Evolution and Intelligent Design

If you have clicked on today’s blog thinking that I am going to engage in a philosophically- or politically-charged diatribe on Creationism, you will be disappointed.  While I believe wholeheartedly in Natural Selection and the selfish, persistent, survivalist nature of our genes, you will not find this argued here.  This is a blog in defense of perpetual decorating.  Let’s just lay it on the line:  there is nothing in my house that cannot be made better, newer, more colorful, or more comfortable.

For many years my husband has tried, in vain, to preserve the domestic status quo.  He does not appreciate his surroundings, turning a blind eye to most things unless they are bound in a medical journal and proven with a high degree of statistical significance.   Once, while sitting in a restaurant, I asked him to describe the items in our living room and he could not—not the color of the walls, the existence of an area rug, the configuration of sofa and chairs, the art on the walls.   He actually asked, “Which one is the living room?”  For this reason, my frequent need to rearrange furniture baffles him.  Nor does he realize that when I say a chair or sofa should be moved, it is not a hypothetical scenario or a question; it means “get up and help me move it NOW.” 

It has been nearly impossible to convince my husband to participate in replacing, repairing or reupholstering an item of furniture.  He simply does not understand an activity that requires expenditure but does not increase function.  A worn and torn chair is as easy to sit on as a new one.  By his logic, why pay for a new chair when it will not be as comfortable as the old one?  If he had his way, he would still watch television from an ancient chair that I picked up in 1982 for five dollars from a friend who was moving cross-country.  For years, he clung to it, swearing that nothing could be more comfortable; it fit his six-foot-four frame to a T.  Although that chair followed us when we moved from Boston to San Francisco in 1984, my husband was oblivious to the fact that it was not among our things when we arrived in Atlanta in 1990.  Score one for me.

Despite the permanence my husband attaches to things that we have, he is surprisingly disengaged when it comes to picking them out.  He does not suffer weekend shopping expeditions well, preferring to watch football, or Bob Ross reruns, rather than sharing quality time in a treasure hunt.  As a result, I have carte blanche when I shop.  One who chooses not to participate, I would argue, has no ex post facto rights of refusal or reprimand.

Decorating is a form of nesting; we women do it instinctively.  Unlike our male counterparts, who would happily reposition a pile of dirty clothes to find a place to sleep, or don’t wash the dishes until the sink is overflowing with them, women are naturally wired to function as “domestic environmentalists.”  We enforce order and aesthetics on our surroundings as a way of caring for our mates and our young.   When we need to put a new paint treatment on the walls, or retile the shower, or hang new Roman shades, you can darn well believe that everyone’s wellbeing depends upon it.  And furthermore, we will not sleep at night until the job is done.

Over the years we not only moved from San Francisco to Atlanta to New England, but we also moved from a tiny Victorian house to a southern farm house to a suburban 70s contemporary.  If the periods of the homes themselves did not dictate a change in style, then our evolution from thirty-something to forty-something to fifty-something certainly has.  Suffice it to say, we have evolved as human beings.  I no longer want to live with the cluttered blue-and-white country style furnishings with which I surrounded myself thirty years ago any more than I want to carry around my childhood “Hi Heidi” doll in her matching pocketbook.   Even after thirteen years in our current home, I am still problem-solving the rooms, embracing new ways to achieve an eclectic mix of well-made furnishings with the spoils of our travels.

This is now the longest we have lived in a single location; the fixed context is wreaking havoc with my adapted decorating behavior.  My husband is starting to notice when I sunset a piece of furniture.  “Didn’t we just buy this?” he asked when I demanded a new mattress after thirteen years.  “We just painted the house!” he admonished when I scheduled the painting crew of scaffold-climbers that had all but forgotten us from seven years ago.  And now I need to reupholster a pair of sofas.  My husband remembers when I bought these sofas twelve years ago.  He remembers how I waited sixteen weeks for them to be built and shipped from upstate New York.  He remembers how much I loved them for their solid wood construction and double-wrapped cushions.  He remembers holding the door as the white-glove delivery guys carried them into the house and around the tricky corner into the front room.  They were quality pieces that were supposed to represent long-lasting value.  So why do I need to do anything to them?

What my husband doesn’t see is the way the corners are worn threadbare from the kids hanging over the arms and backs.  Or the way his nightly newspaper reading has worn a butt-shaped indentation in one particular cushion.   Or the way the center edges of the cushions have collapsed where I spent two months “couch-ridden” after Achilles tendon surgery.  Although I have been diligent about rotating the cushions regularly, the damage is now well distributed across the fronts and backs of every surface.  Had I bought new furniture, I could have slipped out the old as the new appeared and my husband would have been none the wiser.  Eventually he may have asked, “Are these new?”  But the problem arose because I chose the more responsible and Earth-friendly alternative.  There is no way to reupholster the sofas without having them go missing from the house for a couple of weeks.  Carefully, I tried to present a scenario that left no doubt about what had to be done.

Now my husband has caught on to me.  He saw me eyeing the master bathroom with a bit too much interest.  He noticed that the tape measure migrated from its hook in the garage to permanent residence inside the house.  He found my secret stash of fabric swatches and paint chips.  But then something strange happened.  Suddenly he started tagging along on my Saturday “errands run.” He sat for two hours in a fabric warehouse while I collected upholstery samples.  He actually chose the fabric for the sofas, learning about double-rub counts and how to assess them in both morning and evening light. 

I could not understand his sudden change in attitude, but to tell the truth, it was fun having him along while I shopped.  When I could get him to render an opinion about things, I found that it was easy to accommodate his tastes with mine; we both love natural materials.  But when I asked him why he was suddenly getting involved after all these years he blushed a little.  “I saw the way you were looking at the kitchen cabinets, like you couldn’t wait to replace them,” he said.  “I don’t want you looking at me that way!”

Tomorrow's blog:  Anonymous

Helping My Son to Seize the Day

There is no joy as great, nor terror as deep, as having children.   I once believed that after you counted ten fingers and ten toes, it would be downhill from there.  The entire cultural machine of childbirth was so focused on delivery as the ultimate outcome that we were woefully unprepared for what would happen next.  I remember the first night at home with our newborn baby; once we got the little slugger to sleep I thought, “What have we done?”  The reality slowly crept in that the big event was not over; rather, it was just beginning.

By every conceivable yardstick, our son was a phenomenon.  He was beautiful—from his platinum hair to his deep sapphire eyes to the perfect little toes on his adorable feet.  (Alert:  baby feet fetish!)  He was physically active, crawling almost immediately, and running by the age of eight months.  He spoke early and in full sentences.  At the age of four my son’s preschool teacher asked me if I knew he could read.  By five he was reading aloud from young “chapter books” like Goosebumps. 

Despite all of these indicators, or perhaps because of them, I knew that something was not quite right.  Because my son was so verbal at such a young age, I could detect occasional hesitations in his speech patterns.  Sporadically, he would stop midsentence and roll his eyes, a gesture that went undetected by his teachers.  When I sat beside him in the middle of the night, he seemed to be a light sleeper, opening his eyes in the dark at the lightest touch. 

For close to a year I made mental notes of these patterns, afraid to verbalize what I thought I was seeing.  Eventually, I shared my observations with my husband.   He had not detected any of these affects and assured me that everything was fine.   Nonetheless, we tightened the scrutiny of our parental vigil until one day our son nearly dropped his head into his dinner plate.  At that point my husband surrendered; our son, we believed, was having seizures.

When I called the pediatrician he laughed it off.  He had been seeing our son regularly for years.  Certainly he would have noticed if the child was having seizures.  Regardless, I insisted that he take a look.  I brought in my son well before regular office hours so the doctor could spend focused time with him.  After nearly half an hour he shook his head.  “I’m not seeing anything, but if you are that concerned you can go see a pediatric neurologist.”  He called himself and set up the appointment.

When the day came to see the specialist, I was in Israel on a business trip so my husband took our son to the neurologist.  Doctor and four-year-old played together for close to an hour, tossing balls, reading, running, and completing other neurological examinations disguised as games.  The neurologist gave him a clean bill of health.  “This is a perfectly healthy child,” he concluded.  

Long distance from downtown Jerusalem I insisted that my son needed an EEG.  The doctor gave my husband a patronizing lecture about hysterical mothers.  My husband explained that the doctor answered to a higher authority; he had better rethink his response to “she who must be obeyed.”  Thus, the EEG was scheduled for the following Monday.  For the procedure, our son would need to be sleep deprived, which meant that he could sleep no more than four hours the night before the examination.

Unfortunately, the day of the EEG happened to be the day after I returned from Israel.  Already running on empty and suffering with jet lag, I found myself charged with keeping my four-year-old up all night.  At first it was fun, watching inane Disney movies well past bedtime, but by eleven-thirty, my son kept trying to curl up in my lap and go to sleep.  That’s when I scooped him up and said, “Let’s go shopping!”  Thanks to the 24-hour supermarket, we found a middle-of-the-night playground right in our own neighborhood.

I put my son in a grocery cart and began a slow and painstaking excursion through the market, stopping many times in each aisle to pick up jars or cans for an assortment of ad hoc games.  We played “Which food starts with the letter B?”  “Which is heavier?”  “What color is this?”  “Which one is yummy and which one is icky?”  “What do Power Rangers eat?”  “Is it breakfast or is it supper?”  It began as fun, but by the end of two hours both he and I could barely see straight.  I began to worry whether I could drive home safely.  To make matters worse, I was being attacked by eye daggers from nearly every other person in the store, each condemning me with an expression of righteous indignation for bringing a small child out well past midnight.  Raisin that! (see February 17^th blog)

Despite public ridicule, I managed to escape any charges of reckless endangerment.  We complied with medical instructions, arriving at the hospital the following day suitably sleep-deprived.  But there was something about the austerity of the hospital procedure room that set off all of my son’s danger instincts.  An EEG is non-invasive, but it requires a scary looking machine and the attachment (with paste) of dozens of electrodes all over the scalp.  The clueless tech attempted to take my son from me into the room; it was only after my insistence that she allowed me, against policy, to hold him.  Getting down to business, she then tried to attach the many leads, but he was too terrified to let her touch him.  Noting her growing impatience, I suggested that she put an electrode on Nana, my son’s stuffed gorilla (see January 31^st blog).  She gave me one of those “you’ve got to be kidding me” looks.  “If you want to get this done,” I said, “you’ll have to think more like a mom.”

Reluctantly, she sacrificed an electrode to the stuffed animal, taping it to his head.  My son looked at it curiously.  I asked him if Nana was scared.  He shook his head silently  We explained that we needed to do the same thing to him.  It wouldn’t hurt, but the paste might tickle a little.  To prove the point, I touched it to his hand.  He then sat still like a trooper while she parted his short hair and mapped the electrodes across his scalp.  Again, she tried to make me leave the room, saying that he had to go to sleep now.  I looked around the room and at the hard examining table with paper pulled across it.  I assured her this would never work; instead, I offered to lie with him in my arms on the table.  “I guess,” she relented.   She was beginning to give in to our quirky demands, but she warned me that if he did not go right to sleep she would kick me out.  He was asleep before the lights went out.

Instantly, the electrodes began to dance in unison—all except the one taped to Nana’s head, which flat-lined across the page.  “He’s having a seizure,” she said.    A few seconds later, the electrodes again traced their telltale three-peaked spikes.  After only a few minutes, well short of the typical forty-five minute examination, she flipped on the lights.  “We’re done,” she said, explaining that he had had enough seizures within ten minutes to confirm a diagnosis.

That evening the pediatric neurologist called.  “Your son has epilepsy,” he said, confirming what I had suspected for a couple of years.  “But,” he continued, “I want to know how YOU knew.”  He explained that he spent close to an hour interacting with my son and had been unable to detect anything upon physical exam.  “I would have bet money against his having seizures,” he said.

“When it comes to children, I said, "never bet against a mother.  Moms know far more about their kids intuitively than you will ever know by the book.”

Today my son is in his twenties.  As a parent, I wish so much that I could fix this for him.  Instead, he has taught me a lesson in resilience and courage.  He is incredibly compliant with his health rituals.  He counsels and mentors young kids with epilepsy, showing them by example that it is possible to transition to college life, to play sports, to travel, and to be independent.   Although he hates having epilepsy, he has come to accept that everyone has a burden they carry through life.  His is a demon he knows. 

Tomorrow's blog:  Evolution and Intelligent Design

That Was The Lunch That Was

If you were a nerd growing up in the 60s, you lived in worship of Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematician who rolled his love of musical theater in the top topics of the day, resulting in some of the most clever and timeless musical satire ever produced.  Think Weird Al mixed with Stephen Colbert.  This was the generation before nerds found a safe haven in Comic-Con, when rambling off the Elements to the tune of the Major-General’s Song from Pirates of Penzance was a geek’s mating ritual.   Long before YouTube, we would huddle around a turntable and replay track after track on long-playing records, trying to commit the lyrics to memory until they would roll trippingly from our own tongues.  You never knew when you might need to break into a gory rendition of the Masochism Tango or I Hold Your Hand in Mine at a National Honor Society meeting.

Lehrer captured the conscience of our day.  While writing songs for the television show “That Was the Week That Was,” he provided biting commentary on everything from New Math to Vatican II.  He skewered Wernher von Braun, who cut his scientific teeth working for the Nazis before becoming an American rocket scientist.  (“Vonce da rockets are up, who cares vhere dey come down?  It’s not my de-pahtment!” says Wernher von Braun.)  Often censored by the networks, Lehrer eventually cut his own record of the original songs called “That Was the Year That Was.”

As a Harvard freshman, it was no surprise to find that I was not alone in revering Tom Lehrer.  On that campus, he was as popular as Justin Bieber at a Barbie convention.  One day, a bunch of us were sitting around listening to Tom Lehrer songs when I suggested we call him up and ask him to lunch.  One of the record jackets stated that although he taught Math and Performing Arts at UC-Santa Cruz, he preferred to spend his autumns in Cambridge.  I opened the phone book and he was listed.  One proper gentleman in our group thought it unseemly that a young lady should call and ask a man to lunch.  But in the absence of any male takers, I dialed the phone.  The voice that answered was clearly Tom Lehrer himself.  After catching my breath, I explained that we were a bunch of freshman who admired him and wondered if he would allow us to take him to lunch.  His response:  “Would Friday at 1 work for you?”

None of us really thought about what would happen next.  We had no questions prepared, no real purpose for the lunch.  We gathered at a large round table at the Chinese Restaurant across the street and awaited his arrival.  An unremarkable-looking man resembling his own photos walked in.  He found our table and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Tom.”  We were star struck.  For what seemed like an eternity, we shuffled in nervous silence.  I’m not sure if we were expecting him to break into song, or a comedy routine, but clearly he was not going to entertain us.  Slowly, we emerged from our collective paralysis.  It was a lovely lunch.  He did not reveal any answers to the secrets that have fueled the urban legends over the years, such as why he stopped performing so abruptly.  He tutored us on the correct pronunciation of "Santa Cruz" (Sanacrus).  He talked about the beauty of autumn in New England.  He asked about the current faculty in the Harvard music department.   He told us that one of his best friends asked him to perform for his 50^th birthday party.  His response was, “I’ll do it for $50,000, which is my way of saying I won’t do it.”

Tom Lehrer, despite his genius and cult status across nerdkind, is a very real and sensitive human being.  I can believe that after a hundred or so performances of the same material he was simply bored and did not want to do it anymore.   There is something exhausting about being “on” all the time; it was this very feeling that pushed me away from a career as a musician.   He made his mark on a generation, however.  He took a difficult era in our history and made us laugh and think twice about what we were doing.  And he created a body of work that endures, if not in its political relevance today, at least as a first-person account of an important era in American history. 

Today at the age of 83, Tom Lehrer still lives in Cambridge, a place where genius is so ubiquitous he can run wild among his own kind, unrecognized.

Tomorrow's blog:  Helping My Son to Seize the Day

What's Pasta is Prologue

This piece was posted on the night my blog reached 2000 hits.  As I did last time, I will post one of my favorite recipes each time we reach another thousand hits.  Enjoy!

One of my culinary guilty pleasures is pasta.  I remember hearing someone say that Julia Child claimed Italian cuisine isn’t “cooking”—I suppose because, unlike her complex French recipes, yummy Italian food does not require the mastery of age-old techniques.  It is the “folk art” of cuisine; a novice (or even a klutz) can pull together a satisfying Italian meal with a few fresh ingredients.  Add a glass of wine and a loaf of bread and you can turn a simple meal into an occasion.

There is a sensibility necessary to produce quality Italian food, however.  This becomes clear to me when we choose the wrong restaurant in Boston’s North End.  I hope I have eaten my last meal from the “red gravy” set.  You know the place?  They serve overcooked noodles floating in water covered with a ladle of sauce.  It is indistinguishable from a college student’s dinner of spaghetti and Ragu.  For my birthday, and that of my one-day-older cousin Jane, this year we ate at Scarpetta, Scott Conant’s Italian paradise in New York’s meatpacking district.  My bowl of spaghetti tossed and spun in tomato basil sauce was as close to the perfect bite as I have eaten.  Perfectly al dente, the starch helped the sauce cling jealously to each strand of pasta, and the dish was fragrant with herbs without seeing their heat-discolored remains.

One of my personal favorite dishes is pasta in vodka sauce.  It is basically a red sauce amped up with cream, so it must be eaten judiciously.  Traditionally, most people use penne rigate for this dish, noodles that are ridged to provide extra surface area for the sauce.  I like bucatini, a fat form of hollow spaghetti that provides a decadent, chewy canvas for the rich sauce.  Bucatini is hard to find commercially so when I come across it I buy several packages and squirrel it away.  Even more amazing is buying it fresh from Mercado Monica, at the corner of Prince and Parmenter in the North End.  When it is cooked, it resembles the width of Kraft Mac N’Cheese noodles only left uncut to about two feet in length.  Yum.

I have spent several years researching and perfecting the best vodka sauce recipe.  This is my version—the result of much trial and error.  I share it here to celebrate two thousand hits on my blog:

Best Vodka Sauce

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, chopped very fine
3 cloves of garlic, chopped very fine
1 Tablespoon dried oregano
½ Tablespoon crushed red pepper
½ cup Vodka
2 cans (28 oz. each) whole San Marzano tomatoes, drained
salt and pepper to taste
1/8 cup fresh oregano, chopped
1 cup heavy cream
½ cup freshly grated parmigiano reggiano, plus more for the table
1 lb. pasta—penne rigate or bucatini, cooked al dente

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  In a large ovenproof sauté pan with a lid, heat olive oil.  Saute onions about 4 minutes until softened; add garlic and continue to soften for another minute.  Add dried oregano and crushed peppers to pan.  Continue to sweat to infuse the flavors.  Add the vodka, simmering until it is reduced.  Add the San Marzano tomatoes, crushing each one in your hand before adding to the pan.  Season with salt and pepper.  Bring to a simmer and cover.  Place the entire covered pan in the oven to roast for 1 ½ hours.  Cool.  (This entire mixture can be frozen at this stage and then thawed out later to resume recipe.)

Place cooled vegetables in a blender.  Puree until smooth and velvety.  (May also be done in the pan with an immersion blender, but make sure to take your time to achieve the desired smooth texture.)  Return the mixture to the sauté pan.  Add the fresh oregano.  Stir in the heavy cream and bring slowly to a simmer, stirring to incorporate.  The sauce will be a deep pink color.

During this last stage of cooking, bring water to a boil in a large stockpot and cook the pasta until al dente.  With tongs or a handled strainer, lift the pasta from the cooking water and add to the simmering sauce, tossing it to coat.  Add a ladle of pasta water if necessary to thin out the sauce.  Add the grated parmigiano reggiano while continuing to toss the pasta until well distributed.

Serve in pasta bowls and sprinkle with more fresh grated cheese as desired.

Tomorrow's blog:  That Was The Lunch That Was

Born Not to Sing

I am a sucker for the talent shows on television.  By this, I mean American Idol, The Sing Off, and The Voice.   Despite its name, I do not count America’s Got Talent among them; for my money that show is more aptly titled “Stupid People Tricks”.  The Sing Off is a particular treat.  I am a big fan of a capella performances, although I question whether the show can live up to its promise of making any such ensemble into a superstar pop group.

American Idol, and its new competitor, The Voice, are the true talent makers.  I pride myself in having designated several of the American Idol winners from their first auditions.  (Fantasia’s National Anthem is still the best performance I have heard her give; Carrie Underwood was in a class by herself even fresh off the farm.)  Last year, I gave American Idol one last chance.  I grew weary when the show became too much about Simon and not enough about the singers.  His insistence that “it’s all about song choice” and “that was just self-indulgent drivel” was mean spirited without being instructive.  With the return of Nigel Lithgoe as producer, a few kinder, gentler judges, and high quality industry coaches, the show now emphasizes the growth and nurturing of talents.  It is now okay for a contestant to remaining in their indigenous musical genre.  And as flies on the wall, we in the audience now have a better understanding of how hard it is to become a star. 

With an unusual twist, The Voice bypasses the quest for the “whole package” and chooses talent blindly.  Last year, a contestant who could lay down a good performance found himself or herself suddenly paired with the likes of Cee Lo Green or Christina Aguilera.  Now that we understand that the show is a really a competition among the coaches, the stars have tacitly changed the parameters, holding out for the most unusual, never-before-heard voice qualities.  Great mainstream singers are finding themselves going home empty handed, while those with raspy voices resembling Adele or Rod Stewart are hitting pay dirt.

I could not be more jealous. 

By many yardsticks, I am a fairly accomplished musician.  I have played on a solo stage, performed concertos with large symphony orchestras, done chamber music at intimate soirees.  I have played as a member of several symphony orchestras, both as a violinist and a pianist, also doubling on celesta, xylophone, and even the gong.  I have taken lessons in conducting—even waved my hands at an orchestra from a podium twice.  There is one thing I cannot do: sing.  It is not for lack of trying.  I can almost carry a tune, I have a reasonable sense of pitch, and I have a broad range.  Unfortunately, I was born with one of the least melodious voices known to man.

I cannot imagine anything more glorious than singing with a beautiful voice, conjuring music from deep inside of you.   In truth, my devotion to piano playing comes in part from my inability to sing.  I have adapted to my instrument much like one does to a prosthetic leg:  a mental leap that treats the physical object as an extension of your body.   In a sense, I have learned to sing with my hands.

Fortunately, the mind is powerful enough to compensate in other ways as well.  For example, when I sing at the top of my lungs in the car, my brain translates this into something perceived (only by me)as beauty, allowing me to tolerate myself without jumping in horror from the speeding vehicle.    It also renders me musically dumb and mute around others, a failsafe mechanism that prevents me from singing in the presence of humans, particularly the most vulnerable—such as pregnant women and small children.  I must take special precautions at certain times of year, especially around Passover, when a hearty rendition of Dayenu is likely to cause me to lose control and chug Elijah’s cup.   Then there is the infamous Disneyworld incident; apparently, breaking into song like a cartoon princess is frowned upon by that establishment.

So I sit, week after week, scrutinizing the contestants on TV and handicapping my contestant list.  As The Voice ratchets down its teams toward the finals, I will be calling the action from the sidelines.   Before the next America Idol is crowned, I will have dialed the most talented singer’s personal phone number a hundred times.  I will not call for a country singer, but rather for someone who knows how to style a melody in a soulful and jazzy way.  And when the winner I've predicted is announced, I will have tears in my eyes—in part for the excitement of one whose life is about to change forever, but also for the voice that I will never have.

Tomorrow's blog:  What's Pasta is Prologue

Pacino has no lock on Shylock

I have three favorite Shakespeare plays:  Hamlet, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice.  You do not want to sit next to me during a production of Hamlet, as I will likely chant the lines out loud while I watch.  I do not mean to; I have read this play so many times that it oozes out of me.  So well do I know the soliloquys (just ask my kids) that I could probably step in to play Hamlet in any production on a moment’s notice.  I love King Lear for its portrait of human frailty.  Lear is so very mortal and vulnerable in his tragic downward spiral—even his royal stature provides no protection against his own fragile humanity. 

While I admire Hamlet and Lear, I love The Merchant of Venice.  The two main characters, Shylock—the villainous Jewish moneylender—and Portia—the brilliant heroine—are standouts among all Shakespeare’s characters.  Portia resonates with many women; she is “imprisoned” by the traditions of society, watching her youth dwindle as she abides by the terms set out in her father’s will.  She waits for the man who will prove himself worthy, hoping for love but fearing that the victor will be nothing more than a new set of hands upon her reigns.  In the end, she is able to equalize the deficit of her sex, using the power of her wits to prevail—perhaps not gaining the upper hand, but at least serving notice that she is not to be underestimated.

Around this time last year we had occasion to see The Merchant of Venice twice.  The first was a much-acclaimed Broadway production starring Al Pacino in the role of Shylock.  We rushed to New York to see this limited engagement.  It was an interesting production, set in a vintage stock exchange with ticker tape machines.   The financial giants wore modern pin-striped suits, setting off the Jews in their traditional garb.  Pacino’s entrance on stage garnered a show-stopping standing ovation.  I sat back for a spine-tingling afternoon.  Much to my surprise, I was very disappointed.

I do not profess to be a critic or a scholar.  I know what I like and this was not it.  Shylock is said to be one of Shakespeare’s more evil characters.  Certainly there is plenty of evidence that this depiction of Jews as evil was not unusual in its day; Shakespeare would have been familiar, for example, with Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  That Shylock is meant to repel us is evident.  His brand of vengeance—a pound of flesh—is one of the most horrifying and graphic forms of suffering conceived within Shakespeare’s plays, or any other work of literature for that matter. 

Pacino’s portrayal bothered me.  As amazing and deep as every one of his film roles has been, he just could not seem to rock his inner Jew.  He certainly connected with the evil by which this character is defined.  His relentless and mocking chant, “I will have my bond,” was as cold and mercurial as it gets.  I felt the isolation of this man from Venice society, his riches providing cold comfort as he lived in parallel but not in parity with those around him.  But Pacino’s character was too much in the now.  His Jew suffered only the taunts of those who shared the stage with him.  He did not inhabit a symbolic Jew, one whose presence in the play would have suggested one meaning, and whose presence in the twentieth century would have suggested another.  To be a Jew means to understand one’s context, to relate to the persistence of suffering and judgment.  As he first believed he was the victor in the legal contract, he should have relished the moment with more than transactional interest.  As he watches his vengeance slip away, he should have felt the pain as if it was the last of a million injustices.  

Only a few weeks later, we were treated to yet another production of Merchant, this time starring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock.  Interestingly, Abraham had to clarify for the Boston Globe that he is not Jewish—he is proudly of Syrian descent.

It was quite a contrast to experience these two portrayals in such close proximity .  Abraham brought more dimension to his Shylock, playing the role of the societal punching bag but also showing his place as a man and a father, as well as one marginalized by society.  Evil was his character flaw, while his Jewishness reflected a historical burden.   This was evident in how pains of various types weighed upon him differently.  The treatment by the borrowers, although distasteful, was business as usual, while the betrayal of his daughter Jessica grabbed him by the heart.

I always find a live performance exciting; the chance to see someone famous in a limited production makes it even more so.  I loved seeing Al Pacino in a play because it heightened the excitement of the moment.  I was not, however, duped into loving the performance simply because it was Al Pacino.  Perhaps I am the one who didn’t get it.  Perhaps it was the director who instructed the star that ‘Jew’ was just a metaphor for ‘despicable person’.  And perhaps, in Shakespeare’s day, a comedy would have expected nothing more of such a character.  For me, however, Shakespeare (and I use the name as a category, without regard for whether it was possible or probable for a single man of no education to pen 38 such plays) is important partly because of the way the themes continue to resonate in modern times.  I want my Shylock to be tragic because he is a Jew and evil because he has adapted to his circumstances.  If I were casting a movie, I would pick Pacino every time, but for my money, F. Murray Abraham’s Shylock was infinitely more satisfying. 

Tomorrow's blog:  Born Not to Sing

O' Susannah!

My husband and I are addicted to genealogy diving.  Combined, we have a rich history that combines the stories of Fiddler on the Roof with those in Paint Your Wagon.  We are enjoying the painstaking process of research and documentation that allows us to paint a picture for our children of their rich heritage.  Some lines are difficult to trace.  For example, although all four of my grandparents were born in the US, the trail runs pretty cold before Ellis Island.  The one exception is my grandmother’s Siegel family, a tight-knit group that traces their roots to the same Vitebsk shtetl as Marc Chagall—his own name a French interpretation of the family moniker.   For my husband, however, there are five generations of his family buried in a single cemetery at the end of the Oregon Trail.  From this documentation, literally carved in stone, combined with an oral history taken from his great-grandmother at the turn of the last century, it is possible to follow the records of all the lines back eastward with a great deal of confidence. 

Here we have found a rich and colorful history—the story of young American pioneers and prospectors—some starting in Virginia and others in Plymouth--moving ever farther West in search of land and opportunity.  (One English family line can be traced to fighting with the Scots for independence in the first Battle of Stirling!)

One of the more exciting discoveries has been documenting my husband’s direct descendance from one of the unfortunate women executed during the Salem Witch Trials.  Susannah North Martin was likely a proper Christian woman, her only crime perhaps to catch the eye of a widower landowner and subsequently bear him eight children.  Egged on by the fear and gravitas of Cotton Mather’s dominating Puritan presence, and perhaps to shed suspicion from themselves, the women of the town swooned in Goody Martin’s presence as “proof” of her spells over them.  Poor Susannah endured unspeakable indignities, including physical examination by the officiating males at various times of day to collect evidence that she was nursing a “witch’s familiar.”

Susannah was twice tried as a witch.  For the first accusation, in 1669, she was found guilty but subsequently had the charges overturned.  By 1692, Susannah was a poor widow; with council denied by Mather, she was unable to fight off the false charges made by Mercy Lewis and Ann Putnam.   Susannah was hanged on July 19, 1692 along with Rebecca Nurse and two others.  They were buried in a shallow grave near the gallows.

The spirit of Susannah North Martin lives on.  My husband is descended from her daughter Abigail; President Chester A. Arthur was descended from her daughter Jane.  There is a small marker in a Salem cemetery that we visited over the weekend.  In the nearby town of Amesbury, where Susannah lived with her husband, her spinning wheel is on display.  There are thousands of Susannah’s “great grandchildren” who celebrate their wronged relative and keep vigil.  In 2001, Susannah finally was exonerated by official state decree.

As exciting as it is to make a connection to a known moment in history—even one as infamous as the Salem atrocities—it also gives you pause.  We tried to estimate how many “cousins” our children have today who are similarly descended from this single woman through her eight children.  There are likely tens of thousands sprinkled across the planet.  It reminded me of the trivia that emerged during the last presidential race, when it was revealed that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney were cousins.  The concept of a “melting pot” is that we are not supposed to pick apart our differences but rather to live harmoniously as unified whole.  Beware the persistence of our genes!  What we fail to do together in this life, our DNA will live to do in the next.

Tomorrow's blog:  Pacino has no lock on Shylock

Symphony Sensation

There are few pleasures in my life that rate higher on my thrill-meter than the handful of nights I spend each year at the Boston Symphony.  This year, thanks to the retirement of one of my husband’s colleagues, we were able to upgrade our seats.  On the center aisle and twenty rows from the stage—just far enough to see the when the contrabassoon shifts into motion— we love our vantage point from these seats, marked as two among dozens of gifts in honor of late-conductor Charles Munch.

This weekend’s concert was the great Shostakovich 5^th Symphony.  It was preceded by Ravel’s lovely Mother Goose Suite and the quirky Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds.  Peter Serkin, as the piano soloist for the Stravinsky, was as technically brilliant as the last time I saw him, when he treated me to my beloved Brahms Piano Concerto #1—one of the last big concertos I ever studied.  I am rarely indifferent to a piano soloist; I just couldn’t help feeling that Serkin’s virtuosity was wasted on the Stravinsky, a piece where the piano rarely has an opportunity to show off the character that I find most beautiful in the instrument.  Clearly the composer felt differently, as he premiered the piece himself with this orchestra; however, I was much more interested in what the English horn had to say than the piano.  As a pianist myself, I just could not imagine working that hard for that piece.

All was forgiven as conductor Stephane Deneve took the podium for the Shostakovich, a symphony which, despite winning approval from the Communist Party, shares much of the joy and optimism—as well as the key—of Beethoven’s 9^th.  Here was the Boston Symphony at its best:  its full complement packing the stage, and its virtuosity on display.  The familiar opening intervals silenced the winter coughs that echoed through the audience before intermission.  The tongue-and-cheek second movement was celebratory and brilliant.  The lengthy Largo movement hijacked the emotions of the house, wringing each of us with its unbearable grief and delivering us, finally, to the last movement.  The initial tempo with which Deneve started this movement, marked “Allegro non troppo,” (I looked twice to make sure) actually frightened me.  The BSO strings, however, came alive with such precision, preserving their unison with the brass, as if to remind us of their pedigree as one of the best orchestras anywhere.  To think that I would harbor any doubts!

The triumphant finale kept pushing its excitement to the limit, each blast of chords raising the volume in the hall a bit farther, the xylophone doubling the strings yet resonating audibly far above them, until the final boom of the tympani reached “eleven”.  I was not the only one to jump to my feet cheering; it was gratifying to notice how many had been similarly perched on the edges of their seats.  I have attended many BSO concerts, but this will remain in my memory for some time to come.

Like all great performances, it evoked images, memories and thoughts of all sorts.  It was hard not to remember my high school’s own symphonic band and its worthy attempt to render it’s stringless version of the last movement.  I was drafted to bring the violins and zylophone to life on the piano, giving me full appreciation of the BSOs grueling tempo.  When we discovered, just three weeks before our performance, that there would be no piano in the hall where we were scheduled to compete, the bandleader handed me a set of mallets and put me to work on the xylophone—just one of many times in my career when I became an ad hoc percussionist.

I also considered, as I let my eyes gaze across the statuary in Symphony Hall, the many generations of musicians and audiences who had graced this historic building.  It is remarkable that we continue to pack this hall to capacity night after night.  Even the seats in the second balcony that face perpendicular to the stage are always filled.  In other cities the orchestras hang by a thread financially; the magnificent Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, a fixture on the musical landscape for generations, is facing bankruptcy today.  In Boston, however, although we failed to save our classical radio stations, our Symphony continues to loom large.  I counted eighty-eight endowed orchestra chairs, sixty-seven of which are endowed in perpetuity. 

Even more remarkable to me was the homey realization that we were spending an enjoyable evening of entertainment without benefit of high tech gadgetry or special effects.  On stage, each musician was making music with his or her own hands or breath, using instruments that were each crafted or forged entirely by hand.  In many cases, those instruments were many generations old, having been passed lovingly and caringly from one musician to another.  Despite the many wires hanging from the rafters, there is no amplification in Symphony Hall—those microphones are recording devices.  We were listening to the purest of music, projected in real-time by the hands and mouths of live musicians, collaborating to fill the receptive ears and hearts of a grateful audience.  This one night stands alone; the performance will belong only to those who bore witness on this day, musicians and audience members each contributing to the electricity in the hall.  The same program presented the night before or the night after is a similar sensation, but it is something different and distinct.

There is a special place in my heart for professionals who bring music to life, conjuring a sonic apparition that is consumed in the moment, then left lingering in the air until its buzz finally dissipates, and then carried away in the sensory nerves of those who beheld it.  It is a commitment to making art like no other. 

Tomorrow's blog:  O' Susannah!

Dragon Mom

It took me a long time to realize how challenging it has been for our daughter growing up in our household.  My husband and I did not start our family until our thirties, and then our little girl arrived three and a half years after her older brother.  My children have always been very close.  They not only love each other with a sense of family responsibility, but they truly enjoy being in each other’s company.  They are the best of friends.  Even now, although they spend only a few weeks each year together, they are thick as thieves.  Over winter vacation, their heads were drawn together instantly in conspiratorial partnership; off they went.  They took on the malls, the movie theaters, the favorite lunch spots—all like a pair of bosom buddies.  One kid could not miss the opportunity to drive to the airport to welcome the other, or to conduct the final send off.

Quite unexpectedly, our daughter descended into a funk during her sophomore year in high school.  We could not understand it.  There did not seem to be an academic or social problem lurking at school.   Our perennially cheerful sunshine girl simply lost her glow.  It was not until she graduated three years later that she expressed to us how miserable she was when she became, in essence, an “only child”.  She was unprepared for her brother’s college exit, and we were oblivious.  She has always been a reserved child who expresses herself in quiet and subtle ways.

These times coincided with the infamous teenage years.  My husband and I, normally somewhat competent even in her eyes, became ‘lame’ and irrelevant.  But at the same time, something miraculous occurred: she began to inhabit her adult skin and adult brain.  We tried our best to give her some space.  She developed style, taste, interests, opinions, and a clear point of view.  It was during this difficult only-child period that she also emerged creatively, beginning to understand the relationship between inspiration and making art.  She worked hard honing her craft, enduring a succession of drawing classes so narrowly focused that moving from the black of charcoal to the finer grays of pencils felt like she was achieving technicolor. 

At the end of sophomore year she brought home the spoils of two semesters of class activity, a bag filled to capacity with term papers, problem sets, quizzes, and sketches.  I asked my daughter if she would share her art pieces with me, wondering as all parents do whether her talents were in sync with her passions.  She seemed a bit reluctant, and then said, “Mommy, don’t be mad.”  She pulled out a large paper folded in half.  The assignment was to create a collage that captured her “emotional self.”  On it was something much more than a collage; she had created an original image out of her magazine cutouts.  My eyes widened in surprise.

In the corner of the page was a tiny girl in schoolyard plaids—reminiscent of a wonder-lost Alice, meandering on a boardwalk of her favorite daffodils.  She was dwarfed by an enormous mannequin-faced image devoid of eyes that materialized from a mountain of icy snow. Its Medusa-like hair carved from meaningless words reached out in all directions.  From its mouth, the blind creature spewed fire, carved of sharp jagged shapes, like a dragon breathing flames that cut as well as burned.  Chilled by the image, I asked her to describe it.  “This is what I feel like when you yell at me,” she said.  “Parents can make their children feel small and helpless,” she explained, saying no more.

I stared at the image for a long time.  My mind was filled with so many thoughts—my own reminiscences of childhood, confrontations with both of my children, memories of my daughter as she took each successive step toward the woman she was becoming before my eyes. I observed how the image itself moved from left to right, from icy cold to burning hot, telling its story.  I took a quick inventory of my emotions.  I was feeling many things—but nothing I was experiencing resembled anything like anger. 

“It’s amazing,” was all I could think to say, practically breathless.  “You’re not mad?” she asked.  “How can I be mad?  It’s incredible!  This is far more than a collage.  You have created an original piece of art, and it is so expressive!”  I couldn’t say enough.  Here, in her use of color, mixtures of scale, contrasts, literal vs. figurative images, she had managed to do so many things in the context of such a limited school exercise.  I was so proud of what she brought to this silly assignment, and so thrilled to see the first glimpses of a real talent and vision emerge.

“But you’re not mad that it’s . . . about you?” she asked again.  “But it’s NOT about me,” I said, assuring her that I understood.  “You are telling your own story from your own point of view, and that is always OK.”

It can be unsettling when your child holds the mirror up to your face, showing you to yourself in a different light.  Reality has many faces.  She has my blessing to use whatever inspires her creativity; may it give her wings.

Tomorrow's blog:  Symphony Sensation

Sometimes the Truth Hurts

In journalism you aren’t really successful until you get death threats.  When you cut so close to the bone that the subject feels threatened, you know there is truth in the story you are trying to tell. 

My blogs are not journalism in any sense of the word.  They are personal tales and occasionally essays, packaged to entertain the many of you who choose to read, but mainly for my own exercise.  They derive from memories, disappointments, experiences, challenges, and often from personal baggage that until now has been hard to put down.  It is very cathartic to wrap up an emotion or recollection in a story, tying it with a bow and setting it aside.  But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are meant to be anything but my stories.

Recently I have been told that someone told someone who told someone something about something in one of my blogs.  Without having read a single one of my blogs personally, this individual chose to be offended and took drastic measures.  I try very hard to be true to my memories and my experiences, with the occasional sprinkle of satire and poetic license.  These are not fiction; nor are they historical records.  Still, I make decisions along the way about what to include and not include; these choices are mine alone.  I am careful that the person who is stripped bare in my tales is me—not anyone else.  I do not name names.  When I fear that I am perilously close to crossing a line, I consult with my husband.  Those who are acquainted with him know him to be as fair and objective as they come.  Unlike others, he has read every single blog, sometimes more than once.  With his encouragement and a gentle nudge, I then pull the trigger.

While I accept that some people may disagree with my account of certain events, and that others may conclude in error that these tales are about them rather than about me, I stand behind my stories as my own.  I am a first-hand witness to my own life but I do not live in a vacuum; I cannot tell my stories without the poignancy and irony bestowed by those who have touched me. 

I am buoyed by the incredible support and encouragement of my friends to continue on this quest unaltered.  And so it goes.

Tomorrow's blog:  Dragon Mom

Love on Avenue Louis Pasteur

A growing number of people today are making their love matches through online dating.  I guess this makes sense in a world where people chat through their computers rather than face to face.  I cannot imagine choosing to date someone based on a photo and an online list of turn-ons and turn-offs.  My own Facebook picture dates back to 1987!  The idea of cyber-dating violates one of my cardinal rules for life:  don’t look for love.  I do not believe you can make a love match when you are shopping, as the act itself heightens one’s most discriminating filters.  Falling in love, I believe, happens by accident.  It is only when you least expect it that someone sneaks into your life and steals your heart.  Nonetheless, the last half dozen or so people I have met who are recently married—both young and slightly more “seasoned”—claim to have found their loves on match.com.  What do I know?

I met my husband the old fashioned way:  I picked him up on a bus.  Granted, it wasn’t your ordinary bus; it was a Harvard shuttle bus.  My mind was as far from love as it could be.  I was spending the year after college graduation living and working in Boston trying to decide my next move.  I had deferred my admission to a couple of graduate schools in order to apply to the Harvard School of Public Health—their health policy and management program would not admit anyone without at least a year of work experience after college. 

Then one day, out of the blue, I received a very disturbing letter from my beloved grandmother.   She had been biting her tongue, she said, and could bear it no longer.  In her perfect schoolteacher hand—which served only to accentuate the sting of her words—she admonished me for the disappointment that I was to my family.  After all, she explained, I completed four years of college and graduated “with no visible prospects.”   In my mind I was trying to figure out how it was that my family could not understand.  I had been admitted to all the graduate schools to which I applied, but I was holding out for the Harvard program, for which I needed to fulfill the work requirement.   As I read on, I realized that she was not talking about education or careers at all.

Apparently, my family had rationalized my Harvard education as a means to find a suitable husband.  If a misfit “smart girl” like me could be considered attractive anywhere, certainly it would be in a place where everyone else was so smart I wouldn’t stick out.  During college I dated one guy—albeit from that other school in New Haven—almost exclusively.  As we became more serious, I discovered he had rather unpalatable views about marriage and family.  I cut my losses, considering myself well rid of him.  But here in this letter, I found my grandmother telling me “so what if you don’t love him—you’ll learn.”  In her words, I “could not afford to be so particular as to turn down what was likely to be my only opportunity” at marriage.  How could I be “so ungrateful to all that my family had done for me?”  Suddenly, I was Elizabeth Bennett being scolded for refusing the likes of Mr. Collins.  It was better to be locked in a loveless marriage then to be a burden on my family.

I was shocked and hurt.  My grandmother herself had fought with her own father for the right to attend college.  As he was an immigrant, she had to convince him to file citizenship papers in order for her to apply to school.  He was reluctant, as he did not think it appropriate for a girl to be educated.  Yet she prevailed and attended teacher’s college—even though she already had a boyfriend, my grandfather, locked in.  Here was this woman, someone I held as a symbol of self-betterment, suggesting that college was nothing more than a marital shopping expedition!  I could barely reconcile this attitude with the woman I revered.

That year after graduation became an important turning point in my life.  Realizing once and for all that I had only myself to satisfy, I deferred my acceptances, got an apartment in the city with my dear friend Jane, found some meager employment, and worked on my Harvard application.  Late in January, I took the morning off from work in order to have my Harvard interview.  Having missed the last of the morning’s shuttle buses back to Cambridge, I was stuck for the better part of an hour in the Medical School dorm’s common room waiting for the afternoon bus service to resume.  Finally, the 1:15 bus pulled up and I jumped on, a bit anxious that I would be reprimanded at work for arriving later than expected.

I hardly noticed the tall red-head who climbed into the seat in front of me.  Nor did I realize how he had squeezed all six-foot-four of himself into the one row of seats choked by the indentations of the wheel wells.   To this day, neither of us remembers who spoke first.  Somehow, he managed to get from me the most important piece of information—that I was NOT a medical student—a fact that would have ruled me ineligible in his book.  I managed to discover that he was a dental student, something that endeared him to me; the best guy I ever knew—my grandfather—was also a dentist.  What I remember most were his eyes—deep blue pools of light that held me like tractor beams. 

By the time we arrived at our destination, it was as if there was no one else on that packed bus.  He walked me to my office, managing to drop his name into the conversation and to ascertain mine.  When he called an hour later—having tracked me down through a maze of campus directories—I had difficulty maintaining the calm of practiced indifference. 

Ours was a love match, made of equal parts chemistry and serendipity.   It reinforces what I still believe in my heart—that the best things come to you when you aren’t looking for them.  Had I shopped for this man I never would have found him.  He would have been labeled incorrectly and hanging somewhere else in the store. 

Tomorrow's blog: Sometimes the Truth Hurts

Getting in the Write Mind

I laugh out loud when I realize how much I now write on a daily basis.  Since starting this blog I have written over fifty-thousand words, not counting the work I do each day for my clients.

Thirty years ago, however, I could not write my way out of a paper bag.  Somehow I managed to graduate from high school; up in my attic I have a thick stack of papers with As emblazoned on them that would hardly pass muster today.   Endowed with false confidence from my high school education, I set our for college thinking I had mastered the “read-a-book-write-a-paper” game.  When I arrived on campus, however, I discovered quickly that everyone was playing with a different deck.   In my required freshman expository writing class, we read modern short stories and wrote short papers.  The stories stumped me outright; I had no lens through which to process what I was reading.   I could not find the familiar symbolism of Shakespeare, or the quaint period irony of Jane Austen.  There was nothing in my toolkit with which to interpret modern themes.  On one infamous occasion, the writing teacher distributed my paper along with that of a close friend—both of our names 'almost' obscured—as two extreme examples of writing on a similar topic.  One was beautifully executed; mine was the other one.

Having been called out as a bad writer in a Harvard English class was a shame I carried for a long time.   I tried in vain to avoid classes with papers, even stooping to take the one notorious English class with no writing assignments. I worried about my ability to survive long term at a venerable institution of higher learning.  Then I found the sweet spot of my education.  I began to see how the courses themselves followed a natural flow of ideas, an evolution of thought.  I then recognized several ideological connections between my philosophy, history of science, and art history classes.   I started getting goosebumps at lectures, as one by one a string of my professors won Pulitzer Prizes in successive semesters.

Then one day there was an audible click.  I may have been late to the game, but I finally got what it was all about.  As I became more expert in my chosen fields of study, I realized that I was beginning to accumulate knowledge; suddenly I had something important to say.  That’s when writing lost its demonic power over me.  After that, I never stared at a blank piece of paper again.  Ideas flowed from recognition and analysis; the piece of paper in the typewriter was just there to sop it up.

As a professional strategic planner, I logged a lot of hours over the years writing business plans, industry white papers, brochures, and eventually websites. I enjoy the challenge of revealing the virtues of concepts and products that people take for granted. Everything has a story to tell. The fun is in finding the hook and then slowly pulling away the layers one by one. At the company where I worked for a dozen years, I became the go-to person for generating excitement about our products. With my background in healthcare policy and finance, I could help our clients understand how new applications and technologies would improve the way they did their jobs.  Of course we had a team of professional writers in the marketing department whose job it was to create sales materials.  It always baffled me that they resisted learning about the jobs our clients did, or about how our products worked.  It is not possible to write convincingly about something you do not know.  Instead, they would try to take the pieces I wrote and transform them into reusable marketing Mad-Libs. 

Writing is never an exercise in filling a space with words.  I often think of the way that Michelangelo described carving his sculptures.  He did not take a form in his mind and impose it upon the stone; rather, he “liberated” the figure from within.  He recognized the meaningful beauty and simply discarded the rest of the material.  Similarly, good writing comes from finding what needs to be said;  my difficulty in college had little to do with writing skills and a lot to do with lacking exposure to all manner of things.  Having lived through a personal renaissance of a sort, I am a big proponent--perhaps militantly so--of liberal arts education.

Over the years, as my kids worked their way through school, we spent a lot of time discussing the process of writing papers.  Today, kids are taught a strong emphasis on formulating a thesis statement.  They are even required to underline the thesis (or have their score reduced by one grade)—a practice which seems to have followed both of my kids to college.   But they do not always have the tools to formulate their own point of view.   I took to asking them simple questions like, “What was the best part?” or “Who was your favorite character?” or “What makes it a good book?” or “Does it remind you of anything else?”  These questions (and the follow-up “why” questions) helped them transition from retelling the story to talking in the abstract about the book: its significance, the journey of a key character, striking symbolism, parallels to other books or styles.  I would admonish them if they tried to write a paper before they had something specific to say.

Which brings me back to this blog.  Early on in this venture, one of my friends asked if I was doing this to challenge myself, or to rant, or as a form of therapy.  I guess it depends upon the day.  I tend to see life through a comical lens and I enjoy revealing the humor I sometimes find in the mundane.  When there is a story that is meaningful to me, sometimes I enjoy the challenge of framing it in a way that resonates with others.  We all have a lot of personal baggage, and I sense from the responses I am getting—some public, some private—that many followers of this blog enjoy connecting with the more poignant stories.  The most trying moments for me have been those where I vacillated between exposing myself or playing it safe.  If I have learned one thing, it is that honesty is difficult.  Finally, as someone who writes professionally for industry, I am enjoying the opportunity to write on a wide variety of human subjects.  From that perspective, having suppressed my own ego in my writing for so many years, it is both challenging and liberating to be able to exercise my own voice. 

On a final note, part of the fun of writing this blog is to ferret out those of you who have something to say.  If I strike a chord, or hit a nerve, I hope you will share it with the rest of us.

Tomorrow's blog:  Love on Avenue Louis Pasteur