I’ve got an opportunity for writers of all stripes who listen to this program.

I’ve been making The View from Planet Nancy for almost a year now, cooking it up in my living room and uploading it via satellite. Right about the time I get to feeling like enough is enough already and decide to quit, somebody will tell me how much they liked one episode or another and I think “Gee Whiz….there’s still this I haven’t talked about yet, or that…” and whaddya know, I keep living inside the everyday miracle of The View from Planet Nancy, and how it all keeps going.

But I really do get tired of the sound of my own voice. And the sound of my own thoughts, my typical way of reacting to everything. I’d like to open up this forum to some voices and some ideas besides my own.

And so, my fellow writers–what’s on your mind? What’s on your desk? Send something in, up to 300 words, and see if I don’t just read what you have to say on the air.

Go to AuthorNancyCasey.com, and upload your work as a comment to any of the posts that you find there.

What should you write about? Scroll around in the archives and you’ll get an idea of the kinds of things that grab my attention.

Storytelling and information. I want to know what science is, how it works and why we have it.

Religion is always interesting. Theologian Riffat Hassan says that if you are interested in the oppression and foolishness enacted in the name of religion, you should know that a social argument cannot ever trump a theological argument. Only a superior theological argument can do that. So it’s worth it to know where these theological arguments come from. There are so many ways to read the Garden of Eden story, for instance. I’ve been reflecting lately on the Prodigal Son, the shephered and the sheep–all those back-to-the-fold stories.

All the iconic stories are suspect, it seems, not just the religious ones. Read Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, and watch all the great figures of the American Heritage turn into tinker toys and fall apart. And where does that leave us?

These are interesting and worthwhile things to think about.

So is gender.

Perhaps you’ve had your worldview jangled by travel. Or art.

What’s there to learn about language and communication? How do we talk? What do we say? What good does it do us? Where do writing, gesture, and showing each other pictures fit in? Are there languages we can’t speak? Is there talking we don’t hear? Can science wrap itself around the phenomenon of language?

And then there’s this whole confusing business of making our way in the world–our expectations, our choices, how it’s turning out, our relations to others, who those others are… There is so much to learn and know and think about. Are you writing about it?

This is my call to writers who do write about these things. Send something in. AuthorNancyCasey.com. Up to 300 words. Paste it into the comment box. Let’s get some of your thoughts on the air.

I grew up in a post World War II nuclear family that practiced patriarchial Irish Catholic fundamentalism as a spiritual discipline and an art.  School uniforms.  Morning Mass in Latin. Altar Boys. Immaculate surfaces.  Catholic college.  Almighty God.  Mom, Dad, and the kids.

Receive the sacraments.  Make the novenas.  Stations of the Cross.Fish on Friday, Confession on Saturday.  You are called to be perfect as the father is perfect.

Dad was silent.  Mom was holy.  She saw that we chanted the rosary after dinner.  She helped us build our first May altars, knelt down with us before bed and prayed.  There were beeswax candles.  We sang litanies on feast days at midnight.  Sometimes my mother, my grandmother, and all the aunts would circle round the coffee table in the front window after Sunday dinner and disgorge their boxes of religious paraphenalia.  Scapulars, rosaries.  Sacred Heart badges.  They had miraculous medals to pin to your undershirt if you get the croup, and a tiny vial of water from the grotto at Lourdes where the virgin appeared to the little children.  They had holy cards with all the important prayers. like  “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Hosts, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope”.

It was complicated how it all came about:  Jesus in the manger nailed to the cross.  Three persons in one God.  Mortal sin.  The Annunciation.  Adam and Eve.  It was hard to get things to add up. “Honor thy Father and thy Mother” means “Don’t disobey.”  “Thou shalt not kill” means “Don’t fight.”  When you want something, you ask the Blessed Virgin and she puts it in her heart.  Jesus sees it there and tells God.

No one exactly said it outright, but I figured out that the way it was supposed to feel had something to do with radiant light.  We had crystal rosaries and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. Saints had haloes and bands of light leaping from their hands.  Mary wore stars in her golden crown.  Illuminated heart of Jesus, pray for us.  When it all worked out, you’d be bathed in radiant light, the mysteries and miracles would connect, and it would all made sense.  If you didn’t get there right off, well, just keep praying, stick with it.  Maybe when you’re older.

Well, I got older and it didn’t stick.  I took other roads in searh of that radiant light.  They didn’t like it, and used tough love on me.  I didn’t like that.

I’ve been thinking about these things because I’ve been reading Pure Lust by philosopher Mary Daly.  Lust, as in lustre, as in passionate longing — for beauty and truth and tenderness.  Even as that longing is encumbered by the dark weight of the knowledge that something is terribly wrong in the world today.  It’s a death-dealing phallocratic patriarchy out there, says Daly.  Lust has been perverted to Thrust.  We drill for minerals and fire our missles. We make vaginal probes and architectural erections. Sado-society, she calls it duplicitous, self-destructive, raping, lethal. It permeates everything–the ways we are taught to think, almost all of our expections.  ALMOST…

The real reality, the one we can’t stop lusting after, is a biophilic consciousness, says Daly, a consciousness based on life’s obvious afinity for life.  Yet we’re trapped in a sado-society woven of doublethink and deception.  But every deception contains a crack, a lens for lustre where real knowledge, preserved and handed down in the intuitions and memories of women, radiates towards us.

Who’d a thunk it.  The mothers and the sisters and the aunts.  Reflecting and transmitting elemental luminescence.  As best they can.

I took myself on a great big trip recently, and one of the things I did was use my airline miles to fly first class from one end of the country to the other and back. Imagine the perks–food, drink, priority boarding, a big seat… It was my intention to soak up every privilege–without appearing to be too much of a bumpkin.

Except that I am a total bumpkin.

Rich people have codes and signals, and I don’t know them. My comfortable, versatile clothes didn’t exude the right kind of pristine. My skin, hair, and fingernails didn’t show professional attention. Luggage that looks like its’s been Port-au-Prince a dozen times doesn’t make a person look worldly. Even through I’d washed all the mud off my clogs, they still looked like I’d worn them outdoors. Unlike the suede shoes on the man seated next to me which would be ruined if they got wet. His feet would get soaked, too. But I’ll bet the chain across his instep is real gold.

The flight attendant made it a point to sidle up to him privately, and acknowledge that he was a member of the high pooh-bahs of plane ticket money spenders, “so if there’s anything at all we can do to make your flight more agreeable…”

I’d already seen the perfect tailoring of his suit jacket when he stood ahead of me in the red-roped priority check-in line, his left ear pasted to the shaved globe of his head by a phone, into which he was steadfastly “yessing” and “absolutely-ing”, firmly laying out why his interlocutor should give somebody a second chance. “I realize that our performance so far hasn’t shown you…” and “You can be certain that I personally…” It sure didn’t seem like he could affort to lose this account, or not close this deal. “I just want an opportunity to demonstrate that what you’ve seen isn’t an indicator of the way things are going to be….”

It was 5:00 in the morning in Boston. Who was he talking to? Someone in Europe? In Asia? Or some local insomniac bully who was enjoying his power to make this guy grovel?But the guy was good. His grovel was professional, as befitting his shoes and clothes. He was like a boxer, parrying blow after blow, and bobbing back up, nimble and eager. “You’re going to see something different when you find out what our best work is really like.” His head never went down. He had stamina. Whatever the upbrading coming down the line, he was going to flip it into an occasion to regard a new improved future. At 5 AM. All in a day’s work.

People tell me they have some of the most interesting conversations on airplanes. I suppose. I guess you really have to believe that you can make a connection with anyone. We’re all humans, aren’t we? I’m sure there’s some social signal I don’t know how to give that might have set up the context for a pleasant exchange between me and this man. “Hey,” I could have said. “Awesome the way you took that spanking back there.” and if I had said that, he wouldn’t have heard. He put on a set of those everything-cancelling headphones as soon as he sat down, the kind that if he turned and looked at me, I’d be reminded of Steve Martin with that trick arrow going through his head. He didn’t take the bulbs off his ears for the whole flight. Not for the omelette, or the bloody Mary, or either one of the hot towels.

I didn’t care. I had my own armrest, a book to read. The seat was so roomy I could kick off my shoes and sit cross-legged. And I said, “Yes, please,” every chance I got.

My grandmother was the second-to-the-last child in a huge Irish family. When her parents died, she and her husband, Doc, the optometrist, inherited the three story house with the bay windows and wrap around porches. The house, and the bachelor uncles, the youngest of whom, Uncle Bernie, lived there still when I was a child.

On Sundays when we got to Grandma’s, we’d run into the parlor where Uncle Bernie stood waiting for us, hands in his pockets. He shuffled his slippery shoes on the carpet. Do you see one? Is it there? With pantlegs flapping to the clumsy footwork, he flicked Necco wafers out of his pockets, and sticks of Beeman’s gum. Pennies occasionally. One for each of us. No matter how much we danced around him and begged for more, laughing up at the dome of his Santa Claus tummy.

Uncle Bernie was different before The Depression, they said. He was in real estate and would sometimes rush away, saying, “I have to go show a house.” He lost all his apartments, everything, in the crash of ’29. He wore a suit every day and always drove a Cadillac. My grandmother’s albums have picures of him during the War. That would be World War I, when she knit socks for the men in the trenches. In every photo, Uncle Bernie stands in uniform, beside the elephantine haunches of an automobile. Uncle Bernie drove the general’s Cadillac.

Uncle Bernie didn’t read to us or play games of cards like my grandfather did. But he let us sit on the toilet seat or the edge of the bathtub in his bathroom and watch him shave. He sudsed up a brush in a cup the way our dad did and the lather all over his face made him really look like Santa Claus. We’d kick and bounce, call for him to dab us on the nose, expecting the taste of whipped cream and not soap. The aftershave was Old Spice and he made burbly sounds and smacked his jiggley cheeks. He smeared some white goo from a tall bottle onto his palms and into his hair and the comb left tracks front to back through his white widow’s peak. He was getting ready to go across the street to 12 o’clock Mass.

No way we could go to 12 o’clock Mass. We went at 7:15 or 9:30. 12 o’clock Mass was for people who were lazy. And Uncle Bernie. You didn’t ever get to do something justs because Uncle Bernie did it. At dinner, he ate his dessert–a bowl of custard–first. My grandmother made his plate up special in the kitchen. The meat had to be extra well-done black. He wouldn’t tolerate spaghetti, because it looked like worms, nor could he bear the sight of a green bean because there could be a worm hidden inside. Uncle Bernie’s cure for any ailment was bicarbonate of soda. Sometimes my mother and the aunts would exchange murmurs and glances because of him in the bathroom after dinner.

There’s a famous family photo of me in a skinny wet bathing suit, cringing in black and white beside the rear bumber of Uncle Bernie’s Cadillac, wailing straight into the lens, “I caaaaan’t.” He’s bowed to the box camera at his belly, telling me to stand up straight, stand still and smile. Uncle Bernie wouldn’t think of bare feet and hot asphalt, only that one of those kids in the wading pool by the driveway should and get over here next to his green and white Cadillac for a picture.

Uncle Bernie spent his weekday evenings at a funeral parlor. It was just one more oddball thing Uncle Bernie did. Hanging out with his friends in the back of a funeral home.

Uncle Bernie. He drove the general’s Cadillac.