Monthly Archives: March 2013

Rite 13, Pt. 1

Rite 13. It sounds ominous, doesn’t it? It’s way scarier than you can possibly imagine.

A few months ago I was sitting in church, innocently zoning out in my pew. The next thing I knew a bunch of kids I’ve known since they were toddlers were called to the front along with their parents. What followed was the single most devastating ritual I’ve ever witnessed. I began weeping uncontrollably. I felt keen empathy for the poor parents, many of them good friends of mine, who were standing at the altar with their children, completely exposed as they dissolved into quivering puddles of tears. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to make the sanctuary reverberate with my ugly racking sobs.

What I was witnessing was “Rite 13,” a relatively new tradition and liturgy created in the eighties by sadistic Episcopalians in Durham, North Carolina to torture unsuspecting parents of adolescents everywhere. (As if we didn’t have enough to deal with already). It was conceived as a Protestant version of the bar and bat mitzvah of the Jewish tradition. This rite of passage has been adopted by many churches, including the Presbyterian church my family attends. Around their 13th birthday, youth are invited to participate in this liturgy with their parents.

This past Sunday my almost 13 year old son went through his Rite 13. I’ve been dreading this Sunday ever since witnessing the first one. Not wanting to make a complete spectacle of myself and embarrass him in front of all of his peers and the entire church with my ugly crying, I trained for this Sunday like it was an Olympic sport. Here’s how it all went down:

Over breakfast we discussed strategy. My son offered to piss me off so I wouldn’t cry.

“OK. That shouldn’t be too hard,” I readily agreed.

He wasn’t convinced. He kept narrowing his eyes at me and saying, “You’re not going to cry, right?”

I cracked my knuckles and said, “Nope. It’s going to be fine. I’ve got this.”

I told him he had to look respectable. I pulled out a pair of wrinkled khakis from the pile of clean, but unfolded laundry. They were horribly stained! I dug around his drawers and found an alternative: a pair of navy blue pants.

“Here, put these on!”

“Why can’t I just wear jeans?”

“PUT THEM ON!” I barked shrilly.

“Well, actually, I CAN’T, because the button’s missing.”

For the next fifteen minutes I hunted high and low for a needle. For the next ten minutes I tried to thread the needle. I swear it would have been easier to cram a camel through the eye of that needle. For the next ten minutes after that, my husband tried to thread the needle. Finally, I snatched it back from him, managed to thread the needle, find an extra button, and sew it on. We were now running late.

“OK! THEY’RE DONE! NOW PUT THEM ON, QUICK!” (Yes, from that point on, I really was speaking in all CAPS).

I ran out to the car where the rest of my family was already patiently waiting.

“WHERE IS HE?!” I asked impatiently as we waited and waited for the boy/man of the hour to make his appearance in his newly-mended pants.

My husband got out of the car and went back into the house to figure out what was taking him so long.

They both emerged from the house looking peevish and disgruntled.

“He can’t get it buttoned,” he grumbled.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the spare button I had found might not actually fit into the buttonhole.

“I’LL DO IT FOR YOU AS SOON AS WE GET THERE. NOW LET’S GO!”

We pulled into the parking lot and I managed to force the too-large button into the hole. (Are we detecting a recurring theme here)? I stood back to look at my son and only then realized that the size 16 pants he was wearing were at least two inches too short for his gangly legs. (Yep. There it is again).

“GAH!”

We made it in time for the rehearsal. The time had finally come to put my months of training to the test…

Friday: Rite 13, Pt. 2

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Roooaaar!/Baaaaaa!

“In like a lion, out like a lamb.”

A week ago today we woke up to no power and this:

Can you see the tree that fell in our backyard in this next picture?

School and work were cancelled! It was cold, but cozy to be hunkered down with everyone on that first day.

To their great chagrin, I insisted that the kids wear helmets to play out in the snow. There were trees down everywhere and I kept hearing the ominous creaking and cracking of limbs:

That night my oldest son said he would “test” his hardiness by roughing it in his own cold bedroom. My husband did the same. The sybarites among us, (including me), camped out in the living room with the gas fireplace going:

By the next morning the lack of power was getting really old. My husband and I had both done huge separate shopping trips the day the power went out to stock up for the storm. We made a pathetic attempt to salvage some of the food:

My husband tried valiantly to cut up a huge tree that was blocking our road with a rusty old saw. A neighbor with a chainsaw took pity on him and helped him clear the path:

Two and a half days without power left us feeling like primitive cave dwellers.

A week later, the bees are buzzing, the birds are chirping, and our yard looks like this:

What a miracle that this was hiding underneath all that snow!

Here’s that tree that fell. Over the weekend another kind neighbor with a chainsaw surprised us by performing this act of mercy:

I’m so thankful for good neighbors, a warm house, electricity, and signs of SPRING!

Animal Ethics

Here’s another true story that illustrates the complexities of animal ethics:

IMG_0660Last year the Helping Hands kids and I took a field trip to Waynesboro to visit the Wildlife Center of Virginia. This wildlife hospital provides “health care, often on an emergency basis, to native wildlife.” The good veterinarians and staff of the Wildlife Center treat any animal that’s brought to the center. You can take a tour of the facilities and see all sort of wild animals from opossums to bears in all different stages of recovery.

About two dozen permanent animal residents have been identified as “Education Animals.” Ironically, these are the animals that have flunked their survival test, otherwise known as “live prey training,” or more simply as: “Mouse School.” One of the wildlife educators explained it this way…Let’s say an owl is treated for a broken wing. Once it recovers from its injury, it is placed in an enclosure for a couple days with a live mouse. In the morning, if the mouse has been eaten, the owl is deemed ready for release back into the wild.

Clearly, I’m a perverse person, because I just had to ask, “But don’t you sometimes treat mice that are brought to the center?”

The educator acknowledged that mice were indeed sometimes treated as patients. He assured us though, that no rehabilitated mice would ever be used as bait in “Mouse School.” These mice are bought from a company that breeds mice specifically for research and food. He acknowledged that the vets and staff of the Wildlife Center do wrestle with the ethics of this.

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“It’s alive!”

Two people who are very close to me have asked if  “A Snake Tale” is a true story. The short answer is: NO!

On the other hand, a lot of the story details were drawn from life. Most significantly, all the gory information in the story about how snakes are fed is absolutely true…These details gave a framework to the story that struck me as a good way to explore some interesting ethical questions.

Here are some other things that are true:

  • Our landlord’s daughter in Carrboro, NC had an albino snake named Orangina that she asked us to take care of, but it was an albino corn snake rather than a Burmese python. I insisted that they find someone else to take care of her, because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to feed her. All that year I kept accidentally pulling out dead frozen mice in Ziploc bags that had been tucked away into the back recesses of the freezer.
  • I was a docent at a science museum when I was in college. There were two boa constrictors on display at the museum. In the basement of the museum was a tankful of mice who were fated to one day become dinner for these snakes. In my head I can still hear the squeak of their wheel as they endlessly ran by the harsh yellow light of a bare bulb. A coworker told me that she came to work one morning after the snakes had been fed the night before, and she saw that they hadn’t eaten one of the mice. The mouse was nestled comfortably, fast asleep in the coil of one of the snakes. I’m not sure what actually happened to that mouse, but I think we can all agree on what should have happened. If there is even a shred of justice in this world, that mouse would have been shipped off to live out the rest of its natural life vacationing on some breezy, warm isle with a frozen margarita in one paw and a trashy novel in the other, and being waited on by attentive cabana boys.
  • In Carrboro we had a kind, but slightly kooky neighbor (this could describe a large percentage of the population of that lovable town, by the way). One Sunday afternoon he knocked on our door. He told us that he had just killed a copperhead snake and that the kids should come over to see it so that they would know what to look out for. As we crossed the street to his house he explained to us that to make sure it was a copperhead and not an innocuous look alike, he had held out a leather gardening glove toward its head. It had struck at the glove and he saw venom dripping. At that point he whacked it with a shovel, almost but not quite decapitating it. He warned us in advance that it was not going to be a pretty sight. In his backyard we saw the bloody remains of the copperhead. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it, but our neighbor cheerfully said, “You can touch it, kids!” To my absolute horror, all three of my children rushed up to pet the bloody dead snake. Suddenly, my son Nicholas shouted, “It’s alive!” I shrieked as I saw that the snake had indeed started to wriggle. The neighbor assured me that it was in fact dead, and that it was a primitive nerve reflex that kept the snake’s body moving even after death. I was telling this story to a friend, who told me that he had once completely severed the head off a snake and its jaws continued to open and close for a few horrific minutes. I’ve since learned that you can get bitten by a dead snake!
  • Burmese pythons are often kept as pets. They have become an invasive species in the Florida Everglades, probably because pet snakes were released or escaped into the wild. They get so large they have been known to eat prey as large as alligator or deer.
  • My sister called to tell me that after reading my story she thinks I’m a creepy sicko. Hello?! FICTION?!
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A Snake Tale

If you’ve been reading “A Snake Tale” or would like to read it, the story in its entirety now resides on its own separate page. You can access it through the bar at the top.