Context is everything.

I have been postponing writing this blog entry for a couple of days now because I needed to write about two seemingly disparate themes, and was sure some grand poetic gesture would occur to me that would pull the topics together into something nice to read, something to eat while you are giving yourself time to eat more pie (and I say, definitely eat more pie). But nothing came to me and the two subjects at hand are 1) Charles Manson and 2) Thanksgiving,

But last night I was reading Asher and Elijah "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." This evening's reading was made almost excruciatingly poignant by the fact that Avery was there, at first just listening, just as she and Zoe had listened when she was seven and Zoe was five, and I read the same book to her. This is one of the unusual gifts of having groups of children (there should be a word like a murder of crows or a coven of witches, but a nicer word, like oval, an oval of children, or a poem of children, nope that's a bridge too far, you get the wish) far enough apart in age that I could be reading this book to my five year old twins and have my adult daughter listening, and at one point, even taking over the reading when I went off in search of cough medicine and kleenex.

Anyhow, the thing about reading certain children's books that are the wonderful ones is that the authors aren't simultaneously trying to teach the children to read, so the words are the right ones, the ones that come to the writer's minds, not words that a five year old necessarily already knows. That's exactly it, isn't it? You learn these words because they appear in books you are reading or hearing. (We've also been reading the Hardy Boys, where they learn words like jalopy, and pop-gun, and plump (Chet is the plump friend in the Hardy Boys, remember? Bess was the plump friend in the Nancy Drew series--what the hell?)). Last night, the white witch appeared and when C.S.Lewis described her as "stern," Asher's hand flew up. What does stern mean? And before I could answer, he said, "Does it mean mean?" And I said, "yes, it kind of means mean, or cold, or straightforward where you expect kindness. Good job using the context to figure it out, Asher." And he said, "what's context?"

Anyhow, something about explaining context made me realize that the answer to the connection between Charles Manson and Thanksgiving was right in front of me, a sort of prosaic coupling between the two things has existed for me for a long time (the first, the cultish Charles Manson, who collected young women, and some men, but many young women, adrift in California in the mid-1960s and they lived together in real squalor on a deserted stage ranch in the desert, and what happened there is mysterious, but probably far less interesting than the public's imagination was later to collectively imagine because there were babies there, and people to feed, and it was dirty, and well, context is everything, isn't it, but somehow, a group of these young women, and a man or two, rose up at Charles Manson's beckoning and went out into the dark night of the Hollywood Hills of the sixties and savagely murdered some people. Including, most famously, Sharon Tate, who was the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, who you might know now as the sort of original sinner in the unfolding accordion list of men who abused women in various workplaces. I mean, was Roman Polanski the original sinner or was it Charles Manson? At any rate, Roman Polanski was convicted of statutory rape in this country and has never returned to the U.S. to be arrested and tried, and Charles Manson was found guilty of murder, and spent the rest of his life, until last week, in prison, regularly asking for and being denied, parole.

Well, that's what the public thought. But I knew better. As I have told many of you before (perhaps I even mentioned it in an earlier blog, and if so, forgive me for I repeat myself and let's blame the methadone), my uncle Charlie looked suspiciously like Charles Manson. I mean, not really at all, except that in the 1960s they both shared a tendency to a lot, I mean, a lot of hair, and of course, there was the surname. So after reading Helter Skelter, the book which detailed the cult and the murders and the trial, a book written by one of the lead prosecutors), when I would go to my grandmother's house in Cleveland, Ohio, for Thanksgiving, as I did every year, and when I would go to bed, and listen to the voices of my various aunts and uncles wafting up from downstairs--they were home from college, or still in high school, or perhaps working, like my Uncle Charlie did, at a music record label--I would wonder, just a little, if my uncle Charlie was not somehow Charles Manson, escaped from prison, hiding out here in Ohio at Thanksgiving. Oh I knew I was ridiculous, but how scandalous and terrifying.

At any rate. What really scared me about Charles Manson was the way the press portrayed his power over the women in the cult. I could not understand how these girls--that's what they seemed to me to be, just older girls--had left their homes and made their way somehow into the devil's lair. How did they traverse such a distance--becoming angry women on trial, with X's scraped into their foreheads, when you could see their high school photos , where they were pretty and clean and had seemingly never had a murderous thought? How had they become participants in these terrible deadly nights of murder and terror? (Back then, I worried a bit about being murdered and a bit about being unwittingly pulled into a cult; now, if I worry at all, I worry about my children somehow leaving me and ending up on the wrong end of a dark night). I didn't begin to understand it then, and I don't now, even though I took abnormal psychology in college, and I've read the required reading about charismatic cult leaders. One idea that has resonated with me was the idea that all women (and what do I mean by that? maybe women in the United States in the 1950s and the early 1960s, maybe I need a narrower group?) defined themselves in terms of the male gaze. You were waiting to be seen. The entire premise of Seventeen magazine was that you were waiting to be seen. And chosen. And great if you were picked by the handsome football captain, who would go on to sell insurance, but maybe just as great to be picked by the charismatic cult leader, someone who told you to write "Helter Skelter" in blood on a wall because the Beatles song said it first (and I owe much of this thinking to the novel The Girls, by Emma Cline).

I'm so sorry. This has nothing to do with mashed potatoes and more pie, and I will bring it back now. It's just that context is everything. Everything that I understood as choices was yet to come for the girls who went with Charles Manson--the pill, careers (not jobs), divorce. My mother was one of five women in her law school class. My class was split even, right down the middle. I was a baby in California when the Charles Manson murders happened--far too young to have my head turned by a cult leader.

But then again, watching the list of men unspool right now, the explosion of the #metoo conversation, of course makes a lie of the story I just told, of forward progress, and change. The headlines here lay bare the contexts in which women today work and strive and I only know a handful of women who have not, at some point, shared with me their story of sexual pressure or abuse and the workplace, and the classroom, and the bedroom.

So I teach my boys consent by reversing the rule that used to hold sway over holidays like Thanksgiving--give your grandfather a kiss, give your uncle a hug. I tell the boys that it is up to them whether they want a hug or kiss, and in doing so, in giving them permission to say no to a request for a kiss or a hug, I am also trying to shape them into men who won't take a kiss or a hug, or more, without an express yes.

It's a complicated world out there and in here. I think that's okay. Charles Manson is dead, and women and men are speaking up and out about their experiences, and it seems, some people are listening. We can have a world where we have the dearest of experiences--reading the Narnia books to our five-year olds with our twenty-three year old listening, her beautiful head tilted to hear better, their beautiful bodies tucked into their comforters and loveys. We can have three kinds of pie tomorrow, and some of our nieces and nephews will welcome our embraces, and some of them will make us work for the right. It's all real--and when my children are afraid in bed after hearing the white witch be so cold and mean to Edmund, the son of Adam who has unwittingly wandered into her path, I'm glad they recognize the sides of good and evil. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion said.