“We pledge allegiance to the flag,” we children chorused at the start of each school day. I don’t recall questioning the meaning of allegiance. Even as an adult, I find it complicated to define. Allegiance involves the duties basic to a relationship with something or somebody, whether chosen or inherent. It and its synonyms—loyalty, faithfulness, commitment—mean honoring those obligations through thick and thin.

Lately, we hear about individuals’ loyalty or disloyalty as if it’s the prime qualification for public office. Is it, or should it be? To abandon solemn obligations on a whim or for personal gain is unworthy and in some cases criminal. That’s the easy part. The more challenging question is, loyal or disloyal to what?

Most of us have multiple loyalties we take seriously. We may be loyal to a partner, a friend, an employer, a movement, or a nation. We may be loyal to our ethics or our faith. The challenge arises when two loyalties collide. What gets priority when a pledge of confidentiality confronts an obligation to prevent serious harm? What happens when commitment to conscience conflicts with duty to obey the law?

These don’t always have easy answers. Individuals have left their posts because they found the clash of loyalties untenable. Military personnel, members of Congress, and others swear to support and defend the Constitution. That obligation outweighs any other political loyalty, no matter who claims otherwise.

Image: Grove Valley Elementary School, Oklahoma City OK, Facebook, June 14, 2025.

          The twenty-fourth of May’s
          The Queen’s birthday.
          If you don’t give us a holiday
          We’ll all run away.

Around our house in the 1950s, my father sang this ditty from his childhood to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It referred not to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II but to Queen Victoria, who died eleven years before Dad was born. Victoria Day is still a Canadian federal holiday, observed the Monday before May 25 in many of the informal ways Americans observe Memorial Day a week later.

Why Victoria? Reigning from 1837 to 1901, she was the longest-ruling British monarch until Elizabeth (1952-2022). Those years saw tremendous societal, political, and industrial changes. Much work that had once been a family enterprise moved outside the home for a growing, urban middle class. Home was seen as a place of respite from the sordid outside world. Gender roles solidified. Talk of sex was taboo (though discrete prostitution thrived). Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, held up the ideal of the perfect family.

Last month the royal family marked the hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, April 21, 1926. I can’t help but wonder how future generations will look back on her era.

Image: Heinrich von Angeli, portrait of Queen Victoria, 1875, in Royal Collection Trust. Cropped.

I lack expertise in international relations, but my personal relationships have generally been positive and deep. Good luck, good choices, and good models all helped. I’m conflict-averse but not conflict-avoidant; that’s to say, I’ll raise issues but strive to resolve them without a fight. That means moving away from winners and losers, away from who’s right and who’s wrong, in favor of creative solutions everyone can live with.

As a young parent, when children blamed each other for causing a mess, I told them I only cared how we were going to fix it. I much prefer problem solving over punishment, revenge, or finger-pointing. Even in disagreement, two people who care about each other both want the same thing: We each want us both to be happy. Figuring out how to make that happen takes collaboration.

In Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981), Roger Fisher and William Ury describe a process focused on underlying interests, rather than the specific outcome each party demands. If you want to return to the lakeside cabin because you love beaches, and I want to go somewhere new because I crave variety, let’s brainstorm solutions like finding an unfamiliar vacation spot with a beach.

Whether between individuals, political parties, or nations, I doubt unconditional surrender often brings lasting peace. That may say more about my temperament than objective fact. I do believe that understanding another’s viewpoint and letting everyone save face accomplishes more than preening in one-sided victory. Too bad not everyone has the willingness or the skill.

Image: Baja California Sur, Mexico, 2018. Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash. 

I don’t think my mother either loved cooking or hated it. It was just a daily task like making beds or sweeping the floor. We dined on meat, potatoes, and vegetables from a can, unless fresh vegetables happened to be in season. Mashed or boiled potatoes were so predictable that I could start them after school without knowing the dinner plan for the day.

Schoolmates spoke of ethnic foods from their Irish or Italian traditions. My Anglo-Canadian heritage offered none, I thought. In time I realized that breakfasts of porridge (instead of “hot cereal”) and marmalade (instead of jelly) on toast were ethnic, too.

Mother rarely cooked from recipes during my childhood. Later, when I asked her to dictate instructions for making meatloaf—no one else’s tasted as good—she had me write “a handful of this” and “that, not so much.” Even a carefully written old recipe card can lose precision through the generations. I hoped exactly to replicate my mother-in-law’s mother’s favorite casserole dish until I read on the ingredients list, "One ten-cent bag of potato chips.”

My mother taught me basics of cookery, and so did the women with whom I shared an apartment and meals in my twenties. I treasure friends’ family recipes named for people I never met: Susie’s sweet potato pie, Aunt Dorothy’s hot chicken salad. A housemate’s mother’s delicious “up yonder rolls” got their name from the old gospel hymn, “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”