Father John Series #6
Chapter 6
Father John: Discovering Power in the Third Position
When father John approached Bob’s office he could hear Bob talking on the phone. He peered in the door. When Bob saw him, Bob motioned him to a seat. He kept talking, saying his oft used phrase, ‘very interesting…very interesting…very interesting,’ while he scurried about to clear a path to the chair pointed out to Father John. Bob cleared the path, all the while using his ‘very interesting’ phrase on the phone, (which means that he is trying to be positive, avoid conflict and make no commitments). He interrupted his phone conversation saying to the person on the other end, ‘excuse me for a moment.’ He put his hand over the bottom of the phone and said to Father John, “I can see you don’t know where to sit. Move that pile and put it on top of this pile,” Bob pointed to a pile in another chair.
As Father John began this task, Bob corrected him. “No, not directly on top. Turn your stack ninety degrees so that I can keep the two stacks separate.” Bob ended his phone conversation then as Father John completed his task. Bob said, “Now let’s sit down and talk. What’s up with you this week?” Bob began.
“I live in an apartment house with inside entrances and long halls,” Father John said. “There are many Spanish-speaking tenants in my building. One night I hear noise down the hall, yelling and shouting, things breaking. I try not to think about it. Then I hear a small tapping on my door. I go to the door and there is four-year-old Pedro. He has blood on his hands and on his shirt that is now on my door. I immediately check to see if and where he is bleeding, while he yells ‘andellé andellé’ and tries to pull me down the hall. He is not bleeding anywhere that I can see. I go down the hall. The door to his apartment is open. His mother, Carlotta, is lying on the floor, unconscious blood coming out her nose and mouth. She is breathing, but I can’t wake her. I call 911 and I clean the blood off her face. The fire trucks, ambulance and police come. They take her unconscious to the hospital. I ask a neighbor to take care of Pedro and I follow along in my car behind the ambulance to the hospital.
“When she comes to I’m there along with a doctor who is tending to her mouth and nose. Carlotta’s nose is broken and she has some loose teeth in the front of her mouth. She tells me in Spanish that her husband, Juan, beat her and left. When I tell the police, they swear out a warrant for his arrest. Carlotta protested, ‘No arrest Juan, No arrest Juan.’
“The police can’t find Juan to arrest him. He comes to see me the next day and asks me what to do. I tell him he has to turn himself in, that the police told me he could get a bond for $500 and a bondsman would post his bail. Then he would have to appear in court the next week. I went with him to the jail. He posted bond. Later the next week I went with him to court. They sentenced him to eleven months, 29 days or probation if he attended a program for batterers.
“The social worker with the victim witness program recognized me and asked if I would start a batterers program for Spanish speaking people at our church. I told her I would consider it. In the meantime I went with Juan to Nashville’s English version of a batterers’ program. I went with Juan to support him and to see for myself the English version of the program I was asked to sponsor at my church. I was not impressed by what I saw.”
“What was that?” Bob asked.
“The men, all the participants were men, they seemed to have their heads hanging,” Father John observed. “The presenter seemed to be talking down to them, treating them as if they were bad children. I just didn’t like the way it felt there. I can’t imagine that this would help anybody. I asked Juan how he felt after one of these groups and he said he felt ashamed. I can’t see how shame will heal or help Juan or any of the others.”
“I have a former student who ran a batterers program for a time,” Bob said. “I will invite him to come and talk with us next time. His name is David McMillan. He is a lot like you. He has strong opinions and has a lot of salt in his language. I think he would know how to advise you.”
“I would like to meet him.”
The next week Father John arrived at Bob’s office to find Bob talking and laughing with this bald sixty-year-old man dressed like a pro golfer, sweater, golf shirt, dress pants and shoes and suede Ben Hogan cap. He had an air of arrogance about him, but he had a good laugh and a big smile. The introductions were made.
“This is David McMillan, Mr. Sense of Community,” Bob said.
“Yes, I have a theory,” David said. “Give me three facts and I’ll give you a theory McMillan. That’s me.”
“Watch out,” Bob said, “Father John is not a great fan of academic theory.”
“Me either,” David said. “Sorry. I won’t bore you with mine. So Bob tells me you want to start a Spanish speaking batterers program and you weren’t sure you liked what you saw in Nashville’s version of one of those.”
“That’s right,” Father John said.
“Can’t say as I blame you,” David said in a southern accent. Father John was uncertain about the spirit David brought with him. He could be a ‘good ole boy’ or an ‘uptight banker.’ Father John wasn’t sure which. David continued. “I ran a batterer’s program for five years. Our program worked. The Duluth model doesn’t.”
“What’s the Duluth model?” Father John asked.
“It’s a program developed in Duluth, Minnesota,” David answered. “It quickly spread to become the national model for batterers programs. It is the model the Nashville Batterers programs use. It doesn’t work.”
“Tell Father John how you developed your program,” Bob said.
“I think you know my wife, Marietta Shipley,” David began. “She is a Davidson County Circuit Judge. In her work with divorcing families she came across several families where the husband went to the batterers program one night and came straight home afterwards and beat his wife. She couldn’t imagine that this would be the result of effective treatment. She asked me to develop a better program. The D.A. that prosecuted batterers gave me a copy of Adele Harrell’s research on the Duluth model.”
“What did Harrell find?” Father John asked.
“Just what you and Marietta observed,” David said. “The Duluth model doesn’t work. She found that only 50% of those who attended completed the Duluth Model programs. Of those that graduated 90% continued battering. To Harrell it seemed that treatment did not help. I called her and talked to her and she admitted she thought the treatment actually may do more harm than good. I asked her if she knew of a good treatment model and she told me about a fellow in the D.C. area named Steven Stosny. She thought he had a good program.”
“Who is Steven Stosny?” Bob asked.
“Turns out,” David answered, “he is a Catholic social worker. His primary job is his work at the psychiatric hospital for Catholic priests in Washington, D.C. He is in charge of the program for sexually abusing priests.”
“I wonder if that program works?” Father John asked.
“He says it does,” David answered, “but a lot of abusing priests are transferred out of one parish to another, instead of being referred to him for treatment. This is a way that the church blames the victim, assuming that once the predator priest is away from its prey that the problem will be solved. But, for the priests that come to Stosny for treatment, he claims he has a very high success rate.
“And the researchers who studied his batterers program found it to be very effective as well. He graduates 75% of his participants. Only 10% of those reoffended within a year. This is a stark contrast to the 90% of the Duluth Model graduates reoffending within one year.”
“Stosny’s model does sound promising,” Father John said. “I wonder why the Duluth Model doesn’t work?”
“Here’s how Stosny explained it to me,” David answered. “He said: 'Of course the Duluth Model doesn’t work. Like you, I was asked if I could help with a batterers program. I went to the first session and I heard the therapist say this:
‘You are a man. We live in a patriarchy. Men create the violence in this society. Men cause the problem. You are the problem. If we are to stop violence in this country you must change.’
'‘These were the first words these men met when they walked into the room and it’s the same every session. The Duluth Model program doesn’t teach a skill. It doesn’t have a first session that is built on by a second session and so on. It takes in new people in each session. How can a program teach anything when it has to deal with beginners in each session?
"‘The Duluth Model is not treatment. It is a course in sociological research that is designed to humiliate men. You don’t treat anyone by starting with shame. Shame is what anger attempts to cover up. The more you shame someone, the more anger you add. Of course, men come home after a Duluth Model program and beat their wives. And the program organizers blame the men for the ineptness of their program. Domestic violence shelters advocate divorce, but the wives stay in the violent marriage in spite of their counseling.’”
“Did the women in your program use the Domestic Violence Shelters?” Father John asked.
“Sometimes,” David said. “They get the same advice as the wives of Stosny’s batterers ‘Leave the son-of-a-bitch.’ But they rarely do. This is why our program treats the families and not just the batterers. I see it as a system’s problem. We had a great deal of success.”
“So why did you stop?” Bob asked.
“The D.A. changed,” David said. “The new D.A. liked the Duluth Model. She was against having a program that has husbands and wives together, because that’s not how the Duluth Model does it.
“The Courts and the probation officers were hostile to us. We called our program ‘Compose’. They make fun of our program and called it ‘Compost’.”
“Why didn’t you do some research?” Bob asked.“Because who would believe our data?” David answered. “The D.A.’s office did a small study comparing our program with the Duluth Model program. They found ours to be slightly better. They compared twenty people from each program. However, in the sample of the twenty from Compose they included four re-offenders who were referred to our program that never came.”
“I never really understood what we were doing wrong,” David said. “They say that by treating families we are using a systems model that blames the victim. That makes no sense to me.”
“It does to me,” Bob said. “You have run afoul of the 70’s feminist view of family therapy. There once was general agreement among feminist-therapists that family therapy in abuse cases tended to blame the victim. That is beginning to change. There are some dissenting feminist therapists emerging. But apparently your D.A. and the probation officers were not among those.”
“What are you talking about?” Father John asked.
“Well as you might have guessed, this relates to the third position,” Bob said.
“Give a guy a hammer and he will use it on everything,” Father John said sarcastically.
“Well see if you think it applies here,” Bob said. “There are three major theories in community psychology. One is David’s Sense of Community theory; another is Rappaport’s Empowerment Theory and the third is Jim Kelly’s ecological theory of community. And I think my Third Position is coming on to the stage as a fourth. I have always had a problem with empowerment being the dominant theme in the field. And I am proceeding carefully.”
“Why so careful?” Father John asked.
“Well I knew what I had to say didn’t square with the politically correct thinking of the day,” Bob said. “And in Community Psychology we are in a very politically correct world. My thoughts will be considered subversive to the main thrust of the discipline. I have agreed with Community Psychology’s primary direction with the development of the whole community. I wanted to be over prepared and I am conflict avoidant.”
“What does this have to do with the Compose program?” David asked.
“You were trying to change a family,” Bob said. “And perhaps a culture. The dominant feminist view is represented by Bill Ryan’s book, Blaming the Victim. Batterers and their victims became a major source of debate in the empowerment movement. The two polarities in the debate were family systems theory versus feminism. The polarity of family systems theory tended to look at family violence as a systems problem. They would take on the role of objective neutral and attempt to find the contributions that each part of the system made to the problem. This meant that all parts of the system were to blame for the violence, even if only one person in the system perpetrated the violence. Rarely did a family therapist take the most extreme of this position. If they did systems theory would have them blame the mother and the children for some part of the father’s violence. This clearly was another version of blaming the victim.”
“So how did Feminist therapists suggest we treat batterers? The Duluth Model that doesn’t work?” Father John asked.
“Yes,” Bob said, “but you have to put this in context. As the other polarity in this debate women were rightly enraged by how they have been abused and disrespected for centuries. It was only in 1919 that women were seen as worthy of the vote. In the 1800’s women could not own property in some states. In 33 states men could force a woman to abort a pregnancy against her will. A woman’s property and her children were considered property of her husband. Marital rape was legal. In 1782 it was considered an advance in human treatment that a law in England was passed that stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb. In Biblical times women were seen as property of men, because women were believed to be inferior to men. Even today men wield most of the power in our society. So it’s obvious that when men can shift the blame for their violent behavior onto women, they will. Feminist therapists believe that family systems therapy perpetrates this blaming the powerless, when it is the people with the power that should be held accountable. And that was the purpose of the Duluth Model. Though the Duluth Model is a poor treatment approach, the movement that established it did a great deal of good. Judges, prosecutors and police took domestic violence seriously. Feminist therapists helped increase our culture’s compassion for the victims of domestic violence. They created new terms that better conceptualized the consequences of violence toward women, for example, rape trauma syndrome and battered wife syndrome. They directly attacked hatred of women in the culture.”
“I see,” Father John said. “Seeing women as objects to be used and owned is a form of hatred.”
“Yes,” Bob agreed. “Feminists observed that in battering families, the male batterer was already blaming the wife and children for his behavior. Feminist therapists alleged family systems therapists simply aided and abetted the batterer’s justifications for behavior that could not be justified. In domestic violence there clearly were innocent victims. Systems theory included victims in the discussion of things that needed to change in the system. Often the male dominated legal system, piled on too, i.e., police and judges often tended to think, ‘she probably deserved it’ or ‘this is a private family matter, we should stay out of it.’”
“It makes sense that we had to oppose this,” Father John said.
“Yes,” David agreed. “And that’s what the Duluth Model did. It was like a course. In the first session it introduces what’s called a ‘power wheel.’ This is simply a demonstration that violence in our society is perpetuated by men; that we live in a patriarchal society and that the job of this treatment is to help these men (participants are usually all men) accept blame for their behavior and stop their violence.
“Most participants in a Duluth Model program are court ordered. They have the choice of successfully completing the program or going to jail for 11 months and 29 days.
“Various meetings and conventions around the country have promoted the Duluth Model. The attendees are prosecutors, court officers, victim rights advocates, and directors of Duluth Model programs. Generally the report on these Duluth model programs in the journals and at these conventions is that they are not effective. The explanation for this is that batterers cannot be changed. The apologists for the Duluth Model offer two reasons for this. First, batterers are not really interested in treatment. They just don’t want to go to jail. Second, batterers are personality disordered, ‘most are psychopaths’ and all therapists know that these people are some of the most difficult to treat. If a program were to be successful, it is often said that it would take two years. Usually courts only order batterers to attend weekly treatment sessions between six months and one year or less. So apologists of the Duluth model conclude, ‘no wonder our programs are not effective.’”
“How is the Compose program different?” Father John asked David.
“It’s not about shame. It’s about compassion,” David answered.
“That may be the problem you have with the D.A.’s and the courts,” Bob observed.
“What do you mean?” Father John asked.
“Courts are into punishment,” Bob said. “And David’s program may have been too kind.”
“Well, we tried to be kind to everyone in our program,” David agreed. “Our philosophy was that we all have problems with anger. That compassion is anger’s antidote and that we need to give compassion to ourselves and everyone else. We demonstrated the good you do for yourself when you feel compassion. Compassion is like a drug it turns anger off and opens your heart to healing and connection.”
“Now, I can see why the D.A.’s and courts wouldn’t like that,” Bob said.
“But it works,” David said.
“Yes, but right now no one is listening to that,” Bob said. “They are intent on punishing and protecting the victim.”
“But shaming the batterer doesn’t protect the victim?” Father John said.
“And that is the point of the third position,” Bob said.
“What do you mean?” Father John said.
“The problem rests in the issue of what is power and what does power have to do with blame, the victim role and accountability,” Bob said. “Most couple’s fights are about who is the innocent victim. The husband might say, ‘It’s me I am entitled to the innocent victim role because I just finished working overtime.’
“‘The wife might say, ‘No, it’s me because I just finished one job to come home, cook supper and take care of the kids.’
“They are fighting over the role of innocent victim because that role entitles them to the high moral ground. This entitled position then suggests they deserve to rest or to be angry or to get what they want.
“In most of these fights over the innocent victim role, fault or blame is attributed to the opponent. ‘It’s their fault and if they change, everything would be okay.’ Each party often points the finger at the other. In violent families, most of the time, both parties engage in this dance. Psychological abuse often goes both ways. The male batterer constantly argues that the violence is her fault, that he is the real victim.
“Often in the more extreme cases of domestic violence the woman agrees and blames herself. This way she can maintain a sense of control. If she is responsible, then she has the power. In her mind she has emotional strength to handle the blame, while her mate is like an infant that she must take care of. Given this perspective, it is like teaching a child to make her bed. Sometimes it is just easier to go on and make the bed yourself, rather than take the time to teach the child. Sometimes with her husband it’s just easier for the battered wife to accept the blame and accommodate, rather than challenge her husband to take responsibility for his feelings and behavior.
“Infantilizing the perpetrator in this way is disrespectful. It enables him to avoid growing and learning. It nurtures and maintains the chaos. When she buys into his myth that his violence is her fault, there is no hope that he will ever get in control of his behavior. Yet, he is the only person who can really become responsible for his violence. She will never be able to stop it. Blaming herself enables the perpetrator to continue his violence.
“This competition for the victim role disempowers all the players. The only clear innocent victim is a powerless child. This is what the adversaries are really claiming in their fight.
‘Poor me. I’m the powerless child and you are the strong adult who can cope with life, because I can’t. You can adapt and change because you have good sense and I don’t.’
“When we point the blame at someone else, we say that they control us. They can change. They have the power to right our world. We don’t.”
“I get it,” Father John said. “This means if we are defined as innocent victims, power belongs to someone else. But what if we say, ‘I’m sorry. My fault.’ What happens if we accept some responsibility?”
“This means,” Bob said, “that we have power to do something about our lives. We can do something to change things. We are not victims. Accountability creates power.”
“I agree,” Father John said.
“Do you want to make the men who are already powerful and accountable more powerful?” Bob asked.
“Yes and no,” David said. “We want to give the perpetrators more power by giving them more choices. Often violence is the only answer that they know to their pain. Other choices and more understanding of others gives them adult power, rather than destructive childish temper tantrums. So, in a way, yes, we want give more power to the batterer in the form of more coping strategies. And, no, we want the power balance in the relationship to change so that the victim has equal power.”
“That’s why we have the women victims come to our program. It is not to blame them. It is to empower them. We want to teach them the skill of managing their anger as well. We want them to learn to have compassion for themselves first and then for others. We want them to hold themselves accountable for their anger and hold their husbands accountable for his.”
“Isn’t this the point of Louis Farrakhan’s sermons?” Father John asked.
“You mean the head of the separatist Islam African American movement?” Bob asked.
“Yes, that’s who I mean,” Father John agreed. “He says when the white establishment is blamed, then they are given more power. He wants his own people to blame themselves to see what they can do to change and then to change.”
“But what could the victim in your program do to be accountable?” Bob asked David.
“She can contribute her story to the newspapers, magazines, television stations and legislative hearings,” David said. “She can have compassion for herself and be sure that it is safe to be with her husband before she recommits herself and her children to a violent marriage. She can control her anger and her participation in the psychological abuse in the marriage. And she can hold her violent husband accountable so that he can learn, change and grow. When the woman accepts all the blame by herself, she carries her water and she carries her husband’s too. She must make him carry his own water or it will weaken him, their family and perpetuate the violence.”
“But doesn’t the wife often go back and accept the violence?” Father John asked.
“Yes,” David said. “This often happens. Everybody has the responsibility to learn from their past, their pain and the pain of others. Accountability is the expectation that people will learn some new behaviors or skills from their mistakes.”
“So you do want to blame the victims too?” Bob asked.
“Yes,” David said. “We do. We want them to lose their halo of innocence, their helplessness and discover what they can do to change their lives. Yes, we think we should blame the batterers, because we think they need more power and more skills to be effective in life without resorting to violence. But victims of the violence need to learn things too. Perhaps what they have to learn is that they have resources; that they are valuable; that they can make better choices and that they shouldn’t protect their husbands from the consequences of his behavior. We surely do not want victims to remain helpless. They need to ask the questions: Where did they go wrong? What can they change? That is where they will discover power. Accountability should not be reserved for the perpetrator.”
“This is how Mothers Against Drunk Drivers was born?” Bob said.
“What’s that?” Father John asked.
“It’s called MADD,” Bob answered. “They were organized around the accountability question: What can we do to see that this doesn’t happen again? The parents of victims of drunk drivers formed an organization and changed the drunk driving laws.”
“But Bob,” Father John said. “This puts us back into treating the system.”
“Yes,” Bob agreed. “We’ve come all the way back to that. We have talked about three positions where responsibility can be allocated. One is on the victim. The other is on the perpetrator. The third is on the system. When you add a skill like compassion to this triangle, then the debate changes from blaming to growing. Skill building makes accountability easier, because it is no longer about ‘Stop being who you are.’ It is about ‘Here, learn this and see if this works better.’
“In the 1970’s we did not know what to do with violent families. All we had was the adolescent fault-finding that the Duluth Model embodies. When the system offers a skill to learn, then the batterer/victim polarity has a way to grow. The victim and the batterer need a third position to help them get beyond their cycle of violence. The system here provides that third position, but the system needs to offer skills to learn in addition to punishment.”
“You are saying Everyone needs to change,” Father John observed, “that we need to treat the system so we can help the people in the system. Everyone needs to be challenged to grow. We all must be held accountable. No innocent victims.”
“Yes,” Bob said. “That’s my point. Let me read you what a modern feminist therapist, Mary Jo Barrett, said. Here’s her book,” Bob reached over and pulled out a book from a stack and turned to an earmarked page.
“What’s this book?” Father John asked.
“It’s Constructing a Third Reality,” Bob said.
“I might have guessed,” Father John said.
“She is writing about reconciling families of incest victims,” Bob noted. “She said that she hoped to offer them and these now are her words, ‘something that would bypass the poisonous polemic on each side’ …to bring together families torn apart by incompatible and warring realities about the past in order to create a third more livable and peaceful reality for the future.’”
“That would take a third position,” Father John observed.
“Yes,” Bob said, “I think a third, active, transcendent position would” and he picked up the book again and read ‘help families get out of the quagmire of painful accusations and counteraccusations, blame and defense, contradictory memories and differing experiences that never would, nor even could be reconciled.’”
“So how does this relate to power?” David asked.
“When you teach skills as you do in Compose,” Bob said, “or hold everybody accountable so that we all have power, then power is not a zero sum game. It is not a scarce resource that we need to take from one person and give to another. It is something that can grow. Everyone can add to it. The system, the two adversaries all can become stronger, more effective and more powerful. All three can change, while two polarities alone often cannot. In a three position universe each position has work to do. The third position’s job is not just to be a parent allocating blame in a dispute with two children. The third position should offer a process for understanding and for decision-making. The process then becomes a tool that each polarity can use. With the tools learned from the third position, growth and change and skill building replace conflict and competition for the victim role.”
“So the person in the role of the third position has to do more than simply be present?” Father John asked.
“The role of the third position is not an easy one to play,” Bob said. “Sometimes being present and listening is a major contribution. At other times the third position needs to assert a value. At other times the third position must bring a transforming skill for the parties to learn.
“Of course, if all a family therapist is doing is playing the role of a neutral parent between two misbehaving children and choosing where the blame falls between the two, that is inadequate treatment. It only perpetuates unproductive shaming and blaming. It empowers the therapist and disempowers the couple. It adds no new skills and keeps the couple’s pathological defense system in place. We agree with the basic tenets of the feminist position here. Such treatment is simply bad treatment.”
“The third position’s contribution to the discussion of power is that we want everyone to carry their moral weight. We want to avoid creating innocent victims. We all have the responsibility to grow and change. We all have something we can do better. Martin Luther King was holding his people accountable when he said, ‘I know non-violence will work. We have to do it for our dignity. We have to do it for our self-respect.’ He was saying that even the oppressed have responsibilities. And that taking responsibility for our own behavior gives us dignity.”
“That reminds me of a public service announcement for Tsunami victims,” David said. “George H. Bush, the first of the Bush presidents, and Bill Clinton appear together. George Bush says, ‘no on can change what has happened.’ Then Bill Clinton says, ‘but we can all change what happens next.’”
“Yes, we are responsible for what we do next,” Father John said. “Blaming someone else and waiting for them to do right will never give us power. This reminds me of when I did Catholic Mission work in Africa for a year. I was in Blantyre, Malawi in Southern Africa. Everywhere I went there I saw evidence of the failure of our work. The metaphor for this failure was the large metal containers that were used as crates for heavy machinery. The tractors, bulldozers, trucks, front-end loaders had disappeared into metal parts used as counterweights in wells and steel filed into machete blades. What was left that was in fact useful were these giant metal boxes that housed people and animals.
“We missionaries were on a personal power trip to save the African and bring modern culture to change their way of life. In Blantyre when I worked there in the 1970’s the community was a mixture of races: Italian sausage makers, Greek traders, Indian merchants, Sikhs, Gryartutis and Ismailis. When I went back to visit two years ago there were no racial differences. The other races fled for their lives. The only faces and voices that were not indigenous were white-faced, short-time do-gooders. They ran everything. Society there was in the hands of the charities. Giving away and taking care of was the only economy there. They, we, had turned the Malawians into whiners and beggars. We do-gooders never stopped to wonder how to hold these people accountable. How could they become part of the solution? We neutered them by seeing them as innocent victims.”
“So what do you do here now?” Bob asked.
“I want to use the Stosny version for our churches battering program,” Father John said. “I do not want to use the Duluth model.”
“So, is that a problem?” Bob asked.
“Well,” David answered for Father John, “the D.A. and the courts might not refer to his program.”
“That’s right,” Father John said.
“I see,” Bob said. “And I can’t make my ideas about power and accountability acceptable in the academic world right now.”
“We all need the help of a third position,” David said. “Perhaps fate will provide one.”
“Speaking of help,” Bob said, “I could use some help carrying trash bags to the dumpster outside. Can each of you grab one?”
“You are throwing something away?” Father John asked mockingly.
“I can’t believe it,” David chimed in.
“Yes,” Bob answered. “It hurts me but I must part with some of my things: old correspondence, notes and memos. I will miss them.”