Changing, and not so changing, times

New Year's Day, 2025. Over the holidays, those holidays that remind us to be grateful, to give, to BE LIGHT, I remembered an old personal essay-poem written years ago. Festival of Plenty — seems like I wrote it yesterday, not twenty-five years ago..

It’s funny. When I wrote those words, things looked different. For one thing, TCU couldn’t buy a win in those days. In the meantime, my Horned Frogs have had some pretty good years! TCU beat Wisconsin in the 2011 Rose Bowl. In 2023, we may have lost to Georgia in a blowout in the national championship game. But hey! We were in the national championship game! Something neither Ohio State nor Michigan could say that year.

Whether TCU wins or loses, TCU fans still talk about recipes and kids and grandkids and new projects. We love our Frogs, but everything in moderation. For the most part, those of us wearing LaDainian Tomlinson’s #5 Jersey these many years later, love the people we’re with more than the game. Although we do love our football.

In 2000 when I wrote Festival of Plenty, my mom was in great health. She worked in her yard, went for vigorous aerobic hikes, and could beat me easily at Canasta. She had only recently moved to Pennsylvania. We had established our indie publishing house Exclamation! Publishers, as well as Center for White Rose Studies. She played an integral role in both companies. Long-time customers will remember her cheerful assistance.

By March 2009, she could not subtract 7 from 100 and come up with the right answer. She stayed in bed most of the day, uninterested in life, wishing to die, her dementia and related psychosis having robbed our family of the person we cherished. Leaving behind a mere shell of a body.

When I wrote Festival of Plenty in 2000, we lived in Pennsylvania. With four distinct seasons, mountains of snow, and 400+ years of history. In April 2007, we lived in Utah, where her dementia was first noticeable. May 2009, we moved to California for medical help that was unavailable in Utah. California, with gorgeous beaches, sun-drenched days, and places that still have that new car smell. But where my mom worked as hard as she could to hang onto reality.

When I wrote Festival of Plenty, our White Rose work was in its infancy. By 2007, we were steeped in the story, wiser about the people we write about, and perhaps a touch cynical about the historical revisionism the story has been subjected to, something we were blissfully unaware of in 2000. By 2009, I was struggling to take care of mom and continue our White Rose work.

In 2000, we were surer of the future, surer of faith, surer of foot, surer of goal. And unsure about direction and purpose. By 2009, I was surer of direction, purpose, and friends who are in my corner, and less sure of the future and faith.

In 2013, my mom could fight no longer. After six months of hell, that hell where a person with dementia hovers between reality and insanity, she stopped eating. And died, just like that. I had one final glorious moment with her, three days before she died. This happens often with dementia patients. Shortly before death, they have one day of lucid thought where they know everyone and remember people they hold dear. Sometimes they’ll cook a special meal, other times they’ll get out a photo album and tell long-forgotten stories. With me, my mom called me by name and said she loved me.

From 2014 through 2021, I had to rebuild my shattered life. Several times while caring for mom, we were a week away from homelessness. Scary. So I took a job I loved, in Las Vegas, with a company I hated, just to rebuild my bank account. I did as much as I could with White Rose, but working for a toxic boss 70-80 hours a week, that was hard.

When I’d had more than I could bear, I took stock of where I was, what I was doing, and what was happening to my insides. In January 2022, I decided to move back to Pennsylvania where life is slower, people form community, and our White Rose work had been birthed.

In April 2022, I sold my beautiful home in Vegas, a home that had been safe haven when I needed to cry or scream. Packed everything into containers and headed for Gettysburg, a place in Pennsylvania I had never lived, but that embodies the search for justice, the willingness to die if necessary to ensure that civil rights, that human rights, are not trampled underfoot. President Lincoln’s speech is predecessor to White Rose leaflets.

As he said, and as they wrote, we are not done yet, there is still much to do.

In 2000, the future looked bright. 01/01/2000 had not crashed our computer systems. 9/11 had not yet destroyed our innocence as a nation. Clinton had balanced the national budget for the first time in forever. It appeared that Watergate and cynicism about government was ancient history. We also seemed to be making good progress in the fight against fascism, neo-Nazism, and the Soviet threat. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Germany was reunified, and it looked like Russia was going to finally be a democracy.

Those were days of hope, not just for our White Rose work, but for the world.

And then, times changed fast. Too fast. Innocence came crashing down around us as the Twin Towers fell, as the Pentagon was attacked, as courageous passengers took a plane down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania before terrorists could destroy the White House. And then that old Watergate cynicism set back in as George W. Bush made up reasons to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, as Bush tax cuts and deregulation destroyed the economy.

Obama’s election showed us that racism, neo-Nazism, was alive and well in these United States. We witnessed a resurgence of hate crimes, of racist and antisemitic tropes we’d thought had been put behind us. Times changed, and not for the better.

And yet. And yet. Those concluding paragraphs from Festival of Plenty still ring true, as true today as on a chilly, colorful Thanksgiving day in Pennsylvania in the year 2000:

Thankful for the hope of peace, our time to live, a challenge to meet. For the land of milk and honey that can be.

Thankful to be alive – despite worry, stress, disappointment, sickness, sorrow, and all that makes me anxious – thankful for bubblegum and vanilla ice cream, Rabbi and Mom, books and poetry, April and December.

COMMENT WORTH KEEPING

This is beautiful 🫂🫂🫂

--Sodak, January 10, 2025.

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You can order our White Rose histories here: White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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