I had a birthday recently. One terrific gift was a cake, announcing in lavender icing “Happy Birthday Valerie.” Did I mention the icing was buttercream? I loved all the bright colors on that bright white field of sugar. I called it the Cake of Good Hope.
Why name a cake? And why that name? It is my response to the 2024 national elections. I was dismayed by results. Yeah, I thought of karma and her “bitch” persona. A huge number of the people who voted have no idea of this country’s history or what they bought for themselves.
They forgot their white forebearers came here, killed the native inhabitants, destroyed their culture and stole their land. No amount of lying changes that. But now, there are folk of color entering the country and some descendants of the white invaders are inflamed with righteous indignation that people of color should dare to want to live a better life.
We were astonished that people who called themselves Christian began trying to snuff out anyone who was not made in their image. They apparently do not believe in their own god. They’re so scared, they feel they need to protect themselves from new arrivals by stealing their children, placing them in camps and shipping them out of the country. I haven’t heard any of them praying about what to do or saying they believe their god will protect them. “Christian” is just a name they chose because it used to mean a person who tried to live a life philosophy like their New Testament Jesus. Surely Jesus would not recognize his teachings in any of these people.
I digressed. Cake of Good Hope is my sticking point. I will continue to act in good faith in a country founded on the principle of equal treatment for all. I will resist mandates of hate and violence and I will act against it. I will speak out when I see injustice and I will do that without hesitation. We all know what evil requires to sprout and grow – for good people to do nothing.
I started looking at German resistance efforts in the 1930s. One of the most interesting was “The White Rose” movement started by a brother and sister team who were attending the University of Munich. They were surprised that so many of the educated in Germany supported Hitler. Hans and Sophie Scholl, aided by friend, Christoph Probst, began to print anti-Nazi leaflets and painted slogans like “Freedom!” and “Down With Hitler!” on walls of the university. There were creative resisters, like Oskar Schindler who hired Jews to keep them from Nazi hands and Dutch teacher, Johan van Hulst, who used bicycle delivery as a way to sneak Jewish children out of the country. Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz, issued official Swiss protection papers to safe houses in Budapest. As thousands of Jews were forced to walk to concentration camps in Austria and Germany, Lutz, with his wife, pulled as many people as they could from the march and provided them protective documents.
And we have the American, Virginia Hall, the most daring and Reich-feared spy – a Maryland native, I’m proud to add. In 1941, posing as a NY Post reporter, Hall appeared in Paris with a fake id and forged papers. She radioed troop movements and other military info back to U.S. intelligence. She recruited agents for the French resistance.
Hall eventually had to flee the country. She escaped with Spanish guides across a treacherous 50-mile trek over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. No mean feat, pardon the pun, when the woman had suffered an amputated foot as a result of a hunting accident years before.
Virginia returned to France a few months before D-Day via a British torpedo ship. She roamed the French countryside disguised as a 60-year-old peasant woman, organizing sabotage missions against the German army. The Office of Strategic Service (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, credited Hall’s team with derailing freight trains, destroying a number of bridges, killing 150 Nazis and capturing 500 more.
Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest U.S. military honors for bravery in combat. She was the only woman to receive the award during World War II.
Meanwhile, back to The Cake! None of us are going to parachute behind enemy lines and blow up infrastructure. We are not Virginia Hall. We do not own a factory where we can hide folk. And I, for one, have no diplomatic powers to employ. But I have faith in the community of decency and the common good. We will not be silent and we will not be silenced.
Originally the point at the southern tip of South Africa was Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms). We know that years ahead of us will be stormy and our work to preserve a decent way of life will work at times, fail at others. It was much later that John II, king of Portugal, renamed the cape. He called it the Cape of Good Hope to reflect the optimism for new trade routes.
I’m nurturing my optimism; it will need care and feeding. We may get tired, like a boxer keeping his gloves up in a protracted and bitterly contested ring match. Then again, we will definitely have successes. We will go the distance and we will never, ever be those good people who do nothing.
I graduated in the first graduating class of Salisbury’s James M. Bennet High School. That fall I entered Salisbury State College which had just risen from the designation of Maryland State Teachers College in 1963 from a “normal”, or two-year college for elementary school teachers. The school evolved to a fully fledged four-year institution with expanded academic programs, varsity athletic teams and the SSU Foundation.
The choice I made for my freshman English requirement made all the difference in my life. I learned only after my selection of Mary Gay Calcott’s English 101, that hers was a class to avoid. Too hard other students said. You can’t get a decent grade they complained. I was worried.
So I did what I always did when confronted with criticism of my themes or style. I defended my position. Ms. Calcott and I were not seeing eye-to-eye and my grades reflected it. After a few papers, I saw clearly the flaws in my work.
Then, she did what she always did, she spent time hours with a student, when I asked for help. She recommended examples; I read them. She gave me exercises; I practiced. She was not the student-punishing ogre I had imagined in all the chatter I heard. I had begun to learn to write.
In her advanced classes Mary Gay Calcott opened a path to a literary world I had never experienced. I would love that world throughout my life. It gave me endless pleasure in reading and appreciating the craft and imagination.
She gave me an even greater gift in demonstrating how to harness my own imagination into cogent narrative. She introduced me to storytelling. How to breathe life into characters. How to spin a tale to capture readers’ attention. She gave me confidence in my ability.
I now have two books: Driven and Objects of Desire. Both in the Rita Mars Thriller series. I’m working on my third. Driven captured an award from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Objects has launched to amazing reviews.
Since my days at “SSC”, I have always been grateful for meeting Mary Gay Calcott. I was fortunate to have recognized the value of what she was offering me. I carry those long-ago lessons with me every day.
Now as I remember Mary Gay, I recall the words of Gibran: The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. Amen.
My friends – are you as weary, worn and woeful as I have been watching the news of the run-up to the 2024 presidential vote? After a few seconds of the news, I get that itch to switch. I compare the current political news to gavage, the term used to describe the force-feeding of ducks and geese to achieve a ten-times normal sized fatty liver. The end product is a delicacy for humans; not so much for the sequestered and fattened water fowl.
We are drawn like those cliched moths. We moan and complain about the one hundredth view of a politician’s speculation about whether it is better to be eaten by a shark or to be fried by an electric boat. We are flummoxed by the idea of childless cat ladies as an inducement to vote. And we cannot sync the rationale for whining about rally crowd from someone who would be leader of the free world.
Then there’s the guy from one of the richest families in the country scraping roadkill to eat and who later abandons the carcass in Central Park. And how about the female candidate who “turned black.” How in the heck does one do that I think to myself. How would Darwin explain this?
Unnerving and undeserving of our attention is what I say. So how do we counter with something to restore our own mental health with the promise of something uplifting, something hopeful, something just plain more, well, normal.
I submit we should take smaller glimpses of that “must see” political tv and go for the gold. Do it for the sake of your sanity and emotional wellbeing. While we’re not Coneheads, let’s go to France and the Olympic Games.
Ok, I’ll cede you the weird opening ceremonies with a hooded runner carrying the torch, a bizarre rendition of “The Last Supper” and Marie Antoinette, grasping her own severed head. BUT -Celine Dion singing “Hymne à l’amour” at the Eiffel tower sent shivers across the world.
We are able to see Katie Ledecky in performances of a lifetime in women’s swimming. In that same greatest-of-all-time vein, Simone Biles wowed with perfection through the gymnastics moves that only she can perform. We watched a hopeful and sometimes flawed men’s gymnastics lifted to the medal stand by Michael Nedoroscik, the University of Michigan unicorn who rose to the moment on the pommel horse. I was so happy for the women’s high jumper, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who will carry the gold back to her war-torn Ukraine, that I cried. And can you not be moved by Julien Alfred and Saint Lucia’s only Olympic medal in history, a gold?
We needed this Olympics, dirty Seine or not! Like oxygen, we need to see there is beauty and grace in the humanity who populate this orb with us. We need to see that hate does not make us strong or good at our chosen field. We will not believe that grievance will drive us to win because we are witness to the camaraderie among Olympic competitors, the support of one for another, countryman or not. And we will not go back to any time where fear dominates and freedom to be is stripped to leave us empty and wanting.
In this country we stand at a crossroad and we look for a way forward. We will choose a right path and we will not look back.
It was a Sunday afternoon in June. The temps and the sun and the sound of a baseball game on the television reminded me of those meals I looked forward to every week when I was a kid. The inviting aroma of pan-fried chicken wafted through my grandmother’s kitchen and lolled through the dining room. Thick-sliced, just picked tomatoes mounded from their plate on the dinner table. In the fridge was a pitcher of brewed iced tea. The potato salad sat heaped in a serving bowl comfortably slathered in my grandmother’s secret ratio of mayo to mustard, a touch of sugar and a sprinkle of celery seeds. And biscuits . . . oh, my. I lolled about in this dreamy cloud of culinary nostalgia until I began to contemplate cooking for myself.
I started thinking about recipes. I started thinking about the great dishes my grandmother and father could whip up without directions using just their unique sense of proportion and seasoning. I started thinking about the food fiascos I had single-handedly instigated with my lack of any of the above. I sat down until the pipe dream of my cooking could cool and evaporate. Close call! What the heck was I thinking?
It may have started with my contemplation of mystery novels that involved cooking, some that even included recipes. Who wouldn’t love The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joann Fluke where the Cozy Cow Dairy milkman lies dispatched in a scattering of cookie crumbs? Or how about Glazed Murder by Jessica Beck in which our amateur sleuth opens and runs the “Donut Hearts” coffee shop very peacefully until a dead body appears at the shop’s door. Ah, deserts and just deserts in the context of our favorite treats.
If you’re a Chinese food fan, there is always Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chen, part of “The Noodle Shop” series. Coffee anyone? Honey Roasted by Cleo Coyle offers us a clever coffee shop owner matching wits with murderous chefs in the cutthroat world of restaurant startups. And my fave would have to be Deadly Inside Scoop by Abby Collette – you know that murder victim is going to be found in the freezer! And if you want to sample the wilder side of edibles, try A Half-Baked Murderby author Emily George about a pastry chef who opens a cannabis bakery; her beloved aunt becomes a murder suspect and our baker must disprove those half-baked theories of her aunt’s guilt.
As I contemplated these tasty reads, the urge to whip out a rolling pin and attempt the perfect crust grew dimmer until they were not even a speck on my event horizon. I could still savor the stories, the twists and sprinkling of clues without donning an apron and plunging into the too-deep end of a Kitchen Aid mixing bowl. I took a deep breath and started thinking more like my old self about cooking – and eating! Now where could I make reservations and get that dream Sunday dinner?
An undefeated season meets a singular phenom who could drop a shot from mid-court. March Madness Women’s Final was a three-ring, three-point thriller and we could not look away. It was legendary play from surefire hall of famers. Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark drove to the goal, opposing teams but united in belief of their skill, their discipline and their power.
One fine day in 1891, Dr James Naismith, was lolling about in Springfield, MA trying to think up a sport that one could play in the winter. His boss, head of the YMCA International Training School, Luther Gulick, gave Naismith 14 days to think up a game to counter the rowdy energies of young men with little to do in snow-bound New England. Gulick wanted something that required vigorous activity but that did not take the physical toll of the immensely popular game of football. He wanted an indoor game – way too cold to play anything outside – and that game was to be more skill than brute force.
Five minutes later Senda Berenson, physical culture director at Smith College, was meeting with Naismith. Berenson began teaching basketball to her student in hopes the activity would improve their physical health. Of course, this was the Victorian era so every man jack of an athlete, would-be athlete and plain old misogynist had something negative in comment on this development
Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee and known as the father of the modern Olympic Games called women’s basketball “indecent.” Then again, he also decried women participating in any sport. He declared that the Olympics with women would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and indecent”. The “Games”, he said, were created for “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” with “female applause as a reward”.
Oh, give us a break! Another road to success barricaded by short-sighted males with personas as fragile as a soap bubble. Unadmitted fear in the male psyche coursed like a heat-seeking missile. How could men compete with women for the spotlight? Unimaginable to the dim and unallowable to the ones who recognized reality.
By gosh, they threw everything but that proverbial sink at us. Scroll back to the 1967 Boston Marathon. In 1967, women weren’t allowed to officially enter the Boston Marathon, so Kathrine Switzer entered that year as “K.V. Switzer” to hide her gender. Two miles in, an official tried to eject her from the course. She finished anyway, becoming the first woman to complete the race as an official entrant. Women weren’t officially allowed to enter the race until 1972. Women’s marathoning wasn’t part of the Olympics until 1984.
And were we glued to the TV in 1973 to watch a tennis match? We were. On a September night in Houston, Billie Jean King smashed an ace for women in sports with her defeat of Bobby Riggs, a self-described male chauvinist pig. King subsequently organized a meeting that led to the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association. She threatened to boycott the 1973 U.S. Open if male and female champions were not paid the same, which led to the Open becoming the first major tennis tournament to offer equal prize money.
Shoot forward to a few weeks ago, Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark planted another flag in our craggy climb to recognition and equality. Unhampered by the “nervous fatigue” warning from starched collar Victorian men. Bowing to none who forced women’s teams to pay their own way until Title IX, they played. They played to a packed house of 24M, almost double the audience for NCAA Men.
That skirmish is over, the giant leap taken. It could not have been without the play of hundreds of women who went before. I still remember when I played guard in a tunic, a dress; I couldn’t even cross center court and there were six of us. It was a soft game for people perceived as too soft to play the real thing.
Basketball and the sports arena is but one metaphor for women’s emerging role. We will bring the full court press. We will block shots aimed at keeping us subservient. We will not go back to anything where we are “less than.” And we will vote to secure our gains and continue our forward advance.
“I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.” —Calamity Jane
“That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.” We’ve all read stories of the physically challenged who have overcome. Like most, I could not conceive that nothing threatening my life and my work would happen to me. Hey, I made it almost to 75 years without fear that at any moment I could shoot off the planet like a punctured balloon. Those “bad things” happened to others. Until it didn’t
It was a Colorado August afternoon. The sun sizzled the thin air like deep fry oil awaiting the fries. Over Long’s Peak a restless motion of super-heated sky roiled clouds into towering banks of cumulous thunderheads. The breeze stiffened. It’s always a crap shoot as to whether that weather would remain a speculation or pound the earth below.
I decided not to chance it. I needed to lug an open bag of mulch into the garage. There were three roofers shooting nails into spanking new shingles on my roof. Yeah, they told me not to go outside but . . . . Within inches of the garage door, a heavy something slugged the back of my wrist. I looked up first – saw nothing and no one. When I glanced at my wrist, I expected to see a bruise, a big bruise. I saw bone. I saw ligament tatters. I saw stars.
Every worst-case outcome sped through my horrified head as a friend punched the accelerator on the way to the closest emergency center.
I had an initial surgery to reattach my ligaments. I sported a spiffy purple fiberglass cast, followed by a softer support splint a few weeks later. Thought I was on the short path to recovery. But the incision refused to close two small but nonetheless oozy and resistant-to-closing wounds. A month after the usual healing period of such an opening, the incision gaps refused to progress.
My optimism started to flag. My hand hurt and it wasn’t functioning. I couldn’t type. While I previously viewed the wound as an annoyance, I began to doubt. The surgeon speculated on errant stitches and recommended a reopening of the site to hunt. Nothing turned up. While I had just completed my second book, musings on long-term disability at first trickled. After disappointment in the second surgery though, the intermittent disaster scenarios became a steady flow. My emotional state sank like the Titanic – without benefit of the band or Leo DiCaprio!
I thought back to the writers who I read had survived the incidents and setbacks of bad fortune. I considered Hemingway who endured back-to-back plane crashes only one day apart. In order to extricate himself from the day-two crash, Hemingway had to ram the plane door with his head. He survived with a legacy of persistent killer headaches and the after effects of damages to his kidneys, liver and spleen. Given my own depressed state engendered by far less egregious injuries, I could not imagine how Papa managed to write with the incessant distraction of head pain. Of course, he tried suicide multiple times before he set himself free.
I also was reminded of Stephen King’s almost fatal walk along a narrow Maine road where he sustained a broken hip, collapsed lung, multiple lacerations and his right leg was so badly shattered doctors debated amputation. At the scene, EMT’s told King’s brother he might not make it to the hospital. He spent three weeks in said hospital and endured five surgeries. In the immediate aftermath, he decided he would not write again. The pain was too overwhelming. Still, the siren call of writing persisted and, determined to complete his Dark Tower series, he began perspective repair. And we know King did, in fact, return to his work which became his saving grace.
Debilitating what-ifs swirled faster than a mixing bowl beater on high when I learned from the surgeon that a third opening of the wound might be of help. I swore I wasn’t going to cry. Fear cozied up to me. It wanted attention and I gave it. Like a hapless customer in the clutches of a time share salesman, I had no wherewithal to flee. I could not rationalize my way out. I experienced my self growing smaller and smaller. Inversely, fear expanded by leaps.
In a moment of clarity, a still small voice whispered “Enough.” I clung to that and like a climber scaling a fearsome bare rock wall, I gathered myself to act. I spent time learning the specifics of how my ligaments were re-attached. I talked with others who had similar injuries from which they’d recovered. I learned about things I could do to promote my own healing. Once I retook my rightful place as chief of extricating myself from this painful tangent, my strength returned, though slowly. And like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I embraced the necessaries that would restore me. I booted my PC and took up where I had left off.
Without overt summoning, the flint of defiance stuck the stone of resolve. I would find a way and I began to take heart as surely as I had begun to take action. It took some time but I found a chronic wound specialist who made a suggestion for a trial remedy. It worked!
With success came confidence and I’ve been able to return to my writing. At my lowest point, I had given up the idea of being able to create another book, but ultimately, I’ve never been a quitter. My recent brush with defeat is far distant in the rear view. While I continue to have healthy respect for “black swans” and “freak accidents”, they no longer threaten me with nagging residence in my head.
Every adversity has the potential to cut down or build character. I want always to keep the faith and it was the words of Churchill, whose island was crumbling under the Luftwaffe’s devasting rain of bombing, who delivered the message of defiance that stiffened the Brits’ backbone. If you’re going through hell, keep going. And I am.
Valerie Webster and Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller in the spotlight via Author of the Day interview.
Make your next book club event an author event with a writer who’s lived the cases, developed the crime fighting technologies. Contact Valerie Webster today.
