Dancing through the Minefield

Going Down

2007-02-04T14:29:00.000-05:00

Friends, I'm closing the Minefield. Will be checking in with you all--and maybe set up another site at some point.

You'll know me by my limp.

Peddling

2007-01-26T11:42:00.000-05:00

It's so cold today that the exhaust from the cars doesn't even want to dissipate: all those puffy chains just hang there together in the air. Dazed. Much--the dazed part--like the kids, who succumbed to the thing they hate: an undershirt under a turtleneck under a Norwegian sweater under a winter coat. With a scarf. No arguments from either of them this morning. The new car has heated seats; Liam turned on his knees and rested his cheek against them while the car was warming up. The rest of him was warm from layers. I smiled; the new car makes me feel safe. I don't know how else to say it. The heavy sound the doors make when they close--the color, the curves, the seats--the quiet hum: I feel like I've passed to the next level in a game and reached a checkpoint.

Let go. Breathe. Progress saved.

I imagine disaster scenarios in any moment of extremity. I imagine--when I run out without my jacket to turn the car on--what the progression would be like if I didn't have a warm house to return to. How I would die, and how it would feel. Maybe this mindset is created: too much Man vs Wild on the tube. I keep the whole thing to myself--I don't lecture the kids about survival techniques (except for the one about punching a shark in the nose; what are the chances either of them would ever need to?) But it's also experience: things happen, and once they happen to you you're changed because now you know they can happen. I don't let the kids see how thin the safety net is--everybody's safety net. I don't care who you are. It only takes a few bad turns.

Today I took them to see The Pursuit of Happyness. I thought I knew from the trailers what kind of flick it was: hard times--impossible times--then a big break and happy times. But it's not that at all. It was entirely hard times--entirely the pursuit, with blow after heartbreaking blow, and not until the final three minutes of a 2+ hour movie did the big break come. When it did finally come, it was earned--it was no gift of chance. Not the kind of movie I'd have taken them to see. Not yet.

They've never been more still in a theater. "Will we ever be poor like that?" Liam asked more than once. "No," I said. Though we were, only we had family that had spare beds, and a safe place to reboot, and free schools. "What happens if I'm that poor when I grow up?" Maisie asked. "Then you'll come to me," I said. "What if you're dead?" "You'll go to Liam, or to your own children. And if they ever come to you and you have money, you'll help them without making them ask you." That's the hard part--that last bit.

Hard times are a bit like cancer: you don't want to look at it--not on the corner, not on a movie screen--because there's enough of the arbitrary about it to make you feel vulnerable. I held the car key in my pocket on the way out of the theater. "I love our car," Liam said.

The quest for mobility

2007-01-25T16:29:00.000-05:00

My Dad needs a hip replacement; just called from the doctor's office--a doctor my folks have known forever. He'd have the surgery in March but for the fact that, as it turns out, Dad has some kind of HMO instead of Medicare coverage for this. Dad doesn't know how he ended up with the HMO: he knew only that he had Medicare. I need to investigate how he got the HMO. ("Are you paying for insurance?" I ask him. "No," he says.)

But now all talk of the surgery is suspended, though Dad has been unable to get around well for about a year now because his hip hurts. Goddamn system--goddamn confusing, convoluted system. I was uninsured long enough that I actively consider alternatives: "Did you ask the guy what the surgery would cost for private pay?" And then we calculate: better to pay for it out of pocket to get the surgeon they trust, or get it covered with a surgeon they don't know? You'd think it's simple: go meet a new surgeon. The system devalues relationships: they'll end up with a stranger, and my generation is used to the compromise. But they are of a generation that is deeply shaken by healthcare relationships with strangers; they'd rather skip healthcare if the option is somebody they don't know.

I watched Dad when he was in the hospital last year with his heart trouble--watched him trying to win over all the medical strangers that cycled into his room--telling them little jokes, smiling his sweetest smile, modulating his tone of voice so carefully--he never talks to me so nicely--and holding his pee instead of inconveniencing the nurses: straining with every cell to establish human connection. When I wheeled him out the front door on the way home we passed the cardiologist, who shook Dad's hand, and to this day Dad talks about what a great guy the doctor was--not because Dad lived, see, but because the guy took a minute to shake his hand.

Ultimately, again, Dad will bite the bullet on the hip, and the morning he heads off to the hospital he'll say goodbye to me like he'll never see me again. And me--so sure that he's wrong--so quick with the dismissal, the reassurance.

Would it be so hard, really, to just let people choose their own doctors?

Words

2007-01-13T18:04:00.000-05:00

I'm tossing spelling words at the kids in the car--it passes the time on the Maisie-to-Baltimore drives. Liam hears some of Maisie's more ambitious words, gets annoyed, and says, "I can spell Mississippi, you know."

"Spell it," I say.

"M-r-s-period-i-p-p-y," he says. I smile. Maisie immediately corrects him, and he gets annoyed and barks at her, and she barks back, and it becomes the standard scene. But this time, embedded in the part where they both appeal to me for justice, Maisie tosses at him, "She's my REAL mother!"

Dead silence. I couldn't breathe--couldn't believe she'd say such a thing.

"I'm Liam's real mother, too," I say, "and if I ever hear that come out of your mouth again I really don't know what I'll do."

She recoils; she can't believe she said it either, I can tell. I'm second-guessing: did I make it worse by getting so pissed off? More dead silence. Finally a whispered apology from her. Liam remains silent through all of it.

The fact is, there is a difference in my relationships with the two of them--history, biology and color are easy starters--but after a period of SUCH focus on Liam's biological family--the search, the find, the photos, the letters--the three of us instinctively work very hard now to focus on what makes us a family--not what sets us apart from other families; you can get to a point of displacement very quickly, believe me, if you don't watch the focus. A hard balance for me, being the type to look under every rug and pull apart every dream--the type that believes more harm is done by not looking than by looking and struggling.

Tonight it's just me and Liam. He's cutting snowflakes out of computer paper, and talking to me about my old age. He hums a little tune he heard somewhere, and asks about a complicated story we heard on Ira Glass's program tonight. He asks if he would've had to sit in the back of the bus when Rosa Parks was young, and then says it would've really pissed him off. He negotiates for a new Nintendo game tomorrow instead of church. He chooses crab bisque over Indian food, twists paperclips into a long chain, reads the time off his new analog wristwatch every three minutes (new skill). He seems happy.

"Amee tumakay bhalo pachee," he says, and grins. It's the first time he's said it right--"I love you" in Bengali. I kiss his temple, because I don't know how to say, "Me too" in Bengali, and I don't want to repeat what he said because he'll think I'm correcting his pronounciation, and I want to stay where he is. "Dhonya baad," I say. "Thank you" I know, at least. And he's off to Playstation.

Ugly

2007-01-05T21:32:00.000-05:00

I fired someone today. I've lied through many interviews about being able to fire people--it's a skill companies look for these days. And my sister has fired plenty of people, working in retail back in the day. I've had to break the news to people that our company was shutting down and they'd have to pack their bags. And I've helped people through the process of realizing for themselves that the job they had was not the job they wanted, and I watched them walk away with a mutual nod and sigh. Firing someone seems like the cheap way out of human interaction. Who among us hasn't fucked up? Judging is hard for me. No surprise to anyone here.

Today, at 3, I blindsided a person with, "I'm terminating your position with the company, effective today."

It's not that it was undeserved. It's not that she didn't craft the moment herself with her behavior over years--years--with the company. It was well documented. And then she did one more thing--one more angry, contempt-filled thing--and I had to either ignore it or not. I decided it was time not to ignore.

This morning I was nervous, knowing what was to come. Maisie asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I had to fire somebody. "Why are you nervous?" she asked. I talked to her like I was an old hand at firing, but I was thinking of something I heard a farmer say about the job of slaughtering sheep: "When you do this," I said to her, "you should feel sick to your stomach, and your hands should be cold, because you're changing somebody's life, and it hurts them. It's serious."

The woman threw on the face I've seen her use so often--nodded and smiled through my brief comments. She's a bit brittle; I think that behind that smile there's a howl that would make you grab your ears. She chatters when she's nervous. I had to interrupt her apologies to break the news. In the end she looked at me--this was when she got teary--and told me that she loved this company and really cared about the projects she'd been working on. She told me I could call her if I needed help--if I couldn't find something I needed. I told her that I was sorry--that I wished her only good things--and I resisted the temptation to hug her. Then she was shepherded off to clean out her office.

I'm certain this person needed to leave the department she was in. I'm sure it never could have worked--sure I never could have changed what needed to be changed in her to make it work. But I looked at her beside me today and saw a sad, middle-aged woman who's had a tough emotional life--it's just right there, etched in the face--who's leaving a job she's been in for nine years with no severance and no letter of recommendation. What if she can't find another job quickly? She's alone--no husband, grown daughter. What if she hasn't got savings? Whatever role she had in bringing the moment around, it's my name on the bottom of the letter. My karma.

Prayers for Jane tonight, though I'm not the prayerful sort and she surely doesn't want my prayers if I were. I hope her good news is waiting for her, and that there's not twenty miles of bad road between here and there.

Fame

2006-12-30T21:08:00.000-05:00

My niece, Aunia, now on the AP wire. Cute, huh?

The Change

2006-12-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

An old family friend used to be married to the grandson of a former president. Nice enough guy; the two of them came to family dinners often, and I think he had a thing for my mother. But his last name was, I think, a burden to him, and he never seemed able to get his feet underneath him. Lots of unemployment--lots of "consulting" work that didn't pay. Big laughter--barking laughter. The wife was married to him for 20ish years, until two years ago when he chose his 20-years-junior ghost writer instead. Like nobody saw that coming. Now he's married this other woman, and the two of them have avoided debtors and lawyers by moving to Europe, where they live with their two well-named infants in an apartment owned by her parents. I offer no judgment; I've made my own choices, and I've hurt people.

His former wife tells us last night that her alimony stopped the day the guy boarded the plane for the Alps. She has put her house in Iowa on the market--she can't afford the tiny mortgage--and if it ever sells she will have to move in with her mother in a tiny place on Long Island and live off what cash is left. She sat at the table to worry and rage out loud about it all last night, and her hands were shaking--not just from the rage, I think, but from some affliction--and she mused about making a living from her drawings: she wants me to show her how to sell on eBay. I can't imagine how those hands are going to pull off the delicate pen drawings she used to create. She exhales hopelessness. I'm vaguely surprised she hasn't done herself in.

20 years ago this woman created the most amazing art. She gave us some for Christmas gifts. She illustrated award-winning children's books. But she always dabbled at it--even when her husband was "consulting" and they really needed cash. She could've taken a job--she was offered jobs. She didn't want to work. She said so. Her husband would complain about it here, privately. He resented it.

I sat beside her. I asked about her kids--both of them fuck ups. No solutions there. I looked across the table at another friend whose husband left her for a younger woman a month after they'd adopted their only child--now 12 years ago. She, too: trained social worker who stopped working when her husband got a big banking job. Now she lives in a house she can't afford--the big, old family house. She's tried to build a landscape architecture business, but it couldn't sustain the life she and her husband bought into--the one she's still living. She refinances and sucks the equity out of the house every third year: pays credit card bills with other credit cards: dreads the day her daughter turns 18 and the alimony disappears and the whole scene falls apart. She has no plan. For 12 years she's had no plan. I watched her watching this other woman, and I knew what she was thinking. There it is: there's the cliff, right there.

I don't understand this whole scene--and I don't mean to say that I'm unsympathetic, because I swear I am. But if your partner screws you over, why on earth would you not work? Why would you sit and groan until you psych and age yourself out of the job market and have no means to sustain yourself? Why would you wait for the ex- to make it right financially or emotionally? I understand depression--I know people need to mourn. I swear, I'm supportive of these two. Maybe I'd lock up, too. Who knows? But last night I realized that I'm angry at them, too. Women as the vulnerable ones--women as the victims. Please. They have daughters.

Further in my growing sense that marriage is not a healthy proposition: that it induces unhealthy dependency, and that it's best avoided. Go live in sin; the footing is more equal there.

Death by hanging

2006-12-30T08:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know what good this accomplishes. I can imagine plenty of bad. Holding my breath.

Is, Is

2006-12-28T23:31:00.000-05:00

"The thing is, is that..."

Makes me nuts--like the first "is" is an embedded part of the phrase preceding the second "is." Bush used it today, talking about his new year's resolution: "My resolution is, is to..." Keep the troops safe, he says.

"Alot" makes me nuts, too. I see it. A lot. In resumes submitted by eager applicants, often. Don't people spell check resumes anymore?

One guy sent me a resume today for a publicity spot, and he'd formatted it with stuttering prose headlines. "Once Upon He Studied" heads off his education section, e.g. Another skipped the resume entirely and sent me a one-paragraph letter pitching me one of our lead titles, tying it (appropriately but poorly) to Ford's death, and closing with this: "Just $55,000 and this pitch is yours."

It's dangerous to go the creative route when you're applying for work. I've never seen it work--not once.

I had a college teacher once who wouldn't let us use the phrases "based on" or "deals with"--and though I couldn't really tell you why, beyond his complaint that they are imprecise and often used as crutches in imprecise thinking, to this day I don't use them. I'll stop and struggle for the better phrase, even though the teacher's long dead now.

I opened yet another college savings account for the kids today. My mother thought of college in the purest educational terms: a period of exploration. Anything more focused than liberal arts was, I think, something less than good. She had a certain vision. The vision died a little death when her two oldest kids graduated with big debt and took low-level jobs having nothing at all to do with their majors. But you've got to admire it, anyway; the world needs more than MBAs and doctors. I hear "is,is" or see "alot" or--unfair, but there you have it--hear "based on" or "deals with" and the person in front of me drops a little in my estimation. I'm a snob in the most bizarre ways--a snob over the most ridiculous things: things nobody but me cares about. Standard snob fare--cars, schools, clothing, jobs--those things don't hit me.

Maisie asks me: what should she study? And will she be rich if she studies drama? I tell her the truth: she won't have a lot of money working in drama, but if it's her passion, passion matters more than money. I believe it: I'm a believer. But money's not bad, either. Having no money is a challenge. She rather fancies the idea of a big house, no doubt because we don't live in one; I could see her choosing the money career.

"The thing is, is that I like nice things." That's what she tells me tonight.

I can't get her into an English lit program fast enough.

Away in a manger

2006-12-24T18:48:00.000-05:00

Inger wept.

Signed,

2006-12-19T21:57:00.000-05:00

I've got a thing for Maisie's first grade teacher--her teacher from three years ago. His mother used to be my ballet teacher when I was a kid. He's painfully shy, surprisingly prosaic, loves the kids, has a nice smile. He writes beautifully. He's extremely circumspect. He's shorter than me. He might be gay; there is that impediment to dealing with my thing. Liam is now in first grade, and this teacher has moved up to teaching second grade, and so until Liam is through second grade--look how I have this mapped--I figure all things must be as they are: perfectly friendly, perfectly circumspect--because, well, that's how things are. Could be that's how things are because he's gay; my neighbor thinks he is. Could be I'm just not his type. But what does it cost me to entertain it?

But that's not the story.

Three years ago I sent this guy a family Christmas card. Standard teacher card: "Best wishes for the holidays." And I signed our three names. A week later we got a card back from him. "Merry Christmas to all of you! Love, John."

I honestly didn't know it was from him. I couldn't think of any Johns I knew who'd sign with love, and there was no return address. All the kids' teachers sign their cards with love, but it's different when the teacher is male--and when he signs with his first name. No? Am I wrong? Maisie was startled; she shares my crush, though she doesn't know about mine, and she still has that card propped up on her dresser.

Two years ago: we write our Christmas cards, and send one to him, and this time I sign our names with love, too. Because I guess it's OK. Though I admit I felt a little odd about it--a little, oh, exposed. His card comes back a week later. "Fondly, John."

Hmmph. I laughed, but was embarrassed. Maisie was pissed. "Fondly? FONDLY??" That card was also preserved, right next to the first, though in a fire she'd grab the other.

This year we sent him another card. I was clearly not signing with love, but Maisie and Liam--both old enough to sign now--signed their own names with love. And they write so big that there wasn't a lot of room for me, so it didn't look odd, I thought, when I only signed my name. No love. No fondness. No best wishes.

His card arrives today. "Love John." Of course.

All of which I share, dear friends, because can you FRICKING BELIEVE I'm drawing out this little imaginary flirtation of mine at the pace of once a year--sustained only by Christmas card sign-offs?? Once a year. And training Maisie, too. She closed his card today, grinned, and said, "Next year I'm kissing it with lipstick. He'll faint."

Cookies, nuts, and nails

2006-12-16T07:08:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, our neighbor, Filomena, used to make these anisette cookies with thick, white icing on top and a special kind of sprinkles. She baked them in loaves and cut them on the diagonal into little biscotti look-alikes. I'd sneak handfuls into my pockets and run off to wolf them down: SO delicious. Then we moved, and then she died, and when I mentioned the cookies to her daughter a decade after, she promised to dig up her mother's recipe. But she never got around to it.

Yesterday somebody brought a small box of cookies into the office, and though they were round and the icing was watery and transparent, there was no mistaking them: I flashed right back to Filomena's kitchen. So rare that a childhood taste memory lives up to itself, but these cookies did. Today Liam and I are baking them on our own. And if I could send you a plate of them, I would.

***
We've published a book by a Marine recently back from Fallujah. It's selling quite well, and the author has turned into something of a handful. Yesterday I called him--ostensibly to introduce myself, but also to set the stage to yank him back by the neck if he tries one more time to peel the skin off anyone who works for me. So we're talking, and he begins to complain about the high-ticket PR agency we've hired to make him a star, and recounts to me the threat-packed letter he intends to send them. I mean, he's talking like they're the Republican Guard and he's the great white hope. Explicit talk. And then he laughs, like it's all a joke. Soldier humor. And I realize, in a flash, that he's a total loon. Later on I mention his comments to a group of colleagues, and one rolls her eyes and says, "Well, what do you expect? He's a Marine."

I didn't let it go, though it's exceedingly awkward for me--me!--to take a stand in defense of the military. But I find I am not receptive to swipes at the Marines, because now I know a lot of them, and there's not a more honorable sort to be found anywhere. Which makes this particular loon even more intolerable than the standard-variety loon. Thank God I didn't have to be in on this book from the start. It's almost over. Unless people keep buying it and we release in trade paper...

***
I met an agent last week who had fake nails that extended--easily--a full inch past the ends of her fingers. I know I lack imagination--I know I tend to get caught up in the mundane--but I ask you: how do you wipe anything at all--anywhere--with acrylic-reinforced nails that extend an inch past the ends of your fingers? Without drawing blood, I mean?

There's so much to marvel at.

Advent 2

2006-12-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

My sister is visiting--the one I'm closest to. In the next room Maisie is asking her about the story I tell: that my sister reported once, as a child, seeing a spaceship floating outside her bedroom window. "Is that true?" Maisie asks, in her best serious voice. (Privately she thinks it's a load of bullshit.) "I don't know what else it could have been," Kathy says to her, and she's talking down to Maisie a little--still talking to her as if she were six instead of nine; Kathy doesn't know what a world there is between six and nine. "I was awake--I know I wasn't dreaming," she says. Maisie nods, fingers on her chin. I can tell she's not convinced, but I'm glad she's learned to put the face on. In the kitchen Liam is examining my mother's face. "You know, Granny, if I count all the lines on your face I'll be able to tell how old you are." And so she tells him to count, and he does, and turns out she's 32. These things bring me unspeakable joy--these casual chats between my children and my family. Moments when my safety net becomes visible--when the "if I die" worry that underlies everything gets a little soothing pat on the head. They'd all close ranks. There'd be no air between those arms.

We've stepped up our church attendance; it's that time of year. Maisie joined the church choir today--totally unprompted by me, though I think she has a very pretty voice and the guy who runs the music program is out of sight. Much better than the after-school choir she's in now, run by a moody guy with body odor. "Will I get to wear the outfit?" she asks on the way out to the car, and suddenly her motivation is clear: the robe and the cross: the outfit. But so what? People have turned to faith for less.

I've missed writing, but the weekends are so packed this month, and there's no time for anything during the week. I've got to say, this full-time, out-of-the-house work stuff really screws up a good thing. And Mary Grace talks this morning about gift buying and cooking and card sending like they're bad things: like they miss the whole point, and I can only think that I guess I won't bring her that bottle of wine and plate of krumkakes this year. I love the gifting and cooking and carding: it's the day job I could do without.

You know--if I could paint the world.

Progress

2006-12-06T20:53:00.000-05:00

I bought a car. A Honda--a CRV, with better mileage than I have now but not as good as I'd get in a Prius. It was so strange--so casual: in ten minutes I picked a car and shook the guy's hand and ran off to catch a train to the city, and we just agreed I'd come back at some point to sort out financing. Who does that, except rich people; I bought it from the dealer in Westport, and I was dressed in my nice duds, and I guess he made certain assumptions. Not that it matters, but it was a far cry from the reception I got at Stamford Toyota, where I showed up in jeans with my brown kid and the guy started nagging the cash out of me before I'd even decided on a model. No surprise, I know: we all size up strangers and manage accordingly. But there is something quite pleasant about shopping without the nag factor; there's something quite nice about not being talked down to by some guy who finished his education ten years before I did--some guy who says "aksed" and "ecsetera." I should think more about how I present myself. I really don't--hardly ever; too many other things require thought.

I had such a wonderful day yesterday. I'm working on the launch of a new brand--a series of books for women. The lead title is an extremely powerful book by a woman in her mid-thirties who was diagnosed with a rare cancer a few years ago. (Her story launches in a documentary on TLC later next year. ) I met her for dinner. She's drop-dead gorgeous, for starters, and though she's quite pretty in fact, it's this aura she carries with her that hits you: she looks at you and it's like staring into clear pools: disarmingly direct and honest. She's funny and self-deprecating--she tells a great story, even when it's a story about trying to make sense of dying as a crucial part of living. I can't get her out of my mind; I can't think how her mother has come to terms with their new reality (because an individual death never seems as horrible to me as coping with the individual death must be for the ones left behind.) I love that she embeds her mother in everything: in proofing her sample chapters, in making sense of sickness, in refusing so many of the labels we assign to cancer and cancer survivors. Not to say that cancer could ever be a gift, but in her case it has clearly realigned her life in the most astonishing creative ways. If only we could all do that, minus the cancer part. Dump the shit--seize the dream, speak your own truth, etc. But courage like that--I think it often needs to be jump-started. Such a shame for the rest of us.

"Do you have a butler, and does he pack your lunch with love?" Liam asks me this morning when I'm waking up. I smile but don't answer. It's going to be so much fun watching him grow up.

Things that make me happy

2006-11-30T20:03:00.000-05:00

MadGay, missing for too long, now back. I hope he doesn't mind me spreading the word.

Assembly

2006-11-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

"We don't have any Christmas pictures with Keeneye in them," Liam complains, and brings me my camera and grabs the beast, who waits for just the right moment to GRAB Liam's nose. Claws not extended. No need to; the threat is enough.

Does anyone know how to take decent low-light photos with a flash without totally white-lighting the whole scene? It's all or nothing, in my experience, and nothing's better than all. But not by much. Maybe I just need a better camera.

Trees and cars

2006-11-26T06:59:00.000-05:00

The fake Christmas tree went up last night. Fake--bleuch!--but environmentally sensible, and no more needles in the cracks of the wood floor, and no more brittle, droopy trees by the time Christmas Eve rolls around. There is that.

I noticed this year that the tree had a peculiar smell when I pulled it out of its canvas storage bag. A sort of musty, cat smell. Liam pointed out the irony: that our environmentally sensible kitty litter smells like Christmas trees and our Christmas tree smells like kitty litter.

That's just plain wrong. I'm putting the fake tree outside--we'll see if it's indoor/outdoor, and only the fit will survive--and we're getting the real thing. Enough already.

***
Went to the Toyota dealer to look at their certified used cars. I didn't see anything I liked--not used, not new. (Had the standard shitty encounter with a salesman; as I'm walking out the door he's shouting new deals at me--cutting the price by $750 every time he opens his mouth. Which meant I would not buy from him, because I'd think I was schnookered no matter what price I ultimately paid. Why don't they just price the cars fairly and shut up already?) I'll never buy a Ford again; there's history there, most of it, admittedly, relating to customer service. But, too, I need fuel efficiency. I'm in the odd position to be able to buy pretty much whatever I want, but there's not a make or model on the planet that rings my bells. The BMWs sit well on the road, my sister tells me; she just bought one. But I feel uncomfortable with the brand; I want something a little more anonymous: I don't want to hear the comments--I don't like the volume, the statement.

Which made me think last night: would I be happiest if I just disappeared into a little poof--if I didn't even make a ripple?? Car purchase as existential reflection. Exhausting. Somebody just go buy it for me, OK? Pick whatever. I'll pay you back.

Linda's cup

2006-11-25T07:33:00.000-05:00

I've written about Linda, who died two years ago now from cancer in or around the liver--Linda the Buddhist, lit up from the inside. I'd show you--you could see it in photographs--but the day she died, when I went to look for photos of her, I discovered that every single one I had was gone. Gone, though I never erase photos, and would never have erased Linda. She was the kind of person you'd want to inhale and become.

Once I gave her a big mug for her tea, and I liked it so much that I bought the same one for myself. It reminded me of her: soft leafy patterns brushed on gently in subtle earthy tones. After she died I used only that mug, every day. But lately I've begun to notice that I avoid it: that I've developed a fear of catching her cancer by even thinking about her. The fear isn't unprecedented, for me: I've never really known where to draw the lines in the "thoughts are things" principle, and I tend toward superstition about illness. But I talk myself down with a decided fatalism: you go when you go, and going in itself isn't the worst thing in the world.

Last night I dreamed about her, and this morning I read Melly's beautiful post, here:
***
Unsettled
I have been unsettled since yesterday. Witnessed something that just won't leave me. I have been outgrowing my naivete about the world we live in, but the rawness of it still smacks me in the face now and then. I was sitting with Zizi, at the Women's Center in a local hospital. Most were there for routine tests. Some, not so routine. There was one woman in particular that was extremely anxious and with good reason. She had been called to return for a repeat mammogram. A spot they needed a better view. Repeated mammogram. Now she waited for an ultrasound. We struck up light conversation. I wanted to try to make her relax and eventually work into the conversation that sometimes they are just being very cautious. We talked. She gave me a very compressed summary of how rough her life has been lately. I listened. I tried to encourage her. I even tried to put into the conversation some of my "sick humor" as my girls call it...I just wanted the tension on her face to ease up before they called her back in. They did. She came out crying, really crying...sat down. Immediately they called my Zizi in, who of course reached for my hand and said, mommy come with me.. As I got up to follow Zizi, I had to stop, go to the woman's chair, squat and tell her as calmly and with all the belief my soul has...it's going to be alright! The thing that hurt me so deeply, is that in this room full of women, women dressed down to bathrobes, whose breasts are about to be diagnosed, not one, removed her nose from the magazines they held, or one from her knitting, to put those arms around this woman...this sister...I see pink ribbons everywhere. I see symbols. Just symbols. What good are symbols, if we can not use those that matter most? Our hearts and our arms?
***
They were afraid of catching it, I think--all those women, stripped down to their vulnerable sameness: bodies and bathrobes. And in that moment, no job, no savings, no standing or seniority or confidence means a hill of beans: you get it or you don't, and there's no explaining the outcome either way. And so we bargain, and grow superstitious. Or we don't.

Well done, Melly.

All Summer in a Day

2006-11-23T20:03:00.000-05:00

I watched An Inconvenient Truth last night. What a horror. No new themes, for me, but the scale--the urgency--well, suffice to say this: that I thought of my own childhood, and snow up to my waist, and thought how my kids have seen snow that deep only once, and maybe it's not just that I was really short back then and they're really tall: maybe it's not just that. I didn't recycle more today, though I will. I didn't unplug the unused appliances. I did struggle on cars.com, trying to identify the car I'm about to purchase--the vehicle that satisfies my tastes, principles, and budget--and there's no resolution there yet, though I'll put the principle first, I swear. I did decide that I'm never again calling the kids in out of the snow just because I think they must be getting cold. They can crawl in when the flesh feels like it's going to shake off their thighs. What if there's no snow some day? Like, some day soon? No, seriously.

Do you remember that Ray Bradbury short about the little girl, Margot, who lived on rainy Venus, and was the only one of her classmates who could remember what the sun looked like? And the kids locked her in the classroom closet, so she missed the window--the one hour every howevermany years when the rain stopped and the kids saw the sun? Thought of that today, too.

Al Gore was surprisingly prosaic, I thought. Surprisingly dynamic.

Go see the flick.

Tradition

2006-11-22T11:06:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow will be Mark's first Thanksgiving with his new wife. Tomorrow will be Neil's last with the woman he's been married to for more than twenty years. I don't know why the confluence overwhelms me, but it does, and I feel sad. "Be a good husband," I said to Mark, not knowing what else to say. "Whatever you're going to do, don't drag it out," I said to Neil, having been a player in that unhappy model once. The thing is, I can't imagine Mark being a good husband, and to this hour I think Neil is a great husband. But it's hard to be a good husband if you fall for somebody else. There is that.

I love Thanksgiving. Some have been more good than others--some filled with people I love, and other fairly solitary, as this year's will be. But all good in their way. The meal hasn't changed--not since the day I was five: I still make my mother's stuffing, still smash turnips, peel spuds, prefer jellied cranberry over the relish. It's the Norwegian in me: the ruttedness, or rootedness. Pass the tradition. Tusen tak.

I hope you all have a wonderful day tomorrow. Thank you for your friendship; can't tell you the hours of pleasure you bring me.

Happy Thanksgiving.

"How interesting."

2006-11-12T08:19:00.000-05:00

I pulled all the winter bedclothes out yesterday and took them down to the laundromat; it'd take a week to get them done at home. I don't know how a laundromat survives in these parts; most people have washers. 8-11:30 on a Saturday morning, and I saw 4 other people there--two of them just dropping stuff off to be washed by the old lady who runs the place. Must be a write-off.

There was an older man there. I took him for homeless at first; skinny and bent, wearing those green factory pants held up at the waist with a rope, and an old flannel shirt, and he smelled musty. You don't see a lot of rope belts around here. I'd finished my copy of Harper's and walked over to drop it on the table for anyone else who wanted to read it. "Hooray!" said the guy. "Reading material!" And he grinned and snatched it up. First time I noticed him from the neck up: blue beret, snow-white hair and beard--very clean, very combed--and a pink, unlined face with sharp blue eyes. He looked interesting. Half an hour later he wandered over and started chatting.

Turns out he's an organic farmer. (I didn't know we had farmers living in southwest Connecticut.) He lives the principles, and can (and did) go on for quite some time about herbal and intravenous cleansing processes, the benefits of raw food diets, the location of key practitioners in the natural healing community. My mother would've loved him; she's an expert in her own right. She also--unlike me--loves this kind of chance encounter with the non-typical. (The non-typical notwithstanding, I'm just not very social.) I took her with me on a cross-country drive once, and she spotted a Native American wearing full headdress at a Holiday Inn restaurant across the river from Louisville. She sped right up to him--complimenting him on his jewelry, and then chatting for half an hour. I was put off by the headdress--sorry, but it's true; I much prefer to experience strangers who don't wear an identity position on their t-shirts. Or heads. How is a headdress relevant at a Holiday Inn across the river from Louisville? I walked off and waited for her in the car. In Nevada she did the same thing with the local sheriff, and then made me take a photo of the two of them. As I look at the photo now I notice that she looked positively lit up with this big, authentic grin, and the sheriff's all puff-chested and happy--and if you ask her about it now she can tell you things about the town that she learned talking up the sheriff. Interesting things. All I took away from the moment was annoyance. I don't even remember the town: only the photo.

Tom, the organic farmer, moved on to talk about sustainable living, global warming, the lure of the marketplace, etc. And I drifted off in my mind, and thought of a man I met once who lived on a little family farm way upstate and named his boy Bear (and their last name was Wolf). Baby Bear Wolf. I thought how the Wolfs didn't need to tell me why they lived the way they did: they just lived it, and you could come and visit, and take it or leave it. Whatever, with a smile. Not my kind of life, but definitely my kind of people.

In search of...

2006-11-11T21:51:00.000-05:00

I don't know if it's a biological trick--this metabolic resetting that occurs, perhaps post-pregnancy--but something that used to be easy for me is not anymore. I spent half an hour in the liquor store on Wednesday morning, reading Wine Spectator reviews, staring at labels--trying to divine the flavors within. I finally bought two bottles of red--a chianti classico and a dolcetto d'alba. (Dolcettos have always been dicey for me: either dreamy or rotgut.) Tonight I opened them both: the dolcetto first--except it was so bloody awful that I poured all $20 worth down the drain and uncorked the chianti. I quite like the chianti, but I'll nurse it since my stock of two bottles got dramatically depleted tonight.

Do you have a favorite red for less than $15? I need more better-odds choices.

Two tips for you: Nyers Merlot--pricey but yummy--and La Segreta Planeta (a white, but the only wine I ever liked enough to purchase by the case).

A day late, a dollar short

2006-11-10T08:57:00.000-05:00

JS on Rummy's Farewell.

Grandpa was a warrior

2006-11-10T07:42:00.000-05:00

"Dressed to Kill," by Joseph C. Fornelli, from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum.

"Any warrior has something happen when he puts on his battle clothes - you feel that it gives you a kind of magical power, makes you invisible or gives you strength inside. So something takes over that as a rational person you know is ridiculous. But if you thought that way in combat you'd be dead. You're so vulnerable... you know, there is a certain strange high, and excitement about somebody shooting at you and you at them. It's hard to breathe and pushes on your shoulders. This heavy air, the heat, the humidity of Vietnam, is something you don't know. It's the kind of air you can feel touching your body and pushing at you."

***

In Liam's school all the kids were given yellow construction-paper stars and asked to write the name of a veteran they know for display on a certain board in the hallway. Yesterday there were 190 stars up. Some of them had full names, rank, and branch info. Some had the names of family members who'd served in other countries. But most of them just had "grandpa" written on them in crayon. It's unusual--these moments when the space and time between disparate identities evaporate, and we're supposed to consider a soldier and a grandpa in one view--knowing what we think we know about soldiers and grandpas. But all we can really see is a smiling old man with a parchment-skin hand resting on the skinny shoulder of his grandchild. So your eyes fill up; sometimes the blurriness helps.

What secrets we keep.

11/8

2006-11-08T10:19:00.000-05:00

I feel hopeful, for the first time in eight years. No need to be a jerk about it, the way the GOP was in '94--sweeping in and telling the Democrats to get lost. No need for that. The Democrats have been handed the keys--perhaps even in both houses--but only as the lesser of two evils. Now they've got to pony up something good, and take a hand in framing the debates for '08. They're not particularly good at framing debates. And "values" trumps "issues" every time. (The "values" card is a little war-torn these days--but it'll get rehabilitated. It always does.)

But whatever the Democracts do, Bush's imperial presidency is over. And that's reason enough to pop open a bottle of chianti tonight and breathe. Tomorrow's another day.

Vote

2006-11-03T13:15:00.000-05:00

Once again, stories are cropping up: voter suppression in Virginia, annoying "robocalls" made for democratic candidates but paid for by the RNC, voters given the wrong voting location. There'll be more, and then there'll be litigation. Again. My father left the house at a quarter past five this morning--my father with the enlarged heart and the bone-on-bone hip--so he could contribute to the electoral process by standing in the elementary school gym until 2, helping and monitoring the vote. We've got the new optical scanning machines here this time, and at the training session Dad--who doesn't like to draw attention to himself in groups, and especially in groups of predominantly Republican peers--stood up and asked, "How do we know these vote counts can't be tampered with?" And the town clerk--a little old woman with thick glasses and tight curler curls--assured him it was a lock: "It's impossible to tamper with these machines," she said. "Really," she emphasized. She's what counts as the local expert.

I am not hopeful. There's been enough gall delivered directly, unapologetically to our faces for me to believe that what happens behind closed doors isn't even worse.

But that's worry for another hour. Today, we vote.

Talking Doctor

2006-11-01T09:20:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I'm taking Liam to his first appointment with a therapist. I feel hopeful: I don't believe in cures, but I'm hopeful that his internal narrative can be recast somehow--that he won't see shadows of loss, even in the most beautiful things. And I haven't been able to do that with him myself: I think, actually, at certain points I've made things worse; I have told him almost everything I know about his life--I have hidden almost nothing, except for the worst things, because they're also the most obvious: he was given away when he was 3 hours old because he had a twisted foot--a foot that was largely fixed for a few dollars in an orphanage 40 miles away, but that nevertheless totally redirected the flow of his life. Club foot, at the village level, is a bad omen: bad luck--a signal of a mother's sin. I am not in their shoes, but I tell you, I can't imagine choosing what they did: I can't imagine caring more about what the neighbors thought that I would about a creature I grew from scratch in my very own belly. Even though I am not a village woman in West Bengal. And even now, though they know where he is--though I've revealed myself to them--given them my address, my phone number--even though they are not impoverished--they don't want to know. "No, really," I hear loud and clear, "we don't want him. Go away."

"Will you be in the room with me?" Liam asks this morning.

"I'll be there if you want me there, or I can wait in the car if you want me to do that."

"Is it OK if I cry there?" he asks.

"Perfectly OK. Lots of people cry with talking doctors. Sometimes that helps."

"Wait in the car," he tells me. "If she's nice, I mean. Wait in the car."

Liam's Monday

2006-10-30T12:29:00.000-05:00

First, this: he steps out the door this morning, glances down, and freezes.

"I think," he says, "that that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." He races to get a book to save it forever. I take a picture. He closes the book then tells me everything he knows about the lamination process. "We could make it a Christmas tree ornament--we could make a hundred of them!" I admit it's a cool notion.

Then the annual Halloween parade at school. Two kids out of the entire lot of hundreds had made their own costumes. The rest of us blew $40+ apiece and bought into the commercial scene. I'd like to promise that next year will be different, but what are the chances?

The parents all looked alike, too--all but one set: a retired Army guy and his wife. He was in a cheap suit--you don't see a lot of cheap suits around here--and she was decked out in all sorts of pumpkin/witch paraphernalia, including skull-and-crossbones tights and blinking jewelry. They waved madly and hollered their son's name when he passed by, and he glanced at them and turned away. I like them both very much. Like their kids, too--even the little shit who wouldn't own them in public.

Halloween

2006-10-29T20:39:00.000-05:00

One day, some years ago, when I was taking summer courses up in New Haven, I left the campus and walked over to the train station to come home. New Haven is not a city without its problems, but I'd never felt threatened there--not once, not anywhere, day or night.

There was construction going on between the main terminal and the platforms--huge, dark, corrugated-steel tunnels running out to the Metro-North trains. I ran down the stairs into the tunnel to go and wait for my train on the platform. When I reached the bottom and turned into the tunnel, I saw out of the corner of my eye a man standing against the wall.

"Do you know when the next train leaves?" he asked, and in my memory he asked in an almost-whisper, and there was something wrong--something very wrong--though I couldn't put my finger on it in that moment.

"No," I said quickly, and kept walking, quickly, and didn't look at him--didn't connect at all.

I climbed the stairs onto the platform. There were plenty of people there, and it was daylight, but I couldn't shake the feeling: something bad. And then I saw him climbing the stairs, too.

He was in his 30s. He was slim, with messy light-brown hair. He was wearing a wet, white t-shirt, and the collar was ripped off so that the shirt hung in a large circle, and he was holding it at the neck so that the shirt didn't touch his chest. And he was doing that because his chest was covered with angry red welts--burns or blisters or something. They were oozing; there were angry blotches coming through his shirt where it touched his body. He stared at me. He smiled--not a good smile. He walked toward me, and I turned and walked to the other end of the platform, near some men in business suits. He followed, standing ten feet away, holding his shirt, staring and smiling.

The train came and I got on, and he followed. I moved into the next car, and he followed again--through two more cars until I found the conductor and said, "A man is following me," and I think I might have been crying a bit at that point. The conductor looked behind me, saw the guy, and told me to sit where I was. And so the man with the welts sat where he was, too: six aisles away, facing me.

And that's how it stayed for 40 minutes, until the guy stood up and walked off the train in Greens Farms--one stop before my own.

When I got off the train in Westport I was sure I'd see him clinging like Spiderman to the side of the train, waiting to attack. I was sure he was waiting, somehow.

I tell the kids this story. Liam says, "He might have just thought it was funny that you were so spooked by his boo-boos." Could be. Maisie says, "What was he doing down there in that dark tunnel?"

"I don't know what he thought, " I tell them. "I don't know what he was doing. I only know that he made me feel like I was in danger, and you always have to trust what you feel--even if it means you're rude to somebody. Even if it means you run or cry for help and it turns out there was no danger."

Of course, here it is, twenty years after it happened, and I still wonder if he was smiling because I was spooked by his boo-boos--if he was taunting me. And I wonder what he was doing standing in the dark in that tunnel.

Goodbye

2006-10-29T20:15:00.000-05:00

Saul Bellow died. 18 months ago. I heard only today when I was on the highway. Apparently the show was a re-run.

He signed my copy of Mr. Sammler's Planet some years back; Maisie's Dad interviewed him, and I'd pressed my ragged copy into his pocket when he set off to the studio. Marc and I were breaking up then, and it meant something to me that Bellow was cranky with him during the interview. Saul Bellow was the reason I chose the University of Chicago over two other grad schools. He was the reason I contemplated becoming Jewish, at a certain point. His take on human frailty and fear and pride made me want to hear anything he had to say--even if it was released in mass market--even if it was released in dual-cover mass market. He could write about an old person's broken heart in a way that would stop a young person cold. He was the genuine deal.

It's sad. A moment for Saul; I don't think he'd mind the late hour.

Sameness and change

2006-10-29T07:28:00.000-05:00

Sunday was a ritual when I was a kid. There was a period when we went to Sunday school at Sacred Heart--long enough for my sister to receive First Communion, but not long enough for me to do it--but church didn't last; my mother wasn't as consistent as her notions about children and faith were. And her notions weren't all that consistent, either. But my Dad has always been a creature of habit, and his habits have always revolved around food, and Sunday was his day to cook: scrambled eggs and bacon and Irish sausages and black puddings. Mom would wander down at a certain predictable point in the scent cycle, and whip up scones out of flour and butter. Dad played his music on Sunday. He pulled up the top of this TV/stereo/record player unit and stacked his records under the arm: Norwegian ballads, American country, Elvis. My favorite was "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" I still remember the record--it had the RCA dog on the center panel.

The thing is, that entire scene was dished out in degrees of bad moods: Dad complained about the cooking from the minute we got up. Complained because I didn't like bacon--complained if we wandered into the kitchen and complimented him. "It smells so good!" we'd say. "Don't touch anything," he'd reply--and it's all in the tone, all in the delivery--and we'd leave the kitchen. He complained because we made too much noise, or because Mom wasn't awake yet, or because he knew we didn't like his music. (In fact, I never thought of it in terms of like or dislike: it was Dad's sound, much like the afternoon hum of the Mets on TV; I'd hear it and fall fast asleep on the living room floor. It was reassuring noise.) Mom would come down and you could see her humor him out of the bad mood, or at least far enough out of it that he could sit at the table in silence, not barking, not grimacing. We'd have to compliment him on the food--compliments to woo his favor. He'd never respond graciously. "Well, don't expect to get this every day," was the response, every time. All of that for one morning a week in the kitchen. Never mind that Mom did it all the other 20 meals a week.

It was, I realize now, a gift gone wrong. He cooked for Mom--not for us. He loves children in the abstract, but their noise--their sass--he's never been good with that. His perfect day then was all about Mom. Sometimes she got a little tired of having to humor him, and there'd be an explosion. She always came out on top when that happened. Always. To this day. And so, to this day, he backs down before she hits the wall. What's changed is him: now he comes to me on Sunday mornings--wanders over with his coffee to talk about what he read in the online Norwegian daily, or what program he can't get to work, or what the weather will be like today. He calls me Ing--he picked it up from one of my sisters. And if I wander into his house, he turns in his chair and smiles; he's happy to see me, and he's never the first one to break off the conversation: he doesn't want me to leave.

Which is gold. And you have to believe me that I understand where he was coming from 35 years ago--that I don't blame him, exactly--but I still think what a shame it was--for all of us--that he couldn't have felt then the way he does now--that he couldn't have just put his hand on my shoulder when I was 6 and he was 35 and I wandered in by his side to smell the eggs.

***

Not that I've got it nailed, either. We--the kids and I--hang out in bed until 8 on Sundays. We talk. Liam, who wakes up alert and happy, gets silly. Maisie, who needs half an hour to wake up, stretches a lot; it's hard on her, making that 7am bus every weekday. When we wander downstairs, we wonder what we'll eat for breakfast, and sometimes we quarrel about it--and sometimes we make three different breakfasts. Sometimes we make blueberry muffins, and eat all of them with huge mugs of tea. (Today it's pancakes and hot cocoa. Skinny pancakes--the ones that fill the pan and you butter them and roll them up, and cut them into little rolled bites. Sometimes we add baking powder and pour the batter into dinosaur molds from Williams-Sonoma. Maisie doesn't care for those--"cloud pancakes"--and today Liam misses Maisie, so in her honor he has chosen the skinnies.)

I think a lot about ritual, and whether I'm delivering enough of it; I'm not my mother--I don't have her energy and her enthusiasms. I'm not social like she is. This is most evident to me during the holidays, when if she had her way the house would be filled to the rafters with people. I'm more like my father--and it's not a point of pride. I'm low to the ground--I'm steady. But I am not moody the way he was: I love it when the kids wander into the kitchen--I love it when they choose my company. Abstract is nice, too, but I love the sticky, messy, fullness of them, right in front of me. And so I just have to let myself off the hook a little bit on all the rest.

***
I start a new job in two weeks, making my stint with the Annapolis outfit my shortest since I was a cashier at the A&P in high school. I wasn't looking, exactly; the job found me. But it's a better job, with a more secure company--and it's here in Connecticut, though an hour away from where we live. It will mean big changes for the kids: I'll be out of the house every day, and they'll get off the bus to their grandparents. I've been dreading that part of it--not being as close to the everyday stuff with the kids. Liam, especially, is not pleased; what luxury we've had, relatively speaking: a single mother able to put a roof over their heads AND be at the bus stop every morning and afternoon. But I'm also so excited about the job; I haven't felt this excited about work since Maisie was born. It's time to get back into the game.

Hoping. All hopeful.

Boo!

2006-10-26T21:26:00.000-05:00

There are family larks that we choose to undertake because we have an idea about how they might play out--an idea about connection and joy and spontaneity--an idea about making memories. For me--and maybe, admittedly, I'm just limited this way--the larks never play out the way I want. Somebody ends up cranky--somebody gets tired, or pops off a picky comment at her brother or his sister, and before you know it I feel like Mother from the '50s: this "I'm going to kill you" clench to the jaw behind smiling lips. Until I start hollering.

Tonight we finished homework, ran down to the store, bought a slew of candy and crayons and stickers and Play-doh, and packed up 6 plastic cauldrons with ghoulish loot--spookalicious treats--and drove around town Boo-ing the kids' friends. We do it every year--it's such a kick--pulling into driveways with the headlights out, crawling up the grass to their doors, leaving the goodies on the stoop, ringing the doorbell, and TEARING out of there before the floodlights kick on. We leave notes in the cauldrons, but don't sign them. The best thrill is watching from the bushes when the father laughs and the kids dance in circles, and you know that whatever mood they were in before you rang the doorbell, you left them in a great mood. Liam especially loves it; he has no desire to tell his friends that he was the one--the Boo Bandit. More than the sneaking up, he likes to watch families from the bushes--families being happy because of something he did. He'll make a wonderful Santa Claus someday.

Maisie's friends, alas, live in houses with fewer windows and treacherous landscaping, so it's hard to maneuver around quickly in the dark, and we can't spy on them. She knocks hard, twice, then ducks behind a tree and waits; I don't want her to risk running in the dark. Minutes pass--nobody comes to the door. She sneaks back up and knocks again--harder this time. Back to the tree. Nothing. Finally we climb back into the car, and she's disappointed: she's never even seen them open the doors and find the treats. "They come out that door to catch the bus in the morning," I remind her. "They'll see it as soon as they wake up." And so we have to reach for a different kind of satisfaction after those transactions: the pleasure of knowing they'll be happy when they find the treat--even if we don't get to witness their laughter and dancing.

It's not nearly as satisfying for us mere mortals.

When was the last time you pried open a container of Play-doh? Go get some--it smells like childhood.

Nostalgia for the cardboard box

2006-10-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102401168_pf.html

Report Warns of Potential
Voting Problems in 10 States
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; A03

Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states, including Maryland, remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States.

The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races.
The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic, an election system in flux and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide."

In a state-by-state canvass, the 75-page report singles out places, such as Indiana and Arizona, where courts have upheld stringent new laws requiring voters to show poll workers specific forms of identification. It cites states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have switched to electronic voting machines whose accuracy has been challenged. And it points to states such as Colorado and Washington, which have departed from the tradition of polling sites in neighborhood precincts.

The report of the clearinghouse, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the latest of several warnings in recent weeks and months by organizations and scholars who say that electoral problems persist in spite of six years of efforts by the federal government and states to correct voting flaws. The flaws gripped the public's attention after the close 2000 presidential election, which led to recounts in Florida and the intervention of the Supreme Court.

The election shambles of 2000 prompted Congress to pass in 2002 legislation intended to help states make significant election changes, such as by replacing outdated voting equipment. Some of the changes, including making sure that databases of registered voters are accurate, were required to be in effect by this year.

Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, said "things are getting better over time." But he said many of the changes in recent years have led to new problems and disputes. For instance, the decisions by many states to convert to electronic voting machines have yielded new concerns about whether they are secure and accurate, about paper records as backup proof and -- this year -- about whether the electronic or paper record should be considered the official tally if a candidate demands a recount.

The report cites Maryland for what it calls a "dismal primary" in September that "included human and machine failures galore," in part because Montgomery County election officials forgot to distribute to polling places the access cards needed for its electronic machines to work. The study raises questions about whether Montgomery officials are prepared for the bigger crowds in the general election and whether large numbers of mistrustful voters will resort to absentee ballots.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Ex-nay on your Eelings-fay.

2006-10-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

I have four siblings: one brother with two sisters on either side. I'm the second oldest. There are benefits of having so many siblings, not least of which is that when there are quarrels--and there's always something brewing somewhere--chances are good that every one of us feels a connection to at least one of the others.

But there are certain repeat offenders in the social contract, and in a family that tends to mean that everyone else compensates, or assumes burdens unfairly; somehow--and I don't really get it--the offenders are rarely asked to make things right. They suffer in their way: they don't have the same intimate connection with their siblings that the rest do (though they seem to garner more attention from their parents, who, I suppose, worry about them more.) But they don't seem to mind. Or they don't mind enough to change. Or they don't see that the issue is their own.

The problem is, since the offender is not taken to task by the group, it tends to be the wounded party that's asked to pony up the peace: to show up at holiday gatherings and act As If; to let it go--to get over it. And if I could recount for you the offenses--not silly little offenses, but major, life-changing stuff--you'd understand why this blaming of the victim is so obscene. How does a person forgive a wound that's never even acknowledged? And why should they be asked to?

My younger sister--not an offender, not ever--has had more than her share of burdens to bear in this realm. It's in part because she's the most responsible of all of us: the saver, the careful planner, the conservative. (She's even gone over to the Other Side politically, which I have to forgive because I adore her so.) One sibling ruined her financially and then lied about having done it. In a year, this sister had put her life back together--had surpassed the rest of us in terms of togetherness, even. And having gone through that--and mind-boggling abuses that followed from another sibling--my sister got her head straight about what a person must bear in a family, and what's unreasonable to bear. And she's acting on it, without apology. But also, sadly, at additional cost to her.

I keep trying to watch for these bad patterns in my own family, with the kids. No sign of it yet, but I'm staying vigilant. They've only got each other: there's no room for nonsense and abuse.

Families, man. They're not for sissies.

A mark

2006-10-18T09:31:00.000-05:00

There is an old man with an AOL account address on my list of authors for next season. I correspond with him about catalog copy and an author bio to pass along to the sales reps, though I know his isn't a book the chains will carry: the chains don't carry anything anymore. He writes to me in shorthand: phrases, usually. Often all-cap. He either doesn't sign at all, or signs JIM. He happens to be a retired admiral with a jaw-dropping past. I maintain formality, though I'm not a formal person; there's a whole species of life here that I don't understand and can't relax around.

There's something about old people who have led extraordinary lives but have not become egomaniacs. Even when they get smaller and balder and paunchier--even when they wear grandpa clothes and smile at strangers and lose their hearing. You can tell: they're bigger than the rest of us.

My kids were asking me about the Bataan Death March at the dinner table last night; dinner conversations have changed since I took this job: work is like one big field trip. Should the POWs who were used as slave labor by Japanese companies be compensated after the fact, or shouldn't they? They were prisoners, after all. Who's the good guy in a war scene? It's not easy to say.

I know one of these soldiers. He's not a retired admiral: he's just a regular guy--just an average, everyday former POW. He's got that quality that the admiral has: a gentleness, a softness. Buddha-like softness. It's hard to imagine him killing anyone, or being beaten, or starved. How is that, when we think brutality makes people hard?

***
I'm 43 now. I keep waiting to feel that life is passing too quickly, or that I haven't had time to do what I want to do--or to discover something I never even knew I wanted to do. I haven't, that is, commanded the Atlantic fleet, or won the big tobacco case, or written the book. I've got some time still. But I think I may be lucky that way: I think the kids are what I wanted to do, and for all that I think I'd change if I could, I wouldn't have written it any other way.

Newness

2006-10-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

This is Malaika, my niece! I can't get past the miracle of that ear, all twisted and tucked and bent, from nothing to pure, perfect potential in just 40 weeks. And then there's that forearm, as long as my index finger. Can't wait to see what she's like on the inside.

Happy birthday, baby!

October 9, 2000

2006-10-09T14:38:00.000-05:00

I took the kids to the town historical society today--of all yawners of an idea for kids. But they were up for it, and it ended up being really interesting. There are a bunch of these places around here; the towns are all Revolutionary War-era, and there are cool things to see--if you're into butter churners and barn looms and stuff like that. The cradles that rested beside the beds were nearly 4 feet long; kids slept in them until they were 5 or 6. There was a place along the side of the beds where you could tighten the ropes that were strung beneath the straw mattresses. (Hence "sleep tight.") There were spinning wheels that were predominantly used by men, except in cases where families had older, unwed daughters, who would spin in lieu of husbands. (Hence "spinsters.") Children and slaves often stood while they ate, because chairs were in short supply and reserved for the master of the house. (Hence "chairman.") The toys were exquisite: painted blocks and puzzles and doll houses with the most incredible details.

We looked up our house in their books; it's one of the original 42 houses built by the founding 42 families--religious folk who moved up river a few miles to better enjoy their straight laces. (You still can't buy booze here, and there are about 20 churches serving a population of 16,000. But people mind their own business, so it's OK.) The house was passed down through the generations in that same family until 1962, and only two families have lived in it since then. "1962!" I said to the kids. "The year before I was born." I.e.: recently, in a context. Not a spark of anything from either of them, though, and I remembered suddenly that the only president they've ever known is the one we've got now, and that they've both asked me, "What was life like back in the 1980s?"

If I think on it too long, my inevitable death depresses me terribly. Not the dying, but the fear that it'll happen before the kids are ready. And who's ever ready to lose their mom?

One good reason not to visit the historical society.

***

My baby sister is in labor tonight, and by morning my newest niece will be born. The kids climbed out of bed half an hour ago and came downstairs to talk on the phone with my folks, who flew down to Atlanta to be there for the big event. And after we hung up and I was tucking the kids back into bed, I told them again what happens when a baby is born, and Maisie inevitably personalized it, asking about her own birth, and Liam inevitably got quiet, reminding me again that these occasions of rootedness and connection for Maisie are simultaneous reminders to Liam that he does not have those ties to me.

He asks carefully; he monitors his own emotions, and shuts down before he might cry. "Did Aparna have any pain medicine when I was born?" he asked. "Did she cry?"

"She didn't have any pain medicine," I said. "Most women don't. And I would have done it the same way, because if somebody's lucky enough to give birth to a boy like you, she wants to feel every moment of it."

He didn't smile. He didn't say that he wished I had given birth to him. (I've read that some adopted kids do express that wish.) He's so connected to her. "I think she cried when she said goodbye to me," he said, and the thumb was in the mouth by then. I nodded. "I think so, too."

What I wouldn't give to put the two of them back together--to understand what tore it all apart in the first place, and spin back time, and let him be there: one unbroken life story. The people who lived in our house 45 years ago were connected by blood to the people who slept in the same rooms for the 200 years preceding them. But Liam has only 6 years to draw on--sapling roots in dusty earth.

That's asking a lot of a person. Too much for a little boy and his thumb.

***
Six years ago today, a woman I barely knew knocked on my hotel room door in Kolkata and handed me this little boy. "It's your mama," she said to him, and I knew it was for my benefit; the baby had heard only Bengali for the first eight months of his life. He had the most serious eyes: deep and attentive and wise. He frowned; this was not a joyous occasion: he didn't know it--or maybe he did--but four days later he'd leave everything he'd ever known behind, including his own identity.

My darling boy, I could never give you as much as you give me. But I've loved you forever and I always will.

For Liam

2006-10-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

In the beginning of time the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying gray elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth. When they molted millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born.

The blue elephants landed in the sea and their wings became fins. They are whales, the trunkless elephants of the oceans. Their cousins are the manatees, the trunkless elephants of the rivers.

The chameleon elephants kept their wings but agreed never again to land on the earth. They change the colors of their feathers every day. Today they are azure, and when it rains they are the color of pearls.

When they go to sleep, the chameleon elephants always lie down in the same place in the sky, and dream with one eye open. The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/thankyou.php

Foley's Problem

2006-10-08T15:25:00.000-05:00

I've not posted about Mark Foley, though the whole scene makes me wince: once again, the sexual improprieties of a political figure drive his party's message and fortune more than any of the depressingly serious--utterly, profoundly serious--matters that ought to be driving everything. That he was such a condescending boob when Clinton had the affair with Monica Lewinsky (who was 20) makes me sneer a bit. But in DC the age of consent is 16, and congressional pages are 16 and older. (And if the accounts are right, the page played along at least for a while--tossing back his own suggestive IMs.) It's not to say it was appropriate--and not to say that I wouldn't flip out if it were MY teenager he was being salacious with. But child molester? Child predator??

Katha Pollitt writes this in this week's Nation:

Foley has resigned and entered rehab: According to him, it was the drink typing,
or maybe the results of having been molested by a clergyman in his youth. His
fellow Republicans prefer their usual suspect: liberals. Denny Hastert claims
the revelations are a Democratic dirty trick. Rush Limbaugh says liberals are
the real hypocrites ("In their hearts and minds and their crotches, they
don't have any problem with what Foley did, they've defended it over the
years"). Which seems ungrateful, given how many liberals wrote compassionately
about Rush's addiction to illegally obtained Oxycontin, despite Rush himself
having urged draconian punishments for drug addicts. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council blames "pro-homosexual political correctness." Matt Drudge
indicts the teenage "beasts" themselves: "The kids are egging the Congressman
on!" They're probably liberals, too.

Unlike White House press secretary Tony Snow ("naughty e-mails"), I don't minimize Foley's behavior. It's wrong for middle-aged men to come on to teenagers, even if they're of legal age... Let the kids fool around with each other. But there's something unseemly about the festival of ritual humiliation: You'd think he was raping 5-year-olds, not exchanging dirty IMs with high school seniors who could, after all, just log off or not reply.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, they are ill positioned to make the
everybody-does-it defense. Their whole shtick is that they're the community
pillars, and the Dems are tramps and perverts. Now the image is blowing up in
their faces, and too bad for them. Nobody forced them to get in bed with the
Christian fundamentalists, who think homosexuality is evil and disgusting and
sex outside marriage God's biggest preoccupation. If the family-values right
wants Hastert's head on a platter, it serves him right. Live by Jesus, die by
Jesus.

I'll take the Democrats back in power any way it happens; the day the Republicans drop-kick the fanatics to the curb is the day I'll reconsider them. Still, what an embarrassment if it happens this way: because Mark Foley couldn't keep his repressed little mind off of teenaged boys, and everybody else decided that that was the issue that would stick. Is it true? Do we want no other dialogue at this dark hour in our country's history, three weeks before election day? It's a golden opportunity for a Democrat worth his or her salt to step up to the plate and shout through the din. Predictably, not a one of them is doing it.

Shame on both of their houses. And God help the rest of us.

The Wind-Up

2006-10-06T20:18:00.000-05:00

The cat is driving me crazy. He kicks his food all over the kitchen floor, and stands in his water bowl and then tears around the house. He dives under the carpets and attacks them from the underside. One moment he is sleepy and fat and purring into my face, and the next he is possessed: growling, even, to himself. In the mad state, he claws everything: furniture, books, toys, humans. He's shredded two bears and a pair of my shoes. Last night the madnesses were too many, and too frequent, and when he raced between me and the closing refrigerator door and the door closed on his head, I didn't feel even a minute of regret. I felt, to be perfectly honest, a little satisfied. I felt that he was lucky I didn't see him coming because I might have slammed the door instead.

Liam flipped out on me. "You could have KILLED him!" he screamed. I've been threatening to filet the beast for some weeks now, so I'm fairly well innoculated against grief in the event of accidental death.

Later on Liam and I were sitting on the couch and the cat leapt up and clawed Liam in the arm. I went to slap the cat, but he took off too fast and I slapped Liam instead--right where he'd just been clawed.

At the dinner table he recounted it to Maisie. "And then Mom wound up her arm and punched me!" (Wound up my arm!) I laughed. "I didn't mean it!" I said. "I'm sorry!" He wasn't letting it go. "If you're laughing it doesn't matter if you meant it or not," he says, and I know he's right but I can't help myself. Maisie asks what kind of animal we'd be if we could be anything. "I'd be an elephant and I'd eat the cat for lunch," I said. Liam says, "I'd be a jaguar and I'd eat anything that wound up and punched me."

The cat is getting neutered next week. It's his last hope.

Driving

2006-10-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

I remember a day when I lived in Baltimore--back when Maisie was a baby, I think--and I was so tired that I couldn't focus my eyes. I was driving on 39th Street, near my house, and I saw a man in a bright red suit. Boom--I stopped the car in the middle of the block, in the middle of the street: in that moment, the suit translated into a stop sign. I'm fascinated by these brain hiccups.

My father has these kinds of hiccups when he drives, only his are age-related and they alarm me. Multiple threads of logic stress him, and so, for instance, he might have no trouble understanding that he has to wait for the oncoming traffic to clear before he crosses--but he'd be flummoxed by the additional predicate that he can't cross if the light turns red, even if the oncoming traffic has cleared, or if a pedestrian walks into the street. In the same vein, I notice that if he's running late, the effort to not be late takes precedence over careful lane shifts, or leaving some space between him and the car ahead of him, or making full stops. My father, who has always lorded his role as Mr Safety over all the rest of us, now makes dangerous mistakes--even causing an accident a few years ago when Liam and I were in his back seat. (He didn't see a yield sign.)

I have quietly made the decision that I won't let my Dad drive my kids anywhere. And I've told him that he scares me when he follows other cars too closely, so when I'm in the car with him he concentrates on leaving more space in front of his car...which I know reduces his capacity to focus on other things related to safety. So much is bound up in one's ability to get up and get in the car. It's got such value beyond its precise value.

But the day's coming. The Big Bad Talk. I dread it.

October

2006-10-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

Excuse me--really, excuse the language. But why on earth did that sick fuck have to take down a room full of little girls before he blew his own face off? Imagine their fear.

I don't know if it's the percocet, which I admit I've taken the last day or so when a Motrin might have sufficed; I've wanted a little extra numbing. But the world seems too ugly--too garish and perverse to consider sober.

Maisie was invited to join the gifted and talented program in math at school. I'm so proud of her. She conquered the cartwheel this afternoon. She collected red leaves and tucked them into the pages of the OED for some art project that we'll all probably forget to do. The flash of sunlight in her hair is too beautiful for this place.

Adventure

2006-10-01T10:45:00.000-05:00

I had gall bladder surgery on Friday night; woke up in agony Thursday morning around 3am, and woke up my poor Dad to drive me into the ER. Poor Dad: he can't even watch me put an earring in, but he had to sit in the room when the hep-lock went in, and listen to the woman in the next bed screaming because she'd had a stroke and was 30 weeks pregnant, and they couldn't hear the baby's heart beat. He turned gray. I sent him home, and didn't let anyone come back until I was discharged. I couldn't bear to have to worry about them.

But I missed the kids terribly. Was having a weepy moment about it when the perky GI interns came in to listen to my lungs, and I couldn't breathe because my head was clogged. So I got a little tool for lung exercises. Which I used anyway. What the hell.

I had my first MRI. What an exercise in self control. The mind wanders--you try not to let it wander, because the churning and grinding from the machine is very much what I imagine a submarine might sound like, and there I am in this thin tube and I may as well be submerged: I'm strapped in at the legs and can't reach down to unstrap myself. "Rocket Man" was playing through the headset. "Breathe out, breathe in, hold your breath," the woman's voice would break in, and every time I had to hold my breath about 5 seconds longer than was comfortable, which increased my anxiety. How many people squeeze the alarm ball and get themselves pulled out before it's over? I wondered.

Happy to be home. So happy.

Transition

2006-09-24T07:45:00.000-05:00

The earliest changers have hit the ground: they're blanketing the grass outside my window. The trees are still mostly green, though; even in the shedding there are those that are ready sooner than the others.

I feel a quickening this time of year. Maybe it's that my birthday's coming--do we all love our birthday season best of all? Or maybe it's that fall has those magical occasions: kicking through leaves in the dark, wearing a witch's hat; feeling that thing--that something--in the first snowfall, in holiday music, in Santa Claus. In Linus's clogggy-headed recounting of the Christmas story. I don't know how it is that the most alive part of the cycle is the dying part: for me, it's all over on January 1. But I love this time of year.

Liam painted that pot and grew that plant from a seed. He smiles at it every day. "They can tell if you love them," he says, and I believe it. I kiss the flowers when they open: Liam's creation.

Tonya B.

2006-09-23T07:38:00.000-05:00

Maisie's Dad, as you know, was married to somebody else when Maisie was born. When we made her, too. And before that.

They'd been married for 25 years, and by all accounts the first 20 were reasonably solid. Which, from this vantage point, looks to me like a recoverable relationship. Now, today, he's with someone else and he and Tonya haven't spoken in nearly ten years. It's my greatest shame.

Last night I had a dream about Tonya. My car had broken down, and Maisie's Dad invited me to spend the night in their house--his and Tonya's--because she and a passle of family members were away. And so I did; it was my sister's house, actually, and I feel comfortable there. In the middle of the night I heard shouting, and wandered outside to see that there was a steep drop-off behind the house to a field, and in the field a crowd of adults dressed in white were tossing a huge helium ball back and forth and then kicking it up at the house. And they'd lit it on fire.

"Stop it!" I hollered down. No reaction. "I'm calling the cops!" I hollered, and they laughed.

As I turned to go back in I saw that aforementioned passle was in the driveway: they'd returned. I ran back into the house--my clothes, my computer--and grabbed clothes--old clothes I haven't worn in years; clothes that don't fit anymore--and found Maisie's Dad, who was in full panic, and walked behind him with my head down through all the people toward the exit. I knew Tonya was there, but I didn't look up and couldn't tell who she was. And nobody was saying anything to me: they were just chattering, paying no attention.

I made it outside but had forgotten something--my wallet or keys, or something else. And I went back in and found Tonya, who didn't seem to notice that I was the only white person in the room: that I wasn't part of her group. "Can I talk to you in private?" I asked, and she took me down to the basement, and we sat on a couch, and she smiled at me because she thought I was a friend. I knew what would happen to the smile when I told her my name. "Don't get up and leave when I start," I said to her. "I want to finish, OK?" And she smiled and nodded. I really liked her. I sat and stared at her and couldn't think what I could possibly say to her that she didn't already know, or would care to know--what I could say that would make it OK. I couldn't bear to watch the change in her eyes.

The end.

Then you ARE prejudiced

2006-09-22T07:01:00.000-05:00

Remember that commercial? Grandpa's out fishing with Grandson, and Grandson asks what "prejudiced" means, and mentions Jimmy, "my Jewish friend." Grandpa says, "Well, then you ARE prejudiced because you called Jimmy your Jewish friend instead of just your friend."

Made such an impression I can remember the words 30 years later. It was symptomatic of an entire wrong-thinking push to suppress language of identity--or to hyper-honor it with hyphenation. Exhausting, confusing stuff: nobody really knows what counts as offense any longer--and worse: real prejudice slips underground, along with racism, and becomes the worst kind because you can't point it out in the sun.

To all my Jewish friends: L'Shana Tovah, darlings. Peace and happiness to you and your families.

For those in peril on the sea

2006-09-19T20:07:00.000-05:00

There's a man living across the water from my office in a run-down ranch tucked between mansions. I stopped to do some business with him--I didn't realize when he gave me the address that he worked out of his house. I pulled in and sat for a minute, a little weirded out by the scene. The grass was long and the bushes were overgrown, and the house looked almost abandoned--things covering the windows from the inside, etc. He opened the door and I smelled moth balls, and had a Silence-of-the-Lambs moment. I stayed outside and chatted at him through the doorway for a few minutes just to decide whether or not I was going in. But he had such a big grin and such nice manners.

For the past 50 years this guy has recorded live performances of military bands and choirs. He's been doing it since before the groups even thought to tape themselves. His father was an admiral; he grew up listening to the stuff. About ten years ago he started cutting disks and selling them, though his distribution and marketing mechanisms are pretty thin. The disks represent the smallest fraction of the material in his archives. His archives occupy three rooms of his house. His recording equipment takes up two more plus the garage. "Where do you eat?" I laugh, looking at the equipment in his dining room. "Oh, in the kitchen," he says.

"I've been unwell this year," he tells me, "and I'm worried about who's going to take care of all of this when I'm gone." My instinct--the one that always gets me in trouble--is to leap in and take on the problem as my own. But I'm tired, and I have a 5-hr drive ahead of me, and Liam got sick yesterday and I'm worried about him, and I want to get out of there as quickly as I can without being rude.

I'm interested in selling some of his CDs in a holiday catalog, and he's pulled a few dozen disks and put them on the coffee table, and he's already cued up six of his favorites on his CD player. "You've got to hear some of this stuff," he says, and heaves down into a chair across from me. I don't need to hear it to buy it, but I can't say that. He pushes a button on the remote and I realize he's got 6 speakers in this tiny room and the volume is up, and it's like the sousaphone is two chairs over pointing my way. I try not to grab my ears--try not to wince. I don't particularly care for this kind of music; it feels unemotional to me: it feels like a lot of noise. Brass: bleuch.

It's not that at all to him: he's gazing off into space, mouthing the words being sung, and his eyes have gone soft. It's like a photo album for him. 20 seconds of that, then he clicks forward to the next tune, and the next, and so on, though multiple disks for 45 minutes. For every tune he's got a story: he remembers where he put the microphones. He remembers conversations with the conductors. He gossips a bit--giggles at himself. By about the halfway mark the music became a little more interesting--a little more vocal. And then the final disk: a brand new item that arrived at his door from the manufacturer half an hour after I did--the result of 30 years of his labor: a 2-CD, 150-year anniversary celebration of one of the service bands. He skimmed through disk #1. But disk #2 wouldn't play. He tried and tried--he opened two new packages to try others, and sank onto the floor pushing different buttons--opening the carousel and repositioning the disk and closing the carousel again. I thought he was going to cry. "Oh no," he kept whispering. "Oh no..."

And then, for whatever reason, the music started, and it was the Navy Hymn--that mournful, prayerful piece that chokes me up every time I hear it.

I bought a bunch of stuff. We may buy more. He walked me out to my car--all the way out, to the car door, and then stood at the end of his driveway to make sure nobody was coming to blindside me when I pulled out. I felt a little bad leaving him alone, though also I don't really think he's ever lonely. Not even for a minute.

And so I add Charlie to the list of people that make me wonder about this place and this culture. It's not what Charlie chose for his life obsession: it's that he chose. There's a lot of that around here: intensity, dedication. It's a little strange to encounter; it takes me a while, every time, to slip into the language and to find the level. But Charlie's archives are his children. They're his family connection--his life memories. His purpose. And I can relate to that brand of mad love.

Navigation

2006-09-16T08:01:00.001-05:00

My grandmother from Ireland used to live in a duplex in Richmond Hill. Her brother and his family lived in the other side of the house. The area's gone south now; you wouldn't want to walk there anymore. But back when I was a kid my sister and I used to spend weekends there once a month or so, and we grew so close to my two cousins, Oona and Deirdre. We were separated by a year: when my sister was 8, I was 7, Oona was 6, Deirdre was 5. Nearly every childhood memory I have includes those two; we paired up so well: Kathy and Oona, Deirdre and me. We matched temperamentally. We had each other's back, kept each other's secrets.

Grandma raised Oona and Deirdre; their mother, Maura, was never the nesting type, and she spent most of their youth working double shifts at a hospital in Queens, taking courses at City College. Then she moved to Saudia Arabia and worked as a nurse in King Faisal Hospital. She'd write my mother indecipherable letters on onion skin paper--the ink from one side obliterating the ink on the other. She wrote about men she'd met, or the gold tableware at the hospital (some of which made it to Dublin; by then Grandma had taken Oona and Deirdre and moved there.) She met her second husband there, and years later the two of them started her second family--launched it with twins, and a baby girl followed--and the five of them settled in a big house in Frederick, Maryland. I'd never have imagined Maura settling down among the cows and the corn. And yet, of course, that was what she'd come from as a girl in Ireland: that was home; land spells security. And it suited her at that age. She'd had her first girls too young. I think that must be the root of it all, somehow.

I don't remember why Grandma moved back to Ireland. Maybe Queens was heading south even then--maybe the family was concerned about her living in Queens alone with the two girls when Maura headed off to Riyadh. But I remember so clearly the day we took Grandma and my cousins to the pier and waved desperately as they floated away, and how we cried in the backseat on the drive home. We loved them like siblings; the parting was horrible. And it never stopped being horrible: we missed them until the day they came back, many years later, kicking and screaming because by then they were Irish teens, and they didn't want to live in backwater Frederick, where the boys wore workboots and big belt buckles. "Cultchies," they called them. Knackers.

They didn't think much of us, either. There was no ebullient hugging and shouting: they stood stiffly in front of us, quietly. Oona smiled. Deirdre looked at the ground, her face hidden behind her hair. It never got better than that.

Oona married and works as a public defender in the city, and I like and respect her, even if the connection is lost. She has two sweet girls, and we've tried a bit to match them up with Liam and Maisie, as if the past can be replayed. But our visits are awkward and infrequent--once a year or so.

Deirdre remained hidden behind her hair, and I came to feel that we'd done something horrible to her--something lost in the mists, something in our childhood that only she remembered. Eventually she fled to the other coast where she studied alternative healing. I don't know what she's doing now. Neither of them--Oona or Deirdre--has the rich memory of shared childhood that Kathy and I have. Neither of them remembers the holidays, the egg hunts, the water balloon fights, the pranks and the adventures and those wonderful monthly weekends together in Richmond Hill. At family functions in those early years after their return, we'd reminisce about a certain memory, and invariably they'd say they didn't remember and couldn't believe we did, only their sentiments came out as scoffing--not wonder.

"What happened? How could you not remember ten years of shared life? Did we do something wrong?" We'd ask them to their faces, and write them sad notes. They'd never reply. And so we stopped asking. But to this day it makes me sad, because they were such a part of my childhood, and their determined amnesia diminishes the value of my memories.

Which comes to mind now because today Liam and I are visiting my grandmother's grave; it's beautiful and breezy, and I want to. She's buried on a hill a few towns over. The stone is a beautiful, rough boulder--found by my uncle, who knows something about stones and how rare it is to find one like this. Because there's been some controversy about what to inscribe on the stone, there is nothing on it. Somehow that's just right: Grandma would like the simplicity.

Daria!

2006-09-15T22:00:00.000-05:00

Happy birthday! xoxox

Liam says, "Keeneye ripped the pompoms. He ate them. He loved them. Will you make more? My cat loves you. And happy birthday!"

To obey the law of the pack

2006-09-15T11:55:00.000-05:00

My father asked Liam if he'd like to be a cub scout. Liam--not really knowing what it is, but excited to be asked--came tearing into me and said, "Poppop turned my life around! It used to be not so great, but now it's great!" My Dad promises to serve as the adult partner; my Dad--who will drive home instead of parking too far away from the grocery store entrance and walking in--promises to be Liam's partner. I know how this will go. But, though I'm stretched already and a little worried about the time commitment BSA requires, I took Liam--and my Dad--to the orientation meeting last night.

It was us and another mother and child. Two potential joiners, surrounded--I'm not kidding: they stook in a circle around the chairs--by 12 adults in BSA gear--neck ties and patches--giving witness to the value of scouting. My neck got a crick, turning and twisting to give them the respect of eye contact. They showed a powerpoint presentation. They talked about scouting as a way of life.

They asked us to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, and I stood and put my hand on my heart, and glanced down to see Liam in stiff military salute. Copying the leader, I noted. I'd bet $50 the leader is not a vet. He reminded me a little of the Minutemen peppering the AZ border: citizen-cops.

They all looked me straight in the eye--as if they had nothing to hide. It was the look of the faithful. And so, right there, in the Boy Scounts of America, I encounter the two groups that I least trust or know what to do with: true believers and the militant.

Poor Liam--saddled with a loner like me.

No calls back from the Big Brother people.

Poppop turned his life around.

What to do...

Eptembersay Levenay

2006-09-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

She watched the news that morning; I was getting ready for an interview, and I'd planted her in front of the TV. Age 4: that's a plane and an angel, and two dead people and a bad guy. And a building.

It seems the sentiment is this: that after five years it's long enough: now we can watch movies about it, have TV anniversary specials running back-to-back. Five years--the op-eds are popping up already: these landscape assessments from retired colonels or widows.

And yet, for me, every year before this one was somehow easier. This year, it sits in the back of my neck in a hot, tight knot. This year there's less of a distance to travel from everyday stress to tight-chested anxiety.

So off with the TV. I see the towers against a blue sky and I click the x in the upper-right corner. I'm not watching; I've got that spool already.

Boundaries

2006-09-02T20:25:00.000-05:00

"You're my wife," Liam croons to me tonight. Perched on my lap, his hand on my cheek. Maisie groans, "You can't marry your mother. It's not natural." "I can and I already did," Liam says. "I love her and she's a good kisser." Sometimes when I kiss him he grabs my face and holds it to his lips, and I pull away. "That's enough now."

I don't find this cute. I squirm. I redirect--move his hand. I make light of the wife bit: "We're already family--you only marry people you aren't already related to."

How thin all the internal walls are--all the slots that separate all the feelings and categories: his and my own. Separation, individuation, identification--I get so bogged down in worry that I'm not doing it right. But also I feel angry with him: I feel the urge to push him away with a loud shout: Get OFF me!

And hence: unbearably guilty.
***
Maisie's dad and I had a blowup today; it's been a while--it caught me off-guard. He called later to apologize--though continued to press his agenda into the voicemail. I couldn't pick up the phone; he'd tossed out such hateful things earlier. I'm not consistent, I need time to process my own positions--I wound easily. But I never throw the past at him in the heat of battle: I try to stay in the moment, in the issue at hand. Because he doesn't do that the narrative of our relationship tends to highlight my failures, not his. I don't know how to change that, short of fighting like he does. Which I can't bring myself to do.
***
It has not been a good day with the males in my life. It was such a relief to take Maisie to the pharmacy--just the two of us. To walk down the aisle and feel her reaching for my hand.

The Decider

2006-09-01T08:02:00.000-05:00

The neighbor's boy--son of former Superbowl player--is chunky. I'm aware of his chunkiness because a) he tells me his mother says he's fat, which ticks me off; and b) when I took care of him for a week I saw the volume of processed food and sweets his mother packs into him. Which--c)--means the problem, while his to bear, is hers.

To overcome his weight issue, his mother has him in non-stop physical activities. Tennis, football, baseball, karate. It's hard to know whether or not he enjoys the sports; he doesn't really express preference for anything, ever (unless he's playing Playstation with Liam, in which case he has definite opinions.)

Today I got a call from a long-ago friend--one I've missed. She told me about her daughter, who'd explained at age 4 why she didn't want to take ballet lessons: "I'm a little kid and it's just too much. Too much."

"She might be 36 inches tall, but it's still her life," this friend chuckled.

And that, it seems to me, is the crux of it all.

Keith Olbermann, American

2006-08-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

Feeling morally, intellectually confused?

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis-and the sober contemplation-of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land.

Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration's track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril-with a growing evil-powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the "secret information." It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's -- questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England's, in the 1930's.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions - its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic's name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History - and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England - have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty - and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute -- and exclusive -- in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today's Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden's plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their "omniscience" as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer's New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we -- as its citizens- must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism."
As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow. But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: "confused" or "immoral."

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular."

And so good night, and good luck.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/

Uh-oh

2006-08-31T06:45:00.000-05:00

There are blog posts that spark discussion, and then there are some you put out there just to get it off your chest, or out of your head. This is the latter.

I happened on--and then was sickly riveted by--a 2-hour special on 20/20 last night: a fascinating, horrifying look at the top 10 (maybe; I missed the first hour) likely causes of the end of life on Earth. No, really: some producer dreamed this up as good, distracting, primetime entertainment.

When I tuned in at the halfway point they were still talking about a possibility that had never occurred to me: that a black hole would move in and suck us all up. A scientist described in detail what it will (note verb tense, which is what this guy was using) be like: how it will begin with our bodies being stretched, first a little, then more, then uncomfortably; how everything not nailed down will fly off into the hole; how there'll be a crescendo--a WHOOSH sound--a loud sucking noise. Of all things to fill your ears at the end of time.

More scientists weighed in on more likely endings: wiped out by artificial intelligence, asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption, plague, nuclear war, global warming. All handled in certain future tense: all scenarios spun out by scientific experts, quite persuasively--maybe even with a little glee. At a certain point, in order to continue breathing, I felt myself switch to the impersonal view of human life: life as an accident of biology; life on the planet as an accident of nature. I remembered the black hole scientist weighing in: "Hey, if you're going to die, you've got to admit this would be a pretty cool way to die!" And I admit, there's that. In the impersonal. More personally, I'd have to watch my kids get sucked apart, right? And so I would have to kill them. And that, right there, is a good reason not to watch network TV.

The producers interviewed regular folk in dramatic up-close pose, against a black backdrop. The unheard questions: What would you do if you knew human life was coming to an end in 2 weeks, 2 days, 2 minutes? "I'd spend my money." "I'd quit my job." I"d travel." Lots of "I'd be with my family." One woman said, unaccountably, "I'd want to experience having a baby." Not a one of them said they'd kill their family or themselves; no talk of avoiding incineration or suffocation or drowning--no talk of wresting back the decision, of opting to die one way instead of another.

HBO would've talked straight.

Salad dressing

2006-08-30T06:40:00.000-05:00

It's bronchitis. Poor goonie; no school until Friday, at best. He's sick enough for the world to be one big surrealist canvas, but not sick enough to stay out of trouble.

"The ducks like the rain because they eat grass, and the rain is like salad dressing."

"We should use these [female products] for bandages; I don't think they'd stick to the boo boo like those square ones do."

"I had a terrible dream [sobbing] that a mean man came and stole all our toys, so I had to shoot him."

***
My boss is on vacation for a week. Though I work 250 miles away from her, and though we speak about once a week--and though she is, really, a quite easy going boss, as bosses go--I woke up today feeling so unburdened and motivated. I've always known I'd do best as my own boss. Were I only courageous enough.

I've been rereading Thomas Bernhard's books--most of them literary representations of madness, especially Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I love. I was drawn to him first by the title of that book, back when I was reading Wittgenstein. (Now he's one of so many that sit on my shelf and feel like old friends except when new friends come and browse, and then I feel pretentious: we're not what we were; we become dull if we don't watch it--and I could be more vigilant on that score.)

There's a point in Wittgenstein's Nephew when the narrator's friend wants a certain newspaper, and in a manic quest for that newspaper the two of them drive through the night--across the world, in that moment. It reminds me, every time, of a summer when I drove across the country with my college roommate, and 800 miles after we'd left Tijuana we turned on our new stained glass lamps at midnight in a Motel 6 and were so enchanted by the colors that the next morning we drove back to Tijuana and bought two more. I'm unlikely to behave that way now; I'm more like my father than my mother, sadly: shortest line between two points. And the college roommate and I don't really speak anymore, though we were best friends for nearly 10 years. She would still turn around and drive back, even now. Her whimsy is rooted in a complete absence of financial constraint, I realize; her family is quite well off. Life has made me more cautious. But I don't know that I can attribute it all to that.

It makes me wonder, actually, which condition is the more mad: driving across Europe for a friend who wants a certain newspaper, or saying no.

On the Inside

2006-08-29T06:28:00.000-05:00

My mother grew up behind a bar in Shinrone. Her father, William King--Bill--had her sampling booze when she was still in pigtails. "Good to know what it is, Aine!" she recounts he'd boom. I don't know whether or not he drank, though his complexion in photos rather suggests it. She certainly does. Her mother didn't; her mother had a stern, tight look, attributed to hard times and five children. But could've been the booze, and the burden of sobriety. Who knows?

My grandfather died the year I was born; they delayed my baptism because he was in the hospital. I've always been envious of my sister, who has photos of him cradling her and looking down lovingly; he was a tall, strong man with a wide, open face and easy smile: the consummate grandfatherly type. He and my mother were extremely close.

My grandmother was not the type to gaze lovingly at a child; she would bark: "You rotten goons--look at this mess you've left for your poor mother!" Etc. Not that she didn't also have her gentler moments; she raised more than half of her grandkids. The more sensitive among us took her name calling to heart, but all of us knew that there was a certain clan identification--a certain belonging--in being a rotten goon. We were insiders. The Irish are big on that.

Three of my mothers four siblings drink, too. Only one doesn't--the youngest one; the one who fought tooth and nail with her father until the day he died, when her two brothers and my father sat on her in the middle of Grandma's living room floor to keep her from throwing herself through the glass door. When she came out of the psych ward she chose God, not booze.

I'm put in mind of this today because my aunts and uncles and my siblings are talking about the Guinness emblem bearing our family name, and they're ordering large-size, framed, matted versions to hang in prominent places in their homes. One of my cousins was given one as a baby shower gift. I've seen it in another cousin's kitchen, an uncle's living room. Now there's a volume-discount order in discussion, and they ask if I want one. I don't; it's a mixed-bag legacy, for sure, and I don't want my kids seeing it every day. But I feel the old-time tug: the pull to pick up my own membership card.

Later: Man, what a butchered piece of grammar and spelling! Love that edit function...

First night

2006-08-28T19:46:00.000-05:00

Pure resolve did the trick until 1:00: when I arrived to dope him up on more purple stuff the fever was back, and 104. "Why did you take so long?" he asked, all sparkly eyed and dizzy. (Damn it--I never should have let him go in.) I carried him out to the car--he didn't even care that only babies put their heads on their mommies' shoulders in public. "Why didn't you go to the nurse's office?" I asked. "I'm sorry," he said. He made it to the couch awake. When I returned minutes later with the juice, he was out.

Nobody noticed he was sick. First day nutiness, no doubt; nobody knows his normal, too. "There was a kid crying this morning," he told me, "and the teacher didn't hug him or anything. She just told him that he'd be OK, but I could tell he didn't believe it. She was mean." "She was probably trying to calm him down. Were you crying?" I asked him. "Only in the bathroom, 'cause I felt sick and you weren't there." Oooooh. Liamy. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

Maisie, conversely, bounded in the door, floating on air. "It was GREAT today!"

Halfway there.

First Day

2006-08-28T08:18:00.000-05:00

The sun isn't up yet; the bus arrives 15 minutes before the sun--which we wouldn't see even then given the torrential rain. But girly's working the look in the mirror. Last night she emptied her dresser drawers--tried on everything, handed me everything that felt a little snug. (Coming your way, Kiran! Make room!) And she made five piles of clothes she likes, and put five sticky notes on them: Monday, Tuesday... Mad frenzy this morning because the perky little First Day skirt wasn't really suited to the weather, so she had to swap sticky notes: this is Thursday's look. Which--the swap--was almost more than she could take at 6:20. An argument for uniforms, some have told me. But where's the fun there?

He slept with me last night, and I was so hot all night--kept moving him over, until around 3am when I realized the hot was his fever, which I dosed with the purple stuff. And though teachers and parents everywhere will groan, I let him go this morning, because not going was more than he could take--and he looked and felt fine. But he had his clothes picked out, too, and had planned to color-match Maisie's perky green First Day look, and betook his ailing self back upstairs to recover HIS Thursday clothes, the better to match She Who Is Too Cool. His bus was brand new, and the driver brand new, and Liam stopped in the middle of the road and looked back at me and asked, "Are you sure this is the right bus?" and kept going when I nodded. And somehow I knew, in that moment, that I should have kept him home: that a moment of anxiety might be all it would take for the fever to win out over his determination. I'll go in at noon and check on him.

Happy Monday!

"Crop out the crutch, OK?"

2006-08-25T18:35:00.000-05:00

She broke her right leg in three places mountain climbing, but when I asked if I could take her picture with Liam she bounced down onto the ball of one foot--and didn't need my help getting back up again. Oh, youth.

That's Liam's new teacher. She is delightful, and we know her delightful parents. He is, predictably, utterly overwhelmed by her: she's quite tall, for one, and friendly chicks make him nervous. He's recently decided his teeth are ugly so he doesn't want to smile. Ever. That won't stop me from subjecting you to photos.

He's not excited by his very own desk. He's not happy about the crop of friends he's got in the class. He was decidedly UNhappy that Maisie's Dad accompanied us to his class; it highlighted the thing that bothers him most: she has one and he doesn't. I've found a counselor nearby who alleges she has experience in adoption and loss issues, and she's returned my call, and now I don't know whether to pursue it or not: whether to cast his unhappy in these terms; whether to involve another adult in interpreting and processing; whether to involve her, specifically. I find myself put off by her deep voice, of all ridiculous things; I want a soft and reassuring sound from the person who joins our lives for this purpose. Or would he do better with a male?

It is, I realize, just one of those times when I wish there were another adult around here. An arm around my shoulder; a deep voice calling his name. Can't dwell on it--it unravels me and it's pointless. But that face up there kills me, and in one fell swoop mitigates what I do give him, highlighting only what I can't.

Where to begin...

2006-08-24T17:37:00.000-05:00

Influx

2006-08-23T20:42:00.000-05:00

There was a woman sitting 20 feet away from me today--to the right and slightly ahead of me. She had the haircut and color I had five years ago, and she wore clothes very similar to the ones I wore then. At this precise angle she looked like she was me: actually me, sitting there. My nose, my cheek bones, my jaw. She had her arms folded awkwardly, tilted her head a certain way. I felt almost dizzy, watching her; so overcome by such affection for her, and for all the things I knew she was feeling--(how much do I hate a crowded room; why do I always feel an invisible audience; oh, to be able to stand up and leave this room without walking through it)--so much so that when she turned in my direction and I saw her full face, the illusion persisted: what changed was not my impression that she was me, but my sense of what I look like to others. Such wonderful dislocation.

Nobody talks to anybody in the jury room. Not in the elevator, not in the line through the metal detectors. Theater seats--200 of them--and a big-screen TV, and everybody faces forward or reads a book from the shelf by the door. Not a sound. Three hours--nobody looked at me. I tried to imagine, but couldn't, how a random group from this crowd could possibly achieve enough intimacy to argue about what they heard and what it means. Such a diffident bunch--imagine having to entrust your fate to them. I know--I'm told juries work. But it's hard to fathom.

I was assigned to a criminal case that we were told had a two-week window. Medical malpractice; sounded from the witness list like a gastric bypass gone wrong. Turns out, though, that I used to babysit for the defendant's lawyer. Now he's suing doctors and pharmaceutical companies, and his shoes are worth more than my entire wardrobe.

Not that I want those shoes. I'm just saying.

Gonna Getcha

2006-08-23T06:15:00.000-05:00

One of my authors is a spy catcher. He caught a major spy, and now he's written a book about it. Yesterday I met him for the first time, and he's the nicest, more unassuming guy you could imagine: sweet and modest, with a big grin. You can understand how people would confide things in him--how they would trust him if they were in trouble. Can't help but be a bit fascinated by the whole scene. Did he fall into his job the way I fell into mine?

The kids play at being spies; Maisie wants to be a spy when she grows up--wants to go to Spy School after college (because she knows every option comes after college. "So Spy School is like graduate school?" she asks.)

Off to jury duty.

Fingering the Enemy, or: Where Are The Arrests??

2006-08-20T12:03:00.000-05:00

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/index.html
Deadly Baby Bottles
by Craig Murray
One aspect of the alleged bomb plot which has provided a tremendous boost to the atavists, is the so-called "Baby bottle bomb".

As the Daily Telegraph reported on August 14, "Scotland Yard are quizzing Abdula Ahmed, 25, and his 23 year old wife Cossor over suspicions that they were to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb".

This appalling and macabre idea is just what the rabid right needed to stoke up images of how sub-human Muslims are. Prepared to blow up their own baby! For example, John Howard, Australian Prime Minister:

"That would be an appalling reflection on the lack of humanity of that child's parents."

That is one of the more moderate quotes. I won't repeat some of the stuff from US blogs. One allegation on those blogs, that I can't track down any original source for, is that the police found baby bottles containing residues of potentially bomb-making chemicals. This allegation has also been quoted to me in comments on this website.

Whether police really have said this is a matter I can't clarify. But if they have, consider this. I am looking at a bottle of Milton sterilising tablets. I, and generations of British parents, used these or similar chemicals to sterilise my baby's feeding bottle. The instructions read thus:

Active Ingredient
Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate
Warnings
Harmful if swallowed. When in contact with an acid, releases a toxic gas.

Hydrogen peroxide is also widely sold in pharmacists and can be used for various domestic purposes including as a disinfectent.

A very high proportion of baby bottles would show traces of potentially dangerous chemicals. It means nothing.

I hope that the allegation is untrue and this young family intended no such crime. But there is nothing uniquely Islamic about infanticide. Indeed, in the last two days the news bulletins have covered prominently the stories of a British man who allegedly jumped from a balcony clutching his two children in Crete, and the inquest on a woman who threw herself under her train with her nine year old child.

Horrible? Yes. Have Muslims wreaked more horror on the World, either historically or in the last five years, than those professing other religions? No.

Girls

2006-08-19T22:06:00.000-05:00

5 hrs old. Distinctly pre-human, but still the most amazing thing.Five years. Every other kid pauses for the camera outside the church after the wedding. Maisie dances with the air.

Working on ten. Earrings, and the meaning of complete. Completely done with a child's things? Completely entranced with the person she'll become?

There'll come a point, maybe, when every little thing won't strike me as a new page in the album--when I won't blink fast and change the topic.

Or else you just learn to live with a permanent lump in your throat.

I'm a believer

2006-08-19T17:46:00.000-05:00

Sunrocket.com

Just kissed goodbye to my AT&T line and my $180/month phone/DSL bill, and signed on for Sunrocket's broadband phone service for $199/year. (Also got a second local number in Maryland as part of the deal, so Maisie's Dad and my sister--and Maisie, when she's down there--can call here for free.) Broadband will run $30/month. I'm so pleased.

The truth is that I hate the phone, and rarely use it--which has, I admit, its disconnect aspects given my chosen career. Phone conversations make me jumpy; I keep casting ahead to the next turn in conversation: I'm so not Zen about it. (Admittedly it's worse with some than others; I could talk to my siblings for hours by phone. But I rarely do.) Email made the world a much better place for me.

Sunrocket advertises that the reception quality is something between a cell phone and a landline, which strikes me as the perfect compromise: good enough to get the information across, but not the snug, cozy, intimate connection that could entice someone to settle in for a good, long chat.

I know. What can I tell you? It's my thing.

Kids

2006-08-17T18:31:00.000-05:00

It's almost unbearable to have JonBenet in the news again, though if that nut in Thailand is guilty then I have a lot of private retracting to do; I just never could make sense of parents who'd doll up their adorable like a sex kitten. Had to be a dysfunction, I thought: had to be a sickness. Then Patsy dies with cancer--ovarian cancer, of all cancers--and it strikes me as a kind of horrible karma: her ovaries, killing her. The kind of thing you don't want to even hear about, just in case the karma leaps over into your own messiness, your own uglies.

Or: Patsy's ovaries send her to heaven so she can hold her daughter in a big blue rocker.

That child haunts me.
***
Friends of ours are homestudy-ready and looking to sign up with an agency to adopt from India. They asked my advice, and it turned out they'd short-listed to the biggest crook in the business--a horrible woman. I grimaced and told them so, carefully, and watched the wife recoil; it takes very little to hurt women who've miscarried five times--women on the dark side of the fertility window who can't imagine a fruitful life without children. They're walking wounds: you can spot them on the street. Sometimes when people ask what you think, they really only want you to be a wind at their backs.

I wished they hadn't asked me; I dread when people ask. But it's one area I can't lie about. Not even for these adorable, wonderful people--these people who are more suited to parenting than I ever could be. I didn't tell them what I really think: that nobody has any business adopting from India now--that a child's identity is not a moveable feast. I didn't tell them that. I just warned them to be careful. I told them to get online and read the local papers.

They've withdrawn from me a bit in the last few days, and I know what it means: their consuming desire for a child overwhelms their more academic desire to avoid the possibility of a dirty adoption. Better-to-act-now-and-say-you're-sorry-later school of thought. I understand it, and whatever they choose, I'll back them. Maybe I should say that to them. How can they be expected to care about whatever complexities they might uncover in five years, if that's the cost of breathing in the love of a child now? Who do I think I am?

This is why it's unfair to put the burden of cleaning up the system on adoptive families. It's so unfair--so utterly unfair.

Sublime and profane

2006-08-14T09:34:00.000-05:00

Maisie got her ears pierced. Liam stood between her legs, arms wrapped around her, ear to her chest, eyes squeezed shut. "Maisie..." he groaned when the Claire's clerks squeezed the piercing guns and she started. She's so happy--keeps reaching up to touch them; casually tucks her hair behind her ears when we go out. Last night she hugged me from her bed and whispered, "I feel complete now." A landmark on the path, I guess. A foothold.

This weekend we had our family reunion: all my mother's siblings and their spouses and kids. A sea of Irish political energy--I love these people. A few Indian families came, too. The Irish and the Indian fit so well; all that colonial history and literature and activism: generations of resistance directed at the very same place. The kids played baseball on the lawn that grew over the buried pool, and flew rubberband airplanes, and ate too much pudding. I drank too much sangria. Heaven.

***
Geopolitical Diary: Revisiting Core Assumptions (from stratfor.com)
The world's focus right now is on the cease-fire deal in the Middle East. We think that's the incorrect focus. The real focus should be on an earthquake that has shaken the region: Hezbollah's forces, even if they are defeated by Israel in southern Lebanon, will have shown themselves capable of mounting an effective resistance for an extended period of time. The Israelis have not been able to deal them a single, sharp blow and fragment them.

A single assumption has shaped Arab-Israeli relations since 1948: that Israel could decide, if it wished, to resort to war and impose its will on Arab armies. That assumption shaped all political considerations in the region. If Israel is no longer capable of doing that, it follows that a range of political assumptions also are untrue. Consider Jordan: Since 1970, Israel has been the guarantor of Jordanian national security. Consider Egypt: Since Camp David, Egypt has refused to engage Israel militarily. Both of these political certainties have been based on a military certainty -- and if that dissolves, so does everything else.

Anticipating peace

2006-08-11T07:42:00.001-05:00

Blogger's been running in French for a few days, and I posted this morning, hit Publier le Message, and--poof--into the vast darkness it went. It reminds me of a friend who used to wear her wristwatch set to Paris time, though she lived in Virginia; evidence of yearning--reminder of something more, or something else, except that she died before she ever got there.

Oh, the tenuous connections we make.

My sister is visiting with her toddler daughter--the sister who fabricates (or exaggerates) illnesses. Last night she fed her child a homemade waffle, though the child is supposed to be highly allergic to dairy and flour. "Don't tell her Dad" sister sighed, cutting the thing up for the child--as if sheer weariness drove her to it. Made me think of last Christmas, when she hollered at me for offering the child a krumkake. "It'll kill her," she roared. "Her throat will close up--she won't be able to breathe!" The child's father was there then; I guess he's the core market for that dish.

My sister tells me that I am not the maternal type--that "everybody" was shocked when I became a parent, and that "nobody" thought I was cut out for it. I don't know why I let it wound me, but it does--the thought that "everbody" was, that "nobody" did. This sister was an infant when I was 11; her earliest memory of me was when I was in college. So there's that. But I can't fathom why she feeds me this line so routinely. I remember when Maisie was a toddler and my mother said to me--out of the blue--"You're such a good mother." I felt so moved--so affirmed; mothering is exhausting, and generally absent a cheerleading section, or even a reliable guide. So I was determined to give that same affirmation to my sister. Yesterday I chose a moment when she was being gentle with her child, and I said, "You're such a good mother." "I know," she said. So unlike me. Nature is confounding.
***
I don't know what to say about Ned Lamont, and that--that there's not much to say--is his biggest problem. But Connecticut didn't need to be the home of every Republican's favorite Democrat, and Lieberman had to go. The worm turned for me with Lieberman long before he took his stand on the war: for me, it was his position on international adoption, i.e.: Give us the babies! Adoptive parents are born lobbyists: they write, they call. What's an elected representative to do? Why, what else but travel around handing out awards to the adoptive parents that most vigorously oppose the governments that unearth corrupton in their international programs and slam the door on foreign adoption. Cowardice masked as leadership.

Buh-bye, Joe.

I didn't do it

2006-08-05T08:40:00.000-05:00

Maisie was angry with her Dad's girlfriend a few summers ago, went into the bathroom, and, girlfriend charged, dumped girlfriend's expensive hairbrush into the toilet. When questioned about it Maisie said she didn't touch it--that it rolled off the back of the toilet on its own. We'll never know, and so I give her the benefit of doubt.

Were there a test, though, that could tell me the truth, I'd believe an affirmative result; all humans are capable of being little shits now and then--even the adorable ones. She'd still protest that she hadn't done it: what other option is there, short of a collapse into the confessional, which would then have to encompass not only the human failure of anger, but also of dishonesty. The latter is the worse of the two. Once you choose to lie, it's very hard to reverse course.

I believe Lance Armstrong doped up, and I believe Floyd Landis did--and it doesn't particularly matter to me except that it takes away one more opportunity to cheer, and the world needs such opportunities. Floyd should come clean; there's honor in telling the truth.

Unfiltered

2006-08-04T17:41:00.000-05:00

Liam and the cat have a thing. Both of them can go from a state of complete rest to full-on tackle--and the cat does it more effectively: he'll be sleeping one moment, and the next he's launched himself up onto the side of Liam's head, or his back, or his leg (if Liam's walking by). Only to Liam.

And for his part, Liam will walk past the cat, calm as can be, and suddenly let out an "Arrrr!" and grab the cat and tickle him, howling like a banshee the entire time.

Sounds bad, but neither hurts the other; both seem to enjoy it. The cat will only sleep with Liam. And Liam frets about the cat's feelings and welfare as if he had another sibling.

Today we were in my Dad's kitchen and I noticed that Liam had a scratch on his cheek near his eye.

"You have to stop putting your face into Keeneye's stomach," I said to him. "He could scratch your eye out."

My father, who can't restrain himself when there's an opportunity to lecture, joined in:

"I keep telling you--that cat's going to take your eye out!"

Liam's lip started trembling, he backed up, and next thing he was screaming at the two of us. "Why are there two of you saying that now!? Keeneye couldn't scratch my eye out!" And off he ran to some remote sofa, sobbing. Oh the drama, I thought, and let him go.

Later I said, "Hey Liam, I'm sorry I made you feel bad. I was just worried when I saw that scratch so close to your eye."

"It wasn't you," he said. "Poppop is always lecturing me. I get so frustrated."

"I know what you mean," I said. "But you can't scream at him--or at me--that way."

"Sometimes," he said, "I just want to be right."

"I know that feeling," I tell him.

"And besides," he says, "Keeneye would be so ashamed of himself if he scratched my eye out."

"Yes, he's a good cat," I say. "Just keep your face away from his claws, OK?"

"OK."

Ode to Outrage

2006-08-03T07:32:00.000-05:00

We turned down a book today written by a 25-yr-old female soldier whose arm was blown off in an IED attack in Baghdad. Decided it wasn't newsy enough, nor well-written enough to backlist well. Times have changed.

I grew up with Vietnam on the tube; my parents didn't let us watch, but it was hard to miss it. Mine is the generation for whom war is like a movie, and all the full-color images on the 24-hr-news channels only look to me like remakes on the b&w version. The more I see, the harder it is to shock me; the deadening of my sensitivities alarms me.

And so it is with soldier tales. Vietnam vets stood awkwardly in front of my summer history class at Yale and talked about what the experience had meant to them. (I remember those vets especially because they looked like every 50-year-old man, and I had a flash--I really felt, for the first time, what it meant for an event to define a generation. But it wasn't MY generation; I couldn't feel what they felt.)

There is something about the Afghanistan/Iraq vets that reminds me of those men--only now there are women, since the advent of insurgent warfare (Revolutionary War, anyone?) makes the issue of women in frontline combat obsolete. Women warriors--that's new for us. A year ago I watched mothers in khaki kissing their babies goodbye, and I wept. Now I don't. How quickly it becomes old.

The Founding Fathers expected the citizenry to have first-hand experience with military service. That first-hand experience--that's what keeps us sensitive to the reality: the brutality, the cost. Not to say that I support the draft, because I'd whisk my kids out of here so fast their heads would spin. But I see the real value of it in terms of sensitizing a populace.

Instead, we're a people slowly going to sleep--a people breathing in such a climate of corruption and violence that we've stopped reacting to it. What would it take, in these terms, for a revolution?

When you think, in contemporary measure, of what Watergate really was--the relative scale of the crime that brought down Nixon... Who could've imagined those would be the good old days?

34 Children

2006-07-31T12:21:00.000-05:00

This isn't the first time the Israelis have bombed Qana--nor the first time they wiped out so many civilians who had taken shelter there. There's already a "Qana Massacre" from ten years ago: Operation Grapes of Wrath. This will be--what?--the Qana Slaughter? The Killing of the Innocents?

Qana, where Jesus may have performed his first miracle, turning water to wine. Where the UN has a large compound. Fat lot of good faith or peace workers do anyone over there.

34 kids dead--dusty, lifeless little bodies carried through the rubble by sobbing parents--and Rice leaving town because there will be no cease fire until it's an enduring cease fire. That's our ludicrous, official position.

I'm no politician, but to me the Israeli course looks bound to upend the Lebanese government and build even more support for extremists, in Lebanon and across the Arab world. As if Baghdad weren't reason enough. There's no bomb big enough to make peace here. If it can happen, it's got to happen with diplomacy.

34 children. 34 more families with human cause to take up arms against Israel and their fat ally to the west. Maybe Israel will get them first; they're bombing for another two weeks.

Sunny Orange and Indian Formula

2006-07-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

I may not be the fastest renovator, but I've got to tell you: I do excellent work. The bathroom is FINALLY finished (yes, long-term readers--the same bathroom I started this time last year.) I mean, I haven't found the right mirror yet, but the five layers of wallpaper and the cement that was holding them together are all gone, and in their place is a perfectly patched square of walls covered with a lovely, fresh, happy hue that the good people at Brandman's call Sunny Orange. (Muy sunny. More pumpkin than orange. The wainscoting is stained white, so the room can tolerate the color. Can you stand how tedious this account is already??) Moments ago, I left the utter chaos that is the rest of the house, and sat on the beautiful bathroom floor, and felt so proud: I finished something. Don't want to get carried away, but maybe next week I'll put some paint on the living room windows that I primed 18 months ago...

Tonight, to celebrate (and because my obsession with the bathroom overtook all other tasks including grocery shopping), I took Liam out to a little Indian restaurant down the road. I love Indian food, but I've got to be in a social mood to tolerate a visit to an Indian restaurant with Liam; every Indian woman in the place flirts with him, and we're watched. White Americans in my circle have been trained to act like they don't notice color; all their reactions, by and large, are internal, so I don't have to deal with them. But Indians have none of that: they notice, and they ask. "Is your husband Indian?" And when I say, "No," they follow up. I've vowed not to tell strangers that Liam is adopted--it's nobody's business, and besides, it's pretty obvious. So at some predictable point I'm smiling brightly and asking non-sequitur questions in return. (Note to self: must learn how to tell strangers to f off without actually saying the word.)

Anyway, we're sitting there enjoying the food, and Liam tells me that he can tolerate more spicy food than I because he's Indian. "I like spicy food, too," I tell him.

"But I'm more used to Indian food because I ate it when I was in India," he explains, and though he's told me that a million different times, this time I pointed out the timeline:

"Liam," I say, "you were a baby in India: you didn't eat food--you drank baby formula."

"Acha!" he squeals. (I swear: "Acha!"--which happens to be a speech mannerism you'd hear in Bengal.) "It was INDIAN formula."

I laugh. (In fact, it was a Nestle formula. I've got the empty tin.)

The other day he offered up a new twist on his standard reincarnation narrative--the one in which he begs me to wait for him when I die so we can go into our next family as siblings. "Mom," he calls out from the back seat on the highway. "I don't think I'm going to come back after this life. I think I'll be done."

"Oh," I say. "What do you think will happen then?"

"I'll just be part of God," he says, and pops the thumb in the mouth.
***
Maisie's classroom assignment arrived in the mail yesterday, and the boobs at school put her in the same class as the little "Mean Girls" wannabe who caused such grief for her last year. I've fired off a note to the principal begging for a reassignment, but what are the chances? Alas, I may have to actually interact with Mean Girl's parents, who are an utterly depressing, dysfunctional duo.

It begins.

Capturing the past

2006-07-27T16:16:00.000-05:00

Today I picked up my desktop from the local computer repair shop. Yesterday the repair guy called to tell me it was a lost cause: 60GB of data--most of it not backed up. He said the only option was to wipe the system clean and give me back an empty computer. "Don't touch it," I said. "I'm going to see if I can find someone who can extract the data."

Ten minutes--seriously, ten minutes--later, he calls to say, "Good news! I got it!" Not to slam a success, but if he could solve it in ten minutes, he had no business counseling me ten minutes earlier to let him wipe it. I swear...

That's Uncle Jakob. He was on the hard drive. Time to investigate some sort of backup system; that's twice I've dodged the bullet. Anybody have a good setup--preferably one I can install inside this system? (Desk space is a premium.)

Microhistory

2006-07-22T11:36:00.000-05:00

I have a stash of old letters--one of the what-I-would-rescue-from-fire items--that's disappeared. It's not a small stash--it couldn't be lost in a pile, or behind a book. I can only think I packed it in a box when we were preparing to move, and now the box is tucked away someplace. In that stash of letters is the death certificate I have that would tell me when Jim died. It was the end of July, I think. 1992, I think; I remember what apartment I was standing in when I got the call. But I'm terrible with dates. I can remember maybe five, total. Three birthdays, one first meeting, one adoption day. No deaths. Perhaps that's why--being so unacquainted with dates--anniversaries always seem like events: they surprise me, and then I don't know what they mean, or what to do with them.

My mother can remember her great-grandparents' birthdays. She can remember my father's parents' birthdays. Mark--the other one; not Maisie's Dad; the one who's getting married--his capacity for remembering dates bowls me over. No wonder he grew up in reference editing in the publishing business.

"When were you here last?" the receptionist at the eye doctor's office asked me yesterday. (My eyes have been hurting; I need stronger glasses.) "A few months ago," I said. "February, I think. My eyes started hurting almost immediately after." She looks. "You haven't been in since last March," she corrects me. Off by nearly a year.

It was late July, I'm sure of it. Shereen, my best friend then, was in grad school in Chicago. I don't remember calling her, but she told me later that she didn't know what to say because my message was so raw: "Jim's dead." I was earing $16,500 a year, paying $300 in rent. There was horrible brown paneling on my living room wall in a seedy walkup apartment on Maryland Avenue; I was looking at that paneling when Olya's voice came crackling over the wires from Greece. My sister was visiting; she had her hand over her mouth while I had the phone to my ear. I left to be alone after I hung up.

But I can't remember the date.

***
Teacher assignment letters are to come the last week of July. Liam waits for the mailman, though he doesn't know any of the first-grade teachers. He wants to see who's in his class. Maisie asked me to call her when her letter arrives. "Oh I HOPE I don't get Mrs. M!" she moans into the phone. "She's such a grump." The grocery store has dump displays of crayons and glue sticks up front--$.99 apiece--and Lilian Vernon (which I hear is on the brink of bankruptcy) sent out their Back-to-School catalog this week. GapKids had backpacks on the sidewalk this weekend. Liam's six-year molars cut through this month, as did his two front teeth. Maisie learned how to dive.

Whatever the date, it's a pretty good time.

Stratfor.com

2006-07-22T07:43:00.000-05:00

The ground war has begun. Several Israeli brigades now appear to be operating between the Lebanese border and the Litani River. According to reports, Hezbollah forces are dispersed in multiple bunker complexes and are launching rockets from these and other locations.

Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties.

This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing.

Israel is caught between three strategic imperatives. First, it must end the threat to Israeli cities, which must involve the destruction of Hezbollah's launch capabilities south of the Litani River. Second, it must try to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure, which means it must move into the Bekaa Valley and as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Third, it must do so in such a way that it is not dragged into a long-term, unsustainable occupation against a capable insurgency.

Hezbollah has implemented its strategy by turning southern Lebanon into a military stronghold, consisting of well-designed bunkers that serve both as fire bases and launch facilities for rockets. The militants appear to be armed with anti-tank weapons and probably anti-aircraft weapons, some of which appear to be of American origin, raising the question of how they were acquired. Hezbollah wants to draw Israel into protracted fighting in this area in order to inflict maximum casualties and to change the psychological equation for both military and political reasons.

Israelis historically do not like to fight positional warfare. Their tendency has been to bypass fortified areas, pushing the fight to the rear in order to disrupt logistics, isolate fortifications and wait for capitulation. This has worked in the past. It is not clear that it will work here. The great unknown is the resilience of Hezbollah's fighters. To this point, there is no reason to doubt it. Israel could be fighting the most resilient and well-motivated opposition force in its history. But the truth is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah really knows what performance will be like under pressure. Simply occupying the border-Litani area will not achieve any of Israel's strategic goals. Hezbollah still would be able to use rockets against Israel. And even if, for Hezbollah, this area is lost, its capabilities in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut will remain intact. Therefore, a battle that focuses solely on the south is not an option for Israel, unless the Israelis feel a defeat here will sap Hezbollah's will to resist.

We doubt this to be the case. The key to the campaign is to understand that Hezbollah has made its strategic decisions. It will not be fighting a mobile war. Israel has lost the strategic initiative: It must fight when Hezbollah has chosen and deal with Hezbollah's challenge.

However, given this, Israel does have an operational choice. It can move in a sequential fashion, dealing first with southern Lebanon and then with other issues. It can bypass southern Lebanon and move into the rear areas, returning to southern Lebanon when it is ready. It can attempt to deal with southern Lebanon in detail, while mounting mobile operations in the Bekaa Valley, in the coastal regions and toward south Beirut, or both at the same time.

There are resource and logistical issues involved. Moving simultaneously on all three fronts will put substantial strains on Israel's logistical capability. An encirclement westward on the north side of the Litani, followed by a move toward Beirut while the southern side of the Litani is not secured, poses a serious challenge in re-supply. Moving into the Bekaa means leaving a flank open to the Syrians. We doubt Syria will hit that flank, but then, we don't have to live with the consequences of an intelligence failure. Israel will be sending a lot of force on that line if it chooses that method. Again, since many roads in south Lebanon will not be secure, that limits logistics.Israel is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Hezbollah has created a situation in which Israel must fight the kind of war it likes the least -- attritional, tactical operations against prepared forces -- or go to the war it prefers, mobile operations, with logistical constraints that make these operations more difficult and dangerous. Moreover, if it does this, it increases the time during which Israeli cities remain under threat. Given clear failures in appreciating Hezbollah's capabilities, Israel must take seriously the possibility that Hezbollah has longer-ranged, anti-personnel rockets that it will use while under attack.

Israel has been trying to break the back of Hezbollah resistance in the south through air attack, special operations and probing attacks. This clearly hasn't worked thus far. That does not mean it won't work, as Israel applies more force to the problem and starts to master the architecture of Hezbollah's tactical and operational structure; however, Israel can't count on a rapid resolution of that problem.The Israelis have by now thought the problem through. They don't like operational compromises -- preferring highly focused solutions at the center of gravity of an enemy. Hezbollah has tried to deny Israel a center of gravity and may have succeeded, forcing Israel into a compromise position. Repeated assaults against prepared positions are simply not something the Israelis can do, because they cannot afford casualties. They always have preferred mobile encirclement or attacks at the center of gravity of a defensive position. But at this moment, viewed from the outside, this is not an option.

An extended engagement in southern Lebanon is the least likely path, in our opinion. More likely -- and this is a guess -- is a five-part strategy:

1. Insert airmobile and airborne forces north of the Litani to seal the rear of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Apply air power and engineering forces to reduce the fortifications, and infantry to attack forces not in fortified positions. Bottle them up, and systematically reduce the force with limited exposure to the attackers.

2. Secure roads along the eastern flank for an armored thrust deep into the Bekaa Valley to engage the main Hezbollah force and infrastructure there. This would involve a move from Qiryat Shimona north into the Bekaa, bypassing the Litani to the west, and would probably require sending airmobile and special forces to secure the high ground. It also would leave the right flank exposed to Syria.

3. Use air power and special forces to undermine Hezbollah capabilities in the southern Beirut area. The Israelis would consider a move into this area after roads through southern Lebanon are cleared and Bekaa relatively secured, moving into the area, only if absolutely necessary, on two axes of attack.

4. Having defeated Hezbollah in detail, withdraw under a political settlement shifting defense responsibility to the Lebanese government.

5. Do all of this while the United States is still able to provide top cover against diplomatic initiatives that will create an increasingly difficult international environment.

There can be many variations on this theme, but these elements are inevitable:

1. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without entering the Bekaa Valley, at the very least.
2. At some point, resistance in southern Lebanon must be dealt with, regardless of the cost.
3. Rocket attacks against northern Israel and even Tel Aviv must be accepted while the campaign unfolds.
4. The real challenge will come when Israel tries to withdraw.

No. 4 is the real challenge. Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other.

The other solution is to shift the occupational burden to another power that is motivated to prevent the re-emergence of an anti-Israeli military force -- as that is what Hezbollah has become. The Lebanese government is the only possible alternative, but not a particularly capable one, reflecting the deep rifts in Lebanon. Israel has one other choice, which is to extend the campaign to defeat Syria as well. Israel can do this, but the successor regime to Syrian President Bashar al Assad likely would be much worse for Israel than al Assad has been. Israel can imagine occupying Syria; it can't do it. Syria is too big and the Arabs have learned from the Iraqis how to deal with an occupation. Israel cannot live with a successor to al Assad and it cannot take control of Syria. It will have to live with al Assad. And that means an occupation of Lebanon would always be hostage to Syrian support for insurgents.

Hezbollah has dealt Israel a difficult hand. It has thought through the battle problem as well as the political dimension carefully. Somewhere in this, there has been either an Israeli intelligence failure or a political failure to listen to intelligence. Hezbollah's capabilities have posed a problem for Israel that allowed Hezbollah to start a war at a time and in a way of its choosing. The inquest will come later in Israel. And Hezbollah will likely be shattered regardless of its planning. The correlation of forces does not favor it. But if it forces Israel not only to defeat its main force but also to occupy, Hezbollah will have achieved its goals.

Send questions or comments on this article toanalysis@stratfor.com.

An aside

2006-07-21T18:35:00.000-05:00

Back on Weight Watchers, after six months off--a few months in which, just like that, I gained back 7 lbs. I know--I know--it's a tedious topic; others have worse problems. But nothing has defined my life more persistently and insidiously than the struggle with weight. It's part of almost every story, though I usually leave that part out. It's so knotted up in who and why I am as I am that I can't separate it out--only keep it private, because I'm ashamed of it. It's got all the force and agency of an identity: whenever I try to change it there comes a point when I feel it resist. The harder I push, the more it resists, and so I become even more severe--because I can be willful, too--until I'm seeing stars in the shower and I know it's time to stop.

It's a pathetic thing to write about--humiliating--except that it utterly confounds me that two children wouldn't be counterbalance enough in this struggle. One of these days I really must ferret it out.

Lost that 7 lbs again. Here we go!

Making a human from scratch

2006-07-19T08:10:00.000-05:00

I was on the train the other day, and the car was almost empty except for a mother and her 6-ish-yr-old son. For 45 minutes I listened to the kid torture his mother--hitting her, taunting her, making fun of her--and the mother whined and threatened as if there was nothing else she could do in that moment to shut down the behavior. She actually told the boy she was going to tell his father. How did his father factor in that moment?? In a way, I think she thought his behavior was precocious and cute; she giggled a few times--whined his name in a kind of sing-songy way: not a hint of authority in her. She glanced back at me and shrugged and smiled. I didn't sense embarrassment, so I couldn't return a smile of solidarity. I still feel bad about that, because you don't make a mother's life worse by heaping frowns and sighs on her when her hands are full with a little beast. Generally, though, that rule only applies to mothers with bratty toddlers--not grade schoolers. In my view. If my kids behaved that way they'd be grabbed and spanked, and they know it. Because they know it, a glare is usually sufficient; I've spanked Maisie three times in her life, and Liam twice. But the real problem here wasn't the child, so the spank would be useless.

When I was a teenager there was a flood (or else I was just particularly atuned to it) of TV flicks about kids who'd ratted out their parents who spanked them, and school administrators and law enforcement officials got involved, and there was the threat of removal from the home: spanking as child abuse. And so, as a custodial parent with a non-custodial parent who doesn't "believe" in spanking, any time I've spanked I've also felt enormous fear of consequence. I've told Maisie's Dad whenever I've spanked her; I didn't want to give her the power to tell him and manipulate the moment. And I was aware all the time that it might come up if we were ever renegotiating our agreement, and spin is everything. But mothers--especially single mothers--need to own their authority, however it works for them. I just can't stand bratty kids. They're not cute--not from any distance.

Maisie remembers that I've spanked her but she doesn't remember why I spanked her. I reminded her the other day, when she raised again the question of whether a parent should or shouldn't. (She'd capped off a shitty behavior day by spitting food at me at the table when we had company. Age 4.) "I never did that!" she said, outraged. "I'd never do that!"

So, it worked.

Flash in the sky

2006-07-17T07:13:00.000-05:00

I was working at Oxford Univ. Press 20 years ago. Editorial assistant to the woman who acquired religion, philosophy, and linguistics titles. It was a great place to work; it drew such funny, smart people. I'd get off the train in Grand Central, walk the few blocks down Madison, get out of the elevator and hear laughter.

That morning, there was no laughing; I knew something was up before I'd even left the reception area. By the time I reached my desk I'd heard that TWA 800 had blown up in the skies over Long Island, and that David, who ran the international sales department, had been on board.

I didn't really know him, but knew he had a family, and this kind of death--it was like fiction. The Press was quiet for days. There was a memorial service for David downtown at a little church. I didn't go--don't remember why. My boss did, though. That afternoon friends in the marketing department laughed coffee through their noses recounting how my boss--self-proclaimed expert in all things faith-related--sat in the front pew and stood when nobody else did, and recited clearly and without apology the lines only the priest was to say. It's not coffee-through-the-nose funny, looking back.

Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.

Karamchedu: July 17, 1985

2006-07-16T16:05:00.000-05:00

"On July 16th, 1985, at about 3:30pm, a Kamma boy was washing his buffalo at the steps of the water tank of the Dalits, and letting out the soiled water into the tank. He watered the buffalo, and threw the remains into the tank. A lame Dalit youth objected to the way in which the drinking water was being spoiled. The Kamma boy reacted violently and beat him with the cattle whip. A young Dalit woman who had come there to fetch water protested against this beating. She was also whipped and kicked. Another Dalit intervened, and averted further incidents." (From a fact-finding report completed by a team of lawyers, Univ of Hyderabad professors, and journalists, Sept. 1985, Salaha Publishers.)

According to this report, the next day--21 years ago tomorrow--dozens of Kamma men armed themselves and descended on this small Dalit village in Andhra Pradesh. The Dalits--untouchables--were almost wiped out. Old women were beaten and raped. Axes thrown at children, pregnant women speared, men attacked in their fields. The police were present at the end of it and participated in the beatings--of the Dalits. Today, if you look online, you'll find a bizarre tourism website for Karamchedu. The only mention it makes of the massacre is this:

"In 1985 there was an unfortunate riot in the village, which was exploited by unscrupulous politicians and caused a temporary setback to the reputation and progress of the village. There is a unique co-operation and harmony among all castes and communities. There is mosque, church, Ashram and temples in the village and people lead a healthy and peaceful life."

I don't know how long it takes for a people to shake old ways. Some of the world's most socially progressive thinkers are Indian women, and yet the caste system is alive and well there. Everyone in his and her place.

I admit, thinking of the reality of overcoming old ways of thought, that I have a terribly heavy heart watching the missles flying through the skies over Israel and Lebanon this week. The kids quizzed me about it in the car today, and I tried to explain; they know the story of the Holocaust, and the refugees turned back even from American shores. They know that Israel is a young country--a homeland for Jews--and that its birth required a pretty massive assertion of eminent domain. They know that Jews and Muslims have been quarreling over it ever since. They know that the U.S. has backed Israel. They know that I generally don't.

"So how are they going to sort this out?" Maisie asks. "I don't know," I say. "They'll just keep shooting until somebody runs out of bombs," Liam answers. As good a guess as any.

My guess: Israel will disappear off the map one day in my lifetime.

Saturday

2006-07-15T17:57:00.000-05:00

You can't tell from there, because you aren't here, so you must simply trust me that this is proof of insanity. My father likes to make jam, though he can't eat it (he's diabetic) and none of his friends and relations particularly care for jam. Once a year he drives upstate and buys flats of berries--packed to the roof of the car--and spends days preparing them and boiling them down and scooping them into jars, inevitably during the hottest week of the summer. He marks his calendar--he looks forward to this for months. But in the actual experience of it he is an obsessed, raging beast--overwhelmed, overburdened, as if somebody else came up with the idea and ordered the quantity and chose the day. Today he tried to make it my problem.

I want to take this moment to say thank you to Alex, my long-ago therapist, whose voice still calls out now and then from inside my head.

It's hot here. Now that the pool's gone, we're reduced to slip-and-slides (piece of crap--the hose attachment pulled off in the first five minutes of use) and sprinklers. Should have known: you can't beat a good sprinkler. Or even one that only sprays to the left and has two clogged holes.

He's perfect. Even when he's clawing my feet.

Another post from Baghdad Girl

2006-07-13T14:19:00.000-05:00

It promises to be a long summer. We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere....

Here.

"Is any among you sick?"

2006-07-13T05:33:00.000-05:00

My mother went to Catholic school in Ireland when she was a kid, and my father doesn't like to leave the house, and so it's no surprise that neither has set foot in a church as an adult, except for weddings and funerals. The consequence has not been a dearth of belief, but rather an evolution unchecked by orthodoxy: a people-friendly faith.

Last night, for whatever reason, they decided to betake themselves to a church one town over to be healed. Specifically: Dad has pain in his hip, and Mom in her knees. Dad is a closet believer; all his eye rolling is really just a show--a symptom of his inability to embrace anything if there's anyone in the room to see it. Mom's got a glorious dreamscape of belief--bits and pieces from books and memory. He follows her lead, in private, though she doesn't share his fear of ghosts.

"It's true," he tells me today. "I felt a tingling in my hands when I held them up--like little needles."

Nervousness, I think. Circulation, maybe. How long was he holding those hands in the air?

"Some people were passing out--they actually fell backwards into the arms of the people behind them."

I think I've seen that on TV. The fainters have too, probably. Performance pressure. But hey, I get weepy in church listening to "Holy, Holy, Holy"--it doesn't surprise me that somebody might feel lightheaded when their priest channels the healing power of the Almighty.

"Mom's knees felt better right away--she walked up and down the aisle like a 9-year old."

Mom's pain comes and goes. What I wouldn't give for it to be gone forever.

"I don't think I feel any difference in my hip today, but sometimes it takes a few sessions."

For a miracle, you mean?

"It sounds like it was a really powerful experience," I say to Dad, and leave it at that. My faithful aunt attends that church twice a week--has for twenty years. And she's deaf, which she takes to be God's test of her righteousness. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I gather she hasn't read Deuteronomy.

With love and solidarity

2006-07-12T08:29:00.000-05:00

Intimate utterances

2006-07-09T18:33:00.000-05:00

At my sister's house I unthinkingly called Liam a pet name we use at home. My sister laughed and took up the name, and then her husband did as well, and while it made me feel that they were entering with affection into our intimacy, it made Liam feel that I'd betrayed it. The matter of public and private language--the ways in which those languages connect us to the experience of intimacy--interests me; a word that marks us as special at home diminishes our specialness in other contexts. Have you read Hunger of Memory?

On the way home we stopped at a rest stop and I saw a tough-guy teen dressed in fatigues: loose-fitting pants stuffed at the legs into big boots; an oversized top, cut off at the elbows. Distinct swagger; chin in the air. Pure fashion, not uniform. It's never happened to me before, but I felt a flash of anger; soldiering is an alien life choice to me, but if there's ever a suitable time for civilian adults to dress up as soldiers in a line at Burger King, this isn't it.

No museums in Washington; too hot for tromping. But Liam got to go out on the Chesapeake Bay in a pirate ship--Arr!--and shoot a water cannon at Pirate Pete who came zipping by in a dingy and obligingly back-flipped into the water, nailed. Everybody: Arr, laddies! The kid can cut the air with a plastic cutlass like nobody's business.

I learned this week that old American homes--and maybe those elsewhere, but I don't know--have one door to the outside that's wider than the rest: the coffin door. My folks' house was built in 1780, and the front door is the wide one. The strange thing is that whenever I think of the front entryway, I've imagine it with a coffin passing through--a very specific coffin, brown and simple--and people filing through a certain room at the end of a hall. That's never happened in real life; dead people and sick people have passed through that door on stretchers in my time, but no coffins. No wakes. There's a whole host of fantastical things I keep at the edge of what I know to be true, and among them is the sense that physical places have memories embedded in them. My little piece of woo-woo.

Toodleoo

2006-07-05T10:40:00.000-05:00

Skipping town for a week; taking Liam to the Spy Museum and Air & Space, etc.

Check in with you all when we get home. Or see you there, eyeing the Enola Gay.

Food chain

2006-07-04T08:12:00.000-05:00

My Uncle Tom is a jewel on the earth. His recognition will have to come in heaven; life has been hard on him. He married a bitch--no way around it--who got herself three utterly useless PhDs on his income as a builder, and now--what, work??--she beats him over the head with her intellectual superiority, and betakes herself to exotic locales several times a year on income he earned with his hands. Their four kids could have gone either way--jewels or bitches; you never know. Turns out they went nowhere, raised by an abusive mother and a beaten-down father. But this isn't about them.

Tish is Tom's wife's niece. Privileged girl from Ireland who spends half the year in Nepal and the other half in Fairfield County, CT, selling at breathtaking prices unimpressive jewelry she brings from Nepal. Despite the disparity between the quality of the jewelry and the price she attaches to it, she cleans up because she also has a whole song-and-dance about the poor Nepalese children--the waifs she gives her life to. She's got the sympathetic suffering carved into her face, and these rich, stay-at-home women from Greenwich buy it. (You'll have to excuse me: the international adoption scene has soured me on Westerners who collect cash in the name of poor people in under-developed countries.) Buy a ring for the poor CHILDREN, won't you? They're hungry. In my view she's got herself a smooth deal: on the money she makes here, she can live like a queen in Nepal.

Tish has decided to become a mother. Not adopting one of those needy orphans she's got on her poster: she's pregnant. And registered. You name the boutique and she's got her name on a list there. My mother and I chose the most pedestrian place--Babies R Us--yesterday, and pulled the registry from the kiosk just inside the door.

$120 breast pump.
$249 jogging stroller.

"She's taking these things to Nepal?" I ask my mother. I scan the list--expensive baby clothes--ridiculous things. Why isn't she buying clothes in Nepal? I'm not spending more than $50.

For $49.50 I could buy the Sherpa Baby Bundler. No kidding. (Made in India--land of child labor. I'm just saying.)

We tossed the registry list. Bought her things we knew she'd need--things she hadn't put on the list. Registries bother me in the best of circumstances--what chutzpah--but I recognize it's something people do these days. And I had to buy her something; I had to, for Uncle Tom.

But there's no way I'm filling orders from this one.

Trained eyes

2006-07-03T09:35:00.000-05:00

I heard a piece on NPR about a woman who was born cross-eyed, had a corrective surgery at age 2, and lived to adulthood with reasonably straight eyes--but monocular vision. (Same with me.) She knew that she had a dominant eye--that when she looked at something she was looking with that one eye, and that a vague body of peripheral information was coming in through the non-dominant eye. She seemed not to know that people born with perfectly straight eyes see differently: they're able to perceive depth in spatial relationships. For her--for me--there is no difference between the view outside the window and a photo in a book.

Conventional wisdom had it that if a baby's eyes are not corrected before age two, the brain sets in a certain way, and even if the eyes are straightened later on, the individual will not see stereoscopically (as they call it).

Well, this woman can see stereoscopically now. I got goosebumps listening to her account. She was given a simple exercise to train her eyes to work together, and one day she sat in her car and noticed that the steering wheel seemed to be floating in its own space--not locked against the dashboard, flat and static. Her description of her first snowfall with stereoscopic sight--ach.

Oliver Sacks has written about it in the New Yorker; haven't looked for it yet, but will.

Traveling

2006-07-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

My father returned from three weeks in Norway, carting his most precious loot in his carry-on: a chocolate cake from my cousin's wife and 217 photos on the digital camera. I picked him up at Newark--a 90-minute drive from here--and fretted the entire time I was driving that I'd be late. Not that it would kill him to wait 20 minutes for me, but Dad notices when things aren't perfect, and he neither forgets perceived slights nor stays tuned in long enough to hear explanations. And though I got there with time to kill, and stood with a big, welcome-home grin outside of the customs door, he spent the walk from that door to the car poking at me. Wasn't I wearing the same clothes when I'd dropped him off? Had I worn the same clothes for three weeks? (Funny, Dad.) Why hadn't I brought Mom with me? (Because she was minding the kids. (Actually, she didn't want to come. No need to say it.)) Why hadn't I gotten a cart for his luggage? (Because the luggage area is on another level.) The car was parked too far away. I'd parked in the wrong lot. (I hadn't.) How much longer do we have to walk? ("Do you want to wait here and I'll go get the car?" I asked, and he barked, because though walking's hard for him, admitting it is harder.) I finally stopped walking and said, "Stop it. You haven't said a nice thing to me since you walked out that door." He laughed--there goes Inger again being too sensitive, see--but he stopped.

It's his sarcasm that kills me; the man is a master at keeping his distance. I can't remember an authentic emotional moment between us, not in 42 years. Well, once: when he was in the hospital and needed my help. He hasn't belittled that. He wouldn't; it was too painful.

My father loves my mother. More than his kids. His kids, I think--the five of them he participated in creating--are dear to him in inverse proportion to the degree to which they hinder his access to her. I see it clearly as an adult: see clearly how desperately he needs his connection to her, and how jealous he is of her daily calls from my youngest sister. (I see, too, how his need wears on her. Wears her threadbare.)

As a child, all I knew was that he would look away when I would walk into the kitchen--that his mouth would twist into something like a sneer of distaste. "He doesn't like me," I'd whisper to my mother sometimes. "Of course he likes you," she'd laugh back. But I knew he didn't. Maybe I wasn't thin enough--he told me constantly that I was too fat--or maybe I was too brainy; he admitted to me once that he thought I was educating myself beyond my ability to communicate with the family. In time I learned not to look at him when I'd walk into the room--not to give him the chance to turn away. Nor the chance to light up. But he never did light up--not until he was lying in that hospital bed and I'd walk into the room. And even then, his first words were, "Where's Mom? When is she coming?" "Soon. She's coming soon." (She didn't want to come.)

He asks me for help with his computer and the camera. He wants to show me the 217 photos--one by one, slowly, so he can relive the moment. I listen; they're nice photos. There's one of him with his three surviving brothers. (Three out of ten. Countdown.) There's one of a leaky wooden rowboat that he rowed out to the middle of a lake every other day, casting nets for fish with his brother. "I was so happy in that boat," he said, and I was so startled I turned and looked at him, but said nothing because I knew he'd clam up. "I put my hand on my brother's shoulder so I wouldn't fall getting into it," he told me. "I sat on the green bench, and he sat on the yellow one."

He asked me to make that photo his desktop wallpaper. He just sits and stares at it. "That was a great little boat."

Baltimore

2006-07-01T09:16:00.000-05:00

Down and back in the same day, and 4 hours with Maisie in between--enough to give a chick the kind of hangover you get with no alcohol.

Liam and I met Maisie's Dad and his girlfriend and their neighbors at the performance center. We'd stopped to pick up flowers and a bag stuffed with candy--flowers wilt, after all--and I couldn't find Maisie before the show; the organizers had anticipated unruly, distracting parents. So we stood in the lobby, and Maisie's Dad shepherded Liam around proudly as he never does in private, Mr. Social Progressive toting around the cute brown kid. Pissed me off, because Liam deserves the real deal, and wants it desperately from Maisie's Dad. Girlfriend introduced me to the neighbors--lovely people, older and literary--saying, "This is Maisie's mom," and all the eyes lit up--tasty eye gossip: the ex-and the girlfriend, the parsing and owning of little moments. And so when Maisie's Dad walked back to us with Liam and said to Girlfriend, "You look beautiful today," I plugged it into the mental map of How We Play Out to onlookers. These scenes exhaust me; I feel awkward breathing.

And then, blessedly, the lights went down and the kids climbed onto the stage, and Maisie spotted us and smiled, and I wondered if she was exploding inside like I remember doing when I spotted my own mother after having been away; all I wanted was to feel the knit balls of her Irish sweater against my cheek--to breathe in that wool, that scent of security. But Maisie's not that way; she keeps herself in check until later, in private, when she'll burst out with, "Mommy!" She performed perfectly as the Little Prince, and later sang in a quiet group tune that reduced me to tears; nothing sweeter than the warbly sounds of children's voices.

Afterwards we went out for Chinese food, and Maisie's Dad started to order for her--ribs and an egg roll. "Is that what you want?" I asked her. "No," she said, "I want garlic chicken and a spring roll," which she always orders when she's with me. So I ordered it for her, canceling the ribs and egg roll. "But you always want ribs here," her Dad said. "I just feel like something else today," she said, and he shrugged and got quiet, as if this was an act of betrayal. He tends to guilt her; he does it right in front of me, then denies later that's what he was doing. She looked utterly miserable, and I wondered if she even really liked garlic chicken and spring rolls, or if that was just the Mom-landscape order. Couldn't help but think of that Julia Roberts flick about the bride who didn't even know what kind of eggs she liked because she professed to like whatever her latest beau liked. Maisie mouthed, "Can't I come home?" and I mouthed back, "One more week, honey," and she turned and looked out the window, blinking fast. We said goodbye and she had The Smile locked in--I see her do it with her Dad when she's saying goodbye, and then she sobs when he's gone.

I can't make her life simpler. I just wish, given that, I could give her the courage to say who she is instead of pausing to wonder what the adults in front of her would prefer she be. (I think I was, oh, 35 before I summoned that kind of courage myself.) She worries constantly--even about choosing Chinese over Italian. "What would YOU like?" she kept asking me, then her Dad, then me again. "I'd like what YOU'd like," I kept saying, but she was near tears, so I chose the Chinese, thinking it was what she really wanted. Who knows? "The feelings of adults are not your responsibility," I keep telling her at home, watching her struggle with this. "Your feelings are important, and it's your job to pay attention to them. Grownups have to take care of their own feelings." She nods.

Miss the kid dreadfully.

Another rainy day

2006-06-28T17:10:00.000-05:00

Keeneye has chosen Liam. Liam gets up to get some juice, and Keeneye drops everything and trots after him. Liam sleeps on the couch, and Keeneye sleeps on his chest. Liam walks and the cat walks between his legs, oblivious to the peril. Liam writes a letter and Keeneye's chewing on the end of his pencil. "He thinks you're his Mommy," I say. "His Daddy," Liam corrects, then reminds me, "Boy seahorses can make babies, you know." I didn't know, actually.

Maisie, meanwhile, is in week two of an acting camp down with her Dad. They're putting on some musical rendition of The Little Prince. Maisie is the Little Prince--a function, no doubt, of the fact that her Dad's well-known down there. But fine. Good for her. Liam and I will drive down tomorrow to see her performance, then kiss her goodbye and leave again; she's not due to come home for another week (and then leaves for the second three weeks five days later.) She'll cry when we leave. Liam will sob. I wouldn't go except that she's begged me to. But I hate summer. I count the days--actually cross them out on a calendar, one by one. Can't wait for school to begin.

My credit card company and my student loan company have sent me notices in the last few weeks that their secure files of customer SS#s and associated ID have been compromised. A few years ago, it was a former employer that sent the notice--though they were nice enough to pay for me to keep tabs with the credit bureaus for a year. No such niceness from the credit card company or the student loan company. Which makes my paltry little attempts here to put the horse back in the barn a bit amusing. (Rose, even if the archives are hidden, they still pop up in Google search. So I think you either remove them or live with it.)

The painting is by Munch, by the way. Who knew a Norwegian could do peaceful? No doubt she's privately tortured. "Inger en la playa," it's called. Our little secret.

Site-seeing

2006-06-27T22:23:00.000-05:00

This is the Bone Yard--not, as you might think, the final resting place of dead aircraft, but in fact the resting place of ALL military aircraft capable of being returned to flying condition if the need ever arises. It's in the desert near Tucson. You can go there and buy a ticket to tour the place. When you do, consider two things:

1: The 3rd largest Air Force in the world is sitting on the ground here.
2: It's the only unit in the U.S. Air Force that actually makes a profit.

Antiseptic

2006-06-24T22:05:00.000-05:00

I've become increasingly paranoid about having been so free with identifying info here--especially since my employer and I are at such political and philosophical odds. May introduced me to the sitemap, and now I see anyone logged on in the DC vicinity and my throat gets tight.

So I've saved the archives and am deleting them here. Does anybody know how to do that without going post by post? (God, I HAVE gone on...)

And now I need to come up with a name that's not Inger. I guess, for search purposes, I n g e r would work, right? I guess the photo should go. Uch, it's depressing; I like it the way it is...

Roots

2006-06-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

In Liam's end-of-year box I found an art project he'd made but didn't show me: a little booklet of 6 things he loves, with little illustrations throughout. In order, his 6 things: Mommy, Me, Cameron, My Teacher, Elephants, Makhan.

My mother was in his class that day, picking the stuff up; I was down south at work. "I don't know who Makhan is," the teacher said. "Probably a character from Cartoon Network," my mother said, not recognizing the name since Liam had spelled it phonetically: Mukin.

Makhan, of course, is Liam's biological father. Or so we think; I know I've written before about this journey, and how the people listed on Liam's relinquishment document as his birth family have since firmly denied being his birth family. The physical resemblance is striking, though, so I tend to think they're lying; it's a point of some shame to give up a child, here or there. But in the meantime--not knowing for certain--I've been walking a thin line with Liam, who draws pictures for Makhan and Aparna, and writes them letters, and hands them to me to be mailed. I've not mailed them.

(Is it better to have something that could be false packed away--to build on that block as if it were solid, even if you might discover down the road that what you thought was true was not? Or is it better to know what you don't know, even if it means you have a hole where others have something, right there on the foundation level of a human's construction?)

Yesterday Liam asked me, not for the first time, when we could go and visit Makhan and Aparna and their other kids. He misses them, he tells me. I don't know why our deepest conversations take place through the rearview mirror--why we're never looking each other in the eye--but it felt like the right moment to tell him why we can't go and visit them.

I can't remember the words--I stumbled--but I told him that although Makhan and Aparna are on a document that says they're his birth family, they've denied it when we ask them. I told him that often people deny things when they're afraid--and that they don't know us, don't know if they can trust us. So we'll just stay in touch with them and see if they can begin to feel comfortable enough to tell us what happened.

He was crying by then. "So they might not be my family? So I don't have a father?" Oh God, I'm fucking everything up--I know I am. "Everybody has a father," I told him. "We just don't know for sure that Makhan is yours. But I think he is."

This morning he asked me to clarify: why did I think Makhan was his father. I pulled out the fat binder of court documents--stuff he's never seen. I showed him the paper where some man and some woman had identified themselves as Makhan and Aparna, and listed the address of the Makhan and Aparna we'd been speaking to. I showed him the photos of Makhan and their other kids; we looked at how their noses curve the same way, their eyebrows are identical, the shape of the chin--the hairline--the lips: identical. "I think he's the one," Liam said. "Me too," I said. "But we won't know for sure until we get more information."

Then I showed him the document with his name and my name--the document that the High Court issued granting me guardianship. "And this is the paper that says you and I are family forever," I told him. He read what he could. Fingered the seal. "If we want to be," he said. "No," I said, "whether we want to be or not: we're family, forever." "OK," he said, then hopped down and wandered off.

If you talk to adult adoptees, they tend to tell you that they wish their adoptive parents had played it straight with them: that a painful truth is better than an easy lie. But it's not that simple, is it? Could be the easy lies got them to adulthood intact, able to reconstruct, to process. This issue confuses me like no other.

LATER: God, this sounds horrible. I can't tell whether I see it more clearly when I write it out--and so can say easily that I should have said nothing to him--or if the account isn't right. It doesn't reflect months of his little comments--his eagerness to see them, his assumptions about our visits there, his questions about calling them, about sending birthday cards, about inviting his siblings to come to school here because the schools here are so good. He's only six, but would it be better to keep silently nodding and then tell him when he's ten? Or 14? At which point I'll have omitted key information for his entire childhood?

On fitting in

2006-06-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

I worked with a woman once who was a caver. All of about 80 lbs wet--she could slip her body through a wire coat hanger without bending it. And so when a (typically) untrained adventurer ended up trapped or lost in a cave, and the regional alerts would go out at 2am through local speleological clubs, she'd call in sick, pack her gear, and head out; she was often the smallest trained rescuer available--the only one who could fit through the tiniest, darkest openings 14 miles into the earth. And so, though she was awkward above ground--stared at your shoulder when she talked, blinked her eyes furiously, dressed in knee socks and plaid skirts like a middle schooler, was never part of our cool club, never part of our boozy lunch hours, never included in author presentations--I admired her.

One day, shortly after I'd bought my very first new car, I drove her into DC for a meeting, and on the way back, stopped at a light on Connecticut Ave. A guy in a jaguar came screeching up behind us and slammed into the car in the lane next to me. Then he backed up, revved, and slammed into him again. Then got out of his car and stumbled across the road and into the park. Crazed with something, or a thief. I was so relieved my new car hadn't gotten slammed, but beyond that I was fine. My colleague, though, was balled up in the passenger seat, blinking back tears. Her frailty always surprised me; her vulnerability. I always felt I needed to protect her, though in another context she was the only one who could be a hero.

Anyway, I thought of her this morning when I read about the plan to retrieve the body of James Mitchell, who got himself corked into a vertical passage with icy water pouring down on his head. And died. And couldn't be pulled back up, and so the cave was sealed and a grave marker was erected.

Youch

2006-06-22T16:11:00.000-05:00

Poor Maisie. Took a thumb in the eye at summer camp, and she and her Dad just called wondering what to do. I sent them to the ER, since it's hard to brush it off when I can't see it. Her white is red, he says. I think he's more traumatized than she is. Of course, she doesn't have to look at it. Nothing she hates more than eyedrops. Needles, maybe--but not by much.

It's good for them to do crisis together. I hate not being there, though.

Madness

2006-06-20T10:38:00.000-05:00

They must return, a bit, to the way they were when their kids were newborns: no sleeping--certainly no restful sleep. Soldiers' mothers. Can you imagine, in a psychic exercise, connecting with every one of them right now? All that sleeplessness. My heart hurts. Yesterday I read the names of the two soldiers who were kidnapped and turned up dead in Yusufiya; 23 and 25, Tommy and Kristian. You knew they were dead before it was reported. You know what their bodies must have looked like in the end. You know what kind of deaths those must have been. I'm sick about it.

And my mother says, "They're mad over there--those religious factions. Madmen." Of course, we invaded their country. Whatever side you take, somebody invades your country and you're going to fight as dirty as you need to. Maybe not you--maybe not me. But somebody's going to fight back, and fight dirty. Nobody's surprised--not least of all soldiers. But 23. My God. Who knows anything at 23?

This isn't the moment to say that we shouldn't have put them in harm's way--that THIS wasn't the time or the place. But you've got to wonder how it would've played out had the rich white guys been deploying troops that included their own children.

If it was my boy being called up, I'd shoot him in the leg before I'd have watched him go to Iraq.

On not keeping up with the neighbors

2006-06-17T16:46:00.000-05:00

My neighbor is the president of a local animal organization that advocates spaying and neutering of pets. She puts more time into rescuing strays than I'd ever imagine doing for an unpaid position, and so you can imagine the principle at work. She's a believer.

I am not a believer. I've loved any pets I've ever had, and been sad when they've left or died. But they were pets. The cats all played outside. They ate off-the-shelf pet food--none of that gourmet or organic stuff. It just wouldn't occur to me to spend the money. When Sidney got into a fight and I had to make a choice between spending $1,500 on eye surgery that would fix him or $150 on medicine that might, I chose the medicine. When I housesat for the neighbor I learned that she gives her cats bottled water. Ferchristssake.

The new cat is named Keeneye. A good name, with history in our family. There was a certain dog, back in my youth. We bought Keeneye at a pet shop down the street--a pet shop we went into to buy fish, because fish were about all I had the energy to take on. But we had to pass the kittens to get to the fish, and there was Keeneye, being squooshed into a corner by two zippy orange furballs, and the kids asked to hold him just to "give him some air," and that was the end of the fish.

The thing is, I know that this particular store takes terrible care of its animals. I know because the neighbor has told me. She'd told me once before never to buy a pet there, but to go instead to one of the shelters. Which is a good idea. And had I planned on buying a cat that day, I'd have gone to the shelter. But that day I was looking for fish, and Keeneye was sitting in the path, being uniquely kittenish. And p.s., it's none of her fricking business.

Nevertheless, I swore the kids to secrecy. Yes--I rehearsed them in a lie I intended to tell the neighbor: that we saw a sign for kittens in the next town over and we decided to bring one home. Horrible--rehearsing my kids to lie. But that's what I did--that's how much I dread having to deal with the neighbor, who still looks at me with That Look because, after all, had I not allowed Sidney outdoors he'd still be here, wouldn't he? Which only works because, of course, I feel such guilt about that. But not enough guilt to offset my distaste for litter boxes. (Except for kittens, who can't go outside. Yet.)

The kids ran down to the neighbor's house this afternoon, invited down for some birthday cake; her son turns 9 today. "Don't mention the cat," I called to them when they headed out. Five minutes later they're back and the neighbor's in tow. They told--the whole truth, including the purchase source. Could be they even told her that I'd rehearsed them in a lie. (When will I learn?) I know before anyone says a word: her mouth is all tight, and she talks to me about the care of kittens like I'm an imbecile. "Keep him warm. He's shaking--have you fed him today? Are you using organic litter? He'll get sick from the stuff you get at the grocery store. How old did they tell you he was? He looks too young to be adopted."

"I didn't adopt him. I bought him," I said, wondering silently about the return policy. And then, after she left, I barked at Maisie for spilling the beans. Nice, huh?

Not my shining hour.

Magical Thinking

2006-06-11T08:06:00.000-05:00

I read Joan Didion's book last night. I hadn't before--though loss is a topic that interests me--because I haven't read any of her other books--nor her husband's--and it felt intrusive to pore over her life right now. STB and Daria made me take notice, though; I'll read more--I'll read her backwards. And it's the third copy of this book I've bought; I gave the other two as gifts. Intention tips the scales.

Daria wrote to her, c/o Knopf, and Didion wrote back. I won't write to her, but it's impossible not to want to. The living tend to remember the best about the dead--not the annoying stuff, not the quarrels--and her life with Dunne, in her rememberances, is so alien and so fantastic to me. So alluring. 40 years together because they wanted to be together: working from home--together constantly. 40 years of family photos, of important moments and incidentals. 40 years of shared habit and process. She was extremely lucky, I think, even given the pain and dislocation now; how many of us get that kind of connection with another human being--even for a year, much less our entire adult lives?

The book is a constant comparison between luck and loss: between rich memory and barren landscape. Everything reminds her of something else; she guards against doing things or going places that will lead her to memories that hurt, but it's impossible: life is referential. You know she must have an enormous circle of friends--people who watch out for her, who call her and take her places to keep her engaged, etc. But it's the few who are closest--the one, maybe--who can help. When you lose the intimate, who in the throng can reach you?

That will never happen to me. I couldn't help but think it, the entire time I was reading. My kids, my mother, my older sister--those are my inner circle, each with built-in limitations in terms of connection. Granted, I'm in a certain mood this week. (Also--defense or fact--I'm a very independent person. I don't know what kind of person Didion is.) But just as I could have gone to med school when I was accepted (instead I had a child on my own), you can't help but look back on choices that brought you to the life you have, and wonder what you'd have been had you gone the other way. I've been thinking--entirely predictably--about a man who ran a writing program at a university that used to employ me, and how he'd sing me love songs and wait on my stoop with dinner, and offered me a scholarship to quit work and take the writing seminar program, and how I kept him at a distance because his enthusiasm made me wary; what kind of white guy waits for me on a stoop in downtown Baltimore? (I still think there was a little bit of crazy in him. But you know what I mean: people love us, we get suspicious. "What's YOUR problem?")

I read earlier in the week about a woman in the U.K. who lives out of her car, showers occasionally at a local hospital, and, unaccountably, blogs. Found her blog, and read enough--read until her unwillingness to change her life irritated me.