Read in Bed, with chocolate

Nobel Terrorist Cell?

2011-05-27T09:15:00.009-04:00

My husband was nearly arrested at Arlanda

International airport due to a laser pointer I bought him. He had travelled to Sweden, going through security at Logan and at Heathrow, no problem. Trying to get home was another matter, The pen shaped device with batteries in it caught the attention of the sharp security agents at Arlanda. (Nothing gets past a Swede!) Ah ha! A LASER POINTER! Great scott! He must be planning to give a power point on the plane! That was it. Passport confiscated, police by his side; it looked bad for a return trip and more like a trip to jail with a call to the embassy. A colleague travelling with him suggested Jack "play the Nobel card." Instead, he showed why he got the Nobel, i.e., he's kind of smart and he believes in doing the experiment. He suggested the security personnel point the laser at the floor to test its strength. They did, gave it back to him and he got on the plane. Good thing they didn't know blue violet light is highly scattered and so in a bright place it will appear dimmer (less powerful.)

I do wonder, what is the fear, that he will conduct surgery on the plane? He was 30 to 100 watts shy of the power to do that. Perhaps the blue beam made them fear it was actually a sonic screwdriver? That seems more likely to happen at Heathrow, somehow. If anyone does know the reason for this embargo, please share.

addendum: A friend asked me if it would have worked, Jack saying he was a Nobel Laureate. My initial response was that it probably would have ticked them off. But then I realized, this was Sweden, land of the Nobel. I'm not sure it would have gone much differently, but on the off chance they weren't willing to test the laser, trotting out that particular credential may have moved them. Anyway, they were more sensible than I can imagine TSA agents being. Discretion has become a dirty word in this country.

Who Is going to fix this?

2010-03-15T10:48:00.005-04:00

It's raining here in Boston. Raining all over the east coast. There's flooding here, and in the Midwest and in Melbourne, Australia. It's not a sign of the End of Days. It may be a consequence of climate change. There is a column in the Guardian that is essentially asking, "When are we going to do something about climate change?" I've linked to it.

Below is my off the cuff response to the article.

Seems nit picky doesn't it, to say you might the answer in what you left out? But in 2010 do we really still say "mankind?" I'm not saying men have a lock on destructive, linear thinking. I'm not saying women are naturally more nurturing and future oriented. I think that's hogwash. But I do think that the words we use shape our understanding and to continue to say 'mankind" makes it seem as though both the problem and it's possible solution are the purview of men. Leaving out half the population seems a bit, well, stupid.

Frankly, the best folks for thinking about the future are kids. They literally live for it. And they are engaged on the issues of catastrophic climate change. My nine year old son said, "The problem is we keep thinking of better ways to use our current systems, but we need to think of new systems." (Yes, he really talks like that. I blame scifi and science journals for kids. ) No one wants to take children seriously, and they don't have a good grasp of physics and engineering - barring the odd genius. Still, if we did listen, to boys and girls and employed men and women to work out how to shape the worlds envisioned by our kids into reality, we might have something good going.

Sounds silly, I know. But none of this deadly serious crap is working.

New Year, Old Thoughs

2010-01-06T08:30:00.002-05:00

The New York Times today has a front page story asking if the Fed can be trusted to spot the next bubble. Why are we relying on economists for this. Look, if we pay people $1 per day to make $5,000 televisions and $10 an hour to crank out $30,000 cars then who exactly is supposed to buy these things? When wages for tactile work are down and corporate profits are up, that, my friends, is a bubble. For sustained growth you need lower profit margins and that will not be acceptable until we fundamentally overhaul corporate boards, not just through regulation, but law. We need clearer definitions of acting in the share holders interests, and restraints on same. If corporations are legally citizens, which they are, they need to be held accountable to society at large, not just owners. Just like the rest of us.

A new study shows, once again, that girls do not have any inherent weakness in math. http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/01/gender-math.aspx
My brain jumps from this study to a thought I had as I was talking to a friend. I was relating the growing percentage of graduate students and post-docs at our nation's finest research labs who are from China and India and who will be returning home. This was my thought - women. Women, if able to advance here are much more likely to stay. We are still, despite all our rolling backwards these past years, light years ahead of China and even India in women's integration in the culture as equal human beings and citizens. If women, instead of being subtly discouraged in Chemistry and Physics labs, are actively encouraged we may be able to snag some of the brightest minds from China and India.
This is important not because we do not also have bright minds, but because science is a glamor profession in these nations. They watch the Nobel Prize ceremonies on TV. (essay coming soon related to this.) We are, in fact, a bit lazy. We are no different from Sweden or England or any other nation who used to pump out incredible science and scientists. We have taken our supremacy for granted and so few want to work on it, to rise to the challenge.

I do wonder to how excite Americans about education in general. Like democracy, we tend to take it for granted. What we take for granted we can lose to easily. In Sweden I mentioned this to a couple of people, the problem I have with our kids being taught that the U.S. is a democracy rather than being taught that it's citizen's continually make the democracy. It intrigued me that a concept I have trouble getting across over here was immediately seized upon there. The clarity of distance? But how do we get our children to feel that school is not a burden but a gift? I do not mean which method of education, because, frankly, it's pretty rote in places where kids walk miles to school and put up with practically no resources but a place to call school and a dedicated teacher. I am not dissing educational styles here. I am only saying that this is not that question, but a more fundamental one. Ideas are most welcome.

Bikes not Bombs, people!

Too much too blog

2009-12-07T19:29:00.003-05:00

Too busy blogging about the Nobel Foundation's Magic Week and all that is leading up to the award ceremony, at least for us. Come over and read it at http://onthecoattailsofgiants.blogspot.com/

I'll start here again, this time on a regular basis in January.

Peace and sköl.

Obama wins Peace Prize -

2009-10-09T11:23:00.002-04:00

On a plane, returning from The Netherlands shortly before the election, the Dutch gentleman next to me on the plane said, “It would be wonderful if Obama won. It would tell the world that United States is still a beacon of hope and that equality is possible, that change is possible.” I tried to be matter of fact, but to hear my country spoken of us a beacon, as a place to which people might look for hope and guidance struck deeply. This is what President Obama has done for the world. And he has used his position to champion a nuclear free world, peace in the middle east, economic development across the globe, a real fight against global warming - which at this moment is putting nations in the Pacific in crisis - and engagement with both allies and enemies. The peace prize for the fight against land mines was not given out when land mines were gone - we still deal with them, the peace prize to Aung Sang Suu Kyi was not given when she attained the presidency and the peace prize for fighting global warming was not given when that battle was won. These are given to help those waging the fight. Amnesty International, Medicin Sans Frontiers, and President Barack Obama. Once again, Americans need to open up and see things through another’s eyes. As the committee said “Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
We are a beacon again, let’s celebrate and more importantly, get down to the hard work of keeping the light ablaze.

What does it mean to lose Michael Jackson?

2009-06-26T04:40:00.003-04:00

I feel left out of the cultural moment. I am not shocked, or even much saddened by Michael Jackson's death. When I first got the text message my brain immediately weighed it against Mark Sandman's death, the tenth anniversary of which looms. Sandman's death was a shock. Still, it isn't the lack of surprise that keeps me from joining the keening, but the sense that the grieving is long done.

His story is tragic, I fear in the classic sense. The comparison in Salon.com to Presley's death seems apt not only because of their mutual belabored suicides, but the lives. In both one senses the lack of a core, of a person under the persona. There had to have been, once, yes? It feels as though somehow it was erased, or trampled. Seems, feels, all these qualifiers because I don't know. I never knew him, never met him, never saw him in concert. Quincy Jones said, "I've lost my little brother today and part of my soul has gone with him." He believed there was a person in there. I can't help it, though; I wonder when Jones lost him. We can love someone long after they have stopped being the person we came to love. Ask anyone with a family member suffering from Alzheimer's.

Not only didn't I know Michael Jackson, I was never a big fan. I was more moved when Joe Strummer died, not personally, but because I thought he still had much to offer popular music. I don't feel that way about Jackson. Was that why I wasn't with my generation, the way I was when Jim Henson died (he also shared the day of his death with a famous person, Sammy Davis, Jr. I wasn't meant to feel his loss deeply because he was my parents generation, but I loved Sammy Davis Jr., his Candy Man days.)

A new wave girl and then a part-time punk long before Belle and Sebastian thought of the term, Michael Jackson was inescapably my childhood through young adult years. He was not on my turntable, not in my mix tapes, is not on my ipod. But he was there.

I learned "ABC,” "Ben" and "I'll Be There" by singing along with my big sister. They were among the songs we could pick up on the candy colored transistor radios we brought to the beach, and out into our back yards in the summer. Lisa's long blonde hair loose on her back making me jealous. Her fringed bangs made her look like a TV star. I see her, see her shoulders getting pink from the sun when I so much as think of one those songs. Then there were the solo career songs “Thriller,” “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough,” the last of whose lyrics I never could understand. I didn’t try hard. I was busy trying to decipher Mick Jones’ accent and Elvis Costello's sense of humor.

The latter day Michael Jackson songs were played at our teenage drinking parties, then they disappeared from my world. My friends and I listened to REM, The The and U2, Industry and the Jesus and Mary Chain. For diversity’s sake we threw in some Beastie Boys, Grand Master Flash and Frank Sinatra. Then Jackson resurfaced, at work functions and weddings when the DJ was desperate to get people to dance, especially if the crowd looked that certain age. My age.

I feel something at his passing. I feel a sigh; not of relief, but simply that sigh that comes when you exhale a breath you forgot you were holding, holding under all those other breaths. What happened to him? I don't know. How much happiness did he have? I don't know. But I can breathe now. It hurt me to watch him mutilate himself. It hurt to think about him.

A friend was telling me about running into Quincy Jones at an airport in Europe. It was a cool story. She leading an educational tour in France. After her exchange the students, and worse, the teachers asked "who was that?"
Quincy Jones, she said, but they didn't recognize the name.
The famous music producer, she said.
Huh? They responded. What did he produce a teacher asked?
My friend was stunned and one other young woman came to her rescue with “Thriller.”
She told me this story this past Friday. I felt myself pull away at the mere word Thriller. It did not conjure for me the song, or the album or groundbreaking video. To mind came instead the awful, terrifying life of the man in these last decades.

I sigh. I don't have to look away. His death is sad, but it was a long, agonizing death and whatever goodbyes I had to say, I have already said.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Protein Cookies (apres yoga?)

2009-04-01T02:36:00.008-04:00

Full disclosure, this is not really a recipe. More full disclosure, I do not practice yoga. I prefer the martial arts, where I can kiai, since I'm not meant to yell at my children. Or hit them. And I don't. I hit the bag in the gym. Hi-ya! See? That feels good, right? Not to take you away from your breathing, which improves flexibility, energy and is generally restorative and centering. I know. I have tried it. But on leaving class I always wanted, very badly, to kick something, hard. It's true. I failed at yoga. Tell no one.

Back to baking.

Some Caveats. These cookies are, in fact, cookies, and therefore NOT good for you. Lots of fat, lots of sugar. (See below for agave substitution.) Some salt even. That said, I feel better about my boys eating them knowing I've hidden some protein in the treat. Additionally, these cookies are NOT vegan. They can be made vegan by using the substitutions included at the end.

Step One. Pull out your favorite oatmeal cookie recipe. I like the Cook's Illustrated one, I think it's in American Classics. This is not just because I used to share a sitter with Chris Kimball. Though that makes me feel special every time I'm in the kitchen. It's because the recipe is just that smidge better than the one on the Quaker Oats box. You know you love that recipe.

Step Two. BE SURE TO USE THE BEST INGREDIENTS YOU CAN STOMACH PAYING FOR. Maybe that should be step one. Regardless, use unsalted butter and unbleached wheat flour. If there is a wheat allergy you are dealing with - make pudding. Really, at some point the substitutions become ridiculous and it's like eating "vegan bacon." There is no such thing. There's smoked strips of dead pig and there's smoked tempeh, a soy bean product - see the difference? No one should ever eat one and pretend it is even remotely like the other. Acknowledge the integrity of your food and the wit of your senses. Fine. If you truly want to make wheat free cookies experiment with spelt and nut flours. Once you are done, please post your recipe. I promise to do the same. Currently I use white whole wheat, as it adds flavor, but not too much.

The CHOCOLATE. Welcome to church. Our sermon for today is on fair trade chocolate. Please, please, please, eat less chocolate if you have to but make it all fair trade chocolate. The chocolate industry is, indeed, an industry and it is rife, still, with the sins of colonialism. The attendant price is paid, as of old, by the people who actually grow and harvest the cacoa pods. A good reference on the costs of chocolate is Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet by Carol Off. I know, you just want to have one simple pleasure. Could you try, then, to use more fair trade chocolate? Simple steps. If Candy Freak Steve Almond can make the effort I am sure we all can.
I like to use Grenada Chocolate 60% chocolate bars which I break into chunks. (http://www.grenadachocolate.com/)
My theory has long been that if I buy expensive chocolate I'll go broke before I get fat. In this case, the money goes to a co-op of organic farmers so more good goes around. Plus, it's excellent chocolate. I just wish it were more expensive.

REQUIRED substitutions. This is why I get to call them protein cookies. I cheat here, too. I use the Cornell Triple Rich formula. I'm not sure where I first read about this, it may have been in Vicki Lansky's book Feed Me! I'm Yours. It was developed at Cornell, thus the name.

THE FORMULA. For each cup of flour called for in the recipe place 1 Tbsp each milk powder, wheat germ and soy protein powder in the bottom of your measuring cup. Now fill it the rest of the way with your flour.

The Soy Powder. At the grocery store you are often limited to chocolate or vanilla protein powder. You can use the vanilla, it's not a problem; but, if you prefer to use unflavored soy powder, health food stores usually have it. Vege Fuel works.

Spices. If you are using a raisin oatmeal cookie recipe it likely calls for cinnamon. You may skip the cinnamon, however it is very good for you. It is a great antioxidant. And it stimulates your metabolism, or so some studies indicate. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2602825#B11

Plus, cinnamon and chocolate are a wonderful combination. Ground clove works as well, also very good for you. (but NOT if you smoke the clove. Try to avoid sucking smoke into your lungs.) Cinnamon and clove are better for you in a bowl of oatmeal, but if you are going to have a cookie anyway . . .

Were we baking?

Add your other ingredients and mix together. If you are using the vegan substitutions blend your dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately and then add your dry to your wet.

Now, stir in the oatmeal, chocolate chunks and walnuts. The more walnuts the more protein and more omega 3. Chopped small you can get a cup in. My boys will NOT eat cookies with nuts on principle. They eat nuts plenty, just not in their cookies - or so they think. I grind the nuts in my mini-prep until they are paste like and add THAT to the mix along with the flax seed and tofu or eggs if going omnivore.

That's it, really, and you can use the Cornell Triple Rich on any baking recipe that calls for flour.

VEGAN SUBSTITUTIONS:
For butter, substitute 75% oil or coconut oil. (1 cup of butter – ¾ c. oil)
1 egg = 1/4 c. firm silken tofu = 1 T ground flax seed + 3 T water whisked together. I have only done up to 3 eggs.
From: http://eggbeater.typepad.com/shuna/2009/02/vegan-baking-substitutions-solutions-advice-for-flavourful-alternative-baked-goods.html
This is a GREAT reference. If you are using the substitutions you really should read the whole article.
Sugar substitution: You can use 2/3 cup agave nectar or 2/3 cup maple syrup instead of the sugars. (I mix, half and half when I do this.) You will need to make up for the extra moisture. Generally you can cut down on the liquid by 1/4, but I find that tricky with all my other changes so I just grind up the oatmeal into a flour and add about half a cup until I get my cookie dough consistency. Why do I bother? I have vegan friends who do not believe that any sugar is vegan. They are wrong. It may be true that all sugar is a drug, or that sugar is not fairly traded and many other things but there are major sugar producers, as well as smaller ones, that do not use bone char when processing their sugar. Domino is one of them. Still, to make them happy, I substitute.

What you learned: For each cup of flour add one tablespoon each wheat germ, milk powder and soy powder to cup, then fill cup with flour. Now, pretend it's health food and take the cookies along instead of gorp on your next hike

NB: When making brownies you can also substitute cocoa powder for some of the flour called for in the recipes. Obviously, not too much. Make certain you have enough gluten and that the batter is the right consistency. My kids like me to make them brownie sundaes so it's a good bribe for a week of getting their homework done and all their practicing in. For them the best treat is when I put minty fudge sauce over it. They love it, and their father won't try to steal any. He hates the mint-chocolate combo.

Next chocolate installment: making your own chocolates. Next issue: Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Easter - as in estrogen, a time to make like a rabbit?

2009-03-24T02:07:00.006-04:00

A Synthesis of the Tales of Oestre/Eastre/Ostara and her bird

The goddess of the dawn, Eastre, brought not merely a new day but new life. She was the goddess of fertility and every year her arrival was eagerly awaited to bring about the end of winter. As we know, gods and goddesses are not perfect, they are much like humans, only more so. Thus, one winter went longer than it should have as Eastre dallied at what we shall not mention here and brought but a late thaw. When she arrived in the land she found a bird whose wings were frozen in the snow. The bird had returned on time, but the land was not ready for her. Eastre felt pity for the creature- certainly not guilt, goddesses are not about guilt. She freed the bird's frozen wings, but the bird had broken them in its thrashing about to be free. Eastre picked up the creature and tried to warm it at her breast. She stroked it and kept it with her through the day, but it could not be healed by her touch. Left alone, unable to fly, the bird would not live long. Once again the goddess took pity on the bird and changed her into a hare, a fertility goddesses favorite animal, and gave the hare great speed so it would not be hunted. The hare, relieved to be free and smart enough not to hang around a deity, all of them famous for their mercurial natures, hopped away. Come the next equinox the hare was stunned to learn, as might you be, that she could lay eggs. Not just any eggs, but ones of brilliant color. As a gift to the goddess for saving her life the hare placed the eggs amongst the ever green plants and the early blooming flowers. And here they were found by worshipers of Eastre who came to these places to give her their thanks for bringing back the sun and life. Mind you, the eggs were not hidden, but protected from animals that might make off with warm fresh magic hare eggs.

But why are they chocolate eggs? I believe Hershey's, Nestle and Cadbury have that bit of the tale.

An interesting note is that modern scholars refer to the bird/hare as a male. Why a male would lay eggs is beyond me, but it may come from the fact that some interpretations of the text have Eastre taking Lepus as a lover. Whether this was intended in the original tale or not, it is clear that the bird was female. In addition, the translation of the tale to Latin had the hare taking the name Lepus, which is also a hare in roman mythology, in that case a male. My understanding does not have the goddess taking the bird/hare as a lover, but tending to the bird- loving it.

Loving them enough to keep breathing

2009-03-23T17:19:00.008-04:00

I was thinking about this the other day. Suicide. Not committing it but how the option had gone away. In my worst periods I never let it get so bad that I could do this. And, typical of me, it is not for me that I protect myself.

The first time I went on meds it was for me. I was in love and in law school and when the depression came roaring back, triggered by stress and who knows what else, I realized I could lose both my lover and my place at the law school. I knew about the drugs because I had kept up since first being diagnosed after graduating from college (barely.) Mind you, I'd suffered repeated and lengthening bouts of depression since puberty, but no one seemed to think it was more than my being dramatic, or willful or downright evil. Yes, my mother told me that.

As a mother now I cannot imagine but that she herself was depressed when she said it. I never harmed a creature, never stole, wasn't even self-medicating. I was making her life hard by not actually living mine and perhaps that seemed, to her bereaved mind, like an assault. I say bereaved because it feels that way often. Or perhaps bereavement is depression. You do lose the world in depression; it floats away from you and there is grief in that, for me, and rage. Numbness is not something I have ever associated with depression. I am not numb when depressed; I lack the vitality to express my grief and confusion.

But I am a mother now and so dying by suicide, or even selfish risk taking seems to be be a letter to my sons: I didn't love you enough to stay alive.

Please, do not think I look at other mothers or fathers and condemn them if they kill themselves. Usually, I don't. Murder suicide is another matter. As is dying stupidly. I remember when I was first told that Princess Diana was dead. I was on an island in Swedish archipelago, my infant son in my baby bjorn. The staff were quite upset about something, "Princess Dee- ahna is dead," they said. I thought maybe Swedish royalty. Then I realize, Dee fo Di. Ah. I didn't know how I was supposed to feel about this. I was never much for royals watching. I memorized the Declaration of Independence as a child because all the news could do was talk about "The Royal Wedding." But a death is a death and she was young for it. "How did she die?" I asked. When told the first thing I thought, but did not say was "there are worse things than having your picture taken. Like leaving your sons without a mother." Perhaps because I had already suffered a particularly frightening bout of postpartum depression, but standing at the dock waiting to go back to the mainland with my baby drooling on my hands all I could think was how selfish and immature she had been to die like that. So I do judge others. I shouldn't, but I do. But not the terminally ill. That's what that black sickness is, a terminal disease. And it is genetic, it can be contagious, particularly to teen-agers. It is brutal because it lies to you, it tells you medicine cannot help, your family cannot help, nothing will help. Oddly, it is not only easier to listen, to embrace hopelessness, than it is to walk away, it seems more comforting, like the sirens calling you, or Beezlebub, perhaps. Is that where those stories come from? The smooth talking darkness pulling you away from the light.

I come to all of this because Nicholas Hughes, who published his academic work as Nick Hughes, died on Monday, the 16th. He hung himself in his home.

Two weeks ago or so a writer friend asked me if it had shattered me when David Foster Wallace died. I was only partly listening, worrying, as he went through my books, what he'd find and condemn me for, or worse, question me about. Yes, I said, then retracted. It was sad, I said, but I wasn't shattered, I didn't know him. My friend said nothing. I wondered if he'd met him, edited him, smoked with him while looking toward a starless sky deep in the Mississippi woods. I didn't ask. I didn't want to have to cope with it right then. Anyway, my friend, like me, fights depression back with a soggy broom and prayer every day, though, like me, he is, as I like to say, god free. When others fighting the battle you are fighting lose it can rock you pretty hard. But this one didn't rock me. Oddly, it hit me harder when John Updike died. I had met him and this literary beast and fellow Red Sox fan had been kind to me, speaking to me as though for those moments he did not have thirteen better options for his time. It hurt that he was gone. So, if it is the meeting or the not meeting than why am I so thrown, so hollowed out by Nick Hughes death? I think it is because I am a mother.

I really was, just the other day, thinking this, that children of parent's who commit suicide are much more likely, statistically, to die in this manner. So to kill myself would not only rob my children of their mother, not only burden them with questions no one will ever answer, but will likely shorten their own lives. It ignores the extent to which the link is genetic - given the science that is a dangerous piece of information to overlook, unless you are trying not to kill yourself.

In labor with my second child I began to vomit - I was panicking. I was, I thought, in transition. I had been in labor off and recently on for 34 hours. The so called midwife refused to check my cervix for fear of infection. I was on three antibiotics by this time having developed a raging fever earlier in the proceedings. If I was evil, that woman would be no more. It was the not knowing that drove me to panic and to vomit. I was talking myself through it, how long it would last, what I would do, how I would manage, but I knew to restart the labor they had given me pitocin and I knew with pitocin "transition" could be hours of labor. I needed to know where I was, I needed to be able to plot my course through it, and I didn't know and no one would tell me. I panicked. This is what I think of when I think of not having a model. Of not knowing where you are, of not being able to plot a course out, of getting so lost that you believe there isn't one. And the dark, it is so calm. So reassuring.

I am sure now, this is where the stories of the devil come from. Not the serpent in the garden, the serpent is a cautionary tale against science in favor of faith. Do not try and find out, believe. Asking for knowledge, like looking behind the curtain, is treading on toes. God's toes, the wizard's, it's all the same. Yet if we insisted on not knowing we have no medicine for depression, or cancer, or infections. And there would be no democracy.

I saw a Kraken, pieces of a giant squid, at the Museum of Science. The pieces were no more real than a Kraken. But it cheered me. These are stories people told to find their way. What I thought of when I saw it was that David Foster Wallace may himself have been looking for the Kraken, that great beast whose discovery will change the world, give meaning to life, let him gulp down a sense of calm at last. But that doesn't explain his death. I don't know why he was so sick, any more than I know why my uncle had to get cancer. I only know that Nick Hughes, whatever tools he had at his disposal to fight his way out were not enough and I am terrified of leaving that inheritance to my children. It scares me more than death, more than living though the worst of my days.

Recovering

2007-12-17T17:15:00.000-05:00

You know those people who like to go on about how hard it is raise children, "It's just so hard. Oh god, you would never guess how hard it is." Don't you ever wonder if they ever did anything before they thought mattered? Of course it's damn hard. So, no big news, this past autumn when my nuclear family decided to go for a hike in New Hampshire we were not able to meet every one's needs simultaneously. My youngest had some issue that was neither met nor articulated and as a result he was impossible. I ended up turning back with him. My husband and older son followed soon after as the heavy rains of the two days before had made the trail ahead unsuitable for crossing without gear. We all went for hot cocoa and then headed for another trail.

This did not begin well. I sent the others on ahead again, but didn't turn back. I let my son follow me and pull on my bag for a bit, then suggested that I might fall, and what's more, I might fall on him. Maybe he could hold my hand. A minute later he was doing that, still behind me on the trail. We came to a tricky climb and I suggested he go ahead and I'd support him from below. He did go ahead but insisted he didn't need the help, and he didn't. He was still surly so when we came to a waterfall with a wide traverse of bald rock face on the side I was happy to suggest we climb the rock - this is what he really likes. He did his usual bit of running to the waterfall and was on the wet rock. I asked him to come back, afraid he would slip. I'm always afraid he will slip and he always insists he won't and he doesn't. Maybe because we were just getting into a nice groove he did the unusual and came over to me. On the last leap he slipped into a pool of water. The rock, well eroded, was steep and smooth all around him and as he tried to scramble up he kept slipping, falling deeper into the pool. I was worried his head would go under and then he would panic. I couldn't reach him without being on the verge of falling in, so I jumped in, reasoning I was less likely to get hurt this way. I managed to push him out, but then had trouble getting myself hoisted out. While I struggled my son, crying and shaking with cold, asked "do we have to keep going?" It was not existential. He wanted to go get warm and dry. I laughed. "No sweetie, we are going back to the car and get you dry clothes."

I had been yelling "Jack!" to alert my husband. I thought I should yell something else, but didn't want to yell "help," and unnecessarily alarm other hikers. I had just managed to extricate myself from the coldest water I have ever been in when my husband appeared, having heard a faint and unnatural noise.

I know that he inquired with some concern as to what had happened and were we ok but in my neuro cinema this bit has been digitally removed and the first thing I hear my husband say is "Your phone is in the water." I turn around and there, sure enough there is my phone, in the same pool of water I have just left. To understand the poignancy of this, two weeks earlier we had been hiking in New Hampshire. As we started to load up the car and head to the hotel I said "let me make sure my phone is still here." "Why? Where else would it be?" I didn't know, but I just had a need to have it with me in the car. I couldn't locate it in the bag though and thought maybe I'd left it in the glove compartment, when in fact, I had left it on the trail. When the details (it involved painting with pine needles) came back to me I knew exactly where I'd left it, but by then a nice thunderstorm had come upon us and I figured the phone for a loss. The trail we had been on was very busy, straight off the Kangamangus highway so I was sure the phone would be disposed of. I called the insurance company and they shipped me a new one. I activated it and headed back to New Hampshire. On the drive up I called my parents. Since my land line does not do long distance I hadn't been able to talk to them. My plan was to unpack my address book at the hotel and reenter my sister's phone number so I could call her. She is sick and I have been trying to call her regularly if only to give her a long distance hug. That plan was now sunk along with my nifty replacement phone.

The water was clear. If someone had called, and the phone had worked, I could have read the caller id no problem. But my son was shivering and still shook up so I said, "Oh well" and picked him up, more to share my body warmth with him than anything else - he's nearly eight so I'm not certain I was faster carrying him than I would have been walking with him. Jack decided to try for the phone, but was not willing to jump into four feet of water on behalf of it. When he was unable to fish it out using available materials he headed back to join us. We dried off the wet one, giving him our spare socks, sweatshirts and my jacket, which is a product of materials science and thus was dry. (We should all hug a materials scientists at least once a week.)

The whole incident shook me up more than I would have thought. My son did not want the incident mentioned, ever again! It is hard to know if this is from embarrassment or trauma. Knowing him, I suspect the former.

My only lasting trouble was my own embarrassment. I seemed incapable of calling the insurance company and telling them I had once again, and so soon, lost my phone. I thought, best case scenario, they believe me and send me a new phone but add a rider to the contract, "New phone not covered in New Hampshire." I put it off and put it off. When I had lost it the first time and had called right away to have it replaced I regularly called my voice mail box. This time I didn't. Not only that, I still didn't answer my land line - having got in that habit on the logic that everyone I want to talk to has my cell phone number. This lead to difficulty with folks I really did want, and needed to communicate with (have they not heard of email?) One day it occurred to me that my no phone life, while terrifically productive, was amiss, so I broke down and waded through the messages on my land line. Here is the gist of the relevant message:

"Hi, my name is Saint Michael (not his real name) and I have your phone. We found it in Maine. You can call me at this number and describe it and I'll get it back to you." It was about two days old.

Maine? I called. I hoped he hadn't given up on me and tossed the thing. I figured it was the first phone, maybe it had been picked up and brought to Maine before it was deactivated. I called him, but he was, of course, at work, so I left a message. I called back around five, too early, but when he got home he called me.

He had found it in New Hampshire, actually, while hiking with his family. It was there in the water, which had gone down a bit, but not gotten any warmer. He fished it out, brought it to a Verizon store, bought a charger for it, charged it up, looked up my home number on the phone and called me. I was flabbergasted. "I'll pay you for the charger, of course," was all I could say, which was horrible. He said, "actually, my company is having an auction to raise money for AIDS Education so if you just write the check out for that, that would be great." He worked downtown in the financial district so I wore a skirt and boots to bike down there. I didn't want to show up in his building looking like my slovenly self. More than one person was appalled to see someone other than a bike messenger getting off a cycle amid the towers. Undaunted by rude stares outside the building I signed in and went up to the company's lobby. The receptionist knew who I was the moment I came in the door. Guess I wore the wrong skirt, or boots.

She wanted the whole story about the phone and I gave her my version of it and wrote out a check. As I wrote she said, "He's here. Do you want to meet him?" He had told me on the phone that he wouldn't be in the office that day, so I said I didn't want to bother him. When I handed over the check, she said, "it was only supposed to be $36." I had written it for $100. The man had fished into cold water, he bought a charger, he called me and he called me back! And the money was for a good cause. No biggie, right? I didn't have to pay the $50 to the insurance company, I was getting a new charger and I didn't have to tell the insurance company that I had lost my phone, again.

The receptionist called out a woman I can only guess is the director of PR and community relations. She was running the auction. They were both very nice and I finally asked what the company did, having never heard of SAPPI. Specialty papers, those used in magazines I don't read, Elle and Vogue. The paper in those gorgeous coffee table photo books , like Desert Water, a copy of which, along with the humongous fall issues the fashion magazines, she gave me. I had no messenger bag, only my canvas "purse" to carry home my phone and spanking new charger. She gave me a beautiful bag, undoubtedly made of SAPPI paper, with thick, soft string handles. I rode home with all of this hanging from my road bike's handle bars. Maybe SAPPI hires very nice people. Maybe we all just need more chances to help each other out. I don't know, but I have my phone, bought it a new battery and think good thoughts about human beings every time it rings.

The man who found and fished out my phone has a son, "I hope you don't mind he made a few calls on it," he said when we spoke. I'm just glad there are parents out there setting that kind of example. Next time I'm struggling n the trail, maybe I'll yell "help." Give someone a chance to act on their better nature.

Losing

2007-11-20T12:25:00.000-05:00

I took my two boys to see the Revolution play in R.F.K. stadium in Washington D.C. We were full of optimism. We were coming from Boston, home of the Red Sox. We are Patriots fans, Celtics fans, we don't care so much about hockey (though we feel guilty about it.) This is the year, is it not, to be a Boston sports fan? We had kismet on our side. Plus, it was the second match-up in so many years against the Houston Dynamos. Surely we had their number by now.

If you follow American soccer, and chances are, you don't, you know the Revolution lost 2-1 after running out steam in the second half. The sports commentators have not so far mentioned that the Dynamos were literally jumping over our players to header the ball. Nor that a couple of our younger players seemed to have developed a phobia of gaining possession of the ball during the break. The Revolution is a team that can play. I mean, here they are at the cup, again, fourth time, third time in three years. They lost in miserable fashion. My older son actually cried. If Sharie Joseph also cried I don't blame him. He probably had the same thought, why bother coming all this way to lose?

Because my son cried I had to be non-chalant. I introduced him to the old Boston mantra "there's always next year." Now that we don't need it for the Red Sox we can lay it on Twellman and company. I said that the baggage of playing the same team may have hurt, I said maybe most of the team was out partying the night before. This made my upset son more so, only now with me, and my young son laugh.

When I first took this sensitive, intelligent, athletic child to a Red Sox game we lost. I remember thinking (this was pre 2004) "why am I doing this to him?" But I have never regretted being a Red Sox fan, not through all the losses. I've regretted the losses, and many of my fellow fans, but never my choice of team or my choice to be a fan at all. I learn from being a fan. I learn that I cannot control the actions of others. I learn that rarely does how another performs have anything at all to do with me (though I do believe a park full of supporters can boost a team, the way an engaged audience feeds life into a show.) And I learn parenting metaphors. I need these.

This morning , with my son's homework undone he was distraught. I told him he had to go into class and he was beating himself up "I know I can do so much better." I used the one pitch at a time metaphor ( the wounds from Sunday are still too raw to use soccer metaphors.) I have used the Patriots as examples, not how they live their lives, which I don't follow, but how they play the game, how they change position to strengthen the team, how they stay focused in the game, how Brady focuses, making a pass with rushers just about on him. I can't use Randy Moss. He performs outside the level of normal humans. I do use the Red Sox: how Papelbon can get behind in the count, with two men on base and stay with the next pitch, how Varitek adjusts constantly to pitchers, and batters, how Manny Ramirez stares down a pitch no matter the count. I love sports metaphors, though I never played any of these games.

When I was little I was signed up for softball, which my big sisters played. My coach told me not to swing at anything because I was so short, even for my age, that no pitcher was going to be able to strike me out - my strike zone was tiny. If she had worked on also teaching me to hit I might have been willing to employ that strategy during games. But she didn't teach me anything. There was no team building, no skill building for newbies like me. So I swung. Once I swung my bat straight over my head. I imagine that lots of kids do that, but you'd never know it by the reaction of my coach. I quit. I danced instead. I was not going to become a hot shot athlete regardless, though I admired them. As one of five children in a family with two working parents and (horror or horrors) no sitter, no nanny, no cleaning lady, it was all my folks could do to sign us up for lessons. I still learned something. I learned that some coaches suck.

When I had to be away a couple of summers ago I signed my children up for camp during the day. It was tennis camp, well loved by a number of children we know. Turns out in order to love it, you have to already know how to play tennis. This is not what the camp claims, just how it is. There is no instruction, only direction. "Now let's practice our back hand." When I signed them up for swim lessons they were skeptical. The lessons were great and my older son was soon asked to be on the swim team, but the competitive atmosphere of tennis camp had turned him off and he declined. In fact, he dropped out of swim lessons when he thought progression would mean he had to join the team.

As this summer ended I found my son in tears at the prospect of playing soccer in the athletics program at school. It is part of the school day and mandatory. As much as liked kicking a soccer ball around he had never played. He knew some of his friends had and I thought this might be the cause of his anxiety. "No," he said, "I just don't like competitive sports." Two weeks later he got into the car after school with the enthusiastic announcement, "I was sweeper today." He loves soccer. He loves soccer because the coaches at his school are excellent. They build skills and confidence simultaneously. They take a pedagogical approach to what they do and they do it with care.

While we were in D.C. this son told me he hopes to be a professional baseball player. He has never played baseball outside of a pick-up game with friends in the park. I said maybe he wanted to sign up for little league in the spring, something he had been avoiding. "Yeah." He said. I don't know how he'll be at baseball. I don't care. I'm glad he is willing to play, to compete. He cried at the end of his school's soccer season. They lost every game - they only played four. There is nothing wrong with caring about winning, or feeling bad about losing. There's nothing wrong with thinking "I could do better." In fact, it's a great way to look at defeat, learn, and then move on. To the next pitch, the next kick, the next pass, the next day.

So, we went all that way and who knows what happened to the Revs. We cheered like mad, and then cheered them at the end of the game. I asked my boys on Monday, why did we cheer them after they lost? They knew. Because they played hard all year, they made it to the Cup and they gave it their best, even if that day's best was inexplicably lacking. This too is part of being a fan, of understanding that when others fail it is not always for lack of trying, or even lack of ability. Failure is inevitable and we all do it. To be kind to ourselves and others, and to put it in perspective, is something life long fans learn to do. We love our teams even when they fail us, frustrate us, make us crazy. As long as they keep trying, we will keep cheering.

We will be at Gillette Stadium next season, (can't afford Pats tickets) and hopefully, at the MLS Cup. We may miss a little more school, but not a single lesson.

Asking the Wrong Questions

2007-07-30T03:15:00.000-04:00

Charles Lindbergh and my mother were on my mind today. When forced not to think about ill family members or a friend having to cope with a mother straight out of hell my mind invariably goes to one place - baseball. GO SOX!! But the Sox are playing Tampa Bay and my sister who is very ill lives there. Lester is back, Schilling is out. Thinking about Lester makes me think about cancer which is one of things I'm trying not to think about, so I tried to think about the Cardinals, whom my mother loves the way I love the Sox. But then I thought about how the Cardinals went and won the World Series while my little sister was ill and my parents and I were nursing her in a house loaned to us by a Baptist church down in Wake-Forest. My mind raced back to the present, to what I need to do now to see that her physical rehabilitation continues, because she is my little sister, though we are both grown women.

Instead of baseball I thought of my mother's love of St. Louis and its absurd manifestations. Her loyalty to Budweiser, for instance. And to Charles Lindbergh.

As a girl I never heard nor read Alice in Wonderland, never saw Bambi or sang campfire songs. I was told all about the Spirit of St. Louis, though, and watched the movie more times than It's a Wonderful Life - which, after all, is only apropos once a year. When I was a bit older tales of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby entered my nighttime story repertoire. Somehow Lindbergh's Nazi sympathies never made it into the stories.

When I learned about him in college, which seemed late on, as though not only my mother but my entire school system had engaged in a conspiracy, I asked my mother, "Why did he do that? Why did everyone still call him a hero?" But my mother would not talk about it. "Pfft," she'd say, or something to that effect. It bothered me, this unwillingness to discuss what felt like a betrayal. I thought I was disturbed by Lindbergh's betrayal, but it came to be my mother's. How could she set me up to praise a man like that? She never tried to explain him, or her, to me and I decided today this was because she couldn't. She had been a baby when Lindbergh was made a hero. She played war games as a young girl; she and her friends hiding baby dolls in the bushes then venturing bravely out to save the war orphans. Decades later she had trouble sitting next to a German executive at dinner. "Every time he opened his mouth I'd just want to shoot him," she said. She laughed when she said it because she didn't truly want to shoot him, but then again, she did. It was that part of her brain infused early on with the "Germans are our enemy" creed and then given evidence of what they had done. I knew my mother didn't want to shoot him, didn't truly dislike him for being German and she knew I understood this. She is remarkable in the biases she was raised with and overcame. But she would not talk about Lindbergh. She knew, must have, that what he did was evil, but she wouldn't say so. Wouldn't discuss it.

It is hard to let our heroes go. It can be especially hard when they are heroes handed down to us. My mother had no recollection of the flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh was a hero to her because he was a hero to the adults in her life. Her mother, her father, her grandparents, the clergy she knew and trusted. These, along with her life long friends, were St. Louis to her. They gave her Lindbergh as hero. If later she saw him as something else she had to make sense of it in her young mind. So this is what I think, she did make sense of it, as best she could as a child and there she left it. She had no better explanation ready when I asked her about it so many decades later and she didn't want to be challenged to make one. What if she couldn't? What if she lost this hero? With whom could she replace him?

She had other heroes, of course. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and later John F. Kennedy. Kennedy went on to disappoint her. Not with the Bay of Pigs, nor even merely his philandering - he was a man, after all. But my mother could never forgive him for having it on with Marilyn Monroe. My mother with her blond hair that she dyed brown saw Monroe as cheap. I tried to explain she couldn't be that bad if Arthur Miller fell for her, but my mother would not be swayed. So heroes did lose status in her eyes. Not FDR, I think. She doesn't believe he was unfaithful and, though she'd never say this to me, she'd excuse him if he were. For all the First Lady's works Eleanor Roosevelt never made it into my mother's pantheon. Eleanor out, but Lindbergh in? It doesn't reflect what I know to be my mother's values. But it may reflect her St. Louis.
She grew up feeling unattractive, though she is a beautiful woman, and in a family that worshipped the boy child. My mother though is not remotely antisemitic, and she never talked about antisemitism in her family, though she admitted with disdain to their racism against blacks (whether African American, Caribbean American, Afro-Caribbean - it made not difference, they looked down on them all.) But I recall now that when I went to St. Louis to introduce my husband to that side of our family my grandmother, whom I loved, shocked me with the phrase, "he tried to Jew me." I didn't know what she meant at first. Joo? Ju? I had to work my way through, "gyp, for gypsy, oh" So many people still say "gyp" without knowing where it comes from I chose to believe that my grandmother was using an expression whose origins she did not recognize. I don't think that anymore.

In my mother's childhood abode any Catholic who could it make past the protestant gate keepers was a cause celebre. It was naive of me to think that this meant my mother's family understood the perils of religious bigotry. I forget that there is a reason my Jewish friends are amazed that my CCD classes included lessons on the holocaust and trips to synagogues to hear talks from Rabbis. I choose to forget not because of any loyalty to the Catholic church, to which I no longer belong, but because of the dissonance. My family was part of that church and they never mentioned the turmoil in the church over Hitler, over antisemitism, over pogroms. It is my family I want to protect by not remembering, my racist, antisemitic family. These are, for all their blindness, people that I love. I don't want to always have to see the truth. Neither does my mother. Charles Lindbergh was a family hero. No one talked about his antisemitism because it wasn't worth mentioning. Maybe at some point, even for them, it became unacceptable. Perhaps it was too embarrassing to speak of, like the alcoholic uncle no longer invited to Sunday dinner, best not to say anything.

I haven't asked my mother about Lindbergh in a very long while, and I won't now. For years I wanted my mother to admit that he was not an honorable man. I suspect that privately she has. So we will continue to talk about impeaching the president, and how we are faring, about baseball and who won in Tampa. I feel small for ever needing to challenge her after all she has taught me about me giving in the world. I feel small and frightened and I want to hold my family close and never let them go, no matter how we fail each other.