Sunday, February 27, 2011
End of February
I have a new vision to help me through the winter days when the cloud cover is heavy and low and the extra minutes of light at the end of the day are not enough. As I go about my day, I imagine every drawer I pull open, every door, every book I crack, all reveal a surprise of brilliant light, kind and warm. I bathe in the brightness, my pupils go sore from the sudden contraction and I have to smile.
Monday, February 7, 2011
A Coupla Comediennes
After the Japanese BBQ shrimp and s'mores tonight, Mia announces, "I've seen two people with big black earrings and giant holes in their ears!"
"Uck," I say. "Was one of them that guy who works at the ice cream store?"
"Yeah," says my eight year old Janeane Garofalo. "He was talking to me, but all I could hear was EAR EAR EAR EAR! He was saying, 'do you want strawberry?' but it sounded like 'do you want straw-EAR-berry?' I was looking at his face but all I could see was a great big EAR!"
***
Randy and I are talking Bill O'Reilly on the drive home and Nora asks, "Who's that?"
"The rudest man in the world," I tell her. "He asks the President a question, Mr. Obama starts to answer and Bill O'Reilly interrupts him to contradict. He wasn't even listening. He asks another question and Mr. Obama smiles and tries to answer and he interrupts him again! Incredibly rude."
Nora asks, "Did he burp?"
***
A couple of minutes later, she is dancing in her booster seat with a panicked grimace on her face. Our kindergartener has got Carole Lombard's white curls as well as her frenzy.
"Do you have to go to the bathroom, Nora?" asks Daddy.
"Yes!"
"Okay, hold on, we'll find a place and pull over."
A few blocks later, we're turning into the gas station and Nora says, "Don't fall asleep! Don't fall asleep! Don't fall asleep!"
Randy and I are exchanging looks, then she adds, "You might have a pee pee dream!"
Oh. Got it.
"Uck," I say. "Was one of them that guy who works at the ice cream store?"
"Yeah," says my eight year old Janeane Garofalo. "He was talking to me, but all I could hear was EAR EAR EAR EAR! He was saying, 'do you want strawberry?' but it sounded like 'do you want straw-EAR-berry?' I was looking at his face but all I could see was a great big EAR!"
***
Randy and I are talking Bill O'Reilly on the drive home and Nora asks, "Who's that?"
"The rudest man in the world," I tell her. "He asks the President a question, Mr. Obama starts to answer and Bill O'Reilly interrupts him to contradict. He wasn't even listening. He asks another question and Mr. Obama smiles and tries to answer and he interrupts him again! Incredibly rude."
Nora asks, "Did he burp?"
***
A couple of minutes later, she is dancing in her booster seat with a panicked grimace on her face. Our kindergartener has got Carole Lombard's white curls as well as her frenzy.
"Do you have to go to the bathroom, Nora?" asks Daddy.
"Yes!"
"Okay, hold on, we'll find a place and pull over."
A few blocks later, we're turning into the gas station and Nora says, "Don't fall asleep! Don't fall asleep! Don't fall asleep!"
Randy and I are exchanging looks, then she adds, "You might have a pee pee dream!"
Oh. Got it.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Buh-Lizzard!
I stood behind the glass door this afternoon and watched little Nora as she waited for the kindergarten bus. Wrapped in snowsuit, boots, gloves and hat, she worked in the fresh snow, throwing handfuls into the air and catching them on her hatted head like confetti. She looked down the street for the late bus, then looked back to me to wave and catch one of mine, then got down to the business of play again. Big armful-sized blocks of snow were carried to her snowbank work table, icicles retrieved from the cherry tree and stuck in the top, (hair? a crown?) a stick from the maple stuck to Snow Buddha's side. Or perhaps he was a frozen King Triton, after the mermaid movie that we watched again this morning.
This morning the village's miniature snowplow cleared the sidewalk where Nora stands and I'm kind of sad, even with the glorious sky and sun that have followed Tuesday and Wednesday's SnowMyGod Snowmaggedon of 2011. Yesterday I had carved out a wandering path from our front walk to the corner where the bus drops off the kids. Now the way is straight and broad. My homemade version may have been no more wide than the narrow width of a snow shovel, but its leisurely curves and clumsy chunks showed the craftwoman's effort. Like a sculptor's tool marks in the clay.
The last simile brought to you by Steve Martin's newest novel, An Object of Beauty, a lovely and lively tale of art dealers and collectors I'm reading set in the galleries and tony restaurants of Manhattan. Martin, whose memoir Born Standing Up I loved, describes the pre-millennium, pre-financial-crash art scene with the ease of an actual collector:
"Whether (the art of the '90's) was any good or not, the sheer amount of it -- to the dismay of cranky critics -- was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970's, art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete."
Martin's prose is chewy and delicious, well, until I hit the novel's 9/11 episode this morning. Stopped me dead in my tracks, and brought me back to the awful experience of reading the first half of Chris Cleave's Little Bee last summer. (At that novel's midpoint, Cleave puts three of his characters in a horrific scene so vicious and disturbing, every following action can't bear the weight of what horrors came before. I gave up when two lovers were arguing about his wife - how could we be expected to care about their petty squabbles after that unerasable image of the murder on the beach?)
An Object of Beauty hasn't lost me yet, just made me pause. I'll see if the ever-deft Martin can work his magic on the American tragedy that eclipses all others - perhaps he'll whip a cape over the disaster and distract me with some flash in the other hand. Or fit compassion into the cool hearts of his art lovers.
Deborah Eisenberg is a writer capable of handling the difficult retelling of New York's enormous blows in her story "Twilight of the Superheroes" from her recent Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. I've been reading this huge collection for months, after this high recommendation from my friend Christina, "She writes the way I think." I knew what Christina meant by the first page: "...for a moment that seemed endless I had been pulled down into a forgotten period of my life when I, too, had strained to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities." Honestly, I just want to hold up lines to show you - look at this! And this! And this from "Twilight:"
"Oh that day! One kept waiting -- as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real -- the intended -- future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened." Which is about as perfect a description of our collective post-9/11 disbelief, and more specific grieving, as I've encountered in a while.
I've read Eisenberg's story "Days" three times now, after the first reading kept killing me softly with its song. An unnamed woman of undetermined age and means of support stops smoking which begins a downward slide told in precise declarative sentences that made me laugh with their blackness. "I feel as if years of rage have condensed around the sides of my brain and are dripping down into it, forming pools in which all its other contents are becoming sodden and useless."
"The ruin that is (her) life" is slowly saved by an introduction to the YMCA and its cold pool and running track, its "little tropical hut" of a sauna. The woman seems to relearn how to think, like a stroke victim relearning to speak, and her small improvements are about as close as Eisenberg gets in this beautiful and ambiguous collection to a positive resolution.
I know this character's fury and confusion and hopeful persistence. Sometimes to me too, "it seems that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them." If you can laugh with me at that great line, you too could love this story and this book.
This morning the village's miniature snowplow cleared the sidewalk where Nora stands and I'm kind of sad, even with the glorious sky and sun that have followed Tuesday and Wednesday's SnowMyGod Snowmaggedon of 2011. Yesterday I had carved out a wandering path from our front walk to the corner where the bus drops off the kids. Now the way is straight and broad. My homemade version may have been no more wide than the narrow width of a snow shovel, but its leisurely curves and clumsy chunks showed the craftwoman's effort. Like a sculptor's tool marks in the clay.
The last simile brought to you by Steve Martin's newest novel, An Object of Beauty, a lovely and lively tale of art dealers and collectors I'm reading set in the galleries and tony restaurants of Manhattan. Martin, whose memoir Born Standing Up I loved, describes the pre-millennium, pre-financial-crash art scene with the ease of an actual collector:
"Whether (the art of the '90's) was any good or not, the sheer amount of it -- to the dismay of cranky critics -- was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970's, art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete."
Martin's prose is chewy and delicious, well, until I hit the novel's 9/11 episode this morning. Stopped me dead in my tracks, and brought me back to the awful experience of reading the first half of Chris Cleave's Little Bee last summer. (At that novel's midpoint, Cleave puts three of his characters in a horrific scene so vicious and disturbing, every following action can't bear the weight of what horrors came before. I gave up when two lovers were arguing about his wife - how could we be expected to care about their petty squabbles after that unerasable image of the murder on the beach?)
An Object of Beauty hasn't lost me yet, just made me pause. I'll see if the ever-deft Martin can work his magic on the American tragedy that eclipses all others - perhaps he'll whip a cape over the disaster and distract me with some flash in the other hand. Or fit compassion into the cool hearts of his art lovers.
Deborah Eisenberg is a writer capable of handling the difficult retelling of New York's enormous blows in her story "Twilight of the Superheroes" from her recent Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. I've been reading this huge collection for months, after this high recommendation from my friend Christina, "She writes the way I think." I knew what Christina meant by the first page: "...for a moment that seemed endless I had been pulled down into a forgotten period of my life when I, too, had strained to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities." Honestly, I just want to hold up lines to show you - look at this! And this! And this from "Twilight:"
"Oh that day! One kept waiting -- as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real -- the intended -- future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened." Which is about as perfect a description of our collective post-9/11 disbelief, and more specific grieving, as I've encountered in a while.I've read Eisenberg's story "Days" three times now, after the first reading kept killing me softly with its song. An unnamed woman of undetermined age and means of support stops smoking which begins a downward slide told in precise declarative sentences that made me laugh with their blackness. "I feel as if years of rage have condensed around the sides of my brain and are dripping down into it, forming pools in which all its other contents are becoming sodden and useless."
"The ruin that is (her) life" is slowly saved by an introduction to the YMCA and its cold pool and running track, its "little tropical hut" of a sauna. The woman seems to relearn how to think, like a stroke victim relearning to speak, and her small improvements are about as close as Eisenberg gets in this beautiful and ambiguous collection to a positive resolution.
I know this character's fury and confusion and hopeful persistence. Sometimes to me too, "it seems that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them." If you can laugh with me at that great line, you too could love this story and this book.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The Bridge Builder's Gift
The girls are having a snack in the museum basement. It’s Family Day at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and before we jump into the treasure hunt and the koi ogling, we need a short break to fuel up. The girls crunch goldfish crackers and to keep them eating, I offer to read to them one of the beautiful picture books strewn on one of the little tables.
It’s The Quilt Maker’s Gift by Chicago artist Jeff Brumbeau. The rich colors and sweet details of Gail De Marken’s illustrations suck me in, but it is the story that nearly knocks me over.
A rich king so loves his possessions that he declares his birthday celebrated twice a year and demands all his subjects give him gifts. He is still not happy. He hears of a quilt maker, whose intricate and beautiful hand-sewn quilts draw people from near and far to try to buy one for their own. They are all turned away, because the woman finds homes for her quilts in a singular way. Once she had completed one of her masterpieces, she leaves her home at night and wanders the streets of the city until she finds a homeless soul sleeping on the street. She covers him with her quilt and returns home to begin another.
“Give me a quilt!” demands the king.
“Make presents of everything you own,” replies the woman. “And then I’ll make a quilt for you.”
At first the king refuses and his efforts, along with those of his bumbling army, to force a quilt from the woman are foiled in gentle ways that made my girls laugh and cheer. When the king eventually, reluctantly, agrees to the quilt maker’s plan, he can only make himself part with a single marble. The gift makes a boy smile. The king next brings out some velvet coats. The people who receive them are solemnly grateful, and the king feels the beginnings of gratification, but something is still missing. He decides to take his collections of blue dancing cats and clear glass fish and his merry-go-round with live horses to the village square. This gift creates an explosion of joy from both receivers and givers that the king did not know he had been longing for.
He packs his wagons and begins to travel the world, giving away all that he has accumulated. Every time he gives a gift, he sends a sparrow to the quilt maker and she adds another square to his quilt.
By the time the king has given away all his wealth and the last weary sparrow arrives at the quilt maker’s door, my tight throat has pinched my reading voice into an emotional squeak and my nose and eyes are running.
The king's sacrifice is not what has me in tears. When I look at De Marken's images of the king, I see in their place a real man who lived his life in this way.
Thomas J. White, the co-founder of the revolutionary health organization Partners in Health, died this month at the age of 90. By the time he reached his eighties, White had given away nearly all of his personal fortune, tens of millions of dollars, to provide education, health care and services for the poorest of the poor.
A few weeks before he died, Tom White sent a last check of $5000 to Partners in Health, the Cambridge-based organization that has transformed the model of aid-giving from one of charity to one of community partnering. "My role is pretty much played out," read the note accompanying the check, "but on to the future!"
I first encountered stories of Tom White's generosity in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's account of the birth of Partners in Health. Kidder writes how White's initial seed money of one million dollars enabled Partners in Health to begin with a clinic in rural Haiti. That clinic, Zanmi Lasante, evolved into a public health system across 12 sites in Haiti, employing nearly 4,000 people, most of them Haitians, and serving a population of 2.6 million in 2008. The organization has established community partnerships in Kazakhstan, Peru, Boston and the African nations of Rwanda, Lesotho and Malawi, with partner projects working to implement the community-based model of PIH in Mexico, Guatemala, Burundi, Mali, Liberia and Nepal.
Tom White's financial support made much of this possible. His wealth came from J.F. White Contracting Co., a successful Boston construction company White inherited from his father and nurtured from a foundation excavator to a major builder of hotels, stadiums, dams, subways, and bridges.
The word "philanthropist" usually brings to my mind a grainy black and white image of John D. Rockefeller in a somber suit handing out nickels to bewildered-looking children. We're expected to be grateful for the largess of civic donors - our great cities' hospitals and museums, like the one where I brought my girls on this free of charge Family Day, were built and funded from their generous sharing.
But who thinks of a philanthropist as brave? Who thinks of a philanthropist as so selfless he could go against conventional thinking that urges continuous financial growth? So empathetic that he would rather halt the agony of today's sick and hungry than take faith in the metering out of future interest? Instead of treating retirement like a tightrope walk that is foolhardy without a voluminous savings cushion, Tom White used the time as a chance to divest himself of his accumulated wealth. He was able to watch the transformation he made possible as the humblest of homes were improved with solid roofs and floors, as third world lives were saved with the modern medicine we take for granted in U.S. hospitals.
White not only uttered the common sentiment of desiring to die poor, he lived it. "I can't take it with me, my kids are OK, and my wife's taken care of," he told the Boston Globe in 2004. After his children were grown, (thirteen total, from two marriages), he sold his larger houses and lived in a modest two-bedroom condo in Cambridge with his second wife, Lois.
Here is the gift Tom White left for me: a question that feels both revolutionary and of great ethical importance. Why die with money? White cast new doubts on the idea that growing and maintaining the largest financial surplus possible is a worthwhile goal, or even a moral one. Once our children are grown capable and comfortable, what greater needs will they have than those of the world's poor?
I've read the biographies, heard the stories of great men and women who lived lives of self-imposed austerity: Dorothy Day, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi. For some reason it was this man who brought the message home. A modern man, a builder of bridges and clinics, a man who favored plaid golf pants to the white robes of a penitent, who made presents of nearly everything he owned.
It’s The Quilt Maker’s Gift by Chicago artist Jeff Brumbeau. The rich colors and sweet details of Gail De Marken’s illustrations suck me in, but it is the story that nearly knocks me over.
A rich king so loves his possessions that he declares his birthday celebrated twice a year and demands all his subjects give him gifts. He is still not happy. He hears of a quilt maker, whose intricate and beautiful hand-sewn quilts draw people from near and far to try to buy one for their own. They are all turned away, because the woman finds homes for her quilts in a singular way. Once she had completed one of her masterpieces, she leaves her home at night and wanders the streets of the city until she finds a homeless soul sleeping on the street. She covers him with her quilt and returns home to begin another.
“Give me a quilt!” demands the king.
“Make presents of everything you own,” replies the woman. “And then I’ll make a quilt for you.”
At first the king refuses and his efforts, along with those of his bumbling army, to force a quilt from the woman are foiled in gentle ways that made my girls laugh and cheer. When the king eventually, reluctantly, agrees to the quilt maker’s plan, he can only make himself part with a single marble. The gift makes a boy smile. The king next brings out some velvet coats. The people who receive them are solemnly grateful, and the king feels the beginnings of gratification, but something is still missing. He decides to take his collections of blue dancing cats and clear glass fish and his merry-go-round with live horses to the village square. This gift creates an explosion of joy from both receivers and givers that the king did not know he had been longing for.
He packs his wagons and begins to travel the world, giving away all that he has accumulated. Every time he gives a gift, he sends a sparrow to the quilt maker and she adds another square to his quilt.
By the time the king has given away all his wealth and the last weary sparrow arrives at the quilt maker’s door, my tight throat has pinched my reading voice into an emotional squeak and my nose and eyes are running.
The king's sacrifice is not what has me in tears. When I look at De Marken's images of the king, I see in their place a real man who lived his life in this way.
Thomas J. White, the co-founder of the revolutionary health organization Partners in Health, died this month at the age of 90. By the time he reached his eighties, White had given away nearly all of his personal fortune, tens of millions of dollars, to provide education, health care and services for the poorest of the poor.
A few weeks before he died, Tom White sent a last check of $5000 to Partners in Health, the Cambridge-based organization that has transformed the model of aid-giving from one of charity to one of community partnering. "My role is pretty much played out," read the note accompanying the check, "but on to the future!"
I first encountered stories of Tom White's generosity in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's account of the birth of Partners in Health. Kidder writes how White's initial seed money of one million dollars enabled Partners in Health to begin with a clinic in rural Haiti. That clinic, Zanmi Lasante, evolved into a public health system across 12 sites in Haiti, employing nearly 4,000 people, most of them Haitians, and serving a population of 2.6 million in 2008. The organization has established community partnerships in Kazakhstan, Peru, Boston and the African nations of Rwanda, Lesotho and Malawi, with partner projects working to implement the community-based model of PIH in Mexico, Guatemala, Burundi, Mali, Liberia and Nepal.
Tom White's financial support made much of this possible. His wealth came from J.F. White Contracting Co., a successful Boston construction company White inherited from his father and nurtured from a foundation excavator to a major builder of hotels, stadiums, dams, subways, and bridges.
The word "philanthropist" usually brings to my mind a grainy black and white image of John D. Rockefeller in a somber suit handing out nickels to bewildered-looking children. We're expected to be grateful for the largess of civic donors - our great cities' hospitals and museums, like the one where I brought my girls on this free of charge Family Day, were built and funded from their generous sharing.
But who thinks of a philanthropist as brave? Who thinks of a philanthropist as so selfless he could go against conventional thinking that urges continuous financial growth? So empathetic that he would rather halt the agony of today's sick and hungry than take faith in the metering out of future interest? Instead of treating retirement like a tightrope walk that is foolhardy without a voluminous savings cushion, Tom White used the time as a chance to divest himself of his accumulated wealth. He was able to watch the transformation he made possible as the humblest of homes were improved with solid roofs and floors, as third world lives were saved with the modern medicine we take for granted in U.S. hospitals.
White not only uttered the common sentiment of desiring to die poor, he lived it. "I can't take it with me, my kids are OK, and my wife's taken care of," he told the Boston Globe in 2004. After his children were grown, (thirteen total, from two marriages), he sold his larger houses and lived in a modest two-bedroom condo in Cambridge with his second wife, Lois.
Here is the gift Tom White left for me: a question that feels both revolutionary and of great ethical importance. Why die with money? White cast new doubts on the idea that growing and maintaining the largest financial surplus possible is a worthwhile goal, or even a moral one. Once our children are grown capable and comfortable, what greater needs will they have than those of the world's poor?
I've read the biographies, heard the stories of great men and women who lived lives of self-imposed austerity: Dorothy Day, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi. For some reason it was this man who brought the message home. A modern man, a builder of bridges and clinics, a man who favored plaid golf pants to the white robes of a penitent, who made presents of nearly everything he owned.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Merry Christmas!
My holiday gift to you. St. Vincent's "Jesus Saves, I Spend." Enjoy on this beautiful morning!
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