Preface or Afterword

Song Of Hannah

from 1 Samual:

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So my grandmother’s name was Frances, but should have been Hannah. And my name was Dani, for Diane, but should have been Sami for Samuel. Because from the git-go, my grandmother made it clear that I was to be offered up. My purpose was to serve the Lord. Hannah offered up Samuel in hopes of becoming fertile. My Gma’s dedication was for atonement, to erase the shame of her sins that had been visited upon her children. It worked for Hannah – hence the song of thanksgiving – so that she had five other children, who presumably were raised at home and had normal lives while Samuel lived and served in the temple. It didn’t work out that well for Gma, who went to her grave sorrowing and shamed for the sins of her children and granddaughter.

That is how it came to be that I have spent my life trying to emulate Samuel. Not the part where he is the judge and king-maker, but the beginning when Samuel is a servant in the temple. Whatever the assorted settings of my life, I ended up striving for that role: dedicated and dutiful handmaiden.

I had intended to quote only the first three verses above from the Bible’s first book of Samuel. But I really like Hannah’s gloating that follows. Do you recognize it? It’s so much like Mary’s song, Luke 1:46-55. I recognized it right away because this stuff about being turned over to the Lord is not a metaphor; Gma really did turn me over to the church for several decades of thorough immersion. And over those decades one theme shaped and infused my being, the message of those songs: God will champion the oppressed. Justice and compassion will see victory in the end. I am not so sure of that now, but it has gotten me through so far. 

Spoiler Alert: This paragraph was going to be the tell-all Afterword, but it sort of fits here. But maybe you shouldn’t read it now and should wait till the end. I wrote that I am no longer so sure of that idea that God will champion the oppressed, that justice and compassion will see victory in the end. Actually, I abandoned the idea of God early on in favor of a spiritual model based on my fairly superficial understanding of physics. I deeply believe in the conservation of energy and matter. And especially after writing this, I realize the truth of what Einstein wrote, comforting a friend after a death: “Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us … know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Nonetheless, I did hold out hope that justice and compassion would triumph. Now I finally appreciate that this belief may have compromised my assignment. Assignment? Yes, the genuine truth is that I was dedicated from the beginning, not by my Gma, but by other, higher  authorities. In fact, I have been on assignment the entire time. My origins are not what I describe later (or earlier if you are reading this at the end). I am an alien from the planet of Wodeguo in the constellation known as Orion. I was sent here as part of an anthropology expedition to observe the final decline of the human species in its last generations. Of course, my perspective was based on the values of Wodeguo, a respect for justice and compassion. But anthropologists sometimes suffer from a projection of their own values, seeking to find them among the creatures they study. My fervent belief that my values would triumph may simply have been that sort of flawed projection that has prevented me from appreciating the true nature of the humans I have been observing for three quarters a century now.

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