Specifically

Amita--above, freezing with the kids at the beach the next town over--came to visit us this weekend. She's a law professor from Hyderabad who also works with a UN commission on disability rights and is in New York at the UN for a few weeks. Last week she stood in that enormous General Assembly and made a presentation--speaking on the floor that belongs to the world--and had she not been so utterly blase, telling us two days after the fact, the kids and I would've gone in to see her do it. "What does the commission want to accomplish?" I ask her, thinking about how not so long ago incarcerated women here in the US diagnosed as mentally deficient were forcibly sterilized. "We want to establish a principle--an idea," she says. It's not about law yet: it's about shifting the paradigm--giving a structure to dialogue about change--a way to identify and name the issue.

I--and I've known this all along--am not wired for abstract thought. I reduce everything to the specific, the personal. It's the only way I can think something through. I've always taken it as a weakness. It appears, though, that abstract thinkers err the other way: they can tend--whether by impulse or inability--to discount the personal. Amita's work--in disability, in identity, in adoption--sits there, at the place where person and principle meet. Maybe that's the language of the UN, and though I know that institution is flawed and vulnerable, I'm also touched to think of grownups from around the world coming together to talk and think cross-culturally about human life--in principle and in the specific.

* * *
It's been a busy week--getting the shack ready for company, working toward gainful employment, helping Maisie build a model longhouse out of twigs and bark. I wrote to Maisie's teacher about homework: too much of it; there's supposed to be a half-hour of it in the third grade, but the night I wrote to the teacher Maisie had been at it for 2 hours and was still going strong. Teacher writes back to tell me that "many, many families" had said THEIR children were whipping the stuff out in less than half an hour and wanted more. She was defensive. I expected it: I'd also tucked into my little note criticism of her tactic of reading just the first sentence of the kids' essays and then saying--in front of the whole class--"BO-ring." She tried to defend it: called it a pedagogical tool. Poor, poor thing--she's young, and has no idea what she's up against. We're meeting this morning.

Talk about your specifics...

Nice to be missed, though. I'll catch up with everyone in the next few days.