In the 60’s, before the turn of the century, the girls who went to Our Lady of the Catechism School with me all took to knitting during lunch period one year, and it looked interesting to me, so I asked if I could join them. They welcomed me. This was before, when kids could still bring knitting needles to school, when our version of Active Shooter Drills was Bomb Drills.
We sat on the green wood and metal lunch benches way out by the back driveway that led into the unstriped asphalt church parking lot, grass growing up between the cracks, leaning our backs against the ivy growing down the block wall of the neighbor’s yard. There was no fence around the parking lot, other than the neighbor’s wall, and no gate across the driveway.
I learned that knitting and crocheting were different techniques of the same craft, even though some of the girls objected to that classification scheme. I learned that I wasn’t much interested in crocheting anything more interesting and complicated than a belt, although I did enjoy swapping out colors in the yarn at random times. I learned that some of the girls liked the same Beatles songs that I liked. But I was already getting ready to return to Kill-the-Man-with-the-Ball out on the grass when I learned from the Catholic nuns, who looked the other way every day when the pastor put his fingers down the 5th graders’ blouses over by the ice cream shack, that it was wrong for boys to be interested in doing things the girls do. They thought it best that I return to the murder game now, not when I was ready.
I was welcomed back to the grassy fields. I’m still watching men play games on grassy fields, and I am still uncomfortable getting anywhere close to learning “girl stuff.” But I’m thinking seriously about a pedicure.
I learned that taking binary approaches to everything was troubling, and not just because 31 binary splits gives you too big a number to conceptualize, which is exactly why I have never been truly comfortable ordering a double-scoop at Baskin-Robbins. There are too many ways to be wrong!
(I struggled for a long time with another version of this seemingly impossible question: “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?”)
I also learned to recognize when 2 options being presented to me as either/or were in fact not the only 2. A co-worker summed it up perfectly with her oft-repeated reminder to me that there were more options open to me than the 2 being presented: “Did you walk to school or did you pack your lunch?”
Either you support our military, or you support mutiny.
Either the safety of you and your family or open borders.
Either My Country or Right or Wrong.
With us or against us.
But nuances are harder to argue.
I was recently presented with a seemingly either/or choice:
“How can you accept the science of climate change but deny the science of gender assignment?”
My first thought was “I’ll give you biological gender assignment if you’ll give me human-caused climate change.”
But I don’t think that’s what was being offered.
The Billy Pulpit 