Karen Compassion, R.N. Tom Nussbaum entertains us with a Halloween costume

It began with a pair of pastel blue hospital scrubs. How my roommate ac-

quired them, I do not recall. But there we were, Halloween 1982 looming on the horizon and a costume dilemma semi-solved.

“I could go as a doctor,” Mark said.

“And I could go as . . .”

“And you could go as . . . ,” we said in unison.

“A nurse!” we finished the sentence.

So, off to Goodwill Doctor Mark and I went, in search of accessories to complete his outfit and the makings of a nurse more wretched than Ratched.

Mark found a bald-head wig to hide his identifiable golden-brown hair and a novelty item similar to Groucho Marx glasses with mustache. It had, to add to the disguise, a honker of a nose. He also found a toy stethoscope.

I was disappointed, however, in my search for nurses’ paraphernalia when I couldn’t find scrubs to complement his. The frustration, though, was shortlived as I found a white nurse’s dress. And it fit! The cornerstone of my nurse had been laid. White tennis shoes and tights were easily added moments later. But next came a challenge. “Have you ever gone bra shopping?” I asked rhetorically as we neared a Playtexinfested rack. We stared at a collection of brassieres that ran from grandmotherly to Fredericks of Hollywood. Mark leaped forward.

“What about this one?” he offered, holding a sexy red one. “Or this lacy black number?”

“No. No!” I chided. “It has to be white. I’m wearing a white dress, for God’s sake. Those’ll show through. I can’t have that. I am a professional,” I explained louder than necessary. An audience began to form. “I’m not going as a slutty nurse. That’s been done. And done. And done.”

I grabbed a plain white one, voluminous enough to hold two pairs of balled-up tube sox. “I will not be slutty,” I said, “but I will be voluptuous.”

We laughed as we dashed toward a wall of wigs. “Do you want to be blonde, brunette, or a redhead?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know.” And then I saw it. “Oh, my God!” I lunged at a brown one. “This is perfect.” I grabbed the overpermed, big-hair 1980s-styled coiffure. “If there is a god in heaven, this had better fit,” I prayed. It did.

Before Halloween came and we debuted our costumes, I added a nurse’s hat, complete with a red cross, latex surgical gloves, and women’s glasses that hung around my neck and rested on my ample bosom. To avoid using makeup, I wore a surgical mask that hid the lower half of my face and my strong, masculine jaw. Unless one was familiar with my eyes, I was unrecognizable.

I do not recall much about that Halloween. Perhaps that is because of the marijuana we smoked—I mean the medication Dr. Mark prescribed— before we left. But that was not the nurse’s only appearance. I remember the others clearly.

They occurred at the high school at which I worked and were scheduled for every fourth Halloween in order to reach a totally new audience each time. No medications prescribed by Dr. Mark were used in the school setting. Well, by me, at least.

As I was preparing my first appearance as the nurse at the school, I realized I had never given her a name. And she became Karen Compassion, R.N. She no longer was part of Dr. Mark’s medical team; she now was a school nurse. I fashioned a nameplate and positioned it above my bursting, sockstuffed, left breast.

Numerous accessories were added over the years. First was a new wig. As much as I loved the frizzy, large ‘80s hair, I found a campier one. It was a black, short flip-styled coif ala Mary Tyler Moore’s 1960s Laura Petrie. Next was a nurse’s kit, again adorned with a red cross. A few years later, a real stethoscope, gifted to me by a medical professional, appeared around my neck, as did a hospital pen on a lanyard. The final addition to the costume was a pink cardigan sweater.

I have countless humorous memories from those Halloweens, but none dearer to my heart than one that took six months to play out.

It began at lunchtime. I, as Karen Compassion, R.N., roamed the school’s halls, making certain as many students saw me as possible. I turned into a short, out-of-the-way hall to discover a boy and girl kissing passionately. I accelerated toward them. “No, no, no, no, no!” I screamed. “That spreads germs, you know. We simply cannot have that.” My voice was exaggeratedly female and shrill, a cross between a coloratura soprano reaching High C and the Wicked Witch of the West. I waved my hands around with comic exasperation, introducing camp humor to the school.

The couple separated. The boy spewed, “What the hell!” and stared. And I turned and walked away, laughter echoing around me from God knows how many hidden make-out crannies.

This incident came to an unexpected conclusion the following spring. I was leading my special-needs students, who were high school age but between four and ten in their cognitive and social development, in their weekly collecting of classroom recyclables, when I had a sudden idea. Since retaining instructions was a challenge for them, I thought I’d repeat the instructions, one more time, in Karen Compassion’s voice; perhaps the unusual tone and comic quality would echo in their ears and help them process the instructions.

“Now, remember, boys and girls, we want the green pails,” I reminded them. “The brown ones are icky. They have germs.” They laughed at my silliness. But over the shoulder of one of my students, I saw a young man staring at me, his jaw hanging in shock.

“Oh, my god,” he said. “You’re the nurse!” His tone was over-dramatic, his demeanor feminine. With those few words, I suspected he was gay.

“Why, yes, I am. You remember that?”

“Yes. You were hella funny.” He paused. “And that took guts.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I was just being myself,” I said.

He stared at me a moment and then I saw the light in his eyes. He had realized that there was a gay man on the school’s staff. And it was OK.

And, hopefully, he was OK.

Tom Nussbaum

By Steve Griffin

This is the story my nineyear-old brother told me, and one he sticks to adamantly more than half a cen-

tury later. He had wandered away from the group of kids playing down by the creek, heading back, he thought, to the cabins provided for the cherry pickers by Hazel Dell Orchards, Inc. of The Dalles, Oregon. Our family—my father, mother, my younger brother, and I—had been coming to Oregon to pick cherries in June for three years. The first year we had made and saved enough in a month to make a down payment on and move into the first house my parents had ever called their own. We left for Oregon, five hundred miles north of our home, the minute my last class on the last day of the school year ended. My father’s car sat idling on the curb in front of the school. I felt no joy as we set off on the twelve-hour journey throughout the afternoon and night, knowing when we arrived the next morning, a month of long days of labor awaited. There were no child labor laws enforced in the fields in those days, and children as young as eight were expected to contribute their labor for the family’s betterment. Before the Bracero programs, when Mexican laborers replaced the American families in the fields, the summer harvests provided a substantial part of the income for many families whose fathers had no regular year-round employment. Many of those child laborers, including my brother and me, went on to become college graduates, spurred on, I’m sure, by memories of the long hours of toil which filled our summers. The June cherry picking morphed into July and August peach picking and prunes in September. My brother and I looked forward to the opening day of school far more eagerly than most of our classmates.

On this particular day, my brother lost his way heading back to the pickers’ cabins and was wandering around in the vast acreage of towering trees. He soon became totally disoriented, and as darkness began to descend and shadows deepened, he began to panic. He ran in the direction he thought would take him to the pickers’ cabins. Exhausted after a few moments of desperate running, he fell to the ground, sobbing, sure he would never find his way back. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up into the face of a Black man, whose smile my brother has described as the kindest and most reassuring he has ever seen, before or since. The Black man’s voice soothed all my brother’s fears. “Don’t worry, little man. I’ll take you back to your family. Your mother, Isabel, is worried about you.”

“You know my mother?” the little boy asked, surprised, because he had never seen the Black man before.

The Black man’s voice came through the darkness. “Oh, yes. And I know she loves you and often prays for you. I know your father, too. He also loves you, though he often seems cruel and whips you and your brother if you aren’t working hard enough. He does this because that is how he was treated as a child, and he believes this is the best way for you and your brother to grow into strong men. I know your big brother, too, and though sometimes he tells you to quit bothering him and his friends, he loves you and is very proud of you.”

They had walked to the top of a hill. “There’s your cabin,” the Black man said as he released the boy’s hand. The boy looked down into the clearing below and saw the lights in the workers’ cabins. He was overcome with happiness and relief. His gratitude for the man brought tears to his eyes. In a voice choked with emotion, he said, “Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much.” He looked up to the man. There was no one there. He had disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared earlier.

My brother raced down toward the lights, ready for the spanking he was sure awaited him, but happy anyway.

“I ought to beat you good, “his father said. “You had your mother worried sick.”

“I wasn’t worried, Cliff,” his mother said. “The Lord spoke to my heart and told me not to worry. His angel was watching over him.”

Tohubohu

All around me I feel

swarming tumult. I watch news on television and the internet, and most of it speaks to disorder in our universe. However, I feel it is my duty as a human being to be informed at this critical juncture of mankind.

A raging pandemic, worldwide conflict in politics and isolation from friends and family have all contributed to feelings of inadequacy. I never prepared for all this.

That is why I jumped at the chance for enlightenment when a friend asked me to join her on a Zoom conference entitled “Hope in a Time of Disaster and Distrust.” Rev. Dr. Bill Kerley was the presenter. His background is rooted in Jungian psychology, Christianity, and Buddhism. I appreciated that there would be information from multiple spiritual perspectives. Following is my takeaway from this valuable presentation.

We do not see things clearly because we are distracted, have no practices to see and we focus on consumerism. We are broken. But something good can be made from something broken. Dr. Kerley used the metaphor of kaleidoscopes as hope, where beautiful designs come from broken glass making pictures.

Carl Jung, the famed psychologist, was asked, “Will we make it?” Dr. Kerley said we all had our own work to do to “make it.”

Dysfunctional people produce chaotic societies, which produce dysfunctional people. What a vicious cycle for mankind!

Dr. Kerley referenced the shadows we all have in our unconscious minds, and we deny them, yet what we don’t know owns us. We carry fears with us always.

We must acknowledge shadow elements and bring them to light. Some of the shadow elements are the patriarchal foundation of culture and religion, where women’s roles are limited, the notion of a flawed creation indicating something is wrong with us, authority’s need for obedience and submission, so that people do not mature, and a belief in redemptive violence (keeping arsenals of weapons). Finally, there is the shadow of racist culture, where one race dominates another.

When crisis occurs, we must own it. We are all captured. Growth means crisis will occur less, and less intensely. An example of a crisis was the attempted coup of the Capitol in the United States on January 6th . Events like this cause us deep fear for our life stability.

Where is the ray of light here? Dr. Kerley said there is hope for us. He advised we must increase our tolerance of change. I understood this to mean we should embrace progress, not fear it.

There was also discussion of the concept that no hope can flourish without a daily spiritual practice of some kind. Our presenter recommended the book When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodrun, an American Tibetan Buddhist nun. Gratitude exercises were one good example of a spiritual practice. If we note three positive things in our life each day, document them and then review them periodically, we will recognize our blessings.

Additionally, we must address the global issues of poverty and healthcare. I have added Covid19 eradication, world conflicts and conspiracies to this list, as I feel these too will require collective attention. We need to give what we currently witness in our lives a different story, a different meaning. There will be change, as we cannot continue along this path of business as usual. It is not working. There is an unraveling going on right now.

Do we have the will to adapt to change, to recognize how connected all mankind is? If so, our societies will take a different, and better direction.

Katina Pontikes