@ Home in the World

For Susan

Susan Niebur; astrophysicist, blogger, mom, lived with Inflammatory Breast Cancer and metastasis for five years. She passed away Monday, leaving her husband, two small sons, and a legion of inspired women.

I never did get the chance to meet her in person. She left a comment on this blog a couple of years ago and opened my eyes to a whole new world. At the time I don't think her writing was all that focused on cancer, but on the challenges of being a woman in planetary science and a mother of two small boys.

I've never liked that topics such as education and women's health get turned into political arguments because it threatens to trivialize the importance of the lives affected by those arguments. Two years ago, Susan wrote eloquently about the importance of action over awareness, and followed up with a list of actions to take and organizations supporting those actions. Interesting to note that there are no pink ribbons among them.

In the last post on her blog, Toddler Planet, her husband wrote:

In lieu of flowers, please consider furthering Susan’s legacy through a contribution to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or please choose to make a difference somewhere, anywhere, to anyone.

Susan made a difference to me and to many women. Sometimes that's the most important thing we can do in any lifetime.

That House

"This is where he shot himself," my friend said in a low voice. "This is where he died."

We were standing in my playroom full of dollhouses and Tonka trucks. I also thought of it as the schoolroom thanks to the presence of a large double students' desk;  where a pupil might scratch a quill over a sheet of foolscap under the watchful eye of a tutor or governess. The room had once been someone's study. The bare wood floors and the rustic cabinets along the wall lent an air of masculinity that was different from the rest of the large, stone, English-style house. The cabinets held our old school books, games and some dress-up dolls with their clothes, but I could see they were tall enough to have held hunting rifles. 

My friend had grown up in the area. I met her when I spotted her and her sister cimbing around on the rocks in front of the house. She was in a position to have heard rumors about the previous owners.

I do not know why I never asked my mother about that story. Maybe I did, and she dismissed it as my usual histrionics - the word she used often when I was upset about something.

My mother first saw the house from the Yacht Club across the harbor. We had stopped to use the bathroom. She didn't notice it until she was coming back down the dock to my uncle's boat. "Tom," she said to my father, "that's what I want for my birthday."

Local realtors dismissed them for years. "That house will never go on the market. It will never be for sale. Let's look for something else." 

And then, very suddenly, it was. For a song.

The house was our summer home for a few years until my father died and we moved into it full-time. My mother wanted to get out of New Jersey and closer to her family in Connecticut where she could start her antique business. It was the kind of house dramatic British novels took place in. Think Atonement.

When I started going to the local High School, the rare friends I brought home would inevitably say, as we rounded the bend in the drive "You live in that house?" One friend in particular drove me crazy looking for secret passageways. We never found any, but the house was full of places to hide from the reality of living there.

Fierce winter storms remind me of nights in that house. It was surrounded on three sides by water and the wind raged constantly after dark. It sounded of anger and despair outside  - and in.

Our lives in that house were not the stuff of novels. Nothing dramatic happened  while we were there, but it was not a happy place to live. A house like that should have been teeming with guests to put the beach and the rooms and my mother's collections of dinnerware to good use. After my father died, my mother's parents started declining and their eventual deaths led to a split in the family my mother had moved there to be close to. Terrified of losing control of her kids, she sought to keep our world as small as possible, even though, as adolescents, our instinct was to pursue broadened horizons.

It would have been far more prudent to sell the house. Heating and upkeep were ungodly expensive, and my mother was never able to renovate the kitchen the way she and my father had planned. She was trying to run a business, always complaining about the cost of things like phone calls, but it was as if the house was some kind of fortress and to leave it would have been a humiliating defeat.

She finally did sell it when we were grown and moved away. Helping her clean out the house was probably the most emotionally difficult thing I have ever done. I wound up in charge of operations because my mother, normally in control of every detail, was wandering around in small circles, not knowing what to do first. 

I found pictures I had never seen of my parents' wedding. I found photos of my mother's first child who died before I was born. I found an enormous collection of portraits of me as a baby - because she was afraid she might lose me too. There were never any personal photos hung in the house. All of the portraits on the walls were of long-dead people we were not related to posing in wicker chairs.  I found diaries I had written for the years that I lived there, and disposed of them before I got all the way through them. Aside from the embarrassing teenaged crushes and unrealistic hopes for my future, it was all so sad.

I do have a few happy memories of that house - writing little skits for my cousins to act out on their holiday visits (again, think Atonement); the construction crews that filled the house when my father was having it renovated;  learning to slide down the enormous bannister; getting married there surrounded by the friends I had managed to collect and the new, much happier family I was marrying into, the mournful sound of seagulls in the gray early morning.

It looks like the kind of house that gets passed down through the generations, but there's a new family living there now. They've added a tennis court and restored the pool. I'm sure they've renovated the kitchen and a dozen other things my father never finished.  I'll never know the answer to this of course, but I do wonder if there lives there are happy.

Artifactual: A New Project

What have you held onto?

I live not far from a bunch of antique dealers and there's one guy that has two different outlets on the same stretch of road. I always find it interesting because the main shop has a lot of things from the WWII era and older, plus a lot of old books and records, it reminds me of my grandparents on my mother's side. The annex has more of the stuff that is newer, 50s and 60s mostly. It is far more kitchy and it reminds me of my grandparents on my father's side. Every time I go into one of the shops there are always things that I think must have belonged to someone interesting. People around here live to be really old (lots in their 90s) and when you glance at the obits, you get this incredible sense of the history they must have lived through, and you wonder how much of their story is recorded anywhere and what, if anything they have left behind.

When my mom had her antique shop there was always someone who would come through and say "Oh I remember this stuff, what a shame we threw it all away!" My mother used to hate hearing that, and yet I have very little that belonged to my grandparents on either side. Most of it got pitched including a dress I would have loved to still have.

If we have learned anything from shows like Antiques Roadshow, American Pickers, and even Pawn Stars, it's that objects can have stories of their own. Growing up I loved going to antique shows and shops, and wondering what those stories might be. I was often drawn to postcards and diaries that at least gave me glimpses of the people who held them.

Less and less of our communication and record-keeping is handwritten these days. It is all digital - digital photos, typed blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts; digital music. I'm reminded of that old Crane's Stationery ad that appeared on the back of the New York Times Magazine: "When all is said and done, no one will keep your emails tied up in a ribbon under the bed." I have boxes of letters from friends up in the attic, but I probably have not sent or received a letter in over a decade.  I got to thinking about how we preserve the things that are important to us and communicate those stories to the next generation. When so much of what we make is disposable; when so many blogs and books are dedicated to getting organized and throwing stuff out - what about the stuff we keep?  

So I am starting a new project - one that I hope will be populated largely by outside contributors. I am hoping that people will contribute pictures and stories of the things they value, and in the process doument a little more of the history that they share. I tend to think of these objects as antiques, but they don't have to be. Heck, I have an entire collection of concert tickets that I've kept because they represent who I was at a specific period in time.

The Artifactual site will be officially launching in January. If you have something to share, whether it is a family heirloom, or something you have kept for sentimental reasons, please contact me with a photo and description at  LATELIERDELISSE  AT YAHOO DOT COM.

I'm looking forward to your stories.

In case of the Rapture

So do you think it's all the social media that's causing us to pay more attention to some lunatic's claim of the End of the World than usual? I mean, someone comes along and predicts this sort of thing every few years and usually it gets mentioned in a few jokes and we all move on.

This thing has taken on a life of its own like no other prediction, except the one those Heaven's Gate people were involved in - and that was after the fact!

I wonder what motivates these people in their "certainty." I've read some articles suggesting that people put together emergency kits for those left behind (a truly Christian thing to do, I suppose). There are billboards and buses all over the country announcing this stuff. There's a Facebook page dedicated to a post-Rapture looting party. People are talking about the earthquakes and the floods, and the widlfires, and the Terminator. Of course none of that would have anything to do with global warming - except the Terminator and that's just too hot to touch.

It seems to be surpassing even Millenial whackjobbery.

Of course, back then, I knew people who bought guns to protect themselves from Millenial Mayhem. You don't hear about that so much now, but I suspect it's because the people who really believe that a gun would be helpful in an Armageddon situation, think they are going to be the ones who get taken.

I maintain that if you think you are good enough to be taken in the Rapture, you probably won't be.

I'm not planning on it.

Fundy-lit's fascinate me. All signs and no science.

I wasn't brought up with any of this. Catholics don't really talk about the End Times, and I'm not sure the book of Revelations is even in the Catholic Bible (there's a lot of stuff that's not in the Catholic Bible that other Bibles kept), but it's been a while since I've really looked at one of those.

There was a period of time when I studied the fundamentalists, to see if I could better understand what made them tick. This was also a period of perhaps the deepest unhappiness in my adult life. Coincidence? Well, maybe.

I came to the conclusion that the very religious are looking for a set of rules for living, one that might absolve them of responsibility for things that don't make sense. Complexity challenges them so the more black and white they can make the world around them, the better they can function. And if it defies logic? Well, God works in mysterious ways.

I'll admit that I envy people who can live their lives that way, who can accept aphorisms, Scripture, and inspirational soundbites as guideposts for living. I call it the Forest Gumping of America, and I feel that it's gotten worse in the last couple of decades, but that could just be my age and general crankiness about the subject.

Do you remember the Left Behind Series? It was this dramatic story of the End Times that never seemed to end and sold millions of copies in WalMarts all across America. I actually read one of those books. I bought it in an airport in Nebraska, where the was no chance of running into anyone I knew, and I read it all the way home. Curiously, the main characters are in an airplane when the Rapture occurs and one of them has to land it with half the passengers and crew missing. Just what you want to read when you are flying home. Here's the thing about those books - they are written at a third grade reading level. The characters were one-dimensional, story was simplistic, the dialogue was terrible, but the action drew you all the way in. Kind of like an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, now that Ithink about it.

The fact that the series got so much airtime, even on NPR, and no one mentioned how bad the writing was, spoke volumes about what we are dealing with in terms of anti-intellectualism.

Societal fringes both attract and repulse me. I have spent way too much time thinking about them. What makes people join an anti-government militia in Montana (answer: usually a Democratic President)? What makes people think that government should get entirely out of the education business? How do people become convinced there is evidence of aliens being hidden at Area 51? Why do people insist on Creationism when it defies all logic and available science? Why does the birther movement have so much traction? And while we're at it - what the hell was Donald Trump thinking?

You know there's so much information out there, and yet it doesn't seem to be making people any smarter. In fact just the opposite. People are free to take refuge under any form of foil-hat publishing outlet that they find fits their views. No critical thinking needed. It reminds me of that scene in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" where Mike Meyers confronts his beleaguered mother about getting her news strictly from the supermarket tabloids.

 

"Mom, why do you refer to Weekly World News...as 'the paper?'
The paper contains facts."

   
"This paper contains facts.  And this paper has the eighth-highest
circulation in the whole wide world. Plenty of facts.
'Pregnant Man Gives Birth.' That's a fact."

 

Wait, wasn't that also in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie?

This thing has taken on a life of its own like no other prediction, except the one those Heaven's Gate people were involved in - and that was after the fact!

I wonder what motivates these people in their "certainty." I've read some articles suggesting that people put together emergency kits for those left behind (a truly Christian thing to do, I suppose). There are billboards and buses all over the country announcing this stuff.

Fundy-lit's fascinate me. All signs and no science. 

Sing along with Vlad

I can't help it, I want to like Vladimir Putin.

The United States might have a problem with his particular form of democracy, if you can even still call it that, but there's no denying that he restored some much-needed order to Russia after the disastrous free-for-all of Boris Yeltsin.

For one thing, he significantly straightened out the international adoption system so that prospective parents encountered less bribery, and more information in the process.

He used the Russian court system to send Mikhail Khordokovsky to prison for opposing him politically. That particular celebrity show trial was going on when we were there to get Pumpkin. After six years in Siberia, they brought him back to face new charges designed to keep him out of the political arena.

Putin has, shall we say, streamlined elections so that citizens now vote for a whole slate of "approved candidates."

But he is rumored to have a single personal photograph on his desk - that of himself taken with children from a St. Petersburg orphange.

He is said to remain the real power behind current President Dmitry Medvedev.

He has Teddy Roosevelt-like enthusiams for athletics, and is frequently photographed bare-chested or on horseback, sometimes both.

And then there's stuff like this:

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On the one hand, an iron-fisted Bond villain, on the other, a candidate for "most interesting man in the world.

Vehiculus, the parking god.

In college, I had a friend who was much more religious than I was.

That in itself is not that unusual. I went to a Catholic college at the beginning of what would turn out to be my departure from the Catholic Church. I was astounded to find that my classmates still went to Mass on Sundays, in spite of their newly acquired freedom. They went to Chapel, I stayed in the dorm and played AC/DC records really loud, since it was when I was least likely to bother people.

Still, Irena was unusual in that she freely talked about God a lot. We Catholics didn't do that so much back then, particularly in the Northeast, where we were raised to understand that religion was private, and not to be imposed on others.

Irena had a rare single room in college. It was a small space, stuffed to the rafters with colorful decorative items, including a huge Chinese parasol that hung upside-down from the ceiling and frequently served as a catch-all for bottle caps. I had my first beer in that room, and then promptly fell asleep. That room was both party-space and refuge, as she was both hostess and dorm "mom." Rena was never preachy, nor did her faith keep her from having a good time.

Rena graduated before I did, but we kept in touch. She moved with some friends to a large Victorian I dubbed "Arlington House" and I visited frequently. We came from very different backgrounds, but shared some remarkable common experiences. We both lost our fathers early. We both had difficult relationships with our remaining families. There were, of course, disappointing boyfriends. In college we were both labeled "bold children" for not fitting into the mold of the school. She perservered and graduated, I left.

Perhaps it was her faith in God that made her, I realize now, a much stronger person than I was then. The bad times were "a test from God,"  and the good times were "a gift." The way she spoke those phrases, with a slightly flippant edge and a laugh, allowed you to give her a pass on this, because you were never quite sure how serious she was about it.

Years ago, Irena and I were part of a group who went to a museum and then out to eat. Boston can be a very difficult place to find a parking space, and I circled aroud several blocks several times looking for a space within reasonable walking distance to the restaurant. Finally, I spotted a car pulling out of a space and rushed to pull right in. Once the car was stopped, I looked up to see a clear No Parking sign marking the space. I considered this, wondering if I could get away with it, just as the person ahead of me had.

Rena, in the passenger seat, told me confidently "If you decide to leave this space, GOD has another space waiting for you." I smiled and shook my head, as I often did when she said things like this. I have a lot of doubts about God, but I'm pretty sure if he exists he doesn't care about parking places or sports teams.  As I pulled back out on to the street, I noticed that a large, white, Cadillac slipped into the space as I was leaving.

Wouldn't you know, immediately around the next corner, there was an empty, legal, space just waiting for me.

As if that weren't enough, on our walk back toward the restaurant, we noticed the large, white, Cadillac that had come in to the first space behind me was being ticketed and towed.

I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't give Rena's God credit for this little miracle, choosing instead to offer thanks to "Vehiculus, the parking god," a power I occasionally invoke to this day. It's still hard to say who was right, that was over 15 years ago, and I have had uncanny luck with parking ever since.

Friends, unfortunately, can drift apart when their experiences begin to diverge. I have had it happen to me a number of times. I've let it happen a number of times.  Irena caught the bouquet at my wedding, but she never married. I moved farther North, and eventually had kids, she made loads of friends at work. She became very involved with the alumni association at the college, a place that resides on my very short list of regrets.

I've looked her up on Facebook a number of times, thinking that the silliness in which we often communicated would be perfect for that venue. I've looked for her on LinkedIn, but not found her. Last week it occurred to me to simply Google her, and I found  - a eulogy.

She's been gone about 2 1/2 years, apparently from cancer. I'm devastated.

There's not a damn thing I can do about it, and I have no idea what to do with it. Except write.

So, know this about my friend Rena:

She didn't have a whole lot, but she was incredibly generous.

She went through a lot of hard times, but remained surprisingly optimistic.

She had a beautiful voice, and she loved to sing.

She sang for the Pope.

She loved Metallica and saw them in concert several times.

She had a thing for bad boys.

She was always ready with a pot of tea.

Her laugh was hilarious.

She was the first person in her family to go to college and she eventually attained a Master's degree.

She was extremely appreciative of small gestures.

If there is a heaven, Rena is one of the people who truly deserves to be there.

And I'll bet she got a really great parking spot.

Of Russian Past

The Boston Globe runs an occasional series called The Big Picture. It is a showcase of large scale photographs of a theme. Sometimes the theme is centered around events around the world - sort of a day in the life kind of thing.

This one is centered around Russia and other former Soviet countries, but the photographs were taken long ago. From the site's description:

[The photographer] used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.

It is certainly worth a look.

я

Is it wrong that I find all this Russian spy stuff just a little bit amusing?

I mean, they haven't really shared any secrets, they are not being charged with espionage, and it all just seems so quaint.

Except, of course, for the trolls on various news sites screaming that McCarthy was right. That is not so cute.

Look, I'm not dismissing this entirely, nor do I think the notion of spying shouldn't be taken seriously. I'm sort of amused that people are shocked that this is still happening.  Of course it happens, for very serious reasons, and judging by the swap being carried out in Vienna, we are apparently doing it too.

A few years ago we arrested a bunch of people spying for a country most would consider a friend - Israel. Why? Because even friends don't tell each other everything.

As someone who was admittedly drawn in by the seemingly romantic drama of it all, featuring a stunning red head who could play herself in the movie, I'm a little sorry that it is over so quickly.

The great thing though, is that neither country is really making too much of it. There has been some improvement of relations that might have been jeopardized by jingoistic sabre-rattling of, say, the previous administration (cough, Dick Cheney, cough). It's my hope that the two countries might someday become more partners than adversaries, but that's probably just a dream on my part.

Oh by the way, you know when just about anything with a Russian origin is advertised in American the company seems to feel compelled to use that backwards R. You know, in cased you missed the fact that it was Russian? What would you say if I told you that backwards R does not carry an "rrr" sound at all. The Russian R actually looks like a "P."  я actually sounds like "ya."

Ya know?

Recently, in a roundabout way related to the professional part of my life, I came across this blog post about Russian Etiquette (and Folk Medicine (!)). In it were some things that might go a long way to explain why Russian children are perpetually over-bundled if it is the slightest bit cold out, and this item:

 When pouring wine, you should never pour back handed. This was a way of doing away with your enemies. You wear a ring full of poison, as you pour the wine out backhanded the poison drips into the glass un-noticed.

Source: .windowstorussia.com

I actually had one of those rings once.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. -John LeCarré

Fireworks, and other excitement

Hey!

How come no one told me that Craig Ferguson has been hosting the Boston Pops July 4th celebration at the Hatch Shell in Boston for the last three years?

Okay, so it probably wouldn't have gotten me to start camping out on the Esplanade at 4 in the morning for a good seat, it probably wouldn't have gotten me into Boston at all because if I can't deal with the crowds, imagine how overwhelming Pumpkin would find it. But hey, it's Craig Ferguson, I might have at least tried to watch it on TV!

There's always a first time.

I had no idea that our traditional pops concert was broadcast nationwide? How long has that been going on? Okay now someone tell be it's been this way since Arthur Fiedler, and where the hell have I been all these years.

Not watching the Boston Pops, that's where.

Why watch fireworks on TV when every single town in the country has their own?

Of course, my town doesn't have them.

Independence Day is a little offbeat around these parts. But when you live in a town full of eccentrics, the biggest party of the summer is bound to be a little outside the mainstream. My town does not have fireworks, we have, well, I'll get there.

First there's the parade. About what you would expect, but this being a Fireman's Parade, it is dominated by engines. Really loud engines with sirens and airhorns. But there are other things, all sorts of bands.

Guys with kilts. Clearly, we like guys with kilts.

 

A middle school band, a high school band; hey, we've got no football team, but our music programs kick butt. There's a band of people long out of any school, all dressed in costume, and led by this guy. Yes, that's a nightshirt and boots. His baton is a plunger.

 

There's the precision lawn chair team. Don't ask. There are family groups with homemade floats called "horribles." There are several boats on wheels, there's the local politicians, several businesses, including a whale watch company that totes a water-spouting whale, and several fundraising floats. That's what I was doing. For the past two years, I have been in the parade rather than watching, and let me tell you, you start to realize how many people you know around town when you do something like this. I'm not a big hugger, but I hugged more people yesterday than at a family reunion.

The last float in the parade is a Jamaican steel drum band that's just fabulous. In fact, I think we need to start hiring these guys for a wrap-up party after the parade. Seriously, it would be preferable to standing around for two hours waiting for the "high point" of the evening. Oh sure, we have the Legion Band playing the requisite patriotic tunes, and they're very good, but, uhm, no.

You see, as I mentioned earlier, we don't have fireworks. What better way to top off a Fireman's parade than with a huge-ass bonfire on the beach?

This isn't any old bonfire where you hang out and roast marshmallows. This is serious fire, frightening at times. Note house below for scale.

Unfortunately, too much time passes between the parade and the bonfire lighting. There's plenty of time to mill about and catch up with people you haven't hugged yet, but after a while you've seen just about everyone you want to see and are running out of places to hide from the ones you don't. When it's finally dark and you think the big show is about to start, it doesn't. When, thirty minutes later, there's a lull in the bandstand music, and you think it's going to start, it doesn't. Finally, hours after everyone's bedtime, when all the children have sugar-crashed and are cranky, the firemen light the pile.

One year, long before we had kids, I got close enough to the pile to see them light it. And I swore if I had kids I would never let them see what I saw - guys with cigarattes in their mouths splashing accelerant on the wood. Wait, aren't these the men in charge of our safety?

It doesn't take long for the pile to go up. At the very top, there's usually an outhouse. It's an odd sort of sacrifice, but they've run out of actual outhouses and are now constructing new ones for the purposes of burning. Sometimes the pile is topped with a boat, and there was one year that involved a Frosty the Snowman inflating and then burning to death, smiling ghoulishly at all the horrified children below, but usually it's an outhouse.

Eventually, the fire gets so big and so hot, that people start backing off and leaving. A bit anti-climatic really.

Personally, I think the story behind it is better than the actual event. According to the legend, the bonfire got its start during the Revolutionary War, when the townspeople built a huge fire on the beach in an effort to fool the passing British ships into thinking that the town had already been sacked.

Of course, the real story may simply be that it's cheaper to burn four stories worth of wooden pallets and an outhouse than it is to fund fireworks.

This is the first time I've stayed for the bonfire in many years, and it may be many more years before I do so again.

Next year, maybe I'll watch the fireworks on TV with my family.

And Craig Ferguson.

Cheeseburger diplomacy

I love this photo of President Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev hanging out in a local greasy spoon. How cool would it have been to be a regular patron and have these guys come walking in? Mr. Medvedev apparently likes jalapenos on his burger.

You can see the rest of the series here.