Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23

Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23
Jeff Gill

Thinking about Aunt Esmerelda
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Over the last few months, I've been thinking about Aunt Esmerelda quite a bit.

Demographically, I mean.

The name is uncommon, picked for that reason. If there's an Esmerelda who reads this, my apologies, but I had to name her something with an echo of days gone by.

Aunt Esmerelda, in my formulation here, is that "maiden aunt" who becomes, largely by default, the family caregiver. She was the youngest daughter of the twelve children or something like that, and when Grandma got sick, she tended her. By the time Grandma passed, Esmerelda was too old for marriage, and anyhow, she was needed at Aunt Endorra's house, where she moved into the spare room.

Once that situation resolved, usually at the Grover's Corners cemetery, she went home to tend her mother or her father.

Seriously, if you do much genealogy, you recognize "Esmerelda Syndrome" pretty quickly. There were lots of kids, people died at home - heck, they had the calling and the funeral at home usually - and while the menfolk shoed horses and shot bears, and the women churned laundry and scrubbed butter, end-of-life care was taken care of "all in the family."

Plus, this is back when un-ironically people called pneumonia "the old person's friend" because it was the usual end of suffering, before morphine drips and other medications took over. And since some of those medications actually cured pneumonia, we all had to find something else to die of, and that list has been shrunk considerably.

So we live longer, and that's good, but by the time we get to the last few years of debility (if we're fortunate), our children and our prospective Aunt Esmereldas are older, too. This gets called "the sandwich generation," about the large numbers of us adults who have ailing parents and children needing care all at the same time, but if you're thinking about calling Aunt Esmerelda… well, we didn't have her. There aren't many youngest of twelves around.

Smaller families, shorter spans of childhood within a household, and you cut down on the sandwichian overlap, but you come up short when the elderly are no longer 60 or 70, but 90 and pushing up into the centenarian cohort.

Obviously, this is where assisted living facilities and home care aides come in for many families, and when well run and fully staffed they can be a blessing and a good solution to some of these questions.

But they aren't all that. They aren't all well run, and guess which have openings when you need one in a hurry? And fully staffed? Yeah, right. COVID cut a hole through that whole model we're still sorting out, as the elderly are still the most vulnerable to the virus continuing to make ripples of mortality through vulnerable populations. Plus they cost money, which makes for a grim calculus in many families. And I'm no good at calculus.

The situation of an Aunt Esmerelda was not good, and the fact that women aren't shoehorned into such roles as often as they once were, as even Jane Austen feared might happen to her as a "dependent woman," is an improvment. What hasn't improved is how we deal with such situations, as a society or in most families. It's a subject we're all likely to deal with at some point, all the more reason to consider how to handle it now.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his middle name is not Esmerelda but it might as well be. Tell him how you've seen caregiving challenges dealt with helpfully at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-5-23

Faith Works 5-5-23
Jeff Gill

Allegiance is a word I have to look up
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While I am pretty sure I know what it means, allegiance is a word I have to think through before I type it. I don't use it often in print.

The "Pledge of Allegiance" I know quite well, even if I don't write it out much. I'm in school buildings of a morning fairly often, and it is still said by standing students every morning in pretty much every district of this county that I know of.

Even if you're there for a meeting that started early and you're in a conference room, when the voice on a PA starts the Pledge, everyone stands up, puts a hand over their heart, and looks around for a flag that isn't always in evidence, but we all say it, then sit down as the announcer goes on to tell us what today's lunch menu is.

This has been true since my earliest days in school, which to be fair only goes back to the middle 1960s, but I think it's been the case for quite a while. Which is why I was as surprised by Joyce Carol Oates tweeting her shock at learning this was true as quite a few other Twitter followers of hers.

I mean no disrespect to her; she's a fine novelist, short story author, reviewer and essayist, and has been a hoot on social media. But she's just enough older than me (I won't say how much, but enough) and clearly has not been around public or parochial schools below the post-graduate level much to not know the "Pledge of Allegiance" is a common feature of the educational morning.

With deep respect to Jehovah's Witnesses and other freethinkers who sadly have suffered to achieve this freedom, I acknowledge that there's a Supreme Court precedent that clearly states no student has to participate, and I've seen a fair number choose to do so, or rather not do so. It's a tricky thing, that: if almost every other student and the teacher is putting a hand over their heart and saying the Pledge, it's very hard to not do so. And again, I acknowledge that there are people who have a principled reason to not say that public affirmation, and support them in not saying it even as I do so. There's a school of thought that says a better solution is to not have everyone say it, to which I reply, and where does that end? I'm more interested in helping everyone allow exceptions rather than ensuring no one ever has to be one.

This has become an issue for the coronation, which you are welcome to not care about, but is in the news more than a bit. May 6, 2023, Westminster Abbey, King Charles III is anointed and crowned and formally installed, and the monarch in Great Britain is for them what the flag of the United States is for us. This means a pledge of allegiance to the new king, which has traditionally been delivered by the peers (dukes and lords and such) but is being opened up this time to, well, anyone.

Since I agree with George Washington that we don't need a king, this is not technically my event, but as an English speaking Protestant, and as a Christian in general, I'm interested. Trust me, I don't plan to "swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty" but the debate over who can or should is of interest.

Psalms, prophets, so much of Biblical religion uses imagery of kings and monarchs to communicate something of who God is, and how God reigns (such as, "reigns"). This symbolic language needs interpreting, which means work for preachers. This preacher will be watching, and reflecting, and making notes.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's taught the Pledge and flag folding to Cub Scouts for years. Tell him how you understand allegiance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.