Salad Days

I have always hated salads.  This probably stems from the fact that making the dinner salad was my own personal permanent chore growing up.  Every night I had a date with an iceberg lettuce and a cucumber.  I would hack the leafy head to shreds, piling its detritus in the ugly plastic salad bowl.  I had a soft spot for the cucumber, however.  To this I applied much greater care, often using the tines of a fork to apply decorative fluting down the outside before slicing.  Of course, I always snuck a few slices of cuke into my mouth when no one was looking.  There was also a tomato.  I abhor tomatoes.  There is something about the gelatinous seed glop in the center of a tomato that I find especially off-putting.  I will eat any manner of cooked tomatoes, but a raw tomato just makes me want to hurl.

My father was an intensely picky eater.  He ate dried out chicken, well-cooked eggs, and never eggplant or yogurt.   He only ate tomato-based salad dressings, like Thousand Island or Catalina.  Often I would have to fabricate Thousand Island with mayonnaise, ketchup and relish for him.  I did not like the relish and would try to put in less, but he would always force me to make the dressing to his exact specifications.  I remember one particular time when some of the limp leaves of the lettuce found their way into the salad bowl.  When he admonished me for this, I told him to simply remove the offending leaf from his bowl.  I was surprised to find that he was more interested in teaching me the importance of “pleasing the man of the house” when I cooked.  That is when salad lost its appeal for me.  To this day, I can scarcely make a salad for any occasion without conjuring that memory and feeling like I am enslaved.

I used to enjoy ordering salads at restaurants.  The idea that someone else would prepare a salad for me had enormous appeal.  It was like a flash vacation.  But now even that pleasure has been taken away.  Have you seen what passes for salads in restaurants today?  Remember when a salad was a low-calorie, healthy alternative to a cheeseburger and fries?  Not anymore!  I think the FDA or the CDC should do an investigation—especially at establishments like the Cheesecake Factory (OK, the name says it all) and Chilis.  For the last few months, I have been inventorying salads and salad ingredients with great dismay.  I have discovered that an alarming number of restaurants have only the following salad offerings:  Caesar Salad, Cobb Salad, Taco Salad, Fried Chicken Salad.

First point:  A salad is supposed to be about eating vegetables!  Throwing a bunch of protein ingredients on a bed of lettuce is not a salad.

Second point:  Salad ingredients are not supposed to be deep fried!  Fried chicken should be served in a bucket, not on a bed of greens and covered in an oil-based dressing.

Third point:  A taco salad is not a salad, it is a chili taco! 

 

Fourth point:  Cobb salad—who are you kidding? This is an artery clog on a plate.  The primary ingredients are egg, blue cheese, bacon, chicken, and avocado.  Which of these ingredients says healthy to you?  Get the cheeseburger instead—it’s healthier.

Fifth point:  There are close to 40 grams of fat in a side serving of Caesar salad.  

Sixth point:  Enough with the beet salad already.  If I see another beet salad with blue cheese and walnuts I am going to scream.  This salad is now on every restaurant menu in America.  Don’t you guys have any originality?

Seventh point:  When did cheese become a primary ingredient in salad?  I can’t even get a dinner salad in a restaurant that isn’t covered with grated cheese of some variety.

Eighth point:  Knock off all the starchy trash on salads.  A few croutons are OK, but fried tortilla strips in a variety of colors are not a vegetable substitute.  Wonton strips are just a bunch of soggy crumbs.

Now I am really caught.  I hate to make salads, and there are very few places in the world where I can get a decent healthy salad.  (Panera:  you are a grave disappointment)  So like Cleopatra, my salad days are over!

Tomorrow's blog:  Triple Threat

Give a Kid a Break

Last night I attended a board meeting on which I serve to help support the symphony orchestra at my alma mater.  Although I am a pianist, I grew up playing in a local youth symphony where I learned the joy of making music from within a large ensemble.   Once in college, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to continue this activity.  The music director of the orchestra programmed music that ensured me the opportunity to play piano or celesta in almost every concert.  With this group, I traveled to Berlin to compete in an international festival, an event that turned out to be one of the highlights of my college experience.  It also forged close relationships that remain to this day.

I was a “starving student” in college.  I worked multiple jobs during my entire four years—dining hall food slinger, music library catalog assistant, emergency room graveyard shift grunt, babysitter for my professor’s kid—just to make ends meet.  The student loans I took out covered my term bills, but left me nothing for books, piano lessons, James Bond Festivals at the Science Center, or the occasional pizza at Pinocchio’s.  When the orchestra needed a pianist to play the featured parts in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring for the Berlin program, I was unable to produce the several hundred dollars each orchestra member was asked to contribute to the trip.  The board stepped in and subsidized my trip.  It is this same organization that I now serve, unable to feel as if I can ever repay this debt.

Student-run organizations, like other charitable causes, never have enough resources.  Fund-raising is a tough business, but especially in today's economy.  In a time when we all are tightening our belts, it is hard to argue that supporting a symphony orchestra at a well-endowed university should be a priority.  But what appears to be just another musical group opened a lot of doors for a lot of people.  For me, this college orchestra gave me opportunities beyond music making.  As its Concert Manager for two years, I produced eight concerts and coordinated two annual concerto competitions.  This built tangible management credentials that were instrumental in helping me take my next professional step outside of the world of music.  

Surprisingly, we have more difficulty raising engaged volunteers than money.  It should not be this hard.  Our culture depends upon those with experience shepherding the newbies.  Of course we do this through financial support, but also through oral traditions, mentoring, coaching, advising, and hands-on involvement.  These are the catalysts that inspire the next generation to take what we have done in our lifetimes a quantum step farther.  Without the continuity from those who came before, each generation would start from scratch.  I am not suggesting that each reader run out and donate to a symphony orchestra (although it would be nice if you did!)  Rather, I want to encourage you to think about the things that were important to you as you made your way in the world.  What opportunities opened the right doors?  What events were turning points in your life?  What involvements or activities defined who you are today?  What inspired you to take risks?  It may be music making.  Or working in a lab.  Or acting in a play.  Or interning with a government official.  Or having a summer job. Or traveling.  Or attending a certain school.  How can you extend that conversation or connection to the next generation?

Get involved.  Be the trajectory, not the endpoint.

Tomorrow's blog:  Salad Days

Rocket Man

I was born in the late 50s, a child of the Space Age.   When my father graduated from college with a degree in engineering, he took a job at a tech company on the mid-Florida coast as a hardware geek.  I could not tell you the specific technologies he worked with, but it was a time when things like semiconductors and integrated circuits were all the rage.  The company where my father worked was steeped in government contracts.  His circuitry work was used on Project Mercury—leading to the first manned space mission.

I have very few memories of the short time my family lived outside Melbourne, Florida near Cape Canaveral.  In fact, it is hard to know whether my memories are real, or images kept alive by old photos and movie reels.  I remember a beach where the sand was so packed you could drive a car on it.  I remember watching a missile launch in the distance, its tracers lifting from a flash and a blast of smoke.  And I remember a screened porch at the back of a small house where I used to play.

I was not quite two when my family relocated to Miami, my father’s industry taking a sharp turn toward defense contracts.  But those short years we spent on the “Space Coast” changed my father forever.  He loved rockets and the technology that made them possible.  Space travel vastly expanded the size of Man’s immediate universe, and in so doing, it made my father a bigger man.  He instilled in us a sense that space travel was a hugely important agenda.  For years, we watched every launch together on television as a family; these were “life” events.

Like many Americans, the night that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon was a defining moment in my life.  At just ten years old, my parents woke me in time to watch the live broadcast.  Unlike other things on television, this was jarringly real to me.  My family followed every moment of the Apollo 11 mission, collecting the newspaper accounts and watching every live television report.  Because of my father’s proprietary interest in space travel, he made sure we understood the significance of the moment to all of mankind. At the same time, he also made it feel as though this was something very personal happening to our family.

I was in sixth grade when the explosion aboard the Apollo 13 mission cancelled the crew’s landing on the moon.  For four days, our family was held hostage by this crisis.  My father was barely able to focus on work, afraid to lay down his hope for a moment to conduct trivial everyday tasks.  At the same time, he could not speak of the possibilities.  It was like a silent dugout during a baseball rally.   The day the astronauts splashed down and were recovered successfully, my father came home skipping like a new man.  He hugged me especially hard and whispered in my ear, “They are safe.”

Years later, when I was married and living in California, I watched in disbelief as the space shuttle Challenger exploded 71 seconds into flight, killing its crew.  Without even thinking, I picked up the phone and called my father’s office in Ft. Lauderdale.  His voice was audibly choked up as he attempted to speak into the phone; when he heard me cry “Dad!” he said simply, “I knew it would be you!”  Together we mourned the tragedy of lost lives and hailed the heroism of those who “understood” the importance of the space mission.

I had a rush of these memories tonight watching the Space Shuttle Enterprise fly to its final retirement in New York, piggy-backed on a 747.  I remember back in the 70s when fans of Star Trek lobbied successfully—much to my father’s amazement—to name this first shuttle after the fictitious Star Fleet vessel.  I was watching with my father in 1976 as the Enterprise rolled out of its hangar for the first time.  Together we were choked up while we watched the remarkably reusable spacecraft take flight for the first time.   

Today’s events marked the end of the era.  My father is no longer among us, no longer a phone call away.   I know he would have been moved by the sight of this heroic vessel making its final voyage home, and he would understand why it would immediately conjure for me these memories of him.  He would be proud that the space program, in which he participated in its earliest humble moments, lasted well beyond his own lifetime.

Tomorrow's blog:  Give a Kid a Break

Hockey Mom

Today in New England, hockey season is officially over.  It was a shorter season this year than last, and that’s that.  There is no more to say on this matter.

When we moved to New England with our family in the late 90s, my son was over the moon to play youth hockey.  At nine-years old he was doomed to mediocrity before he even started, as most self-respecting Boston-area kids are already suited up and on the ice by the age of five.  Nonetheless, he declared his intentions and brought home a long list of required gear.

Youth hockey already had a bad reputation for injuries and fighting.  Add to that the well-publicized tragedy of a local hockey dad’s fatal assault on another kid’s father at the rink and I was not keen on the idea that my little angel was drawn to this sport.  But there was no getting my way.  Hockey is a rite of passage for any boy in New England with a pulse.

Reluctantly, I drove my son to the sporting goods store.  A patient sales clerk outfitted my son from head to toe, starting with skates (my son had never skated in his life) and ending with a helmet.  I was satisfied at the cage that hung from the front of the helmet, convinced that this might spare my beautiful son’s freckle-nosed face.  But the neck guard petrified me.  What kind of happy sport requires something as frightening as a neck guard?  My mind ran involuntarily through the implication of this piece of equipment; I stopped it in its tracks.  It would not do to have these kinds of thoughts!

Once my son was fully dressed in this getup I asked him to hand me his hockey stick.  In the middle of the store I whacked him up one side and down the other—on the head, on his back, across his knees.  Randomly, I took shots at every inch of him.  “Do you like that?” I asked.  “Get a grip, mom,” he said calmly.  “I can’t even feel it.”  The sales clerk looked at me doubtfully.  “I’m not buying any of this,” I explained, “if he can’t tolerate getting hit.”  Since he did not seem to mind, I handed my Amex to the clerk, convinced that the equipment was suitable.

The gear was schlepped home, filling the entire rear compartment of my ample SUV.  It was the beginning of a lifestyle that included 5am practices, Saturday morning games, and bi-weekly skate sharpenings.  There were tournaments in New Hampshire and Lake Placid.  Soon, there was a permanent, ungodly smell in the car, in the garage, and in my son’s room.  There were in-house leagues, and travel leagues, and fall-leagues.  There were hockey dinners and awards banquets.  There were—believe it or not—codes of conduct for the parents stipulating that you must cheer for both teams and not your own child.

There were also some good things that came out of growing up in a hockey town.  For one thing, I taught my son by the age of ten to do his own laundry.  To this day, I consider this one of my greatest accomplishments as a parent.  His ability to generate dirty laundry far exceeded anyone’s capacity to clean it.  All it took was one time reaching down into his hamper, bringing my nose into close contact with that stench, to declare his laundry forever a mom-free zone. 

More importantly, my son’s hockey buddies are his closest friends even today.  While the locker room conditioned him to adopt a certain temperament and language, it also forged lasting relationships with guys who always had his back—both off and on the ice.  Even if my son is only home for a few days, the gang is waiting to get together. 

 

All these positives notwithstanding, the ten years my son played hockey was a living hell for me.  I did my share of managing teams, coordinating away tournaments, working fundraisers, producing team yearbooks, and cooking team dinners.  In the way “no good deed goes unpunished,” there was no shortage of hockey parents prepared to tell me what I was doing wrong on a moment’s notice.  There are the hockey equivalent of stage-parents, working to ensure that their son will be the one-in-a-million with a hockey scholarship to a leading college.  I did not care about any of this.  Our league included the town where hockey parents beat each other up.  All I cared about was the safety of our boys.  I wanted to see each of them stand on their feet at graduation.  

Today I attend Bruins games with my husband.  I sit in silence as he discusses player injuries with other team doctors in the press room before the games.  I jump out of my seat every time a player is flung against the glass.   I react with stunned amazement as The Garden fans rally when a fight breaks out on the ice, cheering to encourage the exchange of fists; I simply cover my ears and look away.  I remain a stoic kind of fan.  I watch the million dollar athletes with a sigh, remembering that each is some mother’s son.

Tomorrow's blog:  Rocket Man

The Number You Have Reached Is Not Giving Money At This Time

I have said it again and again:  I cannot stand receiving solicitation phone calls.  I am beyond angry.  I have crossed over into unabashed rudeness and am teetering perilously close to a pre-emptive strike.

We all get these calls.  At first I was just barely tolerant, realizing that it is never good karma to shoot the messenger.  These people are just doing their jobs, after all.  Perhaps one of my own children might be desperate enough to take a job making these calls.  No!  I would pay them out of my own pocket to do nothing before I would permit such a thing!

There is a category of calls that I suffer silently.  Take the assortment of almae mater, for example, that call in the fall and the spring between 7 and 9pm.  Alumni canvassing is their biggest source of fund-raising.  It is true that when they send me the annual fund card in the mail, I have a tendency to push it to the side until I am writing checks.  But with online banking, how often do I write checks these days?  Almost never.  I chalk this one up to my own folly.  If I responded promptly it is likely I would not receive the call.

Then there are the home service providers.  This includes the gutter-cleaners, window-washers, chimney-sweep, and sprinkler guy who provide annual services seasonally.  I consider it a convenience that at the end of winter, my chimney sweep calls to clean the fireplace for the summer, inspecting the flu for any birds or winter damage and leaving me with a pristine area in which to display plants or candles.  Same for the window people who come every spring to clean three stories of windows inside and out, also cleaning and replacing all the screens.  Even the fall appearance of the sprinkler guy, who shuts off the water supply and drains the pipes for the cold New England winter, is someone who would never cross my Florida-born mind.  I forgive the solicitousness of their calls, as I could not survive without their just-in-time interventions.

Stray off this narrow line and the calls turn from helpful to obnoxious.  My husband and I have four degrees from three “schools” in the same University.  When I replace the phone from one call only to have it ring again immediately, the same guy now asking for my husband, I am justifiable annoyed.  Then there is the school where my husband spent only his freshman year before transferring to, and graduating from, a different institution.  I am not certain how his name ended up on a list of their alumni, but no amount of begging to be removed seems to work.

There are a few remedies to this situation.  First, I check caller ID before answering the phone.  Any call placed from an 800 number is likely a solicitation.  I also avoided blocked and private calls for a while, until I realized that I was missing calls from my husband’s back office phone line.  I have registered our house landline and all of our family’s cell phones on the National “Do Not Call” registry (www.donotcall.gov).  This cut down the calls enough to allow our family to eat dinner in peace most nights.  We also purchased a “telezapper” at Radio Shack.  This is a gadget that you install on your phone line.  When a computer dials your number automatically from a database, it emits a sound telling the computer that your phone is out of order.  This will normally erase your number from that source.

I find that the undesirable calls fall into a few predictable “types.”  First, is the arguer.  I have a few contribution rules, including that I do not give money over the phone (it is sound practice to refuse to give out a credit card over the phone), and that all of our giving to our alma mater is done in one transaction through a single source.  Rather than appreciating our support, some student will invariably launch into an argument about why I should also give just a small contribution ($10, $25) to the special interest group for which he is calling.  After saying ‘no’ one, two, or three times I usually have no choice but to hang up.

The next type I call the familiar.  These are the ones who not only address you by your first name, they act during the first 5-10 seconds of the call as if they are intimate friends.  I have received calls that begin with, “Hey, how is it going?” or “Boy, it sure is a nice day, isn’t it?”  They turn out to be hawking roofing or duct cleaning.  One of the most obnoxious is our local police department.  They call from a blocked number, use my first name, and identify themselves as the police.  They remind me that they are the respondents when my security alarm goes off.  Our police force is a well-funded community service; the money they are soliciting is for their social events, not basic needs.  Once, when I used my usual “I don’t give money over the phone” tactic, a police car pulled up to my front door a minute later with an envelope!

The third type is the retaliator.  These are the ones who feel that their position as an unwelcome presence in your home is their right.  They are personally offended at your unwillingness to contribute to their productivity statistics.  They want revenge.  I have seen this take two forms.  There was one caller who was offended that I would not let him execute his rather lengthy and inflexible script.  I asked twice that he stop reading and tell me what he was calling about.  When he would not, I simply hung up the phone.   A minute later, the same guy called back and shouted, “You #&%$ing b*itch! How dare you hang up on me!”  I was able to report the number to the police, concerned not only that I was getting an abusive call, but also that the caller had direct access to our home number.  A more subtle form of retaliation is computer manipulation.  There is a particular number that is calling me now.  The first time I received a call from them, I said I was not interested and asked to be removed from their database.  Instead, they have now programmed my number into a dialing machine that calls me first thing in the morning and several times during the day.  When I answer, I can hear that it is a computer call, but it hangs up after a second or two with no message or personal greeting.  Through my caller ID I can tell that these calls are coming from the same source.  When I have tried to call this number back, it is not a number that can be accessed.

A new telemarketing scam is from “Credit Services” claiming to have important information about your accounts.  It is actually an attempt to elicit your valid credit card numbers under the ruse of reducing your interest rates.  Another interesting fact is that companies that market these services to you are first doing credit checks.  So not only are they inconveniencing you while you are putting dinner on the table, they are also invading your privacy and lowering your credit rating, too.

I am not certain how these companies maneuver around the law to continue calling homes that are registered on the do not call list.  I do not know what technology flies in the face of the latest Telezapper gadget.  But I will make this solemn pledge:  I will dedicate myself to the election of any candidate who makes the elimination of telemarketers the centerpiece of his or her campaign.

Brush With Fame

Why do we care about meeting famous people?  They are just people, after all.  Whether by the law of randomness, or by the “six degrees of separation,” it is likely that our paths will intersect those of the famous and the infamous (not to mention Kevin Bacon) on many occasions during our lifetimes.  As the saying goes, famous people put their pants on one leg at a time.  Johnny Carson would famously rail against those who could not contain their excitement in his presence, especially one hapless fool who actually asked for an autograph while the Mighty Carson was conducting business at a urinal.

Proximity to greatness does not confer any special status.  Standing next to Julia Roberts at Starbucks puts the ordinary person no closer to winning an Oscar.  Catching a glimpse of Brad Pitt does not make a man handsome.  Shaking Bill Gates’ hand does not make you rich.  Rubbing shoulders with Richard Feynmann does not make you smart.

As I think back, I have had many brushes with famous people over the years.  For several weeks, my Facebook profile picture showed me standing with Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins at the team’s Stanley Cup celebration.  It was exciting to meet him and the other players.  They clean up well and they are all surprisingly down-to-earth.  Most of them are about the age of my son.  It is fun to imagine their own mothers—simple women in small towns who probably cringed as I did every time their sons took a hit on the ice.  These boys have had their share of broken facial bones and knocked out teeth. 

One time, while flying from Miami to San Francisco with my six-month-old son on my lap, I was sitting in the bulkhead at the front of coach while famed 49er wide receiver Jerry Rice was sitting on the other side of the first class wall just in front of me.  We were living in San Francisco at that time.  I looked down and noticed that my son was wearing a tiny San Francisco football jersey with Rice’s number 80 on it.  I brought my son up to meet him—to have his own brush with greatness; Rice signed the jersey across my son’s belly.  The jersey and the faint traces of Rice's autograph still hang in my son’s room.

I once bought a book from Shelley Winters and had her autograph it.  She thought I reminded her of her own daughter.  She talked to me for a long while about my college studies and career aspirations as the crowd became agitated behind me.

My family once took a vacation in the keys.  Actor/comedian Dom DeLuise was staying at the same quiet hotel with his family.  He was an ordinary man—not particularly funny—as he sat at the poolside soaking up the rays.  I recognized him from television even at the young age of twelve.  I was star-struck!  No matter how nonchalant I attempted to be, I could not get over that this famous man was bathing in the same pool.  He had a small son who was adorable and precocious.  He loved the water and kept flinging himself into it, and then paddling up to the surface.  Dom and his wife Carol kept yelling, “Way to go, Mikey!”  My daughter and I became devoted fans of the TV show Gilmore Girls.  I could not help laughing every time this same “Mikey” appeared in his supporting role as the addle-minded TJ, Luke’s unfortunate brother-in-law.

I greeted the late Sonny Bono on a business trip in Palm Springs, having the opportunity to dine in his yummy Italian restaurant.  On another business trip to Chicago, Steve Martin and his wife dined one table over from us at another fine Italian restaurant. I could barely swallow my food as once again I was starstruck. I went around the revolving door at the NBA store in Manhattan with Beau Bridges, and nearly bumped right into Jack Lemmon at Hammacher-Schlemmer on Rodeo Drive.  

None of these was as exciting to me, however, as meeting my childhood idol and music legend, Van Cliburn.  Growing up as a pianist in the 60s, Van Cliburn was “all that.”  An American prodigy who won the Tschaikowsky Competition in Moscow during the Cold War, Van Cliburn was the de facto artist of choice for every occasion.  He became a household name despite being an exclusively classical artist—a handsome boy possessed of unusual height and flawless Southern charm.  When I was around the age of thirteen, Van Cliburn came to Miami to play a solo recital at the Miami Auditorium.  I begged my mother for tickets to the concert but they were prohibitively expensive.  Then one day my favorite classical radio station—the now defunct WTMI—announced a contest.  The prize was two tickets to the Cliburn recital and a private meeting with the artist.  All I had to do was write an answer to the question, “Why do you want to meet Van Cliburn?”

A week later I received a call that I had won the radio contest. We had seats in the third row.  Before the concert, a representative from the radio station came to our seats and escorted my mother and me backstage to meet Van Cliburn.  He traveled with his mother who, although as demur as a Southern belle, made it clear she could be as fierce as a lioness to anyone who threatened her son.  I could not get over his larger-than-life appearance; he had porcelain skin that blushed like a schoolgirl and the broadest hands I had ever seen.  I brought the [pink] program from a solo recital I had recently done showing that I had performed the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #12—a piece for which he was well known.  He looked at my tiny hands and feigned disbelief.  I asked him childish questions, such as “Do you ever get nervous?” and “How much do you practice every day?”  He smiled graciously, explaining that a well-prepared artist need never worry about nerves.  We had our picture taken together.  He showed me how he washed his hands, “in a symbolic gesture,” before every performance.  Then my mother and I were ushered out and back to our choice seats.  I was breathless through the entire performance.  As Cliburn bowed after his final encore, he caught sight of me in the audience and gave a barely perceptible nod in my direction.

Some thirty years later, I entered the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs.  After the first round of competition, the contestants were called one-by-one across the stage to shake hands with the man himself.  I saw the same hands, the same flawless skin, the same lilting drawl, but there was no recognition in his eyes. I was just another among the throngs of admirers who felt a false connection with him because of his fame, his hovering presence in my life.  Later that week, at a reception for the competitors, I had the opportunity to recall the event of our first meeting with him in a more casual setting.  He smiled and laughed politely at a young girl’s folly misplaced in the middle-aged woman I had become.  And with the turn of his head, I, and the memory of that moment, were gone again from his consciousness, replaced by a fresh conversation and an old friend.

There is something different about superstars and ordinary people.  Their status derives from an ability to leave their imprint on others.  Mine assures me that I can disappear untethered, back into the madding crowd.

Tomorrow's blog:  The Number You Have Reached Is Not Giving Money At This Time

Post Dramatic Stress

Let me make one thing clear:  I do not have writer’s block.  I am not unable to write; nor do I have a lack of stimulating topics on which to pontificate.  My affliction is more specific.  I am stuck, for sure; but I am stuck in another time and place.  It is just after the end of World War I and I am stuck at Downton Abbey.

Over the weekend, my husband and I fulfilled a pledge we have been making to each other for some time to watch the much-acclaimed Masterpiece classic series.  Thanks to a bleak weather forecast, Netflix On Demand, and a peculiar little gadget called Apple TV, we dialed up the first episode to take a look at what all the fuss was about.  Fifteen minutes later, we were hooked.  I no longer cared what chores I needed to accomplish during the weekend.  The bed went unmade and the laundry unwashed.  I never left the house.  The only force capable of diverting this plan was the Boston Bruins.  Their two scheduled play-off games commanded the TV, first for three hours on Saturday and then for another three (including a sudden death overtime) on Sunday.  No sooner were the players off the ice than we were back in the English countryside.

There are sixteen hour-long episodes of Downton Abbey.  We watched every last one.  Avid Anglophiles and lovers of period dramas, we were captivated by the plight of the Crawley family and the behind-the-staircase intrigue among the house staff.  We enjoyed the plot twists that kept Mary and Matthew apart, knowing with confidence that they would come together in the end and wondering who would be sacrificed to make it happen.  We loved the mysterious Mr. Bates, whose suspicious demeanor made it hard to trust in his apparently virtuous heart.  And we laughed at the less-than-subtle battles of wits and words between the two dowager hens, Violet and Isobel. 

Even more interesting was the snobbery between the liveried footman and the backroom cooks and maids.  The attitudes and aspirations of this servant class were an interesting parallel to those who were welcome at the front door.  Each group ran the full gamut, possessing in equal measure snobbery, upward aspiration, hope, futility and a desire to escape.  Though the pace was as slow moving as the practiced indifference of English nobles, the drama itself was surprisingly suspenseful.  Would Matthew walk again?  Would Sybil run away?  Would Bates hang?  Would Richard reveal Mary’s secret?

That Downton Abbey was an obvious nod at two of my favorite pieces of literature—Pride and Prejudice and Les Miserables—only made it that much more enjoyable.  I never tire of these stories where those who “have” are admired for doing nothing, while those who “have not” are admired for how much they do without being observed.  What makes Downton Abbey interesting is that the players on both sides question their roles openly in their social charade, letting us in on the irony as a new era dawns.  Even while preserving the strict trappings of tradition—dressing for dinner, offering the correct wine pairings, maintaining the hierarchy of butler, valet and footman—they wonder aloud at the appropriateness of these details and the effort expended in the name of social order.  

There is a reason I do not watch these series when they run in prime time.  It is because I descend so deeply into the characters and the storylines that I simply cannot function.  When I read (and re-read) Jane Austen or Bronte sister books, for example, I typically read them in one sitting—often reading late into the early hours of the morning.  Weekly television installments of period dramas destroy me.  Not only do I get butterflies in my stomach waiting for the following week’s episode, I dwell in another time and place for days after watching each one.  Today, I am still recovering from Downton overload.  I am fixated on how the characters each wore the same three dresses at dinners over an eight-year period.  I am still trying to figure out the particular configurations that resulted in the girls’ tidy hairstyles.  I am smiling at the clever scene where Anna, the maid, played nonchalantly with the new electric curling iron on her own hair in order to master the technique for her Lady Mary.  I wonder what will become of Daisy and her newfound confidence.  Will Vera’s spirit inhabit the Ouija Board?  Will Thomas prove to have any redeeming qualities?

And now, I am caught up and hankering for more.  I cannot stand it.   Like everyone else, I will have to wait until January, 2013.  At least I’ll be finished with my blog by then, giving me leave to dwell at Downton Abbey for as long as I wish.

Tomorrow's blog:  Brush With Fame

Teenage Mutant Ninjas

I became aware this week that in six months I will no longer be the mother of teenagers.  I confess to indulging in a brief happy dance at this thought.  The teenage years are no picnic for any parent.  On the other hand, it is a bittersweet passage.  There is something oddly comforting in teenage angst.  Though my heart bleeds for the pain of their youthful awakening, the fact that my kids still need me anchors my world.  I am reluctant to let go; yet I find that as they loosen their grips the effect is the same.  And though this is done by degrees over many years, that final release will feel as sudden and shocking as if it occurred all at once.

I remember with amazing freshness the first time my son admonished me for saying “I love you” audibly as he went off with his friends.  The look in his eyes was a combination of horror and mortification.  Later, he confronted me, asking me if I would stop making this embarrassing declaration.  “It’s not that I don’t love you back,” he explained.  “Just please don’t say that in front of my friends ever again.”  Then he suggested that when he goes off with the boys he would touch his finger to his nose.  “That way, mom,” he offered, “you’ll know that I’m thinking about loving you even though I don’t say it aloud.”

This is a sharp contrast to the tender moments with my daughter.  At about the same age, I simply became irrelevant to her.  This was conveyed by a roll of the eyes and the tender words, “Yeah, right.”

I love my children to distraction, and I love them equally.  But this is not to say that they are the same in any way.  They could not be more different in humor or temperament.  From the earliest moments after birth they were like night and day.  My son was independent, arching his back if I held him too tightly in my arms.  My daughter, by contrast, was born to “coze”—she was perfectly happy to be my own living baby doll.  As teenagers, these differences played out predictably.  My son was anxious to buy his own clothes, to drive a car, and to live independently.  My daughter resisted growing up.  I literally had to force her to get her driver’s license.  Although she is wonderfully accomplished, she is also very close with her mother.  Our similarities—not just physically, but also across a wide range of proclivities—are almost frightening.  We sometimes joke that we are a single brain in two bodies. 

This is why the rite of passage affected me differently with my two kids.  My son managed his own emotional growth smoothly.  When it was time to go off to college, I accompanied him on the long trip to the West Coast.  Because of the vast distance, I planned to stay around for a few days as a safety net.  On the first day, we unpacked all of his things.  I hung up his clothes and made his bed.  He then looked at me, gave me a hug in thanks, and said, “Bye, mom.”  With no apparent usefulness, I showed up at my mother-in-law’s house.  Playing a funny sort of latter day “odd couple,” she and I palled around for the rest of my stay as I waited in vain for a desperate call from my son.

With my daughter, however, the teenage journey affected me more personally.  Her brand of independence seemed to come at my expense.   It was less a matter of proving her self-sufficiency as it was proving to herself that she was not me.   I found it difficult to acquiesce to her need for space when it was accompanied by disrespectful verbal jabs.  I could yield to the first, but not to the second.  It made for a tough few years, but she always found a way to let me know that she was still the same person deep inside.  There was one particular moment before my father’s funeral when she squeezed my hand and held it tightly, communicating to me in that moment that she got me like no one else.

I am not alone among mothers who are continually baffled by teenage daughter behavior.  It was explained to me that we tend to treat our children like dogs.  We say “don’t do this” and “don’t do that” until we are blue in the face, (tempting us, no doubt, to wish we could swat them on the nose with with a rolled up newspaper).  Then we are shocked when they act out defiantly under our noses—the behavioral equivalent of pooping on the carpet.  The problem is that daughters are not dogs, they are cats.  Our admonitions fall on deaf (or is it indifferent?) ears.  We are no more able to train our daughters how to act than we are to teach a Siamese to stay off the sofa.

My daughter’s college fencing coach, a former Olympian and Hall-of-Famer who has coached an exclusively women’s team for 36 years, explains it this way.  She said you must think of a teenage daughter’s brain as teeth.  As they are growing up, their brain is like baby teeth.  Then, sometime during high school, just like deciduous baby teeth, their brain falls out.  For an unpredictable period of time, your daughter is walking around with no brain at all; this is reflected in all manner of irresponsible and defiant behavior.  Then one day, her adult brain begins to grow in.  With that, she begins to assume the characteristics of the adult she will become. 

I am happy to report that I am beginning to see signs of adult brain in both of my kids.  I just hope that when all is said and done, I’m not as lame to them as I was during their teenage years.  Yeah, right!





Tomorrow's blog:  Post-Dramatic Stress

Take It To The Limit

So put me on a highway and show me a sign

And take it to the limit one more time.

---The Eagles

When I was in high school I was a confirmed math nerd.  Due to a series of strange circumstances that resulted in my taking Geometry and Algebra 2 simultaneously, I found myself as a senior having already completed a full year of Calculus by the end of 11^th grade.  Figuring that not having a math class during senior year would reflect badly on college applications, a small group of us (David Bennett, Susan Ayoung-chee, and AJ Toussaint) found a teacher who would gladly push us a bit further.  Thus was our school’s first Calculus 2 class.  It was not a very formal gathering, but we had fun schmoozing among our own species and communicating in our secret nerd language.

At the same time, the Eagles (greatest band of all time) released their fourth album, One of These Nights.  One of the singles from this album, released in the fall of 1975, was the song “Take It To The Limit.”  In some strange convergence of events, this became the theme song for our calculus class (if you don’t get the joke, I can’t explain it here).   Forget that this song was really about lost love—which also might have been apropos—to us it was an anthem that inspired us to pursue our nerdly destinies.  Even in college, I used to play this song before exams as a wakeup call.  I was called out a couple of times for absentmindedly humming the theme as I furiously filled blue books with pages and pages of compares and contrasts.

That “Take It To The Limit” would end up as my theme song added a prescient sort of karma to my life.  Around the same time, my pursuit of the piano as a professional aspiration approached its peak.  My piano teacher was demanding that Liszt’s original Spanish Rhapsody would be the culmination of my work with her.  (He wrote two Spanish Rhapsodies:  a backbreaking version for solo piano, and a scaled-back version using the same melodies for piano and orchestra.)  She had earmarked this piece for me years earlier, determined that it would be my final bow under her tutelage.  At the same time, I was also doing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, a sublime masterpiece that still, to this day, will stop me in my tracks and bring me to tears.

The Beethoven was my warm blanket.  Written in E-flat major, it fit the hand and filled the heart.  It was also scored reasonably for the youth symphonies with which I appeared each year.  The Liszt, however, was something altogether unknown to me.  I had played many Liszt pieces over the years successfully, but I had difficulty getting my head—and my hands—around this one.  It bothered me that I had never heard it performed on the radio; nor could I find a record of it anywhere.  Then it hit me: this piece was unplayable.  No one played it!

The composer Franz Liszt was said to have had enormous hands and super-human technique.  In his own time, he was rumored to have dallied with the devil—such was the magnitude of his ability.  He wrote behemoth concert pieces for himself to show off his virtuosity because no other composer’s music did justice to his skill.  In many cases, he recycled other composer’s melodies or folk songs, focusing his creativity on how to push the modern piano, and pianist, to their respective limits.

I, on the other hand, was a seventeen year old girl with hands that barely spanned an octave.  I am also short, which gives me little mechanical advantage over a standard keyboard.  There are passages in this piece that involve rapid repetitive motions with the hands stretched in octaves.  Without getting too technical, I needed to achieve both a hammer-like up and down movement while also manifesting a smooth left-to-right momentum.  I could easily master the notes; it was the performance quality needed for these passages that plagued me.

An interesting thing that happens among teachers, coaches, and even parents, is that kids sometimes become the ammunition in battles among adults.  So it was that my teacher conscripted me as her entry in a special gala concert featuring students from among the top piano teachers in South Florida.  The Spanish Rhapsody took on a different level of importance to her.  It was no longer about my own aspirations as a student or a pianist; this was to be her high-water mark.  I was now the “substance” of a personal pissing competition between her and her peer piano teachers.

Saddled with this responsibility and a rapidly approaching concert date, I spent almost every waking hour working a few key octave passages over and over and over.  I practiced in syncopated rhythms.  I practiced with my eyes closed.  I practiced slow, soft, fast, loud. I woke up one morning to find my hands throbbing as never before.  They felt swollen and stiff, but mostly they just ached—even when I wasn’t moving them.  I was unable to play at all.  I had reached my physical limit.

The doctor’s diagnosis back then was tendonitis.  Today, they would likely choose a more au currant label, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, or de Quervain’s tenosynovitis.  In any case, the result was the same.  Do not play for at least two weeks.  Ice frequently.  With a concert scheduled in just a month, I was under stress like never before.

I would perform the Spanish Rhapsody three times that season.  The first was the planned gala concert, which was a success in all the ways my teacher had intended. The last was at my teacher’s spring recital—my farewell performance before heading to college.  On that night, I received my first sustained, full-house standing ovation.  But it was a bittersweet performance.  Even as I felt the pride in achieving what had once seemed an impossible goal, I knew inside that I had reached my limit.  I would never be a pianist because I do not possess the physical qualities necessary to juggle a large repertoire and to perform constantly. 

I have spent a lifetime battling limits—both artificial and real.  I overcame my parents’ narrow views to live a life of my own design.  I broke the glass ceiling in a company that looked down upon women in positions of power and influence.  I returned to the piano after a twenty year absence to compete in amateur competitions, even having the opportunity to resurrect the Spanish Rhapsody after reaching the final round of the Van Cliburn IPCOA.  It was a less than optimal performance, but only two years after surgery for a large cyst in my wrist, it was more triumphant for me than others may realize.  In subsequent years, I used a personal trainer to build the strength necessary for me to endure a Liszt Transcendental Etude (#10 in f-minor)—one of my personal bucket-list pieces. 

Now in my fifties, the idea of limits becomes a harsh reality.  Plagued by arthritis, I can no longer escape my physical limits by applying mind over matter.  I am planning one more assault on the amateur piano circuit, but I cannot say for certain whether I will be successful in achieving that goal.  On the other hand, persistence of will gives birth to a creative process.  I find that I am reaching forward in other ways, such as through my daily writings and a variety of other creative and intellectual pursuits.  Sometimes a limit is just an indication that it is time to follow a different sign on the highway.

Tomorrow's blog:  Teenage Mutant Ninjas

Papa Bear

Today would have been my beloved grandfather’s 105^th birthday.

Phillip Beshany, (always with 2 Ls) was a special individual.  He was gnome-like in both manner and appearance, always puttering around with some private agenda, walking with a limp from the twisted spine he developed over years of practicing dentistry standing on his feet.  I always tell my husband, who is an oral surgeon, that Papa was the first dentist I ever loved.  He had the biggest heart of any human being I have ever known.  He would give anyone the shirt off his back, without thinking first whether he needed it for himself.

Papa’s family was from Johnstown Pennsylvania—a fact of which he was most proud.  He was a precocious child who skipped from the first to the fourth grade, finishing school in tandem with his older brother.  Together, they attended pharmacy college at Fordham.  As a young 17-year old college boy he met my grandmother, who was only 13 at the time.  Theirs was a love story for the ages, lasting nearly seventy years.

As a child, Papa was serious and religious.  He put on Tefillin daily, studied hard at school and Torah, and planned to become a rabbi.  His older brother Reuben was a bit boisterous, so Papa was often dispatched to make sure he stayed out of trouble.  Both were gifted athletes.  I remember Papa’s telling me that he once jumped nine feet in the standing broad jump at a regional track meet.  On another occasion, the Beshany boys were out playing football with a group of neighborhood kids.  One of the kids offered them a sandwich.  Papa refused because it was not kosher, but Reuben took the ham sandwich and ate it.  Horrified and shocked, Papa left Reuben for dead, running home in tears to tell his parents that his brother had been poisoned.

After college, my grandfather was admitted to dental school at Columbia University.  He was the first of many “doctors” in our family.  I never had much interest in science, but I remember that when my uncle and aunt were in medical school he could hold his own in any debate.  His scientific knowledge may have been cultivated in the 20s, (in the time of the dinosaurs, he would say) but he read every journal and followed every new discovery.  I was just as impressed with his human side as a clinician.  He was so beloved by family, friends, and neighbors that he became a sort of elder statesman in every community in which he lived.  No one sought treatment for any condition without involving him first.  Though this would have been a burden to some, Papa never complained that people relied upon his judgment and his kindness.

And he never refused care to anyone.  Among my earliest memories, my grandparents had a nice apartment on Loring Place in the Bronx.  They lived in unit 1A, which included a dental office attached to their home.  On his own, my grandfather ran a dental practice without so much as an assistant—with the exception of my grandmother, who took calls to schedule appointments.  When they hosted big family dinners for the holidays, my grandfather invariably ended up cleaning teeth or placing a few fillings for anyone who said, “Uncle Phil, would you mind taking a look at something?”

I have to admit, I hated when Papa wore his dentist hat.  He was the first, and for many years, the only dentist I saw for treatment.  He worked largely without anesthesia, and it was immensely painful.  As rambunctious kids, I remember my grandmother’s saying things (that you would never say today) like, “You better be good or Papa will put you in his chair and drill your teeth!”  As idle threats go, it was an effective enforcer.

But the pain he inflicted as a dentist he did with love.  He was a human unconditional-love-generating-machine.  Not once in my life did I hear him refer to my father as his son-in-law.  From the moment my parents were married, he considered my father his own.  The same was true when I brought my Tom home to meet the family.  He pulled me aside and asked:  “That boy over there—do you love him?”  “Yes, Papa,” I said, “I do.”  “Well,” he continued, with a wrinkle of his brow that indicated he had put some thought into it, “then we love him, too.”  With him, it was always just that simple.

I had a very special relationship with this man.  He liked to remind me that although he had lots of grandsons, I was his only grand-daughter.  It was his personal pleasure to spoil me.  When I was younger and my grandparents made their annual visits to Florida, each trip included a planned excursion where Papa would take the grandkids to a special toy store, allowing us to pick out whatever we wanted.  If you were deadlocked between two alternatives, it was not uncommon for him simply to buy both toys.  As I got older, he was always there to offer a “just-in-time” gift:  a new dress for a concert performance, a new pair of shoes, or a folded-up twenty dollar bill slipped undetected into my hand.

Hands down, his favorite sphere of influence was chess.  Papa considered chess to be his domain, and his alone.  No one else was allowed to teach any of his grandchildren chess.  When I reached a certain age, Papa made a special date with me and brought over a chess set.  He explained all the pieces and taught me how to set up the board properly.  But the most important part of the lesson was that of sportsmanship.  He was good at chess and took pride in being able to beat almost anyone.  He liked to kid us, “Why don’t we play a game of chess and I’ll let you win?”  If you gave in to this trap he was very disappointed.  You were expected to say something along the lines of:  “Papa, I’ll only play you if you promise to try your best to beat me.  If not, how will I ever get better at chess?”  When I lost, which was inevitable, I was expected to say “Good game” and offer to play again.  To him, the manner of playing was as much the object of the game as trapping the king.

When I turned sixteen and had mastered “Papa’s rules of chess,” I earned my own chess set. Finding the perfect chess set was an obsession with him.  It was no petty shopping trip; it was a rite of passage.  We combed dozens of gift stores and collector’s shops in pursuit of the perfect artisan-made board and pieces.  In much the way Harry Potter’s magic wand “chose him,” so my chess set chose me.  I was charmed by a Spanish-themed set where the King was a bullfighter and the knights, instead of horses, were sharp-horned bulls with adorable eyes.  Today, although the board is a little worse for wear, the individual chess pieces remain in mint condition.  It is one of my most treasured possessions.

Papa left this world with a broken heart, no longer able to face another day visiting my grandmother in a nursing home, her memory fleeting and her faculties failing.  He folded his hand as an act of mercy, so that she might finally let go—just ten weeks later—of her fight to stay in the present for him.  He was an intensely brilliant man, though he was never a game changer.  His contribution to this world was to live decently and absolutely, to share his life and his love completely, and to ensure that those around him understood unequivocally how much they were loved.

Tomorrow's blog:  Take It To The Limit



I Remember

Today as I write, it is Yom HaShoah, a day to remember for Holocaust victims.  It is widely celebrated in Israel, while somewhat more quietly observed in the United States.  It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, used to remember the six million Jews who perished across Europe.  I have always felt a strange sort of Jewish “survivor’s guilt,” having descended from a family that left the pogroms of Russia early in the 20^th century.  Because I had no relatives in Europe during World War II—all four of my grandparents were born in America—I did not grow up with firsthand accounts of hiding and terror and survival, or see the numbered tattoos that marked the parents or grandparents of other kids in my neighborhood. Nonetheless, we are taught that what happened to one of us happened to us all.  So despite having no Holocaust DNA, I am sad and awed and humbled each year on this day (actually, the 14^th of Nissan on the Jewish calendar) as I contemplate man’s inhumanity to man.

The translation of Yom HaShoah is, literally, “day of remembrance.”  When I visited Israel two decades ago, I was struck by ubiquitous posters and billboards that said, simply, “Remember.”  It was explained to me that as witnesses to the Holocaust become fewer each year, there is a fear that our collective conscience will allow the memory (and thus, the reality) of the Holocaust to be expunged.  At the time I thought this to be impossible, but more recent events, where world leaders deny the Holocaust, demonstrate how transient even documented historical facts can be. 

It is with thoughts of guilt, humility, responsibility, and a sadness for all mankind that I visited Yad Vashem on my first trip to Israel.  Yad Vashem is Israel's Holocaust Memorial--truly the saddest place on Earth.  Situated on a quiet promontory over the Jerusalem forest, even the most jaded visitor cannot escape being moved by this thoughtfully designed memorial plaza and museum committed to documentation, commemoration, reflection, and education.  At the highest level, it projects hope for the future of Jews and Israel while it also aims to capture, through witness testimony, artifacts, videos, and other accounts, the facts and the magnitude of the Holocaust. 

I think of Yad Vashem as an intellectual Rubik’s cube, forcing the visitor to experience the Holocaust from every angle.  In one pavilion you learn of the many concentration camps—far more than you thought existed—sprinkled across Europe.  In another, you see the head count of the slaughtered masses by country, appreciating how quickly and violently the wave of Nazi violence washed across every corner of Europe.  In some countries, like Poland, Jews were truly exterminated down to the last man. 

One of the most impactful exhibits is The Hall of Names.  The one I visited in 1993 is not the same as today’s, with its cone-shaped ceiling papered in photos and testimony of 600 Jews who perished, their images reflecting in a pool of water that fills a reciprocating cone dug into the rock.  In my day, the same photos lined a small space anchored by a dense filing system containing nearly two million testimonials for Holocaust victims.  Any individual is welcome to present documents confirming a relative who perished at the hands of the Nazis.  Today, the repository is built to house six million testimonials, never giving up hope that each man, woman and child lost will be identified and preserved for posterity.  Here in this room, anyone can access the database and look up their relatives.  My kids have several stories of their friends’ visiting Yad Vashem and finding heart-breaking documentation of their grandparents and cousins.

For me, the most moving pavilion is the Children’s Memorial.  We entered a dark cavern with no light except a distant glow.  As we moved through the space, there were more and more lights, until it seemed like we were floating in space with stars all around.  A distant sound was barely perceptible.  As our eyes acclimated to the ambiant darkness, we realized the lights were candles, commonly used to symbolize life.  The distant sound became identifiable as a voice.  Soon, the candles were so numerous that they brought a sense of daylight in the dark.  There were different voices—men and women—each uttering a different name in slow succession.  Moving still further through the maze we arrived at the source of light.  It was a single candle.  Across mirrored planes, the single flame reproduced itself infinitely throughout the space until the masses of flickering lights transmigrated the senses: the sight was deafening!  Only then do you realize the significance.  There were 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust.  Each was more than a single life; each was a pinpoint of light that would have reflected in generations to come.  The chant of names was no longer white noise—we recognized the tender age corresponding to each name .  These were the children whose lives were stolen, robbing them of their innocence and dignity before finally and unceremoniously snuffing them out.  As I moved out of the cavern into the light, I did not realize that had been crying.   I wanted so much to hold my own children who were half a world away.  The short exiting walk through “The Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations” provided only cold comfort.

Last year, my twenty-two year old son took a Birthright trip to Israel.  He called me after his visit to Yad Vashem to tell me that his life had just changed forever.  He had the opportunity to visit the new Holocaust Museum, which was only in the planning stages when I had visited years before.  He described how the walls of the museum were tilted inward, producing an intentionally confined sensation to represent how the Jews were treated.  Walking through the museum, he found himself looking through a glass floor.  Underneath it was filled with shoes—actual shoes that had been taken from doomed prisoners before extermination.  My son was struck by how something so simple—a shoe—could convey the humanity of the victims.  This made it very real for him, seeing his own feet superimposed while gazing upon the vacant shoes.  It shook him like nothing else.

I have no cure for the endemic hatred that permeates every corner of our global village.  I can offer no solution to the political and ideological differences that divide the so-called brotherhood of man.  I do know, however, that while studying history may provide lessons for a better world, living in the past can keep old wounds from healing.  There is profound wisdom in a Day of Remembrance.  Let us all work today for a better tomorrow, remembering enough of the dark past to keep it ever farther in the past.

Tomorrow's blog:  Papa Bear

Here Comes the Sun

Someone once complained, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco!”  Though often attributed to Mark Twain, this quote most certainly is not.  But let me be the first to say this:  the warmest summer I ever spent was this past winter in Boston.  Well, almost.

Back in late October, we were hit so hard by a snow storm that most of our town had no power for four to five days.  The trees were still festooned with dense foliage.  When a heavy wet layer of snow blanketed the trees, they could not bear the weight.  One by one, trees fell across yards, driveways, and main roads pulling down power lines everywhere.  This ignited a political firestorm between our town and the power company, each of whom believed it was the other party’s responsibility to remove the fallen trunks and limbs.  Locked in a stalemate, the power-challenged town opened a comfort station at the local high school so residents could charge their laptops and smartphones (the new definition of emergency assistance!); the townspeople stoked their fireplaces and hunkered down.

Save for a dozen or so flurries and flakes on Christmas morning, this was all we saw of Old Man Winter this year.  I realized the other day that my overcoat spent the season in cold storage.  I occasionally donned a fleece jacket or a wrap, but mainly ambled around in layered clothing without need for a coat.  This week at the Boston Marathon, as unseasonably warm temperatures approached 90 degrees, race officials even conceded that qualified runners who opted out due to the “extreme” weather would be pre-qualified for next year. 

It strikes me as funny that New Englanders fret over the heat, but never the cold.  Accustomed to bundling up, thick blooded Yankees do not think twice about braving the Patriots games at our outdoor stadium even during single-digit cold spells.   Cold weather is never a factor as fans tail-gate and pack the stadium, enduring the football action to the bitter end.  By contrast, South Floridians get their freaks on if temperatures dip into the 60s.  Living day after day in 80-plus temperatures with unbearable, palpable humidity, they manage to live comfortably despite being situated painfully close to the equator.

Growing up in Miami, I was never completely acclimated to the heat and humidity, always preferring refrigerated air over open window breezes.  This was perhaps due to my many allergies; a breath of fresh air normally filled my nose and lungs with enough pollen to render me breathless—and not in a good way.  Nonetheless, I spent an incredible proportion of my youth outdoors baking in the sun.  This was decades before the medical profession began to understand the damaging effects of the sun’s rays.

Back in those days, sun-bathing was considered an acceptable and wholesome activity for young kids, providing “fresh air and sunshine” and all-important Vitamin D.  After chores and homework were completed, it was not uncommon to spend the remaining daylight hours in the pool or stretched out on a lounge chair on the patio.  I have naturally olive skin (people who know me today will laugh at this), so at the end of a day in the sun I would have a very dark complexion.  It was a joke in my family—they called me the “chocolate Easter bunny” because I, literally, changed color.  I didn’t just get ordinary tan lines; I looked more like I had been carefully painted two contrasting colors.  It was difficult to discern whether I wore my birthday suit or my bathing suit!

I have distinct memories of being forced to sunbathe.  My grandmother would encourage me to do my homework in the sun, thus “killing two birds with one stone.”  To my mother and grandmother, pale skin was sickly, whereas a freshly burndt, reddened complexion made you glow with health.  In those days we did not have sunscreen; people covered their bodies with suntan lotion and oils to promote tanning.  As a natural tanner, I never put anything on my skin (except Noxema after a severe burn) and did not even own sunglasses.  I now live in fear of the damage I have caused that will someday catch up with me.

Today, as I look out my window at yet another beautiful day, it is undeniable that we were “spared” the harshness of another winter.  But I cannot help feeling that we should be a bit wary of all this “fresh air and sunshine.”  I am concerned that the summer ahead will sizzle, reflecting the lack of water in the reservoirs.  I worry that we are seeing the next stage of global warming, and that it is progressing too quickly.  I live in fear of the irreparable damage we have caused, and wonder whether Mother Nature is already catching up with us.

Tomorrow's blog:  I Remember

Marathon Man

Many thanks to the many friends who voted me a day off. Unfortunately, there were just as many friends who held me to my commitment of a daily offering. Thanks to both camps for their equal doses of sweet and tough love. I certainly need both!

Those of us who live in New England celebrated “Patriot’s Day” on Monday of this week.  Patriot’s Day is known as the day on which the Boston Marathon is run.  It is typically the first day of spring break for school kids, and many of the local towns—including my own—stage local parades featuring authentically dressed Minutemen, little league teams, high school marching bands, firefighters, and freemasons.  

The true reason for Patriot’s Day is to commemorate the first shots of the American Revolution, which took place in my town of Lexington.    Every Patriot’s Day, at 5:30am, Redcoats and Minutemen assemble on our town green to reenact the first battle of the Revolution.  Each reenactor plays a true historical figure, and these roles are handed down from generation to generation through founding families.  In this world of endless technological bells and whistles, on this day we celebrate the quaint trappings of the past.  Reenactors walk to the battle green in handmade clothes, authentic down to the fabrics and undergarments, and brandishing their blank-loaded muskets.  They are the heroes of our town, reminding us that we live today in freedom because of the sacrifices made by others.    The events leading to that fateful morning 237 years ago underscore how and why the Bill of Rights came to include such things such as the “right of people peaceably to assemble” and the “right to keep and bear arms.”

The real Patriot’s Day was not a Monday holiday, as it is celebrated today.  As the epic poem by Longfellow reminds us, it was the “18^th of April in seventy-five.”  Thus, in a miniscule act of civil disobedience, I am posting this on the actual day rather than the symbolic government-sanctioned one.  One of the things that drew my husband and me to Boston (separately at first, and then back again together) was our love of history and the excitement of living among historical sites and artifacts.  There are many places in this area where we can feel the presence of those who came before us.  Among those, two of our favorites are the Old North Church (where two lanterns alerted Paul Revere of the British approach) and the Old North Bridge in Concord (where the “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired).    Visiting these sites has always held a quasi-religious significance to us.

I believe I was destined to live in New England and especially here in this town.  Even growing up in South Florida, I always thought of myself as a misplaced New Englander; I could hardly wait until college to relocate here.  The first poem I ever learned and memorized, back in the sixth grade, was “Paul Revere’s Ride”—Longfellow’s classic from Tales of a Wayside Inn.    Our home today is just down the street from the site where Paul Revere--the original Boston Marathon Man--was captured and detained by the British, a bit short of his intended Concord destination.   One of two riders that day, he became the hero of Longfellow’s poem, so the story goes, because his was the easier name to rhyme.  Did not William Dawes embrace the cause to change the British laws?

Paul Revere’s Ride  by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
>From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
------------------