- Fire-Bombed Voting Box A few weeks ago, my husband and I cast votes in the November 5, 2024 elections. We had received our ballots by mail, discussed the candidates, then filled out our ballots. We walked a few blocks to the secured metal voting box across from our small town city hall and deposited them there. The next… Read More »
- To Make a Better Life Sometime back before the American Revolution, my ancestors, probably including those of both English and Irish nationalities, immigrated to what would become the United States. They were part of the great migration of European peoples to the Americas. Native Americans would suffer greatly, pushed further and further into less fertile areas, forced to give up… Read More »
- But If Not In one of the battles of World War II, the commander of a besieged British force radioed to his headquarters: “but if not.” These words are found in the Christian Old Testament, in the third chapter of the book of Daniel. Three young Jewish men taken captive by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, refused to bow… Read More »
- Bible Reading in Public Schools I grew up a long time ago in Nashville, Tennessee. In my public schools in those days, a teacher often began the day with a reading from the Bible. It was about as exciting as watching paint dry. I associated it with tasks like learning the multiplication tables. Where Christ’s teachings did become alive was… Read More »
- Reading the Comics Every Sunday morning a half hour or so before my husband and I leave for church, I wander down our walkway to the newspaper box next to the street. I grab the paper and begin scanning the headlines on the way back to the house. Later in the afternoon after church, I enjoy a leisurely… Read More »
Selections from the books:
SINGING IN BABYON
by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
excerpt:
She accepted the job in Saudi Arabia to pay off college loans, not become entangled with a guilt-plagued journalist while dodging morality enforcers.
Kate McCormack:
She sat again and found the advertisement and read it.
“Hanford Language Systems. Teaching eager students English as a second
language in exciting locations. Actively seeking English teachers for
expanding language schools in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Advanced
degree preferred but not required.”
Saudi Arabia? Kuwait? Why not try for it? A long shot, but wasn’t
everything these days?
Philip Tangvald:
Philip Tangvald studied the young woman in the Frankfurt airport
before the flight to Jeddah. She didn’t really look like Tammi. His
youngest sister’s hair fell in golden-red sheaves, not like this
woman’s darker waves. They were about the same age, though, and he
thought she carried Tammi’s air of youthful naiveté.
Later, in flight to Jeddah:
Philip took another sip of his orange juice. At least traveling got him
out of Washington. He hated the city’s traffic, loathed its dress code, and
barely tolerated the weather. A shame he could only visit the family in
Oregon for short breathers between assignments.
Why not chuck the job, go back home? Write that book, whose ideas
teased him. Something about Americans’ fatal ignorance of the rest of the
world.
No reason he couldn’t, now that Veronica was dead. Except he wasn’t
sure how he’d handle the extra time to think.
He placed his juice glass in the holder and escaped into sleep.”
SEARCHING FOR HOME
by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
excerpt:
“July, 1997
Hannah unfolded Jane’s e-mail for a final read before the plane landed in Larnaca. She paused on the last paragraph from her former college roommate.
I should tell you: I don’t intend for you to leave Cyprus without persuading you to ditch that job of yours. It’s too dull for somebody like you. You’ve had a couple of years for grieving; now it’s time to get on with your life.
I’m forewarned, thought Hannah and wondered how Jane’s bluntness meshed with her career as a U.S. diplomat. She felt for her sunglasses in the jumble of her purse and slipped them on, mesmerized by light bouncing off waves below.
The Olympic Airways plane flew like a winged Pegasus, Athens behind her now, along with her Mediterranean cruise ship. The Greek islands glistened under the plane’s body, white and green bits of land floating on a sea of topaz. She yearned to draw the scene. The creative impulse leaped out without warning.
Jane’s right, maybe. Do I want to go back and face that job at Appalachian Life, waste years in one of those little office cubicles? She traced squares on the plane’s window, like the cubicles, or tombstones in a graveyard, or neat rows of teeth in a skull.
She drew her hand away as though it burned. . .”
****
. . . and when she meets the handsome, ambitious U.S. diplomat Patrick Holtzman, her drive to go back to the “safe” computer programming job in Nashville fades . . .
DISTANT THUNDER
by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
excerpt:
They continued toward the Metro station at Foggy Bottom. Brooke’s calf muscles threatened to seize up, and sweat from the September afternoon dampened every thread of her clothing when Jonathan suggested a rest. “Let’s stop in and see old Albert Einstein before we head for the station.”
“Einstein?”
Lisa laughed. “His statue. In a little park off Independence Avenue.”
“I’m okay for anything as long as it’s toward home.”
They sat in the small refuge of elm and holly trees, and her memory called up famous men and women honored in her country’s capital. Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, of course. Native sons. And this immigrant from a country that persecuted his people. Europe’s loss, her country’s gain. It had happened over and over in the years since its founding.
She read an inscription on Einstein’s statue. “As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevails.”
Refreshed, they walked up Twenty-Third Street past a low-rise building on their right, nondescript after the splendid monuments they had visited.
Brooke slowed. “What’s that one?”
“The State Department,” her brother-in-law answered. “We ought to take the tour of it someday.”
Brooke halted, staring. “That’s the State Department? Where our foreign policy is decided? It looks pretty mundane to me. You mean our diplomats work there?”
“Most of them work overseas.”
They found seats together on the Metro and sank into them. Brooke swayed with the train as it curved and plunged into the tunnel under the Potomac River.
“How do you get to be a diplomat?”
Jonathan turned away from tunnel lamps that flashed by their windows. “You pass the exam, or I should say exams, for the U.S. Foreign Service.”
“That’s all? I mean you don’t have to have special training or something?”
“A lot of them have degrees in international studies, but the exam is open to any U.S. citizen who wants to take it.”
“What about age requirements?”
“Not sure, except I know somebody who passed the exam and joined after he finished twenty years with the military.”
She felt Lisa’s gaze on her, but said nothing as the train passed into light for a brief period and the stop at Arlington Cemetery.
WHERE I BELONG
by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
excerpt:
Mark listened as Spencer ranted while they traded off on Spencer’s new electric typewriter to finish a mock cable writing assignment for class. Tossed papers lay scattered around the Fanta and Budweiser bottles on the dining table, the air stale.
“You know what? I get along better with the few Southerners I’ve met, like you and Reye, than I do with a lot of the Northern liberal types, including some of Dad’s friends. I don’t like to be a specimen somebody has to kowtow to, so they can show how unprejudiced they are.”
“Figures,” Mark said. “I’m curious, what does your father think about people in places like Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi?”
“My father wouldn’t dream of being prejudiced against blacks, whatever their class or location. He makes up for it in his attitude toward the unwashed white masses.”
“I’ll have you know, I was taught by my mother that cleanliness is next to godliness.”
Spencer looked like Mark had kicked him. “I’m only exaggerating for effect. You do know that?”
“You’re too sensitive, Spence. Of course I know you’re exaggerating. Anyway, my own father has a few prejudices, too.”
“Different ideas about race, I take it?”
“Your parents’ interracial marriage? That would have sent my father through the roof. Although, Dad didn’t actually hate people because of the color of their skin. He just thought the Bible forbids certain things. Or at least his church teaches him that. I don’t think he’s capable of hate.”
“Never joined the Ku Klux Klan, then?” Spencer’s voice held an edge.
“No, nothing like that.” He didn’t tell Spencer that some of the men in his childhood church were members of the Klan.
“So why are you different?”
“Started back in the fourth grade, I guess. My teacher, Miss Callie, had skin darker than yours. The first black I’d had any dealings with up to that time. Not many blacks lived in the mountains. Most people there before the Civil War were too poor to have slaves, see.”
“It seems so medieval, you know. The Jewish ghettos in Europe that my dad’s ancestors knew and the segregation that my mom knew-and a lot more recent.”
Spencer’s words scratched his guilt, guilt that more than a few Southern whites carried around, but he chose not to reference it. “When the schools were integrated, the year before I entered fourth, she was the only black on the school faculty.”
Miss Callie. Like a second mother almost. “She helped this awkward nine-year-old believe he was of worth, taught him that liking to learn was a gift. Also got me started in a special language program for a few of us that an education team from the University of Georgia in Athens wanted to try out. I probably wouldn’t be in the Foreign Service if it weren’t for her.”
“You and your father broke over the racial issue, then?”
“That’s not what we broke over, because I never shared my views on it.”
“Scared to?”
“Not scared like you’re talking about. I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
Spencer sat back and studied him. “Worse, maybe, than if you weren’t so close . . . if you were more apart, like me and my old man.”
“Maybe.”
A SENSE OF MISSION
by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
excerpt:
I fancy I still hear the call to prayer from the mosque beside the U.S. Embassy compound, though I’m a grown woman now. I remember when the haunting tones of the imam woke me one Thursday morning, the beginning of the Muslim weekend. I had turned nine several months before, in 1396 according to the Islamic calendar. We knew it as 1976, the year of our distant country’s bicentennial.
The imam’s voice wavered, then strengthened. I murmured a prayer to Jesus, as Mama suggested I do during each of the five calls to prayer each day. She said the Muslims’ faithfulness to their prayers put us Christians to shame, but there wasn’t any reason we couldn’t pray to Jesus during those times.
I heard Mama and Daddy downstairs but not their words, just the hum of their voices. I dressed, wanting to finish before they knew I was awake.
I slipped barefoot from my room down the carpeted steps and stopped in the hall to listen to them.
“I know, I know,” Mama said. “We have to go back. But I hate Washington. It’s so frantic.”
I never wondered until later why my mother preferred living overseas to living in the States, why she seemed not to fit into American life, she who had grown up there, unlike me.
I smelled the vanilla from her French toast, and my stomach growled.
“We have to think about Kaitlin, too,” Daddy said. “She hasn’t lived in the States since she was a baby. She hardly knows her own country.”
“You probably could have gotten the Damascus job.”
“It’s a good time to go back to the Department. Nobody’s paying any attention to the Middle East right now. Too focused on China.”
“The Middle East doesn’t let anyone forget it for long.”
A cup clinked on a saucer, and I imagined Daddy frowning at his coffee as he stirred it. “Maybe that’s a good reason for leaving for a while.”
A chair scraped, Mama’s probably. “You know something, don’t you?”
“Nothing I can give you details about. Just hit or miss intelligence about this shadowy group,
small, but mouthing some pretty harsh rhetoric against westerners in general and Americans in particular. You know how these things sprout. Usually turns out to be nothing.”
“Don’t sugar coat things for me, John. You never have.”