by Molly Best Tinsley

In 1993 Steve Scholl decided to refocus his study of comparative religion.  Rather than pursue a dissertation on medieval Iranian Shiite mystics, which might reach an audience of eighty scholars, he opted to leave academia and establish a publishing company, whose “good, solid information” about the world’s spiritual traditions would be accessible to a broad array of readers.  Almost twenty years later, White Cloud Press in Ashland thrives as a local, if somewhat hidden treasure, claiming fifty titles under three different imprints.  One recent release, I Speak for Myself, an anthology of essays by American women about the experience of growing up Muslim, was chosen by Huffington Post as one of the top ten religion books of 2011.  Another, The Muslim Next Door:  The Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, was one of two books selected for Silicon Valley Reads, a three-month-long community event in Santa Clara County.  A significant excerpt from a third, Uprisings for the Earth:  Reconnecting Culture with Nature, will be reprinted in the March issue of The Utne Reader.  At the center of this solid success blooms a strange coincidence of personal determination and historical chance.

Scholl was raised by parents who were “steadfastly uninterested in religion.” He was first exposed to spiritual issues in high school, when the sixties’ counterculture led him first to explore Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, then the mystical and philosophical traditions of the Mediterranean and their flowering in Sufism.  The latter study became his passion.  In college and graduate school, he studied Arabic in order to appreciate the original texts, and had been particularly struck by the translations of Michael Sells, a professor of Islamic History and Literature at the University of Chicago.  Thus, once Scholl’s press was established, he invited Sells to craft a book offering translations of the last 40 chapters of The Qur’an along with commentary.  In 1999, Approaching The Qur’an: the Early Revelations was born.

Because The Qur’an is actually an oral text—the title means “recitation”—Sells included a section of transliterations from the Arabic, which allow readers to see the rhyming patterns of the lines, and a CD, which enables readers to hear their cadences.  This enriched volume became a definitive resource for the Western study of Islam and the centerpiece of the White Cloud list.  That was all before the geopolitical catastrophe of 9/11 launched it off the charts.

In the bewildering aftermath of that horrific day, intelligent Westerners realized how little they knew about Islam.  To reduce that deficit, in 2002 a professor in the Religion Department of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, placed Approaching The Qur’an on the summer reading list for all incoming freshmen.  His decision prompted the Family Policy Network, a Christian fundamentalist group, to bring a lawsuit alleging that the University was attempting to convert students to Islam.  The suit was thrown out of court, but not before the story went viral, making the front page of top newspapers, feature articles in news magazines, and a typically clever commentary and skit on The Daily Show.

The brouhaha catapulted the book to national fame, and what had been a healthy  sales curve soared.  White Cloud Press was on the map as the reliable conduit of information about the Islamic tradition.  It began to receive queries from other prominent voices in the field.

Scholl’s long-time friend Stephen Sendar, who brought his business acumen to the press in 2008, appraised this trend and suggested they formalize it as an “Islam Encounters Series.”  All American, essays by men about being Muslim in the United States, and Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Arab Revolutions will further expand the series in the fall.  Sendar also noted that many other White Cloud titles presented contributions to the health and welfare of the earth and its populations.  Why not designate a second hallmark series “Green Spirituality”:  embracing the “inner wild” by connecting with the external wild?  The Utne-excerpted Uprisings, by Osprey Orielle Lake, epitomizes that theme—an eloquent encyclopedia of ways to restore the language and wisdom of nature to our disintegrating lives.  So does a newly released volume of poems, love letter to the milky way, by the spoken-word artist Drew Dellinger, whose work interweaves themes of cosmology, ecology, and social justice.  The opening poem, “Hieroglyphic Stairway,” begins,

it’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake

because my great great grandchildren

won’t let me sleep.

These lines voice a fitting credo for White Cloud Press going forward, as Scholl and Sendar continue to break the mold of current publishing models.  Instead of aiming solely to sell more books, they’ve committed to more courageous, honest content, and to stake a spot on the front lines of social change.  Scholl has assumed the role of Producer for the Jackson County Library Foundation’s Southern Oregon Arts and Lectures series, which launched in 2009 with historian Douglas Brinkley as debut speaker.  ThePress is also a supporting sponsor of the SOAL series; indeed at the last two events, everyone attending received a complimentary White Cloud book.

In its community involvement and social conscience, White Cloud returns to the role of past, pre-corporate publishers.  In the current world, this represents radical innovation.

To support and celebrate the continuing vitality of the book, original writing, bold publishing, and dedication to the literary life in general, the Hannon Library at Southern Oregon University has scheduled its first Ashland Book Fair for June 23, 2012.  It will take place throughout the building, and include performances, panel discussions, readings, multimedia presentations, and more.  Save the date!

Remember this.

The Jersey shore in the fifties: a woman in a shirred, boned, skirted one-piece poses high on the beach under an umbrella, her mouth fixed in a half-smile, her brow pinched. The baby she is carrying has not yet started to show. The morning sickness it causes lasts all day.

A scrawny boy in bouffant swim trunks shivers in the foreground. His father hollers to him, dares him to get his feet wet—his two older sisters are already up to their knees—but he’s a scaredy-cat. He shies from the challenge and scampers back up the sand.

The sisters each lunge for one of their father’s pale, lotion-slick arms and let him drag them through the cold breakers, which smash across their thighs and bellies. The water rises to their chests, their necks, lifts them off the bottom then sets them down again.

They keep their heads tipped back when the water deepens because they don’t want it to cover their faces. They are not scaredy-cats. On the swim team at home, they practice racing dives and put their faces in the water all the time to do the crawl. But this water is different, the way it pushes you around. It’s a thick greenish-brown, so salty it burns your throat.

When the water goes shallow, they scan the approaching waves, spot the one behind the next that is starting to look mean. Its bulge has already sharpened to a crest spitting bubbles. Here comes a big one, they yell on cue. It swells higher, higher, until it towers over them.

Their father, for whom there is always one right way to do anything, from washing yourself in the bathtub to peeling an orange to assembling and flying a kite—their father has taught them what comes next. Threatened by a big one, it does no good to try to run back to shore. You will be going against the undertow, it will lock you in place while the sand slips out from beneath your feet and the force of the wave breaks right on top of you, uses you to mop the ocean floor.

No, when you see a big one coming, you have to give up on keeping your face dry and dive right into it. Their father shouts Now, and the three of them plunge head first through the terror, the turbulence. When they surface, it’s in quieter water, their feet dropping back onto solid sand as if nothing had happened, though behind them the greenish-brown surge implodes in churning froth.

1

SECURITY SYSTEMS

Our parents were being robbed. They were missing big things like fifty-dollar bills, the 18K gold pendant that used to belong to our grandmother, Dad’s favorite camera, credit cards. They were missing little things, gloves, flashlights, loose change. They were suffering embarrassment when they tried to pay for purchases in check-out lines. They were picking frantic arguments at home.

They suspected the teen-aged son of the mailman, whom they paid to do yard work, a beautiful boy, they said—just like my brother Chris when he was a child—but one of those, like my brother Bill, who knew how to charm and take advantage. There were also rumors of break-ins in town.

Their world had become uncertain, unsafe. What a coincidence—a miracle almost—when the telemarketer called to tout his expensive security system. It was an answer, and they’d always believed difficult predicaments yielded to answers. Cheaters never won, hard work paid off, love conquered but never hurt. And if you put your mind to it, for every problem, you could find a fix.

I could tell their hopes had leaped beyond misplaced car-keys. This complicated system of alarms might finally restore order and serenity to their lives.

“I got tired of her worrying about East St. Louis moving in on us,” Dad told me over the phone. Now if someone tried to enter the locked house, a siren would shriek. Somehow it could also sense alien body heat or footsteps around the perimeter when our parents were at home, and send out another alert. Then there was the button in their coat closet, which one of them could push in case of emergency. “If your father falls,” Mother chimed in, “how would I stand him up again?”

Whatever the calamity, the system was going to signal a central switchboard in New Jersey. Then the monitor in New Jersey would notify the three-man police department back in our parents’ town in southern Illinois, as well as the family member our parents had designated.

Fine. Where was the harm? It was their money. If it kept them busy, gave them comfort, what more could you ask? Besides, I wasn’t the family member they decided to designate. Although my sister Cathy lived in northern Virginia, she was a lawyer, and since security systems reinforced the law, they’d reasoned that she should be the chosen one.

Soon she was being contacted a couple times a week, sometimes in the middle of the night, by a telephone voice with a Jersey accent announcing unspecified trouble a thousand miles away.

When she dialed our parents’ number, she found them in a state of high excitement over the surprise visit just paid them by the Chief of Police. Still too distracted by the honor of it, they couldn’t really pay attention when she tried one more time to talk them through the procedures for unlocking their front door or to warn them about that button in their closet—for emergencies only: otherwise, do not touch. “Remember the boy who cried wolf,” she’d say. Our father had invoked that fable enough times when we were kids. “After a while, nobody’s going to pay any attention.”

To me my sister said, “We’d better start thinking about what to do with them.” Meanwhile she took on ATT to see if we could get the system removed and at least some of their thousands of dollars back.

I couldn’t imagine what she meant—do with them—other
than what I’d always done, which was pick up the telephone once a week and listen to the latest griefs and grievances: brother Bill’s dive from bipolar disorder into addiction, all our divorces, our father’s frustrations with local politics, his eroding health.

“What did we do wrong?” they always got around to asking, and in terms too elaborate and theoretical to hurt feelings, I would try to explain. Smug in my enlightenment after years of psychotherapy, I thought I knew.

“You act like they used to be normal,” I told my sister. “They’ll get by. They always do.”

They weren’t that old by today’s standards, not even seventy. The world was full of AARP poster couples, playing golf and tennis, strolling hand in hand through grocery stores, waiting for tables in restaurants, dozing at the symphony—some of them must have also had have security systems they couldn’t quite master.

“What about the car?” Cathy asked. Our father had just had a minor accident. He’d grazed a bridge support in the LTD. “What if next time it’s a station wagon full of kids? How are you going to feel then?”

She had me there. Dad pulled into traffic with something to prove: Brigadier General, USAF, retired; former mayor of Lebanon, Illinois. Bill Best was a man of importance, authority. The world would have to rearrange itself if he wanted to change lanes. “I just put on my turn-signal,” he’d often told me, “and go.”

* * *

He stands on a parade ground, reviewing block after block of blue uniforms filing past. The band is playing “Wild Blue Yonder,” flags are flapping, salutes jerk in robotic unison. He is at his official peak.

As the new commander of Air Weather Service, he is making his snippet of history. From the grandstand draped in red, white, and blue, my sister and I try to keep our squirming children in their seats, convinced that once out of sight the marchers are double-timing back to the starting line for another round.

The brim of his hat shadows the upper half of his face. The lower half isn’t smiling. His chin juts forward as befits this occasion of high seriousness. It is a time to show uncompromising strength. A time if there ever was one when the code we have lived by applies: feelings under wraps and mouths shut outside the family.

It wasn’t that we had terrible secrets to hide, just that the world was not a friendly place. Outside the family fortress, you needed to be perfect, invincible, to put your best foot forward. Forget love; it was respect you were after, edged with intimidation. You wouldn’t dream of mentioning depression, collapsing marriages, a fondness for vodka or pot. Actually we never mentioned these things inside the fortress either, not until they stared us right in the face.

At work our father chewed his nails down to barely visible dents on the ends of his fingers. At home, he slathered baby cream on them and encased them in an old pair of leather gloves. To get to sleep, he wrapped his head in a special blanket, which our mother replaced every few years because he had to fiddle with its satin binding all night, eventually wearing it away.

He was tall but not muscular, with long, straight legs. He liked to tell us that our mother had the brains in the family; she’d retort that he had the legs. According to her, he was fine-boned, a fact she’d mention in order to emphasize her own large bones, something you actually wanted to have when you were checking one of those charts that dictated your ideal body weight.

Being musical, our father could dance, but he was no athlete. For years I blushed for him whenever he dove into a swimming pool: his stroke was stiff, tentative, and he didn’t cup his hands.

As The Boss in the family, he had us children all figured out. I was the Sarah Bernhardt. Cathy sulked, then turned into Miss Sunshine the minute she was out of the house. Bill was temperamental and lacked common sense, but Chris you could strand in the wilderness and he would survive eating berries and newts.

He coached us with our schoolwork, and assigned us hobbies according to our talents and inclinations as he perceived them. If I liked to ice skate, my sister would be encouraged to ski. If she collected coins, I was to take an interest in stamps. He chose our colleges, and wrote the essays that accompanied our applications, inscribing them with his own grandiose dreams. Mine outlined plans to pursue medical research—which was why I had to take Latin in high school, so as to have an easy time later with the scientific names of body parts and germs.

“If only I’d had some guidance when I was a kid,” he used to say.

We never heard the end of that.

* * *

I told him over the phone not to pick me up at the airport. I didn’t want to put him to any trouble, I said, meaning I didn’t want someone scraping me off a bridge support. I rented a two-door Geo for the weekend, and pulling out onto the highway, I whacked one of those white and orange roadwork barrels, shattering the mirror on the driver’s side.

The chrysanthemums had exploded gloriously along the flagstone path to their front door, upstaging the untended rest of the garden—withered coneflowers, coreopsis, daisies, and phlox—clogged with weeds. Before my raised fist could make contact with their door, it swung open, and there they were, buttoned into their L. L. Bean jackets, hats in their hands.

“We thought your plane crashed,” Mother said, her lipstick fresh and fiery and not precisely on her mouth.

“We thought you could take us to Sylvie’s for lunch,” said Dad, as if I’d just dropped in from down the street. His white hair was combed crisp, but he strained to hold his head up, his chin fell slack, his shoulders sagged, and his eyes looked huge and glassy behind thick lenses.

“Wait till you taste her Reuben,” said Mother.

They stood patiently on the front stoop while I stashed my suitcase and went to the bathroom.

“I’ll take the backseat,” Dad announced once we were outside. He opened the front passenger door. I looked at the sliver of space between the front seat and the door jamb.

“Are you sure you can squeeze through there?” I asked.

He pushed forward the front seat, looking determined, a camel facing the needle’s eye. “This way you and Mommy can talk,” he said.

“You might have trouble getting out,” I said.

He staggered backward, shrugged. “I thought you two needed to talk.”

“Well, it’s only three blocks,” I said.

At that, Mommy, who seemed to have shrunk since I saw her last, slipped through the V-shaped opening like Houdini. It was fairly easy on the other end to grab her hands and drag her out.

When she took off her jacket in Sylvie’s Café, I was surprised to see her mother’s gold pendant on its heavy chain around her neck. I lifted it in my palm. “Hey, great, you found this,” I said. “So where was it?”

“I think that boy must have brought it back,” she said.

“She wants me to fire him anyway,” Dad said. “She gets me to do all the dirty work.”

“Your father ran over a cat,” she told me. “It came darting out of nowhere, and he put on the gas.”

“That is not a true statement,” he told me. Our eyes met. His were full of questions—did I believe him, did I see what he was putting up with?

I smiled and let my gaze slip away.

“I don’t like to cook anymore,” she confessed as we began to eat our grilled sandwiches.

“A brand new stove and Mommy doesn’t even use it. I’m living on cereal and peanut butter.”

“Actually grains and nuts make as good a protein as meat,” I said.

As mayor, he’d fought the forces of anti-government conservatism to apply for and obtain a federal grant for a senior citizens’ dining room. He personally delivered countless meals on wheels. But it would have been showing a dangerous weakness to pick up the phone and ask for help himself.

“When I think about food, I get butterflies,” Mother said. “It makes me too sad.”

The first night the new computerized stove almost defeated me. The instruction book was nowhere to be found, and it took a lot of trials and errors to get the thing to turn on. I fixed the meal which in the past our mother would have—lasagna and garlic bread. The aromas filled the house and lifted all our spirits, especially Dad’s.

“Hey, Evvie,” he sang as he sashayed stiffly into the kitchen, and made a stab at tickling her. “Do a little dance with goosey, goosey gander.”

I set the table in the dining room, nicely with cloth napkins in pewter rings. I put the parmesan in its own pottery bowl, poured ice water into crystal glasses.

“Your father wouldn’t know a sudden urge if it bit him,” Mother confided when he had left us alone. “They just come over me and I want to move the sofa or put in all new roses or get on a bus heading south.” As she complained, she gathered up the silverware I’d laid at each place. In two hands she bore the utensils back to the kitchen and slowly released them on the counter beside the sink. I felt a laugh welling up—the kind you cry at the end of. I’d been doing so well, being so neutral, impervious. I couldn’t fall apart now. “Why don’t we put these back at each place where they belong,” I said.

“Of course,” she answered.

I didn’t check the table until it was time to sit down. Forks and knives lay in X’s and V’s down its center. The room hummed with a new, inscrutable code.

* * *

The Noritake apple—larger than the real fruit, cast in two pieces, shiny red vessel and shiny red lid you lifted by a thin brown stem. Along with a silver coffee service, lacquer tables, prints framed in bamboo, and twelve place settings of Noritake dishes, our mother picked it up during our tour of duty in Japan after World War II, and its two halves had survived at least a dozen moves. In the beginning it held sugar cubes at informal dinner parties when the silver service might have been construed as showing off. Then little envelopes of fake sugar came along, and it dressed them up. Now as a prop in their denouement, it brimmed with pills: hormones, vitamins, our father’s medications for Parkinson’s disease, pills for depleted thyroids, pills for elevated blood pressure, pills for depressed souls. Every shape and shade of pill, all mixed together.

But Dad had this potentially confusing situation under control. He had created two legends on file cards, gluing a sample of each pill down the left margin and connecting it by dotted line to the dosage information on the right. He propped them between the salt and pepper shakers. The first morning of my visit, he and Mother studied the cards as if for the first time. Then with a strange sort of passion, they took turns fishing around in the apple, prolonging the tactile pleasure of all those precious chemical stones sifting through their fingers. That apple promised answers—for every problem, a fix.

Despite surgery twice for diverticulitis, a bad day still doubled Dad over with abdominal pain. Two operations on the veins of his legs had left his size eleven feet so sensitive that he shuffled around in size thirteen Rockports. Our mother suffered from headaches and rampant anxiety that a cornucopia of medication barely touched.

Ten years before, we’d searched out the name of a top psychiatrist in St. Louis for her. We needed a wise man, possessed of a compassionate ear and some insight that just kept eluding us.

“Depression has nothing to do with life situation,” he decreed. “It is the result of a chemical imbalance.” The only way to correct it was with pills.

After a couple of months of them, Mother had phoned me. “My medicine’s backing up on me,” she’d said. “The doctor’s going to change me to something else.” Then the something else backed up on her. None of his something else’s seemed to work. He played his last card—electroshock therapy—calling it the ace up his sleeve.

We children protested, pleaded for a second opinion. But here again was a pat answer. Dad urged her on. When she came home from the hospital afterwards, I stayed with her for a week, and over mugs of coffee at the kitchen table, we tried to reprise the gossipy analysis we used to fall into of family members and friends. She had trouble remembering names. Between platitudes and non sequiturs, her hand wandered toward a cluster of bottles in the middle of the table. Some pills lay loose among them. Her fingers went for them reflexively, pinched them up, had lifted them to her mouth before I could stop her.

“You can’t do that,” I scolded. “You can’t just take any old pill any old time.”

Now ten years later, our parents moped and sometimes raged at their failure to be fixed, yet they still believed in the possibility of fixing. I could tell by the reverential way they assembled their allotment of pills from the Noritake apple.

I grasped each of them by the arm. “You’re sure now you’ve got the right ones?”

Of course they were.

Dad took his one at a time in the order they appeared on the file card. Mother got an extra kick out of amazing me with her ability to swallow all hers in one gulp.

The next day I cooked and froze casseroles, banana bread, beef stew. I dictated instructions to Dad on how to defrost each dish, and he wrote every step down on a pad on his clipboard—underneath the page that reminded him how to set the VCR to tape old movies from TV. He was upbeat, in his element, nailing down a difficult procedure in written steps. And I was stocking their larder: the phrase cheered him as much as the fact.

Inspired by an influx of hope, he realized that what he and Mother needed was one place in the house where they could put anything of importance they had to be able to find quickly—keys, receipts, gloves, my mother’s purse, the flashlight, Clorets, instructions on working the stove. A hoddy hole, he called it.

He proposed the top drawer of an antique cabinet in the hall, where some important things already were, and we set about emptying it of things that didn’t qualify, like old cough drops, candle stumps, wads of bent photographs, a balled up pair of pantyhose.

We were getting organized. They both vowed no more frantic searches. They would honor the principle of the hoddy hole. Make the extra effort to return things to it.

To top it off the next day, a man came out to disconnect the external alarm system. Dad could turn the key in his own door again without bringing on sirens, long distant phone calls, curious neighbors, patient police. Now he could say, “East, west, home is Best,” the way he used to, with Mother and us children bumping up behind him, and feel it was true.

It was the last evening of the visit, Mother had gone to bed early, leaving Dad and me to watch his tape of The Glenn Miller Story, a film I admitted I’d never seen. I understood right away why he enjoyed Jimmy Stewart in this role—he must have recognized his own mix of humility and plain-talking irreverence—but June Allyson as the tirelessly competent kewpie helpmate seemed a painful mockery of the bewildered woman upstairs.

Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Miller’s true love was about to conquer all, their hard work just beginning to pay off, when Dad killed the volume to say, “You know, Mommy sleeps a lot.”

I said maybe she needed to.

“She slept thirty-seven hours last week.”

I pointed out that was less than six hours a night.

“In a row.”

All at the same time? Was he sure that many? On the screen in a monolithic dirndl skirt and high heels, June Allyson tended a bundle of newborn joy.

“So what did you do for thirty-seven hours?” I asked.

“Sat in the rocker and waited for her to wake up.”

My brain jammed. Were her sleep and his resignation accidents? Shouldn’t we be trying to prevent another? What was he talking about? I was supposed to ask questions, draw the information out of him, pronounce an emergency, promise to take action. I just wanted to go home.

There was a stubborn edge to his nonchalance. It reminded me of my brother Bill in his twenties, opening his collar to show me rope burns on his neck. Or bragging about the bottle of sedatives he’d amassed which he kept on his person at all times, just in case. Had we come to that?

“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Are you interested in watching any more of this?” he asked back, then clicked the screen dark. “He gets killed in the end.”

“Could she have gotten hold of some sleeping pills?” I asked. “I didn’t see a sleeping pill on those file cards.”

“You should probably know that Mommy and I have made a suicide pact,” he said with an attempt at bravado, a last-ditch flourish.

I felt as if I’d caught them in an intimate act. Please, cover your souls, I wanted to say. Cathy would have called his bluff, asked what form the pact took, told him she would respect it, if that’s what they’d decided. Chris would have cajoled him into denying serious intent.

All I could think was, I can’t be sucked in. Tomorrow I could go home. “Are you saying it had something to do with that, her long sleep?”

He slumped in his chair, dropped his chin onto his chest. “How do I know?”

“Maybe you just lost track of the time.”

“I can’t get through to her. She’s acting all on her own.”

Thirty-seven hours. A measure of emptiness, a black hole I didn’t want to go near. “Why didn’t you push the button in the closet?” I snapped. “I think that’s the sort of emergency it’s there for.”

The day I was leaving, they were scheduled to see Mother’s latest psychiatrist, who had been prescribing antidepressants for them both. There was enough time before my flight that I could share their appointment and meet the doctor and his colleague in social work who gave each parent a half hour of talk therapy twice a month. I imagined we would all five sit down together and evaluate the situation. I knew I should mention what our father had told me the night before.

Since I was going to the airport right from the doctor’s, we took separate cars. Dad drove the LTD with its scraped fender, and I followed behind, a very slow micro-caravan of missed turns, doubling back, passing by the two-story, dingy brick storefront once, then going all the way around the block before pulling up in front. It was the sort of building where you’d expect loan companies and vacuum cleaner repair shops—a suite of frosted glass and crisp carpet, with a leggy philodendron on a Danish modern table, chairs with sagging seats, and the odor of wet wool.

I’d hated Mother’s well-reputed psychiatrist at Barnes Hospital, his height and pleasant blandness, the obligatory navy blazer and grey slacks, his calm, barely inflected voice, his made-up mind: when his drugs then his plugs failed to work on her, it was somehow her fault.

Now here was her punishment, in a suit out of the seventies with wide lapels and flared trousers and a toupee. It was so shiny and black, it lowered his forehead so drastically—what could he be thinking? I gave him the benefit of the doubt, myself the benefit of a fantasy: maybe what we had here was a simple man, unpretentious and truly wise, whose top of the head was sensitive to cold, and who just didn’t care what people thought. I was already on that flight to IAD. Getting cleared for departure.

He was the first of a number of doctors I would hear yell at our mother, assuming, I supposed, that all old people are deaf. His question was simply, “How are you today?” but I saw her flinch, put up her front, the way she did when Dad raised his voice and she was resolving to do whatever she had to do, say whatever she had to say, to get him to lower it.

“I think, better,” she said softly and he gave her cheek a couple hard pats.

“Had any more of those headaches?”

“Maybe a few. They weren’t so bad. I took some Tylenol.”

This was what he wanted to hear. Now, did I have any questions?

“What might make my mother sleep for thirty-seven hours in a row?” I asked. He didn’t want to hear that anymore than I did.

“Well, it all depends,” he said. “When exactly did you see her sleep that long?”

“I didn’t. My father told me.”

“Oh, your father,” he said, with a glance toward Mother that said We shouldn’t talk about these things around her. Then he began yelling again. “So, Mrs. Best, you’ve been feeling a little tired lately?” A nod from her. “How about if you mention that to Mr. Anderson when you see him?”

When it was Dad’s turn, the doctor approached him with the same loud cheeriness, but Dad would never have said that he was fine, Dad was always terrible. He got angry with Mother if she answered a casual inquiry into their health too automatically, without painting the extent of his misery. He claimed that he wanted people to know all about it so they wouldn’t expect anything of him anymore. He said he wanted to be left alone. He was polishing the last chapter in the story of his life—a man dedicated to public service, elected mayor by a landslide, who had to step down in the middle of his second term because the obstinate stupidity of his enemies broke his health. Now half-crippled with Parkinson’s disease and chronic pain, he was the brigadier general of suffering, the mayor of unjust fate.

We still had to get through the half hour with the caring Mr. Anderson, in his shirtsleeves, argyle vest, and scuffed shoes. He had plenty of real hair and down-to-earth cowlicks and faith in positive thinking.

Were they stopping to smell the roses? he wanted to know. Were they turning off sad memories? Were they giving each other and themselves little treats? Yes, they said. Yes. They seemed pleased. The correct answer was more important than an accurate one.

The performance continued. Who was responsible for Bill’s health? Not Evelyn. Who was responsible for Evelyn’s sorrow? Not Bill. Mother agreed to think better of herself, then shed some obliging tears.

“Who is the one person in charge of your happiness?” Mr. Anderson asked her. That was a difficult one. Was she considering the expert over at Barnes, or his Medicare-bred version in the next room? Or was she tempted to try to explain how entangled our father’s being was with her own? “It’s yourself, isn’t it, Mrs. Best?” coached Mr. Anderson. Mother conceded another yes.

Dad agreed to listen more tolerantly to Mother’s feelings, then tried to explain his new concept of the hoddy hole. Mr. Anderson moved the discussion to the value of making lists. Finally Dad confessed, “We tend to wait a little long or cut a little short and then it all goes kerflooey.”

By the time I brought up the question of Mother’s thirty-seven-hour sleep, it seemed irrelevant at best, at worst, perverse, an attempt to spoil the pleasant mood that had filled in the cracks in the room. Mr. Anderson said something tactful and caring and jotted down the information. I considered asking him if he knew anything about a suicide pact, but then decided that would also be perverse. I decided I shouldn’t be such a snob. Unfashionable clothing did not brand a person incapable of helping an elderly couple. They didn’t need a superhuman intervention. They just needed mottoes enough to make it through each day.

I put away the thought that our mother might have been trying to die, that our father might have been willing to let her. When I reported the incident to Cathy and Chris, it had lost much of its solidity even as a probable accident.

I put away the fact that our parents were dying, and with them would go parts of ourselves. I put away all the doubts that start clamoring as life withers and the layers peel away from its vacant heart. I boarded my flight back to Washington, DC, with the same deep breath, the same righteous relief I’d always felt after a visit—well, that’s out of the way for a while.

In less than a month, our mother would have to be hospitalized for seeing prostitutes with white-painted faces and cats chewing up the bedclothes and defecating in her food. She would claim not to know our father, and, hurt and confused to the core, he would begin to refer to her as somebody, as in “Somebody doesn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore,” or as him, as in “We’re having him watched,” or even, inexplicably, as Max, as in “You can tell from the pictures that Max is dead.”

After dozens of impossible phone calls, Chris and Cathy would take turns flying out to St. Louis. Finally Chris would arrange to have them airlifted to an Air Force base in North Carolina, where he would pick them up and drive them the four hours to his home in Durham, where they could be tested by doctors he was familiar with, our mother’s drugs could be monitored, the antidepressants she’d been popping at whim could be cut back, and our father could get some rest.

Cathy and I would come down to help with their various medical appointments, after which she and I would transport them to her house in Virginia for several weeks, while Chris and I flew back to Illinois to pack up their house and get it on the market. At the same time we would put in their application to a new facility in Durham for something called continuing life care. We were executing plans as fast as we could devise them.

Cathy was driving the four of us toward Virginia, Dad in the shotgun seat, when he attempted clarity: “I’m going to tell you now because I always forget: Mommy has two sicknesses and I have one other diagnosis. Mommy’s is Alzheimer’s and the other is what, sweetie?” When Mother didn’t answer but stared resolutely out her back window, our father and commanding officer tried to rally us. “We’re going to lick this all by standing together,” he said in a thin voice. “The only difficulty is, am I here and is Mommy there?”

What happens when one’s larger-than-life military parents–disciplined, distinguished, exacting–begin sliding out of control?  The General struggles to maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson’s disease; his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves of the perfect solution:  an upscale retirement community.  But as soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.

Entering the Blue Stone asks us to take a skeptical look at our need to spin heroic narratives with happy endings.  It suggests letting go of our persistent orientation to the future in order to appreciate what is here and now.  Rather than taking a how-to approach to the increasingly common experience of caring for diminished parents, it offers a unique perspective on this challenge and weaves a very special form of support. It would make a splendid, thought-provoking choice for many book groups.

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Arlington, Virginia

October 5, 1993

2:00 p.m.

He pinched her left ring finger between his thumb and forefinger, pressing it first onto a pad of black ink then rolling it onto the official card. His fingers were thick as sausages, nails clipped in neat lines, dark hair sprouting above and below the knuckles. Bridget watched as the ink seeped into her skin, like a permanent stain with a sharp chemical smell.

He led her towards a locked metal door and swiped his badge. The door clicked open on a carpeted hallway. At the end, they entered a formal sitting room with blue chintz armchairs, mahogany end tables, and hunting scenes framed in brushed gold. The two large windows were draped with plush burgundy and gauzy liners that shrouded much of the view. A woman in a brown suit stepped forward from the curtains. Bridget jumped back.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” the woman said. Neatly drawn maroon lines highlighted the curves of her lips. Her hair was whitish-blond, clipped into a page-boy. “Special Agent Chase,” she said, extending her hand. “Agent Wilkinson will administer the polygraph. I’m here to monitor the equipment and data.”

A thicket of colored wire crowned a large black box on the floor. Another box with needles and knobs sat on the table, and next to that was a printer with a thick roll of green paper neatly scrolled in the front.

“All that?” Bridget asked, her voice catching.

“We’ll walk you through it.” Wilkinson pointed her to a seat facing the window. All she could see was the stone tip of the Washington Monument in the distance.

“We’ll start with the easy questions first,” Wilkinson said. He knelt beside her and taped a red wire probe to her right forearm. “We have to establish a base line.” He placed green wires on her left arm and looped them into a pad on her fingertip. She avoided looking at the wires and studied the faint blue-green streaks of her veins. Corpsmen had trouble drawing her blood. Maybe the deepness of her veins would skew the readings. A trickle of sweat leaked down her back. She tapped the armrest with her right finger, and the wires began to shake.

Wilkinson noticed the tapping before she did. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everyone’s nervous during these.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said too quickly.

Wilkinson waited for her to look at him then offered a half-smile. “Nerves are usually a good sign.”

At his request, she removed her jacket and unbuttoned the top button of her uniform blouse. He pressed cool metal disks against the flesh along the rim of her bra. He taped another probe to her ankle and slid a cuff up over her right bicep. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest.

Wilkinson stood. “I have to ask you to keep your elbows in the corner of the armrests. The slightest movement can cause interference.”

He stepped back behind the chair out of her line of sight. “We’re ready,” he said. He did not step back into view. He asked for her full name, nickname, address, date and place of birth.

She recited the facts dutifully: “Bridget Jean Donovan. Arlington Gateway, Apartment 1127, Arlington, Virginia. March 4, 1968. Boston, Massachusetts.”

He turned a page. “When did you join the Navy?”

“I was sworn into the Naval Academy July 5, 1986, commissioned May 25, 1990.”

“One of the first classes of women?”

“The tenth.”

“That must’ve been tough.”

“You could say that.” She gauged the silence. His voice had been friendly, almost inviting. People often wanted to hear more about the Academy, women especially, but she didn’t like to talk about it. A vision of Audrey flashed in her mind, and she pressed her eyes shut at the memory.

“At the Naval Academy you had an honor code, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” came out of her mouth before she could stop it. Academy memories always spawned the “sir” response. She reminded herself that the Navy Investigative Service agents were not her superiors. She owed answers and professional courtesy—that was all.

“Can you repeat the Honor Code for me?”

“Midshipmen do not lie, cheat, or steal.”

“Did you ever violate the Honor Code?” he asked.

Her heart fluttered and the wires attached to her arm began to quiver. The real question, she thought, wasn’t whether she had violated the code, but why. She inhaled a deep breath and let it out long and slow. “Yes, I did.”

“How many times?” Wilkinson asked.

“I got some help on a computer program once. Really, I copied a guy’s work. I didn’t understand it, and I passed it in.”

He pressed on. “Outside of this occasion with the computer program did you always follow the honor code?”

She felt her heart shrink. Honor. The word still had a powerful, instinctual hold. “The computer incident is the one I remember most precisely,” she said. Of course, that was a lie. Her right pointer quivered, and she pressed it into the armrest.

Wilkinson tapped a pencil on his clipboard. Chase unscrolled more paper.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Bridget jerked her head towards Wilkinson. Her private life had no business in the investigation. “No,” she said.

“I see.” Wilkinson stopped tapping his pencil and cleared his throat. “Did you know Audrey Richards?”

Bridget swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“How did you know her?”

“She was my roommate at the Academy for four years.”

“Were you aware that Lieutenant Richards was trying to qualify as one of the first female pilots in a combat squadron?”

“Yes.”

“When did you last talk with her?”

“A year ago, maybe a little longer.”

“A year?”

“She was in flight training. She was busy.”

“No other communication?”

“No.”

“No letters?”

Bridget mustered some indignation. “We’d been out of touch. We were both busy with our own careers.”

“Did you consider her a friend?”

“Yes, I do. I mean I did. I do. I don’t know.”

“Captain Fangmeyer said you were assigned to the news desk following the first report of the accident?”

“That’s correct.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“It was good to work.”

“Did you have any concerns about anything you saw or heard?”

She hesitated. “My friend was dead. I had a lot of concerns. I still do.”

“You know there’s been a series of leaks to the press about the investigation.”

“I’ve seen the reports.”

“Do you have any information about that?”

She stayed silent.

“The Washington Post ran an article recently that quoted a ‘defense official’—do you know who that person might be?”

Again, she made no answer.

“Lieutenant Donovan, are you aware that it’s against Navy policy to provide personnel documents to the media, especially ones that contain classified or sensitive information?”

She snorted. “I helped write the guidelines on Navy media inquiries. My job is to speak to the press.”

“I’m going to ask you again. Do you have any information about the material that was supplied to a Mr. Gleason?”

She lifted her hands, and the wires dangled. “Is that really all you want to know?”

“Please, your hands,” Wilkinson said.

“Why are reporters the only people interested in what caused the accident?”

“The Navy’s had investigators on the case from the beginning,” he said.

“No one’s asked me for information.”

“Do you know something?”

Somewhere in the building a compressor kicked on and the radiator vents hissed. Wilkinson inhaled with a wheeze. The thing about silence was that it was never really silent. In those moments when the world fell quiet, memories rushed through her head in whispers that seemed louder than shouts. Bridget didn’t move. She tried not to breathe. Finally she said, “My lawyer advised me not to answer any questions about the case without him present.”

“Does your lawyer know you’re under suspicion for releasing official Navy documents and conspiring to interfere with an investigation?”

“What?”

Wilkinson stepped in front of her. “We’re conducting an investigation into a security breach. Cases involving the release of classified information are required by law to be investigated. They are punishable by court martial.”

“There was nothing classified in the newspaper.”

“The entire Richards file is classified.”

Bridget looked towards Wilkinson, but he dodged back out of view. Her heart was beating wildly. “Since when?”

“This morning.”

“I see.” Bridget sank back into the chair. “Are we finished yet?”

“With the preliminary questions. We’ll need to see you again. You’re not to leave the metropolitan area without notice, and you must be accessible by phone.”

Wilkinson knelt in front of her and untaped the wires. Chase bent over the machine, extracting the coil of paper. “I’m going to give you some advice,” Wilkinson said. “These preliminary readings.” He gestured to Chase, who unrolled the paper, a long pink graph like a cardiogram read-out, and laid it on the table. Wilkinson pointed at the peaks and quivering lines. The entire sheet looked as though it were filled with parabolic sine curves. Up, down, up down. “This is classic text-book. We don’t see it like this too often. If you’ve done something wrong”—he paused and smoothed back his hair—“you won’t get away with it.”

Bridget looked him in the eye. “The one who got away with something is still out there.”

He shook his head. “You’re a terrible liar.”

–Edward W. Jewell, CDR, USN (ret)

I don’t know but I’ve been told, Naval Academy novels are made of gold…at least Black Wings seems that way.

–Alan Cheuse, author of Songs of Slaves in the Desert

Part thriller, part whodunit, I couldn’t put the book down.

–Todd Balf, The Last Jungle, The Lost River.

Told in taut, fast-moving chapters, Jabs’s suspenseful novel rings with authenticity.

– Jon Peede, publisher, Virginia Quarterly Review.

A chilling, fast-paced, and intelligent story, wonderfully written.

–Susan Shreeve, A Student of Living Things.

Compelling mystery told with the authenticity that can come only from an author who knows the territory.  A terrific addition to current, military fiction.

–Tom Young, Silent Enemy, the Mullah’s Storm.

Losing the connection with your child is one of the most horrifying things many mothers will face.

–The Midwest Book Review

The Mother-Daughter Show is a wise and lively look at real grown-ups, alleged adults, and women-in-training.  The characters are wonderfully rendered and the setting, the ultimate, upscale private school in Washington, D.C., is perfect for author Natalie Wexler’s satire.

- Susan Isaacs, New York Times bestselling author of As Husbands Go, Past Perfect, and others

The Barton Friends School’s mother daughter musical is the stage on which the wildly talented Natalie Wexler plays out the foibles, insecurities, and imperfections that plague us all. Every page of this very contemporary page-turner is written with a heartfelt, humorous touch, with characters so vivid and real, they came to feel like friends I’d known forever. I loved the satirical look at the world of private schools, and I cherished the way it inspired me to feel: that ultimately it takes all of us, opening our hearts and turning to each other, for the show of life to go on.

- Rachel Simon, New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Beautiful Girl, Riding the Bus With My Sister, and others

A terrific read. Told from the alternating points of view of Amanda, Susan and Barb, the book touches the dangerous heart of the mother-daughter relationship and captures an intimate portrait of these flawed and entirely sympathetic mothers.  It’s funny and heartbreaking and so credible I laughed out loud.  But oh, do I remember this story as my own!

-Susan Richards Shreve, author of Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven, A Student of Living Things, and others

These housewives of D.C. may be privileged, but they are nonetheless sandwiched between the rocks of their ailing mothers’ needs and the hard places of their unreadable daughters’ imminent graduation. Toss in a few marital and professional insecurities, and who can blame them if some of their stress gets displaced onto the planning of the annual musical? Witty and wise throughout, The Mother Daughter Show highlights Natalie Wexler’s keen perceptions—of family dynamics, social mores, and professional subcultures—and reminds us of life’s one constant: change.

- Erika Dreifus, author of Quiet Americans

A fish out of water memoir about realizing when one is in too deep and struggling to survive,

–Midwest Book Review

Mark Saunders is the classic American innocent abroad, part clueless tourist, part critic, and always a lover. Humor crackles on every page.

–Foster Church , Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Discovering Main Street

Humorist Mark Saunders has invigorated the memoir form by delivering clever, tightly written comic episodes with hilarity and heart. You’ll laugh out loud at these lovable, yet often inept, mid-life expats and their eccentric pets. A breezy, delightful read!

–Kathleen Gerard, award-winning author of In Transit

If you treasure great American humorists—be they Thurber or Perelman, Barry or Sedaris—you’ll love Mark Saunders. His story is as witty as it is wise, a full-course feast for head, heart and funny bone.

–Rich Rubin, Playwright

Thank you, Mark Saunders, for being the one to break out of the rat race, soar off the cliff into the unknown, and live to tell us this heartwarming and hilarious true story. This is one smart, funny, real-life adventure.

–Cynthia Whitcomb, TV Writer and Playwright

January 8th

P U B L I S H E D B O O K ‘ B L ACK W INGS’

Naval Academy grad spins a novel of military intrigue

By Irene Bowers

Correspondent

BAYSIDE

In the rigidly defined world of a fictionalized 1980s-era U.S. Naval Academy, a female underclassman struggles to live up to an honor code that allows no middle ground.

After graduation, the now junior officer is tasked with handling media relations on a story that may mask a scandal and finds that the military model of justice is still subject to error and possible abuse.

Intrigue follows in the debut novel “Black Wings,” written by Virginia Beach resident and 1988 Naval Academy graduate Kathleen Toomey Jabs, who traces the challenges and choices of the book’s protagonist, Lt. Bridget Donovan, with a deft hand.

Jabs, who graduated from the academy 12 years after females were integrated, is also a Naval reservist and serves as a public affairs officer for the Joint Staff. She said her military career allowed her to write the novel with authenticity.

“However, it is entirely fictional,” she said, noting that none of the events or characters are based on actual people, places or incidents. “It started as several short stories in a writing program in 2001, where my professor would say it was a novel in the making.” Later, as a Master of Fine Arts candidate at George Mason University, Jabs was inspired to turn her short stories into a 500-page novel. “Then it went out into the real world of publishing,” she said. “After multiple revisions, I was told it wouldn’t work, so I put the thing in a drawer and moved on.”

A busy mother of two teenagers and wife of an active-duty military member, Jabs ignored the story until she was contacted in 2008 by a former Naval Academy instructor, who had started a publishing house.

“She read it and suggested that I rewrite it as a mystery,” said the Thoroughgood resident, who then became a writing sleuth of sorts at home.

“There were days when I had it spread around the floor like a puzzle, trying to figure out how to add tension and still make sense of it.” The result is a mystery that goes beyond a whodunit. After the introduction of a suspicious death on an aircraft carrier, readers are carried into the insular world of the Naval Academy community on black wings, a fictitious blackening of aviator pilot’s gold wings insignia.

An ominous warning sign, black wings overshadow the fine line between justice and vengeance, integrity and dishonor. Released in December by Fuze Publishing, “Black Wings” is billed as “an intelligent, thought provoking novel.”

“It’s thrilling and slightly nerve-wracking to be published,” said Jabs, who is contemplating a sequel for her main character. One benefit, she admits, was holiday gift-giving.

“It made Christmas for my family easy – they all got a copy.”

“Black Wings” is available at www.fuzepublishing.com or on www.amazon.com.

Irene Bowers, bowersi@aol.com

IRENE BOWERS

Kathleen Toomey Jabs, a 1988 Naval Academy graduate, is a mother of two teenagers and a Navy wife. She calls her novel, “Black Wings,” authentic but “entirely fictional.”

“We’ll start with the easy questions first,” Wilkinson said. He knelt beside her and taped a red wire probe to her right forearm. “We have to establish a base line.” He placed green wires on her left arm and looped them into a pad on her fingertip attached to the lie detector machine. She avoided looking at the wires and studied the faint blue-green streaks of her veins. A trickle of sweat leaked down her back. She tapped the armrest with her right finger, and the wires began to shake.

Wilkinson noticed the tapping before she did. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everyone’s nervous during these.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said too quickly.

Wilkinson waited for her to look at him then offered a half-smile. “Nerves are usually a good sign.”

At his request, she removed her jacket and unbuttoned the top button of her uniform blouse. He pressed cool metal disks against the flesh along the rim of her bra. He taped another probe to her ankle and slid a cuff up over her right bicep. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest.

Wilkinson stood. “I’ll have to ask you to keep your elbows in the corner of the armrests. Even the slightest movement can cause interference.”

He stepped back behind the chair out of her line of sight. “We’re ready,” he said. He did not step back into view. He asked for her full name, nickname, address, date and place of birth.

She recited the facts dutifully: “Bridget Jean Donovan. Arlington Gateway, Apartment 1127, Arlington, Virginia. March 4, 1968. Boston, Massachusetts.”

He turned a page. “When did you join the Navy?”

“I was sworn into the Naval Academy July 5, 1986, commissioned May 25, 1990.”

“One of the first classes of women?”

“The tenth.”

“That must’ve been tough.”

“You could say that.” She gauged the silence. His voice had been friendly, almost inviting. People often wanted to hear more about the Academy, women especially, but she didn’t like to talk about it. A vision of Audrey flashed in her mind, and she pressed her eyes shut at the memory.

“At the Naval Academy you had an honor code, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” came out of her mouth before she could stop it. Academy memories always spawned the “sir” response. She reminded herself that the Navy Investigative Service agents were not her superiors. She owed answers and professional courtesy—that was all.

“Can you repeat the Honor Code for me?”

“Midshipmen do not lie, cheat, or steal.”

“Did you ever violate the Honor Code?” he asked.

Her heart fluttered and the wires attached to her arm began to quiver. The real question, she thought, wasn’t whether she had violated the code, but why. She inhaled a deep breath and let it out long and slow. “Yes, I did.”

“How many times?” Wilkinson asked.

“I got some help on a computer program once. Really, I copied a guy’s work. I didn’t understand it, and I passed it in.”

He pressed on. “Outside of this occasion with the computer program did you always follow the honor code?”

She felt her heart shrink. Honor. The word still had a powerful, instinctual hold. “The computer incident is the one I remember most precisely,” she said. Of course, that was a lie.

Kathleen talked with Fuze about her real-life tenure at the United States Naval Academy in the 1980’s.

Why did you decide to apply to the United States Naval Academy?

I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do after high school. I was very interested in math and ocean science, and I wanted to travel. I happened to pick up a USNA catalog, and I found myself intrigued by the challenge and the opportunities the Navy offered.

What was the most challenging thing about being a woman at the USNA in the eighties?

The scarcity of other women! My class started with about 110 women–out of 1100 midshipmen overall–and finished with about 80. We were scattered throughout the brigade and with all the academic and athletic requirements, there wasn’t always the opportunity to be around other women who were senior, junior, or peers.  Because of the number of rules and time constraints and the absence of phones or computers back then, the sense of isolation could be overwhelming at times.

What was the most rewarding experience while at the Naval Academy?

I went on an English Honor Seminar trip to Ireland the summer before my senior year. We spent the year reading Ulysses, then traveled to Dublin for a week to retrace James Joyce’s steps, and finally went over to Sligo for a seminar on the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was an amazing learning experience.

What do you think has changed the most in terms of the role of women in the military?

The sheer number of opportunities available to women has meant that females in the military are no longer anomalies.  The Navy has opened up many fields that were restricted – ships, combat aircraft, now submarines. There are very few places in the Navy where you don’t see women. While there are still “firsts” for women, gender is no longer the focus.

Why should people attend the USNA

Attending USNA tests a midshipman in every way possible – mental, physical and emotional – and teaches one’s limits and capacity.  The service Academy environment is purposefully stressful, but it builds confidence to meet challenges and to work through problems.

Are you glad that you went to the Academy?

I wouldn’t trade my time at the Academy because it’s made me who I am today. I didn’t always enjoy it, and I would’ve done some things differently, but I appreciate the experience.

Are you still connected to classmates you met while a midshipman?

There is definitely a bond among classmates and then a stronger one among graduates. I’ve recently started to attend Naval Academy Alumni breakfasts in my area and re-connected with some women from different classes. We have an instant comfort level and understanding of what we’ve all endured and survived.

You currently hold the rank of Captain.  Why did you stay in the Navy for your career?

I got out of the Navy after six years, but I missed it. My husband is active duty Navy so we were still around the military. I decided to join the Navy reserve, so I could still participate to some extent in the national security arena and maintain a career. When I moved into the public affairs field, I found a specialty that I really enjoyed.

Would you recommend the USNA to women today?

Yes, and I would also recommend that while they are there, join a sports team or another type of activity with a lot of women. My knees went bad, so I wasn’t able to stay with track during my tenure. I participated in club sports, but it wasn’t the same level of sharing and commitment. There is something reaffirming about bonding with women because many of the experiences at the Academy highlight gender.  Looking back, I realize I was hungry for female role models.  Events as seemingly simple as a Homecoming Dance or a date are much more complicated when you’re a female midshipman. The tension between being one of the guys but also not made boundaries very fluid, especially at an age where you’re very young and vulnerable.

What do you hope might change in the future?

I would like to continue to see the expansion in the military and in the larger government of better ways to blend parenthood and service. There are so many talented Academy graduates and military veterans who would love to be of service, but it’s very difficult balancing parenting demands and full-time careers. As a country, we need to find creative ways of tapping into the incredible potential of women, while at the same time allowing men and women the space and time to raise a family.