The Second Shot Heard Around the World- Part 6
Monica King
October 16, 2005
mer·cy ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mûrs)
n. pl. mer·cies Compassionate treatment, especially of those under one's power; clemency.
A disposition to be kind and forgiving: a heart full of mercy. Something for which to be thankful; a blessing: It was a mercy that no one was hurt. Alleviation of distress; relief: Taking in the refugees was an act of mercy.
Idiom: at the mercy of Without any protection against; helpless before: drifting in an open boat, at the mercy of the elements.
Middle English, from Old French merci, from Medieval Latin mercs, from Latin, reward.]
Synonyms: mercy, leniency, lenity, clemency, charity
These nouns mean humane and kind, sympathetic, or forgiving treatment of or disposition toward others. Mercy is compassionate forbearance: “We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves” (George Eliot). Leniency and lenity imply mildness, gentleness, and often a tendency to reduce punishment: “When you have gone too far to recede, do not sue [appeal] to me for leniency” (Charles Dickens). “His Majesty gave many marks of his great lenity, often... endeavoring to extenuate your crimes” (Jonathan Swift). Clemency is mercy shown by someone with judicial authority: The judge believed in clemency for youthful offenders. Charity is goodwill and benevolence in judging others: “But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?” (Thomas Browne).
When I went to Harvard it was after carrying my baby boy with me & his Dad around the world his first year in a back pack. The kind Outward Bound couples put their kids in when having a baby is not interpreted as time to stay home.
It was after we had returned from this global exploration just in time for my son’s first birthday in May. When I returned to Concord to birth my second child & first daughter into the world at Emerson Hospital, where my son had likewise made his entrance. Nearly a year & a half previous to her. Both “natural” of course. The whole reason I had gone to Simmons to begin with. Understanding how my body & everyone elses’ was supposed to work. It was the mystery of birth that beckoned me into nursing. The incredibly sacred privilege of doing that. That & a little thing called love. Where fools rush in, or rush out, leaving plans to major in music at the place I came to be in.
Having had the spirit of adventure move us, enticing us to see so many other places & cultures, & share meals at so many tables, shorelines, camp sites, cities & towns, our little band returned to our little farmhouse in Concord.
Experientia docet. Experience teaches. The one phrase I remembered from my fourth grade Latin class.
It was true, is true. And truth was what I was after at Harvard. I graduated from a Boston college with a large & sheltering tree as our crest or school symbol. With royal blue & white as the school’s crest’s colors. Then Harvard. The oldest crest; Ver Ri Tas. Crimson. Then Dartmouth, Vox Clamatis in Deserto, a Voice crying in the wilderness. Hunter & hunted green.
After this odyssey of an expedition, four years out from undergraduate studies, & more experientia with human suffering than before, with a seemingly unquenchable desire for understanding the WHYS of things, I made a simple hypothesis in my mind. A simple question, the start of any good research; how is peoples’ ability to heal affected by their belief systems?
A broad, expository type of question. Not one lending itself to simple deductive reasoning.
Simmons had given me an excellent education in nursing. Not that I was astute enough to make that clear to my growing children in Concord however.
I am still stunned to reflect back on my daughter’s 17th birthday party, where we gathered at a Chinese restaurant there with some of her friends in celebration. It being Concord & they approaching the final nail-biting year of high school, we of course spoke of college, of where they were applying & so on.
My kids had heard me say so often that I was a Harvard drop-out, that even my own daughter did not realize until this round table dialogue, that I HAD graduated from college to become a nurse!
Teaching kids is always interesting.
In my Chinese Art History class at Simmons, my elegant professor intoned to us solemnly as she taught us more about Eastern philosophy through the understanding of the paintings we gazed at, that “May you live in interesting times” was a Chinese curse, not a blessing.
But with every error of perception the Universe provides an antidote.
I was pleased to set the record straight, & sing the praises of Simmons to the young & impressionable women assembled.
That in this society it was visionary & prudent to remain an exclusively women’s institution in order to really receive a quality education in the professions & liberal arts both.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Both Harvard Divinity & Dartmouth were obviously admitting women at their hallowed halls too by this point in time, by the time I walked in, but the solid foundation of exclusively women’s company & instructors who were exemplars in my chosen field remains unmatched by either of the two older & more endowed Ivy Leagues.
Because boys are noisier, cut up more in class, & simply do not focus their attention on matters of higher education the way women do when set apart. I really don’t care, reader, if you think I’m a castrating witch or bitch at this point. I got shot in the chest, my breasts splattered apart & my give a damn about “politically correct” writing or speaking was never there in the first place.
Like Farmor & Daniel I call’s it as I sees it.
My paternal grandmother Farmor gave me the gift of unvarnished truth talking. She too, especially once Farfar passed on, just said exactly what she thought, & made no apologies to anyone about it! In her widowhood she was more than a grey panther. She was a legendary Valkerie. Matriarch supreme.
To deal with men in an academic setting is straight up a pain in the ass.
At any rate, I have a nice hybrid education. The only completed degree I have is from Simmons, & it is the school I am most proud of.
But I joked about dropping out of Divinity school so often within my children’s hearing that that was what stuck. Mom’s a Harvard drop out. Or drop in. Or free world traveler just visiting. Take your pick. I came, I saw, I listened, I preached, I danced in sanctuaries, formed mothers groups to express feminine spirituality. My final sermon at our church, the Unitarian church in the center of town was on Waging Peace. On Mothers Day. With my son & daughter going to Sunday school classes for that blessed hour of sanity we all could draw near to, into, in that plain meeting house, where all were welcome, whether you believed in God or not. The Trinity or not. Could come from any religious tradition or none at all. A safe gathering place for people who need people. Working out how to do that in a spirit of love, by joining committees & Steering the church, or teaching the kids or going on retreats with them, or visiting Starr Island. Or like me, just showing up to lead a congregation & speak in a feminine voice as a student minister at Harvard, & an every day housewife in Concord.
The conditions I was balancing were not the usual divinity school graduates’ circumstances.
I had kids at home. Small kids. Ages two & three.
I was writing papers that had to be pieced together again after one of them took their blunt edged scissors & made a collage out of them. Wiped off peanut butter from the edges of the crisp white paper I was so hoping to make look Harvardian & divinely acceptable.
No I was not your average graduate student there. Or at Dartmouth either. I traveled with kids. The Erin Brockavitch of the graduate schools.
I remember the day I had been accepted to Harvard & took the trek in from Concord, a decent & manageable commute from our little farmhouse on route 62 just near Author’s Ridge where the transcendentalists were buried.
It was a warm spring day. I brought my son & daughter with me, looking mainly like the two little Campbell Soup kids.
My son had on overalls. My daughter, uh, I don’t recall. What I do remember was how inept my colleagues were of being any use to a young mother at a cafeteria. No common sense! No attunement to the simple acts of kindness that help.
No, there I was, kids both under three in tow, trying to balance theirs & my lunch trays & keep a pinky finger hooked in my son’s overall strap so he wouldn’t run off & disappear down a Cambridge street somewhere, which he was more than capable of doing. Since it was another part of Cambridge I did not really know, it was a little nerve-wracking. My daughter more cautiously clung to one of my legs.
Anyhow, there I was this human totem pole with trays making my way out to the sunny spring courtyard to find a spot suitable for my little entourage. Slowly, attempting to be oh so polite & properly quiet, & kind of well, cloistered & somber, as this was the austere, but thawing feel of that particular first impression & day there. I managed to find a wall to perch some of my stuff on, & settle in to feeding myself & the kids, looking around as you do when you are joining a new group to make eye contact with someone, anyone really.
My son did not really want to eat. He had something to drink, gnoshed on something, then decided that the tree in the courtyard that had been perfectly mulched in a circle around it, would be a good place to start whirling around.
Around & around he went, holding onto the trunk with one hand, as he swung his little body around.
There were some women nearby. I think I politely was inquiring of them, so scholarly looking & intelligent, what they were majoring in, what their interests were to prime the social pump a bit & you know, just find someone I could talk to. Manners are the oil of civilization my diplomat grandmother would often instruct us.
One started to explain she was working on her ThD... a doctorate in Theology. She was catholic, when SPLAT!, my son upchucked all over his overalls & new sneakers.
The two women I was hoping to get to know simply drew back in unmasked horror at this sight.
They looked at me like some strange species that had wandered in off the street & sniffed & wrinkled their noses.
That, one looked at the other knowingly, “Is exactly why I am NOT having kids!”
Welcome to Harvard Monica!
Yippee!
n. pl. mer·cies Compassionate treatment, especially of those under one's power; clemency.
A disposition to be kind and forgiving: a heart full of mercy. Something for which to be thankful; a blessing: It was a mercy that no one was hurt. Alleviation of distress; relief: Taking in the refugees was an act of mercy.
Idiom: at the mercy of Without any protection against; helpless before: drifting in an open boat, at the mercy of the elements.
Middle English, from Old French merci, from Medieval Latin mercs, from Latin, reward.]
Synonyms: mercy, leniency, lenity, clemency, charity
These nouns mean humane and kind, sympathetic, or forgiving treatment of or disposition toward others. Mercy is compassionate forbearance: “We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves” (George Eliot). Leniency and lenity imply mildness, gentleness, and often a tendency to reduce punishment: “When you have gone too far to recede, do not sue [appeal] to me for leniency” (Charles Dickens). “His Majesty gave many marks of his great lenity, often... endeavoring to extenuate your crimes” (Jonathan Swift). Clemency is mercy shown by someone with judicial authority: The judge believed in clemency for youthful offenders. Charity is goodwill and benevolence in judging others: “But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?” (Thomas Browne).
When I went to Harvard it was after carrying my baby boy with me & his Dad around the world his first year in a back pack. The kind Outward Bound couples put their kids in when having a baby is not interpreted as time to stay home.
It was after we had returned from this global exploration just in time for my son’s first birthday in May. When I returned to Concord to birth my second child & first daughter into the world at Emerson Hospital, where my son had likewise made his entrance. Nearly a year & a half previous to her. Both “natural” of course. The whole reason I had gone to Simmons to begin with. Understanding how my body & everyone elses’ was supposed to work. It was the mystery of birth that beckoned me into nursing. The incredibly sacred privilege of doing that. That & a little thing called love. Where fools rush in, or rush out, leaving plans to major in music at the place I came to be in.
Having had the spirit of adventure move us, enticing us to see so many other places & cultures, & share meals at so many tables, shorelines, camp sites, cities & towns, our little band returned to our little farmhouse in Concord.
Experientia docet. Experience teaches. The one phrase I remembered from my fourth grade Latin class.
It was true, is true. And truth was what I was after at Harvard. I graduated from a Boston college with a large & sheltering tree as our crest or school symbol. With royal blue & white as the school’s crest’s colors. Then Harvard. The oldest crest; Ver Ri Tas. Crimson. Then Dartmouth, Vox Clamatis in Deserto, a Voice crying in the wilderness. Hunter & hunted green.
After this odyssey of an expedition, four years out from undergraduate studies, & more experientia with human suffering than before, with a seemingly unquenchable desire for understanding the WHYS of things, I made a simple hypothesis in my mind. A simple question, the start of any good research; how is peoples’ ability to heal affected by their belief systems?
A broad, expository type of question. Not one lending itself to simple deductive reasoning.
Simmons had given me an excellent education in nursing. Not that I was astute enough to make that clear to my growing children in Concord however.
I am still stunned to reflect back on my daughter’s 17th birthday party, where we gathered at a Chinese restaurant there with some of her friends in celebration. It being Concord & they approaching the final nail-biting year of high school, we of course spoke of college, of where they were applying & so on.
My kids had heard me say so often that I was a Harvard drop-out, that even my own daughter did not realize until this round table dialogue, that I HAD graduated from college to become a nurse!
Teaching kids is always interesting.
In my Chinese Art History class at Simmons, my elegant professor intoned to us solemnly as she taught us more about Eastern philosophy through the understanding of the paintings we gazed at, that “May you live in interesting times” was a Chinese curse, not a blessing.
But with every error of perception the Universe provides an antidote.
I was pleased to set the record straight, & sing the praises of Simmons to the young & impressionable women assembled.
That in this society it was visionary & prudent to remain an exclusively women’s institution in order to really receive a quality education in the professions & liberal arts both.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Both Harvard Divinity & Dartmouth were obviously admitting women at their hallowed halls too by this point in time, by the time I walked in, but the solid foundation of exclusively women’s company & instructors who were exemplars in my chosen field remains unmatched by either of the two older & more endowed Ivy Leagues.
Because boys are noisier, cut up more in class, & simply do not focus their attention on matters of higher education the way women do when set apart. I really don’t care, reader, if you think I’m a castrating witch or bitch at this point. I got shot in the chest, my breasts splattered apart & my give a damn about “politically correct” writing or speaking was never there in the first place.
Like Farmor & Daniel I call’s it as I sees it.
My paternal grandmother Farmor gave me the gift of unvarnished truth talking. She too, especially once Farfar passed on, just said exactly what she thought, & made no apologies to anyone about it! In her widowhood she was more than a grey panther. She was a legendary Valkerie. Matriarch supreme.
To deal with men in an academic setting is straight up a pain in the ass.
At any rate, I have a nice hybrid education. The only completed degree I have is from Simmons, & it is the school I am most proud of.
But I joked about dropping out of Divinity school so often within my children’s hearing that that was what stuck. Mom’s a Harvard drop out. Or drop in. Or free world traveler just visiting. Take your pick. I came, I saw, I listened, I preached, I danced in sanctuaries, formed mothers groups to express feminine spirituality. My final sermon at our church, the Unitarian church in the center of town was on Waging Peace. On Mothers Day. With my son & daughter going to Sunday school classes for that blessed hour of sanity we all could draw near to, into, in that plain meeting house, where all were welcome, whether you believed in God or not. The Trinity or not. Could come from any religious tradition or none at all. A safe gathering place for people who need people. Working out how to do that in a spirit of love, by joining committees & Steering the church, or teaching the kids or going on retreats with them, or visiting Starr Island. Or like me, just showing up to lead a congregation & speak in a feminine voice as a student minister at Harvard, & an every day housewife in Concord.
The conditions I was balancing were not the usual divinity school graduates’ circumstances.
I had kids at home. Small kids. Ages two & three.
I was writing papers that had to be pieced together again after one of them took their blunt edged scissors & made a collage out of them. Wiped off peanut butter from the edges of the crisp white paper I was so hoping to make look Harvardian & divinely acceptable.
No I was not your average graduate student there. Or at Dartmouth either. I traveled with kids. The Erin Brockavitch of the graduate schools.
I remember the day I had been accepted to Harvard & took the trek in from Concord, a decent & manageable commute from our little farmhouse on route 62 just near Author’s Ridge where the transcendentalists were buried.
It was a warm spring day. I brought my son & daughter with me, looking mainly like the two little Campbell Soup kids.
My son had on overalls. My daughter, uh, I don’t recall. What I do remember was how inept my colleagues were of being any use to a young mother at a cafeteria. No common sense! No attunement to the simple acts of kindness that help.
No, there I was, kids both under three in tow, trying to balance theirs & my lunch trays & keep a pinky finger hooked in my son’s overall strap so he wouldn’t run off & disappear down a Cambridge street somewhere, which he was more than capable of doing. Since it was another part of Cambridge I did not really know, it was a little nerve-wracking. My daughter more cautiously clung to one of my legs.
Anyhow, there I was this human totem pole with trays making my way out to the sunny spring courtyard to find a spot suitable for my little entourage. Slowly, attempting to be oh so polite & properly quiet, & kind of well, cloistered & somber, as this was the austere, but thawing feel of that particular first impression & day there. I managed to find a wall to perch some of my stuff on, & settle in to feeding myself & the kids, looking around as you do when you are joining a new group to make eye contact with someone, anyone really.
My son did not really want to eat. He had something to drink, gnoshed on something, then decided that the tree in the courtyard that had been perfectly mulched in a circle around it, would be a good place to start whirling around.
Around & around he went, holding onto the trunk with one hand, as he swung his little body around.
There were some women nearby. I think I politely was inquiring of them, so scholarly looking & intelligent, what they were majoring in, what their interests were to prime the social pump a bit & you know, just find someone I could talk to. Manners are the oil of civilization my diplomat grandmother would often instruct us.
One started to explain she was working on her ThD... a doctorate in Theology. She was catholic, when SPLAT!, my son upchucked all over his overalls & new sneakers.
The two women I was hoping to get to know simply drew back in unmasked horror at this sight.
They looked at me like some strange species that had wandered in off the street & sniffed & wrinkled their noses.
That, one looked at the other knowingly, “Is exactly why I am NOT having kids!”
Welcome to Harvard Monica!
Yippee!
Print
Email
