Are You a Follower, a Bender, or a Breaker?

Rules are meant to be [FILL IN THE BLANK]

BEACH CLOSED, said the sign. HAZARDOUS.

And yet the people walked toward the sea.

When my boys were in elementary school, their principal sent out a weekly email containing parenting tips and anecdotes. In one such message, she told the story of a mother and child she’d seen at the natural grocery. The child reached for something marked off-limits. The principal overheard the mother say, We’re not supposed to touch those, but let’s do it anyway.

I hope that child doesn’t go to my school, our principal wrote. I’m a rule follower.

The rules keep us all safe, she went on to explain. They keep our community running smoothly.

Of all the emails I received from her during our years at that school, this is the only one I remember.

I was raised to be a rule challenger, bender, and, in some cases, breaker. I was a young child when Timothy Leary popularized the phrase Question authority, but its guiding principle was baked into my DNA. My parents were anti-war and civil rights activists. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was three years old. My dad was a leader in a movement to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, a movement that eventually led to the creation of a public pool that all could enjoy. My mom, though reserved and soft-spoken, wore jeans in college as part of a coordinated effort to overturn the college’s dress code for women. She marched on civil rights picket lines. Much later, as a faculty member in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, she mentored women in math and science and pushed back against attempts to favor American PhD candidates over more qualified international students.

Of course these are very different kinds of rules from the ones my boys’ school principal was talking about. These were matters of principle, not safety or courtesy.

Even so, when I read the words, I’m a rule follower, my gut registered it as if she’d written, I’m a sheep.

Yet though I would never say, I’m a rule follower, I would also never say, The rules don’t apply to me.

The former calls to my mind the sickening phrase just following orders—also known as the Nuremberg defense—while the latter evokes a certain orange braggart who deems himself above the law.

So what’s the difference between a rule breaker and one who thinks the rules don’t apply to them?

Memoir/Personal Essay, CreativityTanya ShafferJanuary 25, 2024freedom, responsibility, rules, memoir, theatre, Grotowski, experimental theatre, actingComment

All That I Hope To Say

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” - E.B. White.

My dear friend M recently told me she needs an unselfish reason to write her story. Without it, telling the story feels yucky to her, like some big ego trip. A voice comes into her head saying, “You’re just trying to get attention,” and that stops her words from flowing.

I get it. I’ve got those voices myself, the ones that say things like, Who the hell are you to think you’ve got something valuable to say? Everything worth saying has been said a million times over.

There’s no arguing with that choir. Those internal carpers will out-reason me every time. Which is why I try to put aside reason when it comes to making stuff. The reasons for our actions that our brains come up with are rarely the real ones anyway. Mostly, we follow our mysterious longings and invent rationales afterwards.

CreativityTanya ShafferJanuary 25, 2024creativity, writing, memoir, agnosticismComment

The Exuberant Professor: Introducing Harry

There he is—Professor Harry G. Shaffer. See him tearing around the campus of the University of Kansas like a man hellbent on jotting down an idea before he forgets it. See his white hair flying, papers spilling from his old-style leather briefcase, his jacket and suspenders and lightly scuffed Florsheim shoes. See him adjusting the microphone for his intro economics class, where he lectures to some 300 students at a time in his scratchy, heavily accented voice. See how these students adore him, how they laugh at his jokes, repurpose his sayings, draw hearts on their end-of-term evaluations and write comments like, “I want to sit him down by the fire and feed him warm cookies” and “I wish he were my Grandpa!” Behold the Facebook group Harry Shaffer is the Man, made up of current and formers students, which at the time of his death in 2009 boasted 800+ members. Read tribute after tribute to “the man who never left home without his toothbrush.” See how they celebrate his daily greeting, “Good afternoon!,” sometimes transcribed phonetically as “Gut ahftanun!”

Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferDecember 22, 2023memoir, History, Holocaust survivor, civil rightsComment

The Song You Came to Sing

There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.

That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.

Somewhere in the Universe, All of This Is True

I was late because I overslept.

I was late because I was dissolving in tears.

I was late to protest the tyranny of time.

I was late because I was sucked into a Black Hole. Fortunately it didn’t like the taste of my deodorant, so it spit me back out.

I was late because I was smelling every flower and petting every dog

I was late because I fell asleep on the couch by the fire, covered in a mauve wool blanket, one dog snuggled against me and two more on the rug beside me, and when the alarm went off—I’d set it because I had to meet you—I thought I hit snooze, but I accidentally hit stop. That’s why I’m still asleep, and what you see here is not me but a holographic projection. The real me is still asleep on the couch by the fire and will sleep there for a hundred years, until awakened by True Love’s Kiss.

I was late because I was deciding whether to jump from a bridge into the choppy silver waves and let the fish feast on my flesh.

I was late because I was frolicking in the autumn leaves.

I was late because I’m genetically coded for lateness.

I was late because of the rain.

Because of the traffic.

Because of the traffic caused by the rain.

Because a woman with a walker was crossing the street in slow motion, and I had to wait for her to pass.

Because I was standing at the tippy-top of the world, wondering what would happen if there were no gravity and I were lifted off into space to float around the universe. Would I find another planet with life on it? Would they accept me? Love me? Would I finally feel at home?

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

Paint Your Scars With Gold

The other day I was reading about an ancient Japanese art called Kintsugi, in which, if a ceramic object such as a bowl breaks, it’s repaired using a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Once repaired, the fault lines are illuminated, making the object increasingly beautiful as it ages. The philosophy behind Kintsugi treats the process of fracture and repair as part of an object’s history, something to be celebrated rather than hidden or disguised.

This got me thinking about marriage.

I’ve been with my spouse for seventeen years now. And though it’s not easy to share this, I’m going to summon my wobbly courage and tell you: My marriage is not perfect. There have been deep fissures, gashes, cracks that are difficult to repair. In the complex soup of a shared life, the flavors of laughter, tenderness and delight are liberally seasoned with rage, frustration and tears.

Memoir/Personal Essay, RelationshipsTanya ShafferFebruary 5, 2019marriage, memoir, kintsugi, therapy Comments

After the Giddy Plunge

How to describe the beauty and challenge of that day? How high and steep the dune, how fine and bright the sand? How the ocean—no, Lake Michigan (ha, I wrote ocean!)— spread out below us, an impossibly pure colorscape, gradations of aqua, turquoise, teal leading out to a deep true cobalt?

We were at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the Northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. We were traversing the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive when we stopped at #9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

At first I tried to stop D and E from rolling down the nearly vertical dune, fearing they’d lose control, plummet over the edge and disappear. They started rolling anyway, tentatively at first, stopping and starting, looking back. I glanced uncertainly at my husband—I’ll call him H—and he, ever the cautious one, shook his head. I called, half-heartedly, Boys, come back. They ignored me, of course, and I discussed with nearby adults whether it was safe to go down. A couple with toddlers shook their heads and left. But then a man with two young kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old, appeared on the horizon as if by magic.

Off-Leash Writing