Gholson Commentaries

It's hard for me to believe that 25 years have passed since the assassination of President Kennedy. I've been listening to all the programs, interviews, and speeches about it I could find and reading all the articles, but I still don't understand his death any better than I did when it happened. I was in the third grade when he died. When Kennedy ran for president years earlier, I had fallen in love with him and decided I would marry him. And in the third grade, I was much older and wiser and had already realized that would never happen. I had begun to realize, however, that because of him, some things were changing for the better. My parents had tried to explain all the civil rights marches to me, but I found themselves backing up just a little bit to explain to their incredulous daughter that black people, like John and Bertie, who lived up the street, had only recently won many of the rights we took for granted, and in many ways still didn't have the freedoms we had. And from what I had heard on the radio and had seen on TV, President Kennedy was the person who was leading the fight to make things better.

I remember the day he died very well. My school didn't have a hot lunch program so I was at home and had just finished eating. My mother was at work and my father evidently on his day off was in the basement. The radio in the living room was on as it always was during the new hours that we could hear the news, but the news was interrupted for a special bulletin. The president had been shot. When I ran to tell my father he didn't believe me, and he came up to the living room to try to figure out what it was I had heard. The bulletin came on again. See, I said. My father looked at the floor. After a few seconds he just said, oh my god. That afternoon we reassembled in our desks, half excited to know that something of incredible importance had happened. But sober with the understanding that what had happened was terrible. And a few minutes into our handwriting lesson, the janitor, a young black man, opened the door to the classroom. He had tears running down his cheeks as he addressed the teacher. The president just died.

In the days that followed my perspective of the nation and the world changed immensely. I began to realize the relationship of our country and our president to the other countries and leaders in the world. For the first time I realized the man who had died was a world leader, and at the same time the daddy of a little boy who did not understand what had happened. And once again I watched history being made as Jack Ruby approached Lee Harvey Oswald and pulled the trigger. Kennedy's family has, in recent months and years, protested that his date of birth should be remembered rather than his date of death. And while that feeling is understandable, it was his death that was the catalyst for massive change in the country. It led us into a period of violence both in action and thought, unprecedented for this country in peacetime. We were at war with each other and with all the values we had ever held. Social change had begun even before he was elected and had been promoted under his leadership, but his death necessitated the emergence of other leaders and showed us the necessity for becoming leaders in our own right.

Kennedy was also one of the last great leaders in the Oval Office. And Johnson opted out under heavy criticism, Nixon went down in flames, and presidents Ford and Carter, who were capable but not outstanding leaders, both suffered from the fall out of Vietnam and the Watergate years. President Reagan has tried to lead us with images, but has been a little more than a caretaker president under which significant damage has been done, not from policy, but from benign neglect. 25 years later we see ourselves in a different time, another place, but it could be said we are simply at the end of the Kennedy era. Our national grief and our recovery from it has nearly come full circle, perhaps now we are ready to put it to rest and define the future for ourselves. The hallmark of Kennedy's death has become more to us than the tragic death of a president, it's become the day we started to grow up. Maybe now it is time to put this death to rest, and to look forward to a future when we can put to use the lessons we have so painfully learned. I'm Jenny Goulson.

A visited family in Western Kansas over Thanksgiving and during the midday drive out found myself the recipient of an incredible gift, the opportunity to take the time to appreciate the land and its inhabitants. A conversation with a new acquaintance a couple of weeks ago led to a fresh appreciation of the landscape. A new friend talked about differences in languages and pointed out that the Eskimos have at least 18 different words to describe the color white. That comment led me to realize as I drove past fields where cattle grazed that this season provides us in Kansas with a wealth of shades of brown, everything from brilliant goals and deep rusty reds to subtle grey tones that lend a soft definition to the gentle swells and depressions of the hills. And when past your brown and white cattle randomly scattered, grazed and watched the cars go by, while in another, or heard a sheep nibbled the grass, heads down and backs to the sun, all lined up in exactly the same direction.

Down the road, shiny black steers were silhouetted against a blue sky with a field of new green shoots at their feet. On every horizon were silent skeletons of trees, waiting for spring, carving black cracks in the air. I know this landscape better than I know my own soul. It's always been a part of me and will forever be. And a few weeks it'll change, and the gorgeous rich brown grass will become frosted and in places will protrude sharply from small mounds of snow. The animals will stay near the barn then, feeding on hay and silage, longing to be turned out of their pens and to the open fields. A few weeks later the barren hills will come alive, with new growth that will flourish in the sun and the rain, and grow strong to withstand the harsh conditions that summer almost surely will bring. When I returned, in a long late-night drive, the weather had changed, clouds had covered the sky, holding in the heat in the light. The low hills became shadows in the glow of the lights from the small towns that lie on either side of the highway.

The simplicity of such a landscape is often lost on visitors, who complain there's little goals to see here. That's fine, let them pass on through, leaving beloved simplicity to those of us who love and deserve it. This is not the seashore, with glistening sands and roaring waves. This is not the mountains, with a Disney land of land forms stealing the sky. This is a place of quiet, of elegance and openness. This is Kansas. This is home. I'm Jenny Goulson. This can be a frustrating time of year. The holiday season seems to have changed from a time of anticipation and excitement, to a time of dread and irritation. We have expectations of finding just the right gift for everyone, but the reality has become a matter of playing the game, of getting ready to go out and cope with the crowd, and getting the requisite gift before everyone else does. And poor Santa Claus gets blamed for the whole mess. The man in the red suit has, over my lifetime, changed, from a jelly fellow with a bag

over his shoulder to a vulture-like creature with his hand in my pocket, and when he gets done, my pocket is quite empty. I've been reading up on holiday customs lately, and have come across some very interesting things about St. Nicholas. According to legend, he was nothing like the man he has become. The real St. Nicholas is credited with leaving gifts for poor people who really needed them, anonymously, and in the middle of the night, expecting nothing in return. And our commercialization of the holiday has turned him into a man who leaves nothing for the poor, and is anything but anonymous. I think it's time for us to reclaim Santa Claus and reestablish his presence in our lives. We could start by educating children and adults alike about who he really was, and encouraging emulation of his actions. We could enhance that image by pointing out that not all gifts are found in brightly wrapped boxes. To celebrate who St. Nicholas really was, and to put back some meaning into the holiday season, would be a simple matter.

Children could be told that the idea of his making a list of who's been naughty and nice simply means that he's a man who knows who we are and loves us anyway. We could be encouraged to take stock of ourselves, carefully considering our faults, the gifts we have been given in life, and the gifts we could give to others. And we could make a wonderful game out of giving those gifts anonymously, and let that replace the parking space race we play in the mall parking lots. That might be encouraged to let their parents awake in some morning during the Christmas season, and find the table set for breakfast, for example. Older children could get the coffee started. Adults could surprise children with a visit to the zoo or a walk in the park. Adults could surprise each other with a scraped windshield on a frosty morning, or some other tedious task taken over and done. The possibilities are incredible. Just think about what it would do for your day to find a hot cup of coffee sitting on the table by the bed when you wake up, or find the walk shoveled, or the car window scraped clean when you leave the house to do errands or go to work.

Taking back Santa Claus could be such a simple matter, and could be just the thing we need to restore meaning and sanity to the Christmas season. It could make us turn away from the material meaning of Christmas, toward a meaning that celebrates life and the small gifts we all have. So many people, frustrated and angry because of what Christmas has become, urge us to abandon Santa Claus and, as they put it, put the Christ back in Christmas. But we can do that so easily without abandoning the dear old fellow who has served us so well for so many years. It starts with an action that we could transfer to ourselves and to other people, to see him for who he really is, and love him without further expectations. I'm Jenny Goulson. It was the kind of night where you hit the pillow thinking of all the things that must be done before noon the next day. Phone calls to make copies to run a distribute, memos to write, things to look up, things to get ready, things to enter in the computer. Listen list of things in your head, and as you get sleepier and sleepier, they finally

stop compounding and get tucked away for recall in the morning. Fantasy things begin to surface in your mind and grow and change and become other things as your brain flips through everything you've been thinking about today, as if to deposit those thoughts beside the door of the never-neverland of sleep before you enter. But then there it is, slicing into the night, dragging you abruptly from your half-dreams back into the real world. It was over before you really heard it, reaching out into the night and recoiling again before your ears and your brain could grasp hold of it, but you know you heard it. It was definitely a woman's scream. It was not the first of the noises I've heard from nearby lately, but most of them have been not so violent as ambiguous. The kinds of noises that make you take notice and ask yourself, what was that? But then by then they've stopped and you have no further evidence on which to base your conclusion. I know he's hit her before. She told me so. She was angry then, and she talked freely. She told me a couple of other things that made me like him even less.

And she vowed it was over. Months later his car started appearing again in the parking lot. A few weeks into summer I met him. Not a formal introduction, but it was no problem to figure out who he was. And I didn't like him. He reminded me of a man I saw in a courtroom one time, a man who was charged with nearly beating a newborn to death. Both men are handsome and clean-cut, they could pass her Sunday school teachers. Everything looks normal. Until you look into their eyes and realize something vital, something unnamable is missing. But a few days ago I realized what I didn't see is conscience. Maybe it's just my projection onto the man that makes me say that. But the reason I don't think so goes back to an interview I had with a mass murderer a few years ago. I definitely remember seeing the man's conscience deep in his eyes. I got the feeling he didn't understand what he'd done, any better than I did. There is, in this man, a similar lack of self-awareness, but it seems to be accompanied by something else, something that puts an uneasy feeling into the backs of my shoulders

when I talk with him. But now the decision, how involved do I get? We haven't talked in months, she and I, to approach her about it would almost certainly be awkward and may make her feel even more isolated and alone than before. It's a kind of situation where you hope good sense will prevail and she'll get rid of him. You think about all the things she has going for her and hope she has the confidence in herself to boot him out and make it stick, all a while grieving for the relationship that might have been. Something like this happened a few years ago when I lived on the other side of town. My pounding on the door probably provided enough distraction to stop the beating, but as he drove away and his pickup my eyes focused on the guns and the rack behind his head and I realized that intervening was more stupid than it was heroic. So I probably will not go and talk to her. If it happens again I will call the police and I know that the time between the call and the arrival of the officers will seem like almost forever. Most of these things end with nothing more than a few bruises and a deeply wounded

psyche. I keep telling myself that and I keep hoping I won't come home to find the police and an ambulance there for her. Someone probably would start talking about how people don't care about each other anymore and someone, maybe even me, would inevitably ask, why didn't someone do something? How could you know and not act? And I will think about her privacy and humiliation and about the coldness in his eyes and I will not have an answer. I'm Jenny Goulson. About a week ago, which topally served as search warrant on a local address and when it was all over, a young mother of two was dead. The community has responded in many ways and I too am going to put in my two cents worth. There are a lot of issues surrounding this case that need to be discussed. Local media have not done a good job of educating the public about the procedures our employees must use in the situation like this.

At times the reporting has been incomplete and at times the reporting has been downright bad. More than one television station reported that the police officer was suspended. He was not. He was reassigned to other duties and as a matter of routine, met with a police counselor and engaged in other activities to aid in the adjustment and evaluation process. The television stations had a field day with the neighbors. The neighbors were pleased to go on camera and report that they didn't see why the police didn't just warn the woman. She was after all they said, a good mother, but they did. They said suspect she and her husband were selling drugs because of an increased amount of traffic they noticed at the house. After all, somebody said it was only marijuana. So let's take the issues one by one and examine them. I have to admit to an attitude that possessing or selling marijuana doesn't disturb me quite as much as selling things like heroin or crack. But the police don't have the luxury of being able to differentiate between illegal substances. It's illegal to possess half a pound of marijuana and it's illegal to possess half a pound

of crack. The police are charged with enforcing all the laws, not just the ones they want to. And another issue, and almost unspoken one, surfaces here. The woman was not killed for possessing a half pound of marijuana. Twila Hipscher died because she raised a 357 Magnum and pointed it at a police officer. As far as the officer was concerned the marijuana had nothing to do with it. He at that point had no way of knowing for sure what may or may not have been in the house. But he did the same thing to her that he would have to do to me if I walked up to him on the street and did what Mrs. Hipscher did. What of living in the society we live in is knowing that you cannot point a gun or anything that looks like a gun at a police officer and expect to get away with it. Probably the most commonly raised objection to the officer's actions is the idea that he should have not killed Mrs. Hipscher but just wounded her. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Police officers work in the real world, not in the Hollywood world.

They cannot script any given scene to work out the way they'd like to see it happen. The plain and simple truth is that only in front of the camera or only by coincidence does an officer shoot a gun out of the hand of an assailant. In real life there isn't time to aim. The target is what police call center mass and the policy is shoot to stop. Shooting to wound doesn't stop the assailant from shooting back. A wounded person in many instances has an adrenaline surge and a powerful self-defense mechanism. Case files across the country are full of sad stories of officers and other people killed by a person who was wounded, sometimes even mortally wounded. The policy is and has to be shoot to stop. Although that doesn't necessarily mean shoot to kill the police except that that often is the unfortunate result. But the bottom line is, once a gun has been drawn and pointed at an officer, it's a no-win situation. May almost certainly is going to get shot and probably as the result of that will die.

We don't pay our police officers to die for us and that means that realistically the ideal outcome of such a situation is that the officer lives in the assailant dies. And let's take one last look at this good mother. If she was as the police believe, selling drugs, even marijuana, that paints a picture of a woman who was willing to bring people she very likely didn't know, into the home where her children were being raised. One thing about that doesn't fit very well within my definition of a good mother, even if everything else she did for her children was good. It's not going to be a very merry Christmas for a lot of people because of this incident. The family and friends of Twila Hipsher deserve our sympathy and prayers. My own heart, however, goes out to Officer John Green, who is forced into doing something no police officer wants to do, and he will carry it with him for the rest of his life. For months to come it will be part of his shadow, and no matter how well he adjusts, will influence his thinking, both on the job and off.

He will be remembered by many people in this community as the cop who shot the mother who was only selling pot, instead of the hero, who put everything he believed in on the line and saved other officer's lives. It's an unfair burden to ask him to bear, but when he willingly took on when he accepted his badge. The next week or whenever he returns to his normal duties, he will accept the responsibility for doing that, again, if that's what it takes to protect us. This officer and the others who accept the same responsibility deserve our support. To Officer Green and all others who also wear the badge, Merry Christmas, and thank you. I'm Jenny Goldson. Like Neil Lehrer closed out their newscast Wednesday night with a photo essay of the aftermath in Armenia, as it began I found myself making excuses to stay in another room so that I wouldn't have to watch, somehow I just wasn't willing to look at it to make it any more real in my mind than it is already.

The past few weeks have been difficult. The earthquake, the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Scotland, and the local death of a firefighter have been weighing heavily on our minds. It's been terribly depressing. But I'm not going to start railing at the news media insisting that more good news should be run. I'm not interested in having pages laid out and newscasts edited with the idea in mind of whether the news is going to make me happy. That's not what it's for. As awful as things have been, we need to know what happened and why. But knowing that I need to know doesn't make it any easier to deal with it. I'm going through right now the same slight depression I often hear friends referring to. Just to knowing there is incredible suffering going on, but needing to hide from it. It's not that we don't care. It's that from time to time, enough is enough. A hundred years ago, disasters such as these might well have happened with most of the world never hearing about it. But with current technology, it happens quite frequently that people thousands of miles away hear about an event before people five miles away hear about it.

And that often means that we become aware on a daily basis of events that are quite difficult to assimilate into our own lives. Yet we go on, day after day, putting one foot in front of the other, and progressing through the daily routine as if nothing had happened at all. Now and then we have to be reminded that just leaving the house in the morning is in some ways an incredible leap of faith. One believes in these times that everything will be all right, whether it's because of a belief in God's mercy through simple faith and other human beings, or even a realization that the law of average is alone protects us from needing to expect the worst as we pull out onto the street, on route to the tasks that are part of our daily lives. We continue every day to enjoy life's riches and endure the small problems and annoyances without giving a thought to the possibility of terror from either natural or man-made disasters. Back at home at night, there is the news. With its pictures of starving injured and grieving people, it's difficult to watch sometimes. But we need to know, we need to have a framework in which to reference our own lives, a perspective

that shows us that whatever minor disasters we may have encountered during a day, other people endure major disasters and still survive. And we need to remember when we think of them, that just as there are small miracles within our own lives, so will there be in theirs. We have an opportunity, through knowing about them, to become part of the miracles in their lives, through donations of money, service, or political action at another appropriate time. So even though I may make my own decision not to watch still more pictures of the suffering in a distant country, I cannot ask the news media to take it upon themselves to shelter me from it. The papers, the radio, and the television are, from time to time, necessarily full of stories that are truly depressing. We have to remember that it is not the purpose of news organizations to make our lives feel better. As their purpose to give us the information we need, so that we may interact with others to make their lives better.

I'm Jenny Goulson. The celebration of Martin Luther King Day is upon us. Maybe because of its newness, we haven't yet figured out how to celebrate it, but it's time we got with the program. Dr. King was black, of course, but the words he said and the ideas he promoted speak to all people. The issues he worked for happened because of the era in which he lived to be directly related to black people, but the ideas he promoted speak to all of us. Most of Dr. King's ideas simply extend the idea of freedom that was the foundation on which the country began. When the entire course of the country's history is examined, there are strong parallels between the civil rights marches and the Boston Tea Party. Just as the early colonists were not content to be second-class citizens, other people nearly two hundred years later rebelled against the tyranny that made them second-class citizens because of the color of their skin. The idea during Dr. King's time may have looked like race, but the underlying idea was the simple concept of true freedom.

Dr. King made it his cry just as the early colonists did, that any freedom restricted because of reasons external to the individual was freedom wrongly denied. Dr. King outlined freedom as having several elements, including the capacity to deliberate or weigh alternatives, freedom of decision and responsibility for decisions, and a quote from a speech delivered in December of 1962, Dr. King also said, The absence of freedom is the imposition of restraint on my deliberation as to what I shall do, where I shall live, how much I shall earn, the kind of tasks I shall pursue. I am robbed of the basic quality of madness. When I cannot choose what I shall do, or where I shall live, or how I shall survive, it means that in fact that someone or some system has already made these a priori decisions for me, and I am reduced to an animal. I do not live, I merely exist. The only resemblances I have to real life are the motor responses and functions that are akin to humankind.

I cannot adequately assume the responsibility as a person because I have been made a party to a decision in which I played no part in making. Dr. King's ideas and philosophies were an essential part of many of the elements of our society that we today take for granted. At the time, many of his words were considered revolutionary, but they have endured and have since then been woven into the very fabric of a society that is stronger and more responsive to the needs of individuals. The journey to real equality and freedom is not over, and the problem of the King holiday being relegated in the American mind to one of interest to Blacks only, is proof that we have far far to go. Dr. King was the conscience of an entire generation. Since his death, momentum has been lost, a leadership vacuum has developed, and the country has progressed very slowly in the civil and human rights area. When the push to make the holiday became official was on, one of the most often voiced protests was that King had not been elected to national office, but that's part of the point. King could not have been elected to national office because of the color of his skin.

He was, however, no less a leader of this nation than any president has been, and a much finer leader than many of them have been. He deserves to be remembered with this holiday, and we all owe it to ourselves to make it a meaningful part of our lives. His words and efforts led one generation, and had the power and potential to propel another to greatness. It is up to us to accept the challenge. I'm Jenny Goulson. Monday was a day of unfortunate irony. It was the day we celebrated the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who championed the causes of civil rights and nonviolence, and it was also the day our sensitive, insightful governor held a press conference announcing his plans to promote the cause of capital punishment in Kansas. Not only did Mr. Hayden fail to treat Monday as a holiday by continuing to carry on the affairs of state as if Monday were just another day, but he also failed to realize that one of the most powerful arguments against capital punishment is our society's failure to

administer it in a way that doesn't discriminate against the non-white and the non-affluent. In short, he showed that Dr. King's birthday meant nothing to him, and that he has learned very little of the things Dr. King stood for. I've discussed my objections to capital punishment before. It doesn't take a lot of research to discover that there is little, if any, statistical proof that as a deterrent, it's effective. And statistics also show overwhelmingly that capital punishment is administered disproportionately to the poor, the uneducated, and the minorities, making it a nearly wholesale violation of civil rights. Even the violent and abhorrent argument that the state saves money by executing rather than feeding and housing a prisoner is no longer valid. The appeals process, a necessary and standard part of the system, is enormously expensive, far more so than the cost of Roman board. The only thing capital punishment does effectively is allow us to believe we've solved our problems. By executing convicts, we get a misplaced satisfaction that we've effectively fought crime.

Instead, we've buried a human being along with all the problems and factors that led to the crime. No where in that process is our society or the state required to examine the life of the convict and take any responsibility for the factors which influence the person's behavior. On death row in Texas, as I speak, as a man who is said to have the mind of a child and who had a childhood no one should have had, and the state is very, very anxious to rid itself of this man and even the score between him and his victim. The governor's press conference on Monday was a real crime against humanity. It was the height of insensitivity and ignorance, but when you're white and you have money and position, you can get away with things like that. You can get away with a lot. You can get away with murder. I'm Jenny Goulson. The headline news of the week has been, of course, the execution of Ted Bundy.

After last week's commentary against capital punishment, and this week's execution of a man whose multiple brutal slangs of women almost defy comprehension, I've had to do some real soul-searching, but the only conclusion I still can reach is that capital punishment is wrong. Ted Bundy should never have gone to the electric chair. Our thinking about this execution and the appalling events surrounding it make no more sense than Bundy's own crimes. I can understand certainly a need for revenge within the families and friends of his victims, but having that need and carrying it out are two very different things. The need is understandable and excusable. The act is not. Of course, we all realize that killing Bundy won't bring the victims back. But many of us believe that the deaths of perhaps as many as 50 women are avenged now, or at least that things are a little bit better or more even. And I have a problem with that. These victims died because they were women.

Their brutal murders were part of a much larger picture that legitimizes violence against women in our society. And to be really straightforward about it, this woman is sick and tired of a society which promotes violence against women by allowing it to happen in the first place, and then making a big macho display of vengeance so that everybody will think everything has been made all right. Those women are dead, and Ted Bundy is dead, and more women are going to die in the hands of other men like him out there, and it is not all right. The streets are not any safer than they ever were because of Bundy's death. Even if we caught and killed all the men who brutalized women, things wouldn't be any safer for women because within this whole crime and punishment cycle, we are not looking at the psychological and societal factors which allow this to keep happening. We do not know why some men molest young girls, some men rape women, and some men batter women. We just let it keep happening and trying to make everything all right after it happens.

That's not good enough. Women want and deserve better than that. We don't need revenge. We need it to stop happening in the first place. That is justice. Punishment of the offender, even capital punishment, is not justice at all. The demonstration outside the prison where Bundy was executed was absolutely sick. What were they rejoicing for? To think those victims were avenged by that one act is to cheapen the lives of those women and of all women. I want to know why everyone said fry Ted, and no one said prevent Ted. That whole display of macho revenge was an insult to all women who have been and will be victims. These executions solved nothing, but made a lot of us feel that things are better now. But no matter how many men like him we execute, nothing will be better. Listen to this woman's voice. Do not give me dead criminals. Give me live healthy men who can feel whole and vital without needing to brutalize me

and my sisters. Then justice will be served. Then things will be better. I'm Jenny Goelsen. Get out the black clothes, the black hat, the black shoes. Cancel the parties. There is nothing to celebrate anymore. This is the end of life as we've come to know and love it. Largers is closing. What shall we do? Where shall we go? I know about Largers even before I moved to Wichita. I worked on a hotline in the early 70s with a guy who used to be a carry out boy there, and he told me wonderful tales for hours about all the foods I'd never heard of, and the foods I'd only heard of but didn't even know anybody who'd eaten them. Then one day I visited Wichita and Largers and it was grand. When I finally moved here, the first apartment I moved into was in Largers' neighborhood. Even if my car broke down, I could still be able to walk over there.

Largers was a Disneyland for a foodie. Five lobsters, lemon curd in jars, cherry vinegar, arboreo rice, fresh herbs, and the steaks. Now those were steaks to die for. They were actually worth paying for, unlike a lot of the meat in ordinary grocery stores. If you needed something special for a party but didn't know what you wanted, if you just looked around a little bit, you'd find it and it would be perfect. If you had a new recipe which had an ingredient you'd never even heard of, you just took it to Largers and even if you didn't find it on the shelf, someone there would know what it was and would probably find it under another name somewhere. Take a recipe to one of the big stores and you're lucky if you see an employee outside of one of the checkstands. And if it's anything more exotic than flour or sugar, not only will they not know what it is, they won't know whether they have it or where to find it. Largers was also a place to spend the lazy Saturday afternoon mulling over the condiments and wondering just who it was who actually ate those strange-named things.

How wonderful it was to browse through the cookies and find something new and delightful. It was comforting to know I could stop by at a hurry and of course they would have Tahini. Even though I now live on the other side of town, I still try to get to Largers every couple of weeks or so. I've grown fond of having a couple of amaretto cookies without forking over for a whole tin. It's nice to pick out a shiny apple and then stop by the meat counter and have them cut off a couple of slices of a farty with herbs to go with it and call it lunch. A quick stop on a Friday after work would net a sack full of weekend goodies, not to be found anywhere else, or just the right kind of olive oil for a weekend cooking spree. But now I'll only have the chain stores to visit. And we will go on though it'll be hard, but I hate to think about it. It'll be a whole new way of living. I'll mean living without hazelnut oil, fresh tarragon, wine crackers and flavored vinegars. I'll learn to get along without the wonderful jellies and marmalades, but I won't like

it. Summer certainly won't be the same. Who wants to go to the trouble of firing up the grill just to toss any old meat on it? It's almost enough to make you become a vegetarian. The closing of Largers will be the end of an era in Wichita and significant too in another respect. It's a sign of the times, times in which things are becoming more and more the same. Now we'll all be buying from a smaller range of choices, food from supermarket shelves. That's a different kind of buying since availability in the chains is very often not a matter of having a choice of the best products available for the best price, but rather of paying inflated prices to a company that had to pay special fees to the grocer for having their products stocked on eye-level shelves or stacked in a way that occupied a certain percentage of the available display space. Every time we lose a place like Largers, we lose a little bit more of our freedom of choice. We lose the personal service they offered. We lose a little bit of the specialness that makes Wichita a good place to live. I'll spend the weekend grieving, I know, and maybe make a last goodbye visit before

the close-out sale starts. And I'll probably launch a frantic effort to find my Balducci's catalogue. Life without Largers will be livable, but I won't like it. I won't like it one bit. I'm Jenny Goulson. Since moving back to Kansas eight years ago, I have developed a deep affection for artists who are content to live and work in this state and who choose to represent our landscapes in their works. People who don't live here often have an unfortunate opinion that nothing is here worth looking at. But a potential new source of pride in the beauty of our state is on the horizon. Now the National Autobahn Society has plans to try to bring attention to a site near Strong City, the Z-Bar Ranch, and already it's working. Listen to the description written in the New York Times. Date line Strong City. The Z-Bar Ranch here is a vast stillness of hills, valleys and treeline creeks where hardly a sign of human beings intrudes.

A ranch house of native limestone is tucked behind a hill, and on a far rim a few horses graze, small brown shapes outlined against the sky. Considering most of the things that are said about Kansas, that passage almost sounds like poetry. It introduces a story outlining an Autobahn Society proposal to make the Z-Bar Ranch a wildlife preserve and working model of a historic ranch. The Society has obtained an option to buy the property and wants Congress to take over the option, buy the property and convert it to a Flint Hills Prairie National Monument, and have the National Park Service operate it. The proposal is meeting some resistance from the Strong City area, mainly because of a previous proposal for a Prairie National Park that would have taken over a lot of Flint Hills land by condemnation. But the Autobahn Society is trying to win over the people of the area, and I hope they succeed. Providing such an area would make a public statement about the beauty, value and worth of our state and our way of life.

Creation of the preserve would be a way of letting unfortunate non-cansons know that what is here is good and is worth preserving and worth looking at. Promoting that attitude would be a wonderful support for tourism and for economic development. The Autobahn Society proposal is deserving of serious and careful consideration. The idea is a good one, and we should make sure the fine print measures up. If it does, then the Sanctuary would be a fine addition to our state. With things like that going for us, who knows what other nice things outsiders might find to say about Kansas. I'm Jenny Goldson. I almost have to pinch myself these days to make sure I haven't fallen asleep and re-awakened in 1969. I had almost given up hope that some of the lessons we had learned would stay with us. But the tide is turning, and it's a cause for celebration. One of the most promising things to happen to this community in a long time is the efforts

of those people who are starting recycling programs. It was as if we had forgotten how small our planet is. But now that the landfill is running out of room, we finally have an effort geared towards getting us to do what we should have been doing all the time. After hearing everything written about it lately, I'm becoming almost paranoid about plastic. That stuff has just about literally taken over. Almost everything we buy has plastic wrapped around it in one form or another, and it's made so that once removed it has almost no weather function. It's a frustrating state of affairs, and if we're smart, we'll jump on whatever passing bandwagon there are to promote the decline in its use. Plastic is a wonderful substance that has revolutionized the world, but we've gone overboard in its use and have been negligent in its disposal. Having such a durable substance around is wonderful, but we need to use it only when necessary, because it's becoming obvious that its durability is raking havoc with the environment. Its use is almost so automatic that once you start thinking about being careful about it,

it's overwhelming. I have to remind myself about buying things in plastic containers when I could opt for a paper container or no container at all. I have to make it a point to carry tote bags so that small amounts of groceries don't have to be sacked in bags that don't have to be used. Worst yet is the problem of disposal. It's difficult for those of us who live in small spaces to find room for containers full of old containers that will be recycled in a few weeks. It's so much easier just to cart everything out to the trash. That is the kind of thing one can get used to, another adjustment to be made like so many other adjustments we have made. I keep telling myself that if I can learn to use a computer or can muster up the intelligence and concentration needed to make the copy or do what it's supposed to do, I can remember to put newspapers and bottles and cans aside and to take them to the recycle site on the appointed day. The people behind the recycling efforts are the unsung heroes of Wichita. It is silly for us to almost literally drown in our own trash, to pollute the planet

and to consider spending huge amounts of money for an incinerator to burn it when we can simply and easily reduce the amount of it we generate. And speaking of incinerators, beware of the proposals to build one anywhere near River City. Incinerators are not waste destruction, they are waste concentration. It is not healthy for us to breathe in concentrated amounts. The stuff we card out to the garbage can, don't let the proponents of that project stick some fancy names on it so that you too can believe it's wonderful. It's not, Wichita is and should remain above that kind of thing. It's the kind of thinking behind the recycling movement that will keep this community healthy and will aid in propelling us in good shape into the next century. Waste incineration not only won't do that, it could quite literally keep us from getting there at all. I'm Jenny Goulson. It's been quite a while since we've seen the kind of furor over a piece of writing the way we have over Salman Rushdie's novel, Satanic Versus.

And it's been fascinating to sit back and watch the development of the story and the reactions to it. The first thing that comes to mind is that the Ayatollah Humane with his more than a little bit distorted view of the world has done more to condemn Islam than Rushdie ever thought about doing. People who would have ignored the novel, under normal circumstances, are now clamoring for it and have developed not only a great deal of sympathy for the author, but a great deal less respect for the religion Humane seeks to protect. A simple self-righteous condemnation from Humane would have gone a lot further than the death sentence he has imposed on Rushdie. Nearly all of us with our innermost feelings dictating that all religions deserve our respect would probably have supported Humane had he simply uttered angry words of outrage. We would, of course, continue to defend Rushdie's right to print what he chose, but our hearts would have gone out to Humane. But with Humane's over zealous words of hatred and his command to send who knows how many madmen end to the world to wreak revenge, a lot of us have developed an unfortunate attitude

towards Islam of, if that's how they are who needs them, and if Rushdie's insulted them who cares. It's a little difficult to develop sympathy for a band of murderers, which is exactly what Humane has pictured his followers to be. Instead, quite a few of us are trying to get our hands on Rushdie's novel, not because we particularly want to read it, but because Humane has threatened our right to read it. The satanic verses is not my kind of reading, but it'll probably become part of my collection if for no other reason that it's a part of literary history and First Amendment history, and for those reasons I'd like to own it. If it even gets put into my stack of things I want to read, it'll be months, maybe even a year before I'll get to it. A final word to be Dalton and Walden books and all other cowards who pull the book off the shelves, shame on you. The repentance of the booksellers is little consolation for a really dangerous act of censorship. I'm Jenny Goulson.

It was gratifying to learn late last week that the police department's new policy regarding making arrests for...let's start over. It was gratifying to learn late last week that the police department's new policy regarding making arrests in domestic violence cases is working out well. The policy has been a long time in coming and was implemented, none too soon. It allows police to make arrests at the scene if there is evidence of a misdemeanor assault and battery, and if the victim is willing to sign a complaint, the complaint can be dropped only if the victim has attended a support group meeting. There's not enough recognition in our society that our bodies and lives are our own, and that there are boundaries other people need to observe with us. Sometimes very early in our lives we learn to relinquish our own rights to other people, never learning how or why we need to reclaim them. That's especially but not exclusively true of women. And the new policy makes a strong statement to both victims and batterers about one's rights, about one's body, and its surroundings.

If the policy puts more batterers behind bars, then it will be very successful indeed. But it also makes a statement about the rights we all have to control our own bodies and lives. Then it will be a...provide a valuable service of making people involved in domestic violence aware of the subtle aspects of personhood, and in that will be the beginning of a healthier attitude. It's necessary to point out also that policies like this one often have unanticipated payoffs. Take for example the problems of the elderly. We're finding ourselves not only with more and more elderly people to care for, but also with many of those people determined to live independently, and we need tools and attitudes that will allow us to intervene in their lives when it becomes appropriate in order to protect them and ensure their safety. Especially when it's obvious they cannot do so themselves. An older couple I have known for years recently showed me how important it is. A few months ago he was admitted to the hospital with some unexplained injuries and strong evidence that some really bizarre events had taken place.

I call police in the large out-of-state city where they live to alert them to the real possibility that the wife may have been abusing the husband. After half an hour in conversations with three different people, I finally got a captain to take a report, and I'm pretty sure he did it just to get rid of me. But the attitudes of a records clerk, a lieutenant, and a captain were, why in the world would you want us to get involved? A policy in that department, similar to the one now in use in Wichita, could have provided some valuable tools in ensuring not only that the husband would be safe, but also might have provided social service agencies with an opportunity to intervene and assure the well-being of both the husband and the wife. Public violence is a difficult problem to deal with, but the new policy in use could go a long way towards making both victims and batterers realize that our society recognizes each individual has rights that are worth protecting. I'm Jenny Goldson. The good news is not only is it Friday, but it's also only 10 days away from the first

day of spring. Today is the day the man at the nursery told me that the herb plants are due with the greenhouse, and so with visions of tarragon and rosemary dancing in my head I look forward to the coming days when even the smallest tinder shoot peeking up through the soil can represent all the promises of life itself. I don't care if it's a weed, I need to see green. Having lived in Kansas all my life, I'm not naive enough to believe that on March 20th, whenever the sun officially passes over the equator, all the cold and nasty weather will be gone. On the contrary, the first day of spring in Kansas can signify that Mother Nature has just gotten her second wind and has turned nasty and vindictive to boot, but I am a person who has been needing spring for a few weeks now. Most of my friends and I were exhausted all the last week and spent as much of the weekend snoozing as we could. I have co-workers who got excited when they found out it was frozen food month. I have cats who cannot remember what a bird looks like.

Only around me seems to need spring just as much as I do. Around my place spring has certain rights and rituals and a few of them have already come to pass. The major hallmark happened a few days ago when I asked the apartment management to please make it so that no birds could nest in my dryer vent. And low and behold, just a day or two later, a note on the door indicated the repair had indeed been made. I raced over to the vent and excitement eager to see evidence of real ingenuity. I saw evidence for the third year in a row that the same people who are normally wonderful at apartment repairs do not understand birds. This weekend I will hit my friends up for a ladder and do the job myself. One must understand that birds do not have to think about car repairs and computers and whether to buy a black or colored mascara. All they know is eating, flying, nesting and laying eggs, and they are very, very good at those things. They didn't take much for them to figure out that my dryer vent is a wonderful place

for a nest. It's about 12 feet off the ground and has a roof over the opening. A little bit of screen stretched across that opening is not even a discouragement, much less a deterrent, but this year I have a plan, and if all goes well, the only cooked birds at my place will come out of the oven. Spring these days brings out the child and me. I remember all the seasonal things we'd do in grade school but stopped doing in junior high and high school. For a long time I didn't particularly care what season it was, but with each passing year the subtleties of the seasons grow a little more fascinating and joyful. Last year's magic was provided by a pair of cardinals who decided they liked the tree outside my bedroom window. If I lingered outdoors to watch them, they'd flee to safer purges on the overhead wires and chirp impatiently until I gave up and went indoors where I belonged. But I knew they returned to the tree as soon as I left, because a cat would sit on the window sill and literally howl with frustration of having too such delectable morsels that were so inaccessible.

Each project seems to bring spring just a little bit closer. After the dryer vent project comes from herring the ground for new plants, cleaning out the grill and all the other preparations that help bring in a new season. Even washing windows will be a treat this year. Somehow it seems that the act of sweeping cobwebs out of corners gets them also out of the elbows and the knees and even the mind itself. And for that reason spring won't come even a moment too soon. It's been a long winter in a lot of ways, and I could really use some fresh air. I'm Jenny Gullson. It was gratifying to read in yesterday's paper that the National Weather Service is making a lot of changes in an effort to come up with better forecasts. Whether or not better forecasts will be the end result remains, of course, to be seen. But the upgraded equipment, especially computer equipment, is badly needed if they toss some of the antiques they've been using it certainly won't hurt anything. I know all this because I am the daughter of a National Weather Service forecaster. It's made for an interesting life.

I've developed my own brand of forecasting to accompany my fathers. I don't forecast the weather you understand. He does that part. I forecast how well my father's forecasts are going to hold. And I'm better at mine than he is at his, but don't tell him I've said that. My father's good at modifying other people's forecasts. I call him and say, are we really going to get four to six inches? And he says, of course, not. You might see an engine. You might not see that. Any fool can look at those maps and tell that. And this is where discretion comes in. I never, never ask which fool looked at the maps and saw four to six inches. There are some things in life were better off not knowing. I've also learned over the years that although a certain forecaster is very good at short range forecasts, trends are not always the strong suit. And he announced that we were heading into a cycle of rough winners. I shopped for like jackets instead of parkas. Like I said, I'm better at my forecast than he is at his and I haven't been wrong yet. They say it's the doctor's kids who never get medical attention and the shoe salesman's kids who go barefoot.

Well this forecaster's kid panics every time rough weather hits the old hometown because she knows her parents are not acting appropriately about it. The last real tornado warning they had, which was for the north end of the county, which is exactly where they live. Dad heard the sirens went out and looked at the sky and said, nah, I went back in the house and made coffee. The rest of the neighborhood was undercover and my parents were drinking coffee and loading the dishwasher. The warning before that he went outside, looked at the sky, saw the tunnels on the ground and yelled at my mother to get the camera. They got some really good shots. It's true. And when I mentioned that a few pictures are not worth risking one's life over, they headed me one of the prints and said, we're going to get this one blown up and framed. With my words of caution have been ignored over the years. So have my words of advice. My father and I have talked about the inaccuracy problem and I have advised that it's really just a matter of public relations and wording. I have explained that when a storm is approaching, saying we have a 20 to 30% chance of rain makes it sound like somebody took a glance at the maps, looked at the calendar, flipped a coin,

which between you and me, well let's not tell any tales out of school here. You never know who might be listening. My advice has always been to say that we have a 24.63% chance of rain so that when it doesn't come they can say in a calm, somewhat self-righteous voice, we stand by our calculations. It is not our fault the whole dog on cell took a ride at Montana. It's appropriate though that the National Weather Service sinks and funds into upgrading the service. It's an agency which has operated relatively frugally in the past and their due for modernization. To give you an idea of how bad it's been, I asked a computer friend about some problems on whether service computer was having and he looked at me with a puzzle expression and announced that it doesn't matter since nobody's even used one of those for more than 10 years. And I said yes there are people who still use them. When they do away with them my friend wants to buy one to sit in the corner of his living room on top of he says, another antique. All in all the National Weather Service does a good job and deserves our respect.

They not only put up with the indignancies of aging equipment but also continue to smile when some local amateur forecaster at a radio or TV station puts out an original forecast way off the mark which the listeners or viewers confuse with the Weather Service forecast which is often much more accurate. They don't even say a word when other local broadcasters put their own names on forecast they just pulled off the weather wire and retiped. These are the people who just show up for work day after day, column is a sim and then watch all that promise snow take a holiday in Colorado. I'm Jenny Goulson. I met a friend for lunch the other day or at least I tried to. Well actually I did and she was there but we didn't exactly do lunch. In the end I ate and she worried. She was inconsolable. There was nothing she wanted to eat and I have to admit I was no help. The problem is she's developed a food phobia, everything has too much fat, too much salt or maybe contains cyanide or has maybe been sprayed with insecticide, nothing is safe,

not even the water. I haven't talked to her since yesterday's report of all the millions and millions of pounds of toxins that are in the air we breathe. She's probably turning blue right now. I can laugh about all this because I'm used to it. I am the sister of a woman who a few years ago plunged headfirst with feeling into health food. Everything had to be wholesome. No additives, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no artificial colors. She haunted special groceries for margarine without added coloring. The cheese in her refrigerator tasted like cheddar and looked like Swiss, no coloring in that either. All the bread in her house was homemade so they wouldn't have to eat even a single molecule of preservative. She even ground her own weight to bake the bread. There was no jello at her house but there was an interesting concoction, a various liquids bound together with unflavored gelatin. It was more or less dark colored and it moved sort of like jello, but not quite.

When I ate at her house I pretended I was in a foreign country and I followed the same rule everyone follows when eating in a foreign country, you're better off not asking what's in it. I do have to hand it to her though, everything she served tasted good and there was nothing on her table I couldn't pronounce. The hard part was being at my house and sitting down to a good old-fashioned meal of stuff I was used to eating and listening to a lecture on what additives and preservatives and artificial junk will do to you. There was only one hole in her logic. She and her husband are cattle farmers and although they wouldn't eat store-bought bread they ate beef like crazy knowing full well what had been injected into it. They drank coffee too and ignored various reports about what coffee might or might not do to you. Oh well, nobody's perfect. The whole house of cards fell one labor day. When I opened the door to the camper and saw what I always suspected really went on she was in the corner surreptitiously sipping a cherry coke.

Now when we were kids and I caught her doing something she wasn't supposed to do, I behaved like a typical little sister. I jumped up and down and shouted descriptions of her sense to the whole world. But now we're grown and things are different. Well, some things are different. When I saw that cherry coke in her hand I lost it. Hey everybody, look at this, the earth mother herself drinking a cherry coke. It's got additives, it's got preservatives, it's got artificial color and artificial flavor, and she likes it. Some relatives came to see. Others were laughing so hard they couldn't get out of their chairs. And she has never, never forgiven me. And it was worth it. These days I eat whatever I want within reason without worrying about whether some little evil molecule will break loose from the pack and lodge in some unknown place in my body, ready to wreak havoc when I least suspected. This stuff is just too much to worry about, you know? Not being Congress or the legislature to cut down on the impurities our bodies consume

is a very reasonable thing to do. Working to stop a local manufacturer from further polluting the planet is even more reasonable. But sitting at the dinner table during suspiciously at one salad is not a good idea. Just think of life in America now that we know the score as life in a foreign land. Don't ask. Just enjoy. I'm Jenny Goulson.