Valerie My Activist Daughter, on her 47th Birthday:
When Valerie was two years old, she took to wandering. I normally did not worry about my children playing in an unfenced yard in the quiet community of Takoma Park MD; there were always the older ones to look out for the younger, and always enough going on to keep their attention so that they didn’t stray. At least, (not much) till Valerie. She would trot off down the street, and crossing streets posed no problem for her. She ended up at the police station licking ice cream cones often enough that I think she just made a beeline for there. One Saturday, when it was Sabbath Day at the Seventh-Day Adventist Church down the street, and across one street, she ended up on her tricycle riding around the church yard while parishioners stood around gossiping after church, everyone thinking she belonged to one of them there. After we moved to a farm on the Shenandoah River near Front Royal, I used to have two little boys her age, four and five, to visit. One day they all three disappeared. You can imagine that I was frantic. I ran around calling them, checked down by the river, in the tent set up by the river, in the barn and down the driveway, and finally called the sheriff. As I went back outside, I discovered them emerging quite happily from the wooded hills behind the house—Rabbit Mountain we called. “Oh, we just went for a walk the way we always do.”Valerie’s fearless wandering may have been prophetic and metaphoric. She was four-and-a-half when a friend and I started a small preschool in the friend’s house in Front Royal VA. There was a minor difference of philosophy between Nadine and I, as she was evangelical and really wanted to start a religious school, and I was secular and just wanted to teach children to read. Still, we resolved our differences somewhat, and agreed that she could read Bible stories to the children as long as I could read the dinosaur book to them.
We had differences of style too; when I was reading to the children, of whom there were five, I gathered them around me on the couch, as I did with my own, while Nadine preferred to stand in front of them in a teacherly style. One time, in this pose, she asked the children to be very quiet, and demonstrated how they were to take their imaginary keys, lock their lips, and throw the keys away. Valerie dutifully grabbed her key out of thin air, locked her lips, and put the key in her pocket for future use! Nadine was presenting a lesson on how God made things grow. Before the words were scarcely out of her mouth, “Only God can make flowers grow…” Valerie was saying, “Uh-uh, we can plant the seeds and make flowers grow.” “Well, yes, but only God can send the rain…” “Uh-uh, we can water them…”
Things didn’t get much better as she got older. In fifth grade, after we moved to Montana, she came home one day in despair. “Mom, today Ms Killdeer was talking about tree rings, and she said that in years when the weather is good, the rings are narrower than in years when the weather is bad, and I said, “Uh-uh, the trees make wider rings in the good years.” And she said, “There goes Valerie again, acting like she knows it all.” Valerie felt terrible about having made such a bad impression.The next day I happened to see a scrap of torn up paper on the floor, and upon reading it, discovered that it appeared to be part of a rough draft of a note of apology to Ms Killdeer. When she came home, I asked her about it, and she said that, yes, she had written a note of apology to Ms Killdeer, and given it to her that day, saying that she was sorry for contradicting the teacher. “But,” she said to me, “I know that I was right.”
Now we all know that Valerie has never ceased her metaphoric wandering and her activism; from small beginnings at a tender age, I am sure a book could be written on her forty odd years since then.Long may she wander; long may she raise her voice. The world is richer.
