First there was the murder of the woman and two girls near Yosemite. Sam and I had been there recently, twice, at those same majestic spots where the girls mugged for the camera one last time. Then NATO went to war in Yugoslavia, or the former Yugoslavia, or the former former-Yugoslavia, that I guess is now Yugoslavia again. Then the Columbine massacre made Yugoslavia seem rather routine in comparison.

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"Were the Columbine boys on drugs?" Sam asked hopefully.

"Nope, not as far as we know."

Silence. "I guess they just weren't any good at feeling bad."

"That's probably the smartest thing anyone has said so far."

Poor Sam. Poor crazy everybody. About 20 minutes after this conversation, the tornadoes tore through the Midwest.

I hate that the more hysterical members of the Christian right are having such a field day, sure that their angry prophecies are finally coming true. But they're wrong. It's narcissistic to think that suddenly, in our times, things are desperately worse than anytime before. Things have always been crazy down here. We forget that the world has always seemed to be coming to an end, but now it's noisier, more global, more rococo. The news of bad things just used to stay local or took forever to reach our shores. People used to hide like meerkats peeking out of the bunker -- "Here it comes! Here it comes!" Huns, plague, predators. It's really the same old same old, only now we see and hear about each distant disaster within seconds of its happening.

Not a year ago, we used to have terrible things happening worldwide on a daily basis, plus Pete Wilson was governor of California. But he isn't anymore, so to me, that's progress right there. But Sam and his friends have been having a hard time, and I wanted to help them get their optimism back. I wanted to give them something to hold on to, that might give them hope, like in this story by the late Rev. Charles Allen. He wrote that after World War II, the Allied armies in Europe gathered up thousands of homeless, orphaned children and took care of them in camps while trying to figure out what to do. The children were well fed, tended to by loving men and women, but they were so traumatized by what they had seen and what they had already lost that they simply could not fall asleep. Finally, someone in one camp started giving each child a slice of bread to hold while they slept. There was plenty of bread to eat when the children were hungry, but this one piece was just to hold, so that their deepest inside parts might rest in the assurance that there would be more food in the morning. And I wanted to give Sam some spiritual bread to hold besides the promise of Heaven, to warm him, and help him feel secure. So I asked friends for help.

They sent poems, postcards, cartoons, and I taped them all to the wall by my desk, and they actually helped me, and thus in the trickle-down economics of motherhood, they helped Sam too. Then he began to sleep a little better. It's funny -- you keep thinking there's some fine spiritual gold jewelry out there that someone can give you or that you can earn, that's going to save you. But fine jewelry doesn't necessarily warm the heart. So our friends give us metaphoric handmade beads, quirky millefleurs made of cheap Fimo clay, and we string them together like a mala -- Hindu or Buddhist prayer beads -- a rosary. Holding these beads helps us remember that we are held. So beads or bread, something handmade to hold.

If I were to string the most recent offerings together, the first of these beads might be the cartoon that an old friend sent:

A man is walking by a house with a sign on the lawn warning, "Beware of Dog!" Looking up, he sees a hound on the porch wagging its tail and holding a sign that says, "Jesus loves you!"

Next page | Feeling safe again