as driven, but the plan was definitely to get it done. Meanwhile, stories were told, gossip was shared, snacks were fetched. Each person worked on one area and rejoiced when it could be attached to the whole. Sometimes it took a couple of evenings out of a weekend family gathering. That’s when I first noted the loss I felt when I saw that someone else had finished what I’d been working on.

There’s a reason that jigsaw puzzles became so popular during the early days of the pandemic. When all the world is falling apart and we’re denied our usual social distractions, the putting together of pieces to make something beautiful is soothing. It feels creative without the agony of actual creation. It gives us control, and meaning: we begin with chaos—a heap of fragments in a box—and end with a perfect order in which each tiny piece fits into its place.

A brightly colored jigsaw puzzle is in its early stage of being put together. The outside pieces are in place; there's a heap of pieces in the middle of the puzzle mat and even more pieces in the box at the side. The box cover with the picture of many brightly colored hearts sits upright in the background.

For me, the putting together is the whole point. I own it all, both the chaos and the order. It is the doing I delight in; the “done” part is a form of good-bye.

Which is why I recently responded to a casual offer—“would you like us to help you get your puzzle finished?”—with a stammering, awkward refusal. It was a gracious social gesture, an entirely laudable wish to do something together, but just for a moment, I felt as if something that was mine was about to be taken away from me, as if the goal had co-opted the process.

My dilemma had a solution that made sense to me: I offered a different puzzle, still in its box. If I know from the get-go that the puzzle will be a communal effort, I happily join the being together, which is, in the end, even better than the putting together. Actually, the putting together becomes a different process when many eyes and hands find order in the midst of chaos. It is useful to be reminded, especially these days, that shared fragments are much less fragmented, less chaotic.

A whole pineapple in the foreground beside a wooden bowl of apples, on the shelf of an oak china cabinet. In the background are several recipe books, a china elephant serving as book end and a few puzzles.

If I am to be happy with pineapples and jigsaw puzzles—and all manner of doings—I shall have to practice sorting out the doing from the done, and which is important when.

Working together with other people requires me to let go almost entirely of the final product. It may or may not be what I had envisioned. My perfectionism (sometimes a virtue, sometimes a grievous fault) needs to be held in check during the doing and completely set aside for the done. What matters is the warmth of shared effort, the laughter, the swapping of stories, the mutual encouragement. It helps me to see two processes at once: the task at hand which needs to get done, and the happy work of building friendships which needs doing even more (and luckily never arrives at a state of doneness).

When working alone on a task, I hope for wisdom to know just how important it really is to get it done. Is efficiency what matters? Is this just to get it done and out of the way? How often shall I let that urgency spoil the intrinsic pleasures of the doing? Surely I can take time oftener to feel the evanescent tickle of soap bubbles in the dish water, the soft yieldedness of bread dough taking shape under my hands, the miracle of color in cut fruit, the crumbling of soil in my fingers as I transfer a trembling wisp of a pansy into the next size of pot.

Close-up of cut pineapple chunks on a wooden cutting board, the tip of heavy knife visible in the bottom right corner.

A pox on getting it all done just to get it done! A life lived deeply might be just as full as the life lived headlong forward.

Containing Annoyance

On March 30, 2022March 31, 2022 By ednafroeseIn Choices, Easter, hope, spiritualityLeave a comment

On any continuum of fury, annoyance sits near the gentler end. Annoyance is our response to some slight loss of control or disappointed expectation: the two hours assigned to an important task were wasted because of missing parts and a malfunctioning tool; a craft project meant to delight a small child disintegrated into tangled threads; a short errand became an ordeal thanks to elusive parking spots and a badly signed detour. We can all add our own examples. I daresay a thousand gizmos and a million advertisements have offered to hold back the tsunamis of annoyance in our lives.

Odd that I so readily connect annoyance to things rather than people. Really, it’s other people who disappoint and frustrate us more and oftener than poorly designed things. Yet my tolerance for people who annoy me is considerably greater than for things that annoy me. Nothing flares my temper quite like the vacuum cleaner that will not suck, or the pill bottle that refuses to be opened.

Lately, that un-openable bottle has come to stand for what will turn into an obsession if I do not contain it sensibly. Contain – the word sums up the problem.

It’s an ancient one: humanoids have always fashioned containers for carrying and storing food, tools, treasures. There is no doing without containers. The more we have and make, the more we need containers. From hollow stones and woven baskets to carved bowls and on toward metal chests with ropes, we have contained our way to our current avalanche of plastics and paper, unfortunately made worse by the pandemic’s take-out meals and online shopping.

But it is not environmental considerations that I want to think about right now, even though those considerations should move us way past annoyance all the way to rage over our garbage-strewn planet.

No, what troubles me is my own garbage-strewn mind, for I keep letting small vexations prompt unreasonable anger.

photo of a bowl of oatmeal topped with a generous helping of fresh blueberries.

Take blueberries, for instance. I love them. Their mating with yogurt and granola (or oatmeal) for breakfast is made in heaven. But blueberries will not grow in my garden. Believe me, I’ve tried. And wild blueberries don’t appear in the environs of Saskatoon, either. Hence my need to buy – which means containers. Once upon a time, frozen blueberries could be purchased in lightweight plastic bags, simply sealed. All it took was a scissors to snip off the top ¼ inch and some device to tie the bag thereafter. No problem.

Then someone, intent on claiming as much shelf space as possible, invented stand-up bags. Sturdy bastards they are, as they were meant to be. Now my arthritic hands are supposed to tear off the top strip, then somehow grasp the minimally remaining edge to force open the zipper—yes, these “bags” come with their own zipper requiring more manufacturing. Having achieved my breakfast, I am expected to re-zip the stiff bag so that it stays shut and doesn’t spill the rest of the berries on the way back to the freezer compartment where it claims space beyond reason.

Similar bags now contain flour, rolled oats, and all manner of staple goods. I frequently imagine a vengeful kind of afterlife in which the designers and makers of those damned stand-up bags are forced to measure—accurately!—flour and starch and rice for an eternity. It’s awkward to pour anything from those bags and even more difficult to scoop out from without spilling.

I now avoid frustration by cutting the bags open below the zipper; I can then cleanly transfer the contents to a glass canister or some other stable, non-disposable container. Frozen berries are put into small Ziploc freezer bags which are plastic and do have their own zippers, but at least they’re reusable multiple times over, and their zippers are easier to manage.

Am I becoming a crusty senior citizen, whose tolerance for small physical demands is decreasing? Perhaps.

Another shift in grocery packaging likewise stoked annoyance. Decades ago, we discovered a small bulk food store that sold a wide selection of basic baking and cooking ingredients for reasonable prices. The local owners bought goods in bulk and sold them in small or medium bags that were completely see-through, entirely flexible, and durable. We bought all manner of nuts and flours and pastas and spices there. The bags were tied with tiny strips of sticky paper that were easy to undo; thereafter I re-closed them with whatever baggie ties we already had. It was simple. The bags were small enough and flexible enough that they claimed no more space in the cupboard or freezer than was their due. I have washed and reused the bags for decades; they’re almost everlasting.

Then the beloved bulk food store changed its packaging to brittle, cheap, mostly unrecyclable rigid containers. They sat nicely on the shelves, yes, and I could see the contents, but they were beastly to open and worse to reclose and claimed the same greedy space whether they were full and almost empty. We have not been back to the store again.

It did not improve my mood to see grocery stores shut down their bulk food sections when the pandemic began and likewise stock their shelves with those miserable square plastic abominations. I still vividly recall the day that I failed to resnap the lid of a newly opened container of sunflower seeds, precisely as required; I spilled the entire contents into the fridge and onto the floor.

The unfortunate conjunction of changes in packaging and loss of dexterity due to arthritis has turned me into a curmudgeon. Call it a refusal to acknowledge the aging process, if you must. Or a failure to manage frustration, which could be blamed on COVID loneliness. I’m less inclined to fret about the sources of my irritation than about a way out of the downward spiral.

These words are being written in Lent, the season of conscious awareness of life and death that precedes Easter, the most important holiday for Christians.

photo of two small begonia plants, just barely leafing out.

I have been watching in wonder as my seemingly dry, lifeless begonia tubers are now eagerly responding to warmth and light with the first intricate leaves. They will yet produce flower buds which will open into the brilliant colors begonias are known for. Those dry tubers contained life and the promise of beauty.

As so many symbols of Easter do. The shell of the egg, whether painted or no, contains (or did contain) that which nourishes life. Indeed, if I wish to return to the realm of the inorganic, I think of decorative boxes containing chocolates which sometimes contain delectable fillings, pretty baskets containing eggs that contain desired somethings. The most powerful symbol of all, the empty tomb, speaks to the transformation of death into new life. Life cannot be contained; it will burst forth, it will begin anew.

I have moved from the ridiculous (ridiculously trivial, that is) to the sublime. Can I contain both in one posting? Why not? If I can remember to focus on the “contained” rather than the containers, and then, whenever possible, choose that which offers life rather than more inanimate garbage, annoyances should lose some of their power to annoy. I could also choose to advocate for better containers, but that is another project.

We Need a New Word

On February 28, 2022 By ednafroeseIn Choices, Conversation, hope, Love, peace, possibility, Protest, reform, Words2 Comments

Words are slippery.
They mean what they mean, yes, but they mean always within a context, and contexts change.

As a child of the Protestant Reformation, a descendant of Mennonites (a radical branch of that Protestant Reformation), and a wordsmith, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our political language. What on earth happened to protest since the 1500s? Why could I be proud of my religious heritage, yet so much on edge and unhappy now?

The verb “protest” has become more noun than verb. One doesn’t pro-tést these days – one joins a pró-test, and that changes more than just pronunciation and grammatical function.

Photo of my book shelf with the English Oxford Dictionary prominently displayed.
The second photo is the opened dictionary with a magnifying glass highlighting "protest."

So: protest as a verb. It differs from object and from disagree. To disagree means, according to Oxford Dictionary, to “hold a different opinion.” In other words, you and I don’t think the same way about some idea or some thing or some action: cement is a better surface for an urban driveway than asphalt. There are good reasons on either side of that disagreement (cost, labor, endurance) but moral implications are absent.

To object means, again according to Oxford, to express or feel opposition or disapproval or reluctance. That’s stronger than to disagree because emotion is involved. Whatever happens in the discussion, the one who is objecting feels hurt or offended or even appalled. That would be the distinction that my editing self would make. When my late father used to introduce me to his acquaintances as the “baby of the family,” never mind that I was already an adult with children of my own, I objected strenuously. It felt belittling to me, although I’m willing to concede now that he meant it as affection. We disagreed on the meaning of “baby” and I objected to his application of it.

But to protest is to bring in not only emotion but moral judgment. Here I’m reaching back in time to try to recover the meaning of the word before it became a noun that means an official demonstration against government or some other powerful institution or leader. That’s the primary meaning now. Even in that noun form, perhaps especially in that form, the word carries the weight of moral judgment. A protest (noun) occurs because enough people judge some action morally wrong. It’s deemed unjust, unfair.

If we’re talking about unfairness or injustice, it follows that the protester is in a position of less power than the person or institution against which the protest has been made. The protestor may be a direct recipient of the unjust action or maybe not. Many protests have been launched on behalf of those who had no voice or influence. The common thread is the moral judgment. This or that action is just wrong; it violates a law or some accepted standard of behaviour.

There is something else about the verb “protest” that we seem, as a nation, to have forgotten entirely: it is intended to persuade. The very fact that the objection raised is morally justified assumes that the one who protests and the one against whom the protest is made share (or should share) a common ethical standard. The concept of injustice makes no sense without an accepted definition of justice. Martin Luther, who inadvertently began the Protestant Reformation, appealed to the standard of the Bible and the tenets of Christianity when he protested against several actions of Roman Catholic clergy. His initial intention was first open discussion, then persuasion, based on a common faith.

(Generally speaking, it is, of course, possible that the objection has been made in bad faith and is not morally justified; equally possible is that those whose behaviour has been objectionable do not have any ethical standards to which one can appeal. Neither case invalidates the protest’s initial purpose of persuasion. I insist that the ideal not be forgotten.)

By this point, given the current political climate, all sorts of righteous stances are doubtless being claimed by my readers, not to mention fervent disagreements with my definition of “protest.”

So I will retreat temporarily into a simple illustration taken from my teaching years. A student was unhappy with an assigned grade; she felt certain that I had marked her paper unfairly because I was prejudiced against her. That is a moral problem. While some subjectivity is always a factor in marking essays, outright unfairness is unacceptable, not only to students but also to university administrators and department heads.

As long as my student expressed her opinion courteously and presented evidence for her accusation, she was completely within her rights and could hope to be persuasive. My role was either to offer a reasonable explanation of the grade or to acknowledge her point and re-evaluate the paper (and/or ask a colleague to evaluate it). Either way, we should have been able to end the discussion with our dignity intact. Indeed, it could have been the beginning of an improved relationship.

However, if she had insulted me as a person and added threats of character assassination or even worse, she would have crossed a line between protest and blackmail—“you do this or I will ruin you.” That is not yet physical violence, but it is violence. Her protest would have given up the moral high ground and become intimidation, thus turning the interaction into a power struggle, which leaves no one’s dignity intact, and makes an improved relationship very difficult, indeed.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi before him, insisted that any and all protests should remain non-violent, in language and in action, they were aiming at persuasion, which seeks to make clear what the relevant moral principles are and appeals to both a common humanity and a common acceptance of those moral principles. This is not to say that protests against long-standing evils such as slavery are easy. By no means. Many, perhaps most, slave-owners saw the protest marches as intolerable uppity behaviour by those whom God had made to be their slaves. As long as the marchers refused to turn their protest into rebellion, they kept the moral high ground and underlined the principle of a common humanity, something the slave owners had consistently denied.

I indicated earlier that I was a descendant of Mennonites, first known as Anabaptists, who refused to bear arms and developed a strong code of pacifism. Other groups like the Quakers have also chosen non-violence. That does not rule out protest. To speak up against unfairness and injustice, even oppression, is a moral obligation, especially if the speaking up is not for oneself but for those who cannot speak up.

But the way of peace refuses violence in all its forms, and seeks reconciliation. That is the ideal. I cannot speak for Quakers but I know that Mennonites have not always avoided violence, either on the national stage or in their own families. The teaching remains, though, challenging us to seek actively to make peace.

I confess that I am congenitally disposed to avoid even legitimate protest. I will write letters to my elected representatives (not very often), but I do not march or carry signs. My preference is to “guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride,” to quote from a 1970’s Christian worship song. Other cultures value the “saving of face” which is simply a different metaphor for the kind of agreement that allows for gracious exits from the conflict.

Is that always possible? I don’t know. Some situations do present themselves as inherently impossible, yet I have read many inspiring stories of people who have suffered much rather than use violence and have ultimately brought about lasting change. Stephan A. Schwartz argues that social changes attempted through revolution and violence generally do not last as long as those social changes created through non-violent means. He lists several examples, including universal education, abolition of slavery in countries such as Britain, universal health care. Remember the old saying, “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”?

As Stephen Berg wrote in “Deer in the Mist,” “insisting on angels drives angels away.” Or as I heard in a sermon many decades ago, the way of spiritual grace is always a matter of “gift,” not “grasp.”

Everything real, happens first,
out of sight, in the far away furnaces of courage
which are fueled, not by passion, but love. (Stephen Berg)

Photo of a single clematis vine climbing up a wall with seemingly nothing to cling to. There is one lovely mauve flower.

A Story in Five Rings

On February 14, 2022 By ednafroeseIn Choices, family, friendship, Gratitude, identity, Love, marriage, memories, StoriesLeave a comment

No, this is not a story about the Olympics. It’s a love story, an ordinary one. Many couples could tell it, I guess, except that no two love stories are exactly the same.

Photo of a Valentine's Day bouquet with a mixture of mostly pink flowers but some red and one yellow. Flowers are mostly mums.

Western love stories have typically followed familiar plots: 1) two kindred spirits fall in love, face and overcome obstacles, marry and “live happily ever after”; 2) follows plot 1, but adds more obstacles after the wedding, which a) may be overcome and lead to a renewal of the happy ending, or b) may not be overcome and lead to an unhappy divorce, or to affairs, or to divorce and then remarriage for an eventual “happily ever after” ending; 3) either version 1 or 2a is continued into old age with even more obstacles to be overcome. In all variations, some major drama is needed to make the story novel-worthy or memoir-worthy. Add WW2 or clashing cultures (see Romeo and Juliet) or national borders or cancer or Alzheimer’s or a pandemic or death or . . . .

But this story is made of plain stuff-of-life events—the kind that cause no gasps and raise no eyebrows. Yet I would insist that no lasting relationship is ordinary to the ones who live it. For them, the story in five rings (or three or four or many) is a jewel of great worth.

The first ring – May 3, 1968

Photo of a ring box with my black diamond ring.

It was an early birthday gift, given just before I left for a summer job in another province. That was our first experience of letter-writing instead of dates. Our years-long “ordinary” friendship had only months ago deepened into romantic love. No dramatic “falling in love,” no electric glance across the room from a stranger, just increasing warmth in the familiarity of being comfortable together.

Promise rings hadn’t been officially invented yet, although high school rings were often exchanged (we had not done that). Nothing was actually promised over that black diamond ring, not that I recall. Nevertheless, I quickly discovered why lovers give one another rings, besides to make their commitment more public. A ring is always there, always beautiful. Always a silent affirmation: we love and are loved. That is always a miracle.

It’s been decades now since I’ve worn it. The thin gold band proved too delicate to tolerate the chores of a household and garden, and the black diamond itself, with its tiny gold clasps, too likely to get caught in sweaters or in fine baby hair. Still, it has not lost its worth as a symbol of our beginning love, even after its place of honor on my left hand was taken by a symbol of much deeper commitment.

The second ring and the third: April 15, 1970 and August 28, 1970.

First photo is of a ring box with our wedding bands (my wedding band together with my engagement ring). Second photo includes a tiny wedding picture, two wine glasses and the ring box with our wedding rings.

My engagement ring and my wedding ring were welded together within weeks of our wedding day, after I had caught my hand in a heavy door as I rushed to my university class, and bent both rings badly. I could have taken that as an omen. I didn’t.

The engagement ring had been slipped on my finger several days after a long evening spent in a 1958 Chev, parked in a favorite spot by the river. We talked about our future. Both of us were going to be university students in fall, each living on a shoestring budget. No doubt we remember the evening differently: at what point did our half-spoken dream change into a definite plan to share our shoestrings? I couldn’t say.

Surely it was foolish to become engaged in the middle of exams at the end of my third year of university. I still smile when I remember sitting in some stifling exam room, tension palpable everywhere, and staring in astonishment at the diamond ring on my finger. It’s a wonder I could focus on the exam at all.

We began our life together on one scholarship plus one student loan, in a furnished basement suite. We were so confident in our love, so sure that we knew exactly what we were doing and that we were mature enough to face whatever difficulties came. Oh, yes, we did say that. We had no illusions that life “happily ever after” was going to be simple or certain. Of course, there would be tough times. I know now that we had not grasped at all what “tough” would feel like or how long it might hang around.

That’s a good thing, actually. Love is known best in the midst of loving, not in the fear of what might be. Strength is found in the doing and recognized later in the remembering.

With this ring, I thee wed

We exchanged wedding bands in a small church service in the summer of 1970. I was so very happy and proud. We loved and were loved.

Over the years we had to learn to straighten bent conversations and adjust attitudes as we got our rings straightened and strengthened when work or accident tested the gold. No marriage escapes stresses. Those “tough times” we’d been so confident we could handle? They came in guises we hadn’t anticipated. There were some very dark days, when we seemed to be functioning in separate spheres, partly because we were each adapting to new roles on the basis of different family backgrounds.

It is not easy to shift from being single independent adults to being parents of our own children (though they brought us so much joy). Nor was it easy for me to become more responsible for my parents—a change that called for considerably more maturity and self-awareness than I had. A return to graduate studies added more stress and demands on my time. Were we to do it all again, we would make some other choices and seek out more support.

The fourth ring: August 28, 1995

Photo of both our left hands with focus on our wedding bands.

Twenty-five years after our wedding, we went shopping together for new wedding bands. My husband’s ring had worn too thin through years of hard work to tolerate any more straightening; mine also needed repair. It was not only the rings that needed repair. We had traveled a rough road, and it was time to re-evaluate who we were together, and to renew our commitment to love and be loved. Our new wedding rings were simpler, also much wider and stronger, appropriate for our resolve to walk on together in however many years we were granted.

We have now passed the fifty-year mark of our marriage. It came in the middle of the first pandemic year and right after major cancer surgery for me. Tough times? Yes, indeed. Good times? Absolutely.

Birthday ring, May 24, 2021

Photo of my hand, next to an aloe vera plant. Focus is on the silver ring on my right hand.

Although it was a so-called special birthday, the number being somehow significant, I hadn’t expected anything particular. We had had no celebratory parties in the pandemic years. It was enough to have an occasional lovely dinner for two in our house or in the backyard, grateful for our health and for being together. As for gifts? We have what we need, really. Why add more stuff?

So the ring was a total surprise, yet the longer I wear it, the more meaningful it becomes. It’s silver, not gold, a softer metal, easier to shape I’m told, and comfortable on my arthritic hands. It was made by a local silversmith, who creates jewelry in her spare time. In the years since my husband took up the hobby of making chain maille jewelry, we have learned to appreciate the work and community of local artisans. It is an honor for me to wear this ring.

In the midst of recent “tough times,” it matters more than ever that commitment has lasted, that the circle of love is there. I’ve heard love defined as an act of the will as much as a feeling; a policy decision as well as a relationship. I agree.

Love is an act of the will, a policy decision, a long commitment in the same direction.

The story of five rings has an ordinary plot—first dates, engagement, marriage, jobs, children, grandchildren, retirement. Its moments of joy and glory, like those at the Olympics, are made possible through hard work and self-discipline, evident in thousands of ordinary small actions. It’s a story that has been told in some form or another in millions of families, I am sure. Yet every story matters to the ones who live it.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my friend and lover of almost 52 years!

First photo is of a fancy heart-shaped box of chocolates; second photo is of a Valentine's Day bouquet with tiny white mums, green-centered red daisies and green mums plus sparkly red hearts.

Love is known best in the midst of loving, not in the fear of what might be. Strength is found in the doing and recognized later in the remembering.

Thinking About Report Cards

On February 2, 2022 By ednafroeseIn books, Conversation, evaluations, friendship, hope, memories, possibility3 Comments

A prowl through a file cabinet drawer, long untouched, revealed a collection of report cards with my name on them (Grades 1 – 12). Oh, my. There were some blunt comments from teachers about my hopeless handwriting—that mattered in those days—and inconsistent work habits, and one anomalous observation on the Grade 3 report card that perhaps as I grew older I would take part more in outdoor sports.

photo of my report cards from Grades 1 - 4.

Remember those report cards, and the trauma of taking them home? Those were the days when children could fail their grade and be asked to repeat it. I was never seriously concerned about that possibility, yet still anxious about what I might have to take home to be signed. Would the report card be good enough that I wouldn’t get any reprimands? My siblings and I were expected to do well in our studies and to conform to strict standards of behaviour. And where there is a clear expectation, there is also the possibility of failing to meet it.

Which raises two questions, I suppose, with wide application: how clear and reasonable is the expectation? how fair and appropriate is the evaluation? That bygone teacher who bemoaned my lack of participation in softball had known nothing about the daily hours I spent outdoors walking, exploring, doing farm chores, playing with animals, helping in the garden, even reading in secret places in the nearby bushes. She could not have known that for me solitude in the natural world felt infinitely safer than the ball diamond.

And I began thinking about the edginess in our societies these days. I use the plural form of “society” because ever-present social media have created separate cultural groups whose component parts span continents, and because the pandemic has encouraged the creation of very small sub-societies along with huge online silos of rigidly held opinions. No longer do the report cards, in whatever form they take, come only once a year.

We live now with evaluations all the time: some are formal, such as work performance reviews, grades on particular projects, peer reviews of publishable articles, demotions or promotions, professional degrees, trade certifications; some are informal, such as the disappointment or delight on someone’s face, a welcome invitation to a social occasion or utter silence from former friends, thousands of likes or brutal online bullying, a stunning bouquet delivered at the door or a package of dog poop left on the porch, acceptance or rejection. There is not much point in railing about the unfairness of evaluation itself—who can ever really grasp everything about someone else’s circumstances or motives?—because we simply cannot manage without evaluations, both great and small. To be realistic here, I should admit that we have always been living with evaluations; they are nothing new.

Do we not get quotes for prospective building projects or home renovations? Each business that submits a quote will be evaluated. Do we not develop friendships with former strangers on the basis of our judgment of their trustworthiness and compatibility? Do we not evaluate the politicians who present themselves for office and call for our votes? It’s important that we take time to decide whether trust is justified or not. Will we listen to the cold call we just got on the phone, or slam the receiver on yet another bogus message about credit cards? (It is really too bad that cell phones have no slam option). Will we respond warmly to the chatty clerk or resist what feels like too much sales pressure?

There are degrees of judgmentalism, of course. Some of us are suspicious, automatically assuming that others’ motives must be nefarious at worst, self-interested at best; some of us are more open, assuming that others are well-meaning until we are clearly proved wrong. I am using the personal plural “we” and “us” rather freely here to underline the fact that none of us is entirely one kind of person or the other. Our motives are not consistent; our behaviour is not consistent; our tolerance of risk varies; our ability to learn and change is always there.

Herein lies the importance of report cards. They do not function only to regulate who is allowed to proceed and who is not qualified for some task (and I know of no society that does not have some such structure for organizing itself). For now, think instead of the personal value for the recipient of the report card, whether it be an actual document with an official seal on it or not.

The phrase that comes to my mind is Canadian novelist Adele Wiseman’s description of Abraham, the key character in The Sacrifice. He has visualized himself as a very important man in his small Jewish community; he may be just the local butcher but he’s also a keen student of Torah, a master story-teller, a man of wisdom who “knows” that God has a special role for him. He is, after all, Abraham (and Wiseman gives him no surname). But there comes a moment in a terrible family conflict when the angry words of his daughter-in-law become a “mirror flipped up in his face and he himself stood revealed as he was to another, a stranger. . . (The Sacrifice 316, emphasis mine).

That is the function of evaluations. How can we know ourselves without the reactions of others? Child psychologists speak of the importance of parents mirroring the infant’s efforts to communicate. The return smile and the verbal echoes tell the little one that she/he matters. Ditto for the clapping games and the singing and the hugging. The babe is busy discovering a self through parental affection—a process that remains mysterious, despite all the books and much documented experience.

This discovering of a self, shaping a self? I understand far too little to hold forth on it with any wisdom. What I do know is that, necessary as unflattering report cards are now and then, equally necessary, in far greater measure, is affirmation of the various selves that we live out in our daily lives—affirmation that is needed in both the giving and the receiving.

In these days of way too much judgment and far too many anonymous “report cards” circulating online like some virus worse than COVID, perhaps the best thing we can do is to flip up a gentler mirror that reflects respect: “I see you, and you are a human being of great worth.”

I wish I could show you

when you are lonely

or in darkness

the astonishing light

of your own being.

(Hafiz)

A Tipping Point

On January 6, 2022 By ednafroeseIn food, memories, restaurants, wages, workLeave a comment

I will apologize, at once, for an inexcusable pun in my title—I mean “tipping” as in voluntarily adding money to a restaurant bill to pay the server directly. At the same time, I do also mean that we might just have reached a point when we can recognize that tipping is a demeaning, demoralizing, exploitative practice that needs to end.

Now after that provocative statement, I should write a proper introduction and ease all my readers into a topic that requires gentleness and diplomacy:

Some weeks ago now, on CBC’s The Current I heard Matt Galloway interview Corey Mintz, a chef, a restaurant critic and an author, concerning his latest book The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After. Mintz begins with the plain fact that restaurants are among the businesses most affected by the pandemic. All of a sudden, we Canadians, who typically eat out rather often, who can barely imagine getting together with friends without visiting some coffee shop, bar, or restaurant, couldn’t visit any of those places except to take out food to eat at home, with only our household. It was a terrific shock to our system. Now that health restrictions have eased, in some places, and dining out is possible again, owners are having trouble finding staff. That would indicate that something’s wrong. Perhaps plenty of things.

As I listened to Galloway and Mintz talk about what it’s like to work as a cook or as a server or as an owner, I remembered my own years-long experience as a restaurant server, first in summers only so I could pay for my university education, then full-time for a few years because other jobs proved unattainable and the rent needed to be paid. That meant serving the public, trying to adhere to the principle of “the customer is always right” (although I knew very well that customers could be foolish, ignorant, and downright mean), and depending on the tips to make ends meet. Even then, even when I walked home with pockets heavy from collected change—and bills—I had hated the practice of tipping.

Here’s why I felt that way, and there’s no ranking order to my objections:

It allowed my various bosses to pay me the minimum wage without regard to how much experience I had, how efficient I might be in getting the work done, or how willing I was to do the backroom jobs (making salads, cleaning work stations, cleaning the ice cream dispenser, etc.) that not only earned me no tips but reduced the time I could have spent on the floor earning tips. According to Corey Mintz, in some provinces, wage laws allow restaurants to pay even less than minimum wage because of tipping. In fact, Mintz talked about high-end restaurants that don’t pay their staff at all; they “allow” them the “privilege” of working in the establishment, leaving them entirely dependent on the generosity of patrons. This is demeaning. As Mintz pointed out, we wouldn’t dream of paying our dentists or electricians in that fashion. It is utterly unprofessional. Isn’t it time that we recognized that serving food and wine to the public is also a profession and worthy of dignity?

Tipping corrupts the relationship between server and served. I did not initially understand that because my first job was in a private businessmen’s club (and yes, it was only men back then) where tipping was automatic and official. A percentage was added to all bills and given to the wait-staff as part of their paycheque. So I could treat all customers with respect and offer good service, simply because that was my job, not because it might garner more tips. Not until I got into a hotel dining-room, and later into a nightclub, did I realize how quickly servers learn to evaluate all customers according to their tipping potential. The best service is offered to those who are deemed to be well-off and sophisticated. The customer who hesitantly chooses the cheapest item on the menu will not be served with the same alacrity and promptness as the customer who begins with a pricey wine. I was often ashamed of the way that I viewed people as tip-dispensers or tip-withholders, but it seemed inevitable.

Because customers are tip-dispensers, servers are tempted to see one another as competition rather than as allies. I witnessed angry arguments over who got which section of the dining-room, nasty allegations of tip-stealing off the tables (back when cash was the primary method of payment), refusals to assist other servers unless some portion of the tip was surrendered. There were quarrels when servers lied about their take to avoid sharing more of it with the cooks or bartenders or busboys, not to mention the assumption that one did not report tips on income tax forms. All of that, too, was demeaning.

Of the deep embarrassment of receiving an exorbitant tip from someone too drunk to tell the difference between a dollar bill and twenty dollar bill, I would prefer to say little. My shame is even deeper when I remember the brief weeks in a nightclub when I gave in to the temptation to overcharge obstreperous and obnoxious customers. My friend and fellow server first suggested it as a way of getting back at customers who were rude and difficult. I gave the subversive practice its name – “an aggravation charge.” It was of no financial benefit to us because the bills were paid to the house, yet it allowed us to feel, briefly, as if we had some agency, some way of redressing the frustrations of having to be obsequious to the most boorish of customers. While strictly speaking, this had nothing to do with tipping, I see now that it was part and parcel of the lack of dignity that with which servers were generally treated then. According to Mintz, that lack of dignity is still the issue. Tipping, after all, had its origins in the days of slavery when one would throw a coin at a slave and demand a dance or other favour.

In the years after my server days, I dutifully tipped whenever I ate out and encouraged whatever companion I was with to do likewise. What is far more important to me is that I didn’t forget what I had learned backstage in the restaurant. It was my duty – no, my privilege – to treat servers fairly and respectfully. They were fellow human beings who were sharing their time and skills with me, never mind the corruptions of the system which hired and paid them (as little as possible, of course).

If, in my city, a restaurant was established that made tipping obsolete and paid its staff appropriately, I would happily patronize it – when I’m ready to return to eating out. There is a particular pleasure in savouring a meal without having had to cook it or serve it or feel obligated to help in someone else’s kitchen. All of those are tasks that I have happily done; it’s part of the privilege of living with others and sharing food with friends and extended family. Nevertheless, the joy of eating out and having what Mintz calls a “magical evening” is worth enough that I believe we should extend dignity to all the skilled people who can make it happen. They are professionals, or are on their way to becoming professionals, and I would be glad to know that they have been adequately trained and are paid with a decent salary.

No work is insignificant. All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King, Jr.