The Dove of Peace

Just as with all of us, the virus is dominating my every minute. But as I suggested last week, the world is still out there. So during the next weeks three of my columns will be focusing on events not shaped by the coronavirus. I have reached back in my history, and I’ll be reporting on personal episodes from fifty years ago. Here is the second.

Some day in the far distant future, archeologists will be digging through this generation’s landfills and from the clues found in our trash will write books about how people in the 20st century went about their daily lives. As archaeologists tend to do, in our trash they will find not only pottery, shards, pots and pans, parts from some long-obsolete mechanical device, but also objects of art. While they will produce great tomes describing what our generation was like, these strange artifacts may evade their most sophisticated analysis.

Every home probably contains several of these mysterious symbolic artifacts. My guess is that each of them has a story to tell. While we may know these stories, unless we tell them, in a generation or two they will be forgotten, and our grandchildren, let alone 25th century archeologists, will have no idea how these objects describe what e 20th century life was like.

Consider this dove that sits on a shelf in our apartment. I could tell its story, but why not hear it first hand? Let the dove speak for herself.

I’ve been around my owner for over half a century, packed and unpacked with moves from Washington, to Chicago, to Missouri and finally to California and this apartment‘s bookshelf. During the years my owners lived in Australia I was stored in a Missouri attic.

I am powdered marble that was mixed with water and an adhesive, and dried in a mold. So I became an expensive stone sculpture. At my creation I was a brilliant white. But look at me now.

I was given by one of the church members in response to my owner’s series of sermons on peace. You got it. Yes I am a genuine dove of peace, even if I don’t look like it now. Oh, what I’ve gone through!

In Chicago I was placed on a shelf in the church library. It was an exciting time during which the church was the center of protests about the Vietnam war, and at the same time the safe meeting place for the two large rival street gangs. One night one of the gang’s regulars arrived at the coffee-house that was part of the church’s ministry, waving a loaded gun and claiming the coffeehouse as his Gang's turf.. No guns were allowed in the building, so my owner took it from him,—I thought he was going to get shot--- but he calmly put it with others he had confiscated in the office safe, and told the young man that for the next month he was not welcome in the building.

As you might imagine, this didn’t go over very well, and in the middle of the night my owner was awakened by a phone call from this young man informing him that the church, just a block away, was on fire, and I was one of the casualties. This pure white dove of peace was scorched! People would thereafter come in and look at me, but for some reason no one asked how I had gotten to be in such a disreputable condition. This is the first time it has been described.

“Peace” may appear to be a gentle safe retreat from the hard violent world, but I am a stone testimony that it is not. So if you visit our apartment or see my image displayed with this column, you may realize the risk of trying to make peace between The Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples, gangs who were at war on Chicago’s South Side.

I imagine there are objects in your dwelling that have stories to be told, but if they can’t tell them, I guess it’s up to you to become their voice.