Why I Spend Thanksgiving in Fort Worth, Texas...

When I was a child most of my classmates would talk about going to grandparents' for Thanksgiving or having grandparents visit them. I was never the conventional kid, and so instead of that my family always trekked to Fort Worth, Texas. When asked "why?", my answer was usually along the lines of "just because", but over time I began to understand why Fort Worth and why it mattered, and along the way I learned some valuable lessons about life and family.

In the beginning, everyone went to Ma and Pa's house (Amanda Ellen Brown Peacock and George Omo Peacock) near Shay, Oklahoma. It was natural that all their girls and the one son would congregate there. In 1938, Pa died the day after Thanksgiving and according to those who remember, was buried on a cold, rainy day. His death had a profound influence on my mother (then 3), but that is another story for another time. Even after that, the group went to their house for the holiday. There were Thanksgivings during that time period, but for my family, the "first Thanksgiving" was in 1944, and the reason I go to Fort Worth.

In 1944, World War II was in full swing, and all the "girls" except my grandmother had moved to the Fort Worth area to work in defense plants, and Ma rotated living with whichever daughter had the newest baby and needed help. The economy was bad, we were at war, and it seemed as if everything was rationed. Tires were rationed, gas was rationed, sugar was rationed, and other things were rationed. Defense plants worked three shifts a day, and there was no Thanksgiving holiday for those workers. As a result, it was decided to have Thanksgiving dinner at the oldest daughter's house (Auntie to me, Aunt Maudie to the rest of the clan). It would be an all day affair with folks coming together whenever they weren't working.

My Papa didn't trust the slick tires on his 1941 Ford to make it the slightly more than 100 miles, but he didn't want my mom, uncle, and grandmother (Mamie/Aunt Goldie) to miss the family dinner. He put them on the passenger train in Kingston, OK at 4:00am and at the end of the line, Nunkey (Uncle Ernest) picked them up. It was quite the adventure for my mom who had just turned 9 and my uncle Eddie who was about 18 months old.

Auntie and Nunkey had moved to a new neighborhood and had a house on Malvey Street. When they pulled up in front of the house, Mama remembers seeing the two blue stars in the window -- one for each of their sons. She also remembers seeing too many houses with gold stars in the window as they drove the streets of Fort Worth.

Meanwhile, Papa had decided he missed the closeness of my grandmother's "people" and instead of driving about 10 miles to where some of his relatives were having dinner, he decided the tires weren't "that bad" and drove to Texas. He'd never been to the house, and Auntie and Nunkey didn't have a phone then, so he just drove around, knowing it was somewhere near a Montgomery Ward store and a water tower. After asking several folks with no positive results, he continued driving around and happened across my grandmother's two youngest sisters, Jackie and Sis (Velma) as they crossed the street. He flagged them down and went to the Thanksgiving gathering.

It was an all day affair, with loads of food and laughter. There was an ongoing game of 42, and by hook or crook, it seemed Uncle Bufard was the ongoing champion. The children played. The adults visited and listened to the radio. Late in the evening things began to wind down, and a family tradition was born.

In 2008, we had 87 people at Thanksgiving Dinner. Four from the original group assembled in 1944 were there -- Aunt Jackie (of chocolate pie fame and the youngest and only surviving Peacock girl), my mother, and two of her cousins, Bruce and Judy. Bud was one of the blue-star boys that first Thanksgiving, but he has missed very few years since he came home from the War.

We've long since outgrown meeting at a home, and the last 20 years or so we've met in a fellowship hall at a local church, but no matter where we meet it's family time.

In my 44 years, I've missed a few when we've lived too far away to make the trip or my dad only had one day of vacation, and I missed a few years ago when Mom had heart surgery and our family had Thanksgiving at home. Other than that, there's been little question where Thanksgiving Day will find me. Several years stand out in my memory: an unknown year in the early 1970s when some of my cousins and I discovered a way into the YMCA and just about wore out the trampoline; 1985 when Mamie was too weak from the cancer to cook and she sat in her chair and instructed me on how to fix her ham and other side dishes; years when we had lots of new babies, particularly the births of my cousins Andrew and Chloe; and two years ago, which was the first time I went by myself because my parents' were ill and that was the first Thanksgiving after losing my uncle Eddie.

It's been 64 years since the "first Thanksgiving" and yet there are so many similarities -- the economy is shaky, we are at war, and several houses in the family could sport blue stars -- but most importantly God and family remain a central focus of the extended Peacock clan. A new generation has taken over but we remain true to our heritage.

And that is why I go to Fort Worth every Thanksgiving....and Aunt Jackie's chocolate pie is a bonus!

Adam's Navel instead of Adam's Apple

Although it is invisible to me, I am convinced I have a sign on my back (or front) which says, "Please talk to me about anything and everything." It is this sign which has strangers in towns in which I am also a visitor ask for directions, desk clerks at hotels in small Texas towns asking for psychoanalysis, and seatmates on airplanes talking for the duration of flights. Perhaps I am too polite, but when folks talk to me in spite of my reading a book and listening to my iPod, I feel compelled to listen. A recent flight from Dallas to Washington, DC was no exception.

My seatmate on this particular flight was a very nice young man from Texas who won a contest hosted by the American Architectural Foundation for creating plans for an ideal school. At one point during the flight, I held an art book for him while he retrieved something else from his backpack, and I happened to notice a caption related to a picture of Adam by Michaelangelo about which there was some controversy due to the inclusion of a navel in the painting.

The question as to whether or not Adam had a navel gave me something to ponder for the last 30 minutes of my flight, and has yielded an interesting study topic. I am quite familiar with many of the traditional debates in the scientific and religious communities, and this was a new one for me.

I will readily admit that I don't pay much attention to religious art, primarily because unlike other historically-based paintings, there is no evidence to support what Christ, Paul, Peter, or Adam looked like. My personal background includes being raised with constant reminders that the pictures, whether from a famous artist or in Bible school materials, were man's guess as to the appearance of Biblical figures. Thus, while I may appreciate them from an artistic standpoint, it's been pretty much like all other art -- I either like it or I don't -- and I've never considered the accuracy of the renderings.The picture caption led me to realize that painters throughout history, but most specifically during the eras in which religious based art flourished, had a decision to make when rendering Adam. Michaelangelo, in a very famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, gave Adam a navel. Others avoided the issue by using foliage, strategically placed forearms, or the famous figleaf.

Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica in 1646 included an entire chapter to "Pictures of Adam and Eve with Navels" when he wanted to expose some of the "vulgar errors" present in the society of his day.

Another mistake there may be in the Picture of our first Parents, who after the manner of their posterity are both delineated with a Navel. And this is observable not only in ordinary and stained pieces, but in the Authentick draughts of Urbin, Angelo, and others. Which notwithstanding cannot be allowed, except we impute that unto the first cause, which we impose not on the second; or what we deny unto nature, we impute unto Naturity it self; that is, that in the first and most accomplished piece, the Creater affected superfluities, or ordained parts without use or office. For the use of the Navel is to continue the Infant unto the Mother, and by the vessels thereof to convey its aliment and sustenation.

Browne continues to refer to Adam's absence of a navel in his Religio Medici when he says:

But it is the corruption that I fear within me, not the contagion of commerce without me. ’Tis that unruly regiment within me, that will destroy me; ’tis I that do infect my self; the man without a Navel yet lives in me; I feel that original canker corrode and devour me; and therefore Defenda me DIOS de me, “LORD deliver me from my self,” is a part of my Letany, and the first voice of my retired imaginations. There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole World about him.

Philip Gosse presented a pro-navel argument in his 1857 Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. He asserts that even though Adam had no need for a navel, God gave him one. The argument is related to the notion of a "mature creation" in which God created the world to be functional, and therefore even though they were newly created, geological structures (i.e. mountains, canyons) and living organisms (i.e. trees, plants, animals) were in a mature state and would reflect "aging" even though they hadn't actually been through the process. This developed into the idea that because of Creation putting the world in a mature form, scientific efforts to document the age of the Earth and the universe as a whole cannot be reliable.

There are those who maintain the notion that Adam and Eve did have navels, although when they were placed there remains a subject of debate. The three primary theories are: Pre-Umbilicism, Mid-Umbilicism, and Post-Umbilicism.

Gosse's argument for a mature creation is at the foundation of the Pre-Umbilicism movement, in that it considers Adam and Eve to have been given navels at the moment of their creation. There are those in this movement who maintain that since man was created in the image of God, including physical characteristics, they suggest Adam and Eve were connected to God with some sort of cosmic umbilical cord. Pre-Umbilicism advocate occasionally go so far as to suggest that prior to Creation, God was a giant fetus attached to a large placenta. When the Big Bang occurred, God was severed from the giant placenta. God roused to realize He was God (complete with physical navel from the separation from the cosmic umbilical cord), and decided to create a universe from the remains from the explosion.

Mid-Umbilicism suggests that the navel of Adam is a scar. Our navels are the scar resulting from the separation of the umbilical cord shortly after birth. Adam was not born of a woman, and didn't have the scar resulting from that experience, but received his navel when the rib was taken from him to make Eve. In other words, his navel does not represent being of a woman, but rather woman being of him. Mid-Umbilicists do not believe Eve had a navel because there was no need. Some of this theoretical perspective believe that man being created in the image of God referred to the male species only, not the female, and therefore women were from an inferior creation. In this view, only men were destined for immortality.

Post-Umbilicism maintains the navels were given to Adam and Eve when they were driven from the garden and was a mark of being "separated" from God by sin. Just as babies bear the scar of being separated from their mothers, Adam and Eve bore the scar of being separated from their Creator.

Adam and Eve were the products of Creation, not natural childbirth, and did not have a need for navels or the related umbilical cord. Adam could not have been born of a woman because woman had not yet been created: "Then the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." (Genesis 2:7). "For man does not originate from woman." (1 Corinthians 11:8). Similarly, Eve was not born of a woman. "So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from man, and brought her to the man. And the man said, 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.'" (Genesis 2:21-23)

To give Adam and Eve navels would leave the impression of their being the result of natural childbirth, and this would be a mistaken impression since they were divinely created. That God could bear false witness by putting a false impression mark on Adam and Eve would suggest He could lie in other contexts, and a deceitful God irradicates His perfection.

Ken Ham, as quoted by Gary Parker (1996) in Creation Magazine once said:

Lack of a belly button on Adam and Eve would be one of the biggest tourist attractions of the Pre-Flood world, as the grand-children and great-grand-children would come up and ask, 'Why don't you have a belly button?' And the could recount again and again, to generation after generation, how God had created the special by completed supernatural acts, and had designed them to multiply and fill the earth in natural ways that are equally a part of continuing care for what He created.

Given the inquisitive nature of small children, that notion isn't far-fetched.

So, back to the controversy surrounding Michaelangelo's rendition of Adam....

While I'd never before considered it, I think the artist was in error to put a sign of human birth on an image of someone divinely created. That is only my very human opinion, and while interesting to ponder, this matter has little to do with my salvation.

JEF

Voting: The Right, Privilege, Responsibility Trifecta

Thanks to the concept of absentee ballots, I have already voted in my 7th Presidential election. Compared to my father, who has been voting since the 1940s, it isn't a long time, but it is my privilege, right, and responsibility.

I remember every election year except my first. I was less than a month old the first time I went to a polling place. In 1964, my mother put me in her 1956 Chevy Belair and drove to the west side of Dewey, Oklahoma where she voted in an Indian Methodist Church. I've no memory of that particular election (though I strongly suspect at that time my parents' votes cancelled each other out), but according to family legend, the precinct supervisor would not allow Mom to carry me with her into the voting booth, so she set me on a table in my jumper seat under the care of an election worker while she cast her ballot.

The next election cycle, "we" voted at the Washington County Fairgrounds and my mother wore the blue wool dress for which she had won a blue ribbon at the fair a few weeks prior. I recall that election because I was allowed to open the curtain after Mom had flipped all the levers for her preferred candidates.

In our family, election night was an exception to bedtime routines, and I am sure I will be watching the incoming results this year and typing bulletins into email for friends unable to watch live coverage. I've long since grown weary of the debates and campaigning and endless advertisements. My phone has rung more in the past week than it has in months and almost every call is an auto-dialed encouragement to vote for a particular candidate. I stopped a young man from putting a bumper sticker on my truck (though it was for my preferred candidate) and I have not answered my door this afternoon when last minute campaign efforts were in my neighborhood. It's time to get this election done.

I'll be watching and waiting with the rest of the country. With the utilization of the Electoral College and the volume of voting it is unlikely the election will hinge on my particular ballot. Nonetheless, my vote is important.

My vote is a privilege citizens of many countries devoid of the democratic system do not enjoy. As with all privileges, it can be taken away, and having known my fair share of folks who have spent some time on the inside of a barred door, one that is missed in the truly rehabilitated.

My vote is a right. As a woman, there has been a time when I would not have been allowed to voice a political opinion by casting a ballot.

More important than the right or privilege, my vote is a responsibility. Partisanship aside, one of my favourite movies is "American President". Michael Douglas' character says at one point:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight.

It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.

You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free".

You may not hear me singing, but I did cast my vote.

JEF