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Archive for the ‘Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country’ Category

Birds of a Feather

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2013| 5 Comments »

Last night, while making dinner, I heard Bob yelling from the living room, “You’ve got to see this, there’s a hawk…” and in the middle of my beans and rice he’s rushing into the kitchen to point out the commotion. Let it be said, I heard the commotion.  There is no TV in the kitchen so I can conjure up culinary delights quietly and without much fuss. One of the first questions the architect we unfortunately had to fire asked us was, “Do you want an open plan kitchen, or do you like this space separate?”  Since I actually cook in my kitchen, pots and pans everywhere, I thought it should be my haven of peaceful mess and creativity. “Private kitchen,” I said.

Turning off the burner, I spied a bunch of black birds buzzing around a tree, having a good old fashioned spring squak-fest. Following Bob’s finger’s line of sight I saw it. At this point my dear husband is proclaiming it to be an eagle. The American Bald Eagle is his favorite bird, really if he could be reincarnated he’d come back as an eagle and soar around on thermal winds. The hawk/eagle was just sitting very haughtily on a dead branch while these pesky black birds were telling him to move on. Bob quietly retreated to fetch his camera and here he is:    Osprey Web 20130508

When we were first married, we lived on the edge of a bird sanctuary in Pittsfield, MA. Wild Guinea Hens would visit our bird feeder and peck around on the ground to give us a show. Later, when we moved to the Jersey Shore, a Great Blue Heron would fly out over our garage most mornings for breakfast in the Shrewsbury tributary. When I discovered 2 old prints of these birds at an antique fair, the hens and the herons, I had them framed and hung in VA.photo copy 4 photo copy 5

Still not sure what bird should represent our Blue Ridge mountain home, I’ve been deciding between the Cardinal, the Blue Bird or the Woodpecker, all very abundant on our land. But truth be told, red-tailed Hawks are almost always flying in the valley.

After sending off the picture to a local birder, we were delighted to find out that this hawk/eagle was actuallyan Osprey!

The last time I saw an Osprey was in Martha’s Vineyard, nesting on top of a pole. But sure enough, this bird of prey likes to migrate through these parts in the spring and fall. Still we’re told, they are rarely seen in the Ivy Creek Natural Area which is a part of the  VA Birding and Wildlife Trail. http://ivycreekfoundation.org/ivycreek.html

Well we missed the annual meeting of the VA Society of Ornithologists, but I’m going to tell Bob to send his picture in to the eBird site http://ebird.org/content/va so they can document the Osprey’s fight path. Maybe he’s heading back to Menemsha pond, where the toddler Bride and I would dig for clams.

And a footnote: yesterday the Bride found a bird in her bathroom. It was a beautiful day so she had left her back door open; luckily she shooed it out the same door!

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And All That

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 7, 2013| 4 Comments »

How to begin? My Mother used to tell me a couple of things, repeatedly, that I’m sure she never said to my brothers: 1) “You have to suffer to be beautiful,” and 2) “You can never be too rich or too thin.”  I’m afraid that while combing and trying to braid my daughter’s wavy, sand-soaked hair at the beach I may have repeated her first message. Here is the Bride and Bug considering beauty products. I hope she doesn’t hear that message about beauty. photo copy 3

But I tried to banish the second from my mind.

In fact you can be too thin, and if you care to read about one woman’s struggle, Mika Brzezinski and her friend Diane Smith co-wrote a book together, Obsessed. It’s like Jack Spratt and his wife; Brzezinski went from a size 2 to a size 6 (and yes, I guffawed at this) and Smith, a fellow TV journalist, lost 75 pounds.

But Mika was honest about how she may be perceived as the mad, “skinny bitch.” They talked candidly about food as an addiction problem, as a public health problem when I happened to tune into their conversation one morning on Morning Joe, and it was enlightening. They were 2 sides of the same coin, a woman’s body image and our country’s dysfunctional obsession with food. It all started when Mika confronted her friend about her weight gain, calling her “fat and obese,” in case she didn’t hear the fat part. Smith called her a “food Nazi.” And then Mika confessed to a life-long struggle with anorexia and bulimia

Mika said, “How I eat, diet, and look has tied me up in knots my entire life, and I know I am not alone. I have been held hostage by food since I was thirteen years old. My body started filling out more than the figures of other girls in my class, and that set off what has become a thirty-year battle with my body image. Food has been my enemy.” http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/05/06/an-excerpt-from-mika-brzezinskis-obsessed/

My psychologist brother Jim has often said that people are either wrapped too tight or too loose. I worried when the Bride went off to Duke. She was surrounded by Type A young women who were wrapped pretty tight with body dysmorphia – exercising too much, throwing up in bathrooms. It was hard not to see it and not to buy into it. But my daughter is a smart cookie IMHO, and moderation was always her approach. I once heard a friend of hers in med school describe some food as “bad,” and I couldn’t help lecturing her about how food can’t be “bad” or good for that matter. Applying a moral code to ice cream for instance is ridiculous. But putting the spoon down before the pint is finished is a matter of choice. And I realize now, it’s much harder for some of us.

I had a dance teacher who used to say, “I only need a taste,” to be satisfied. What will power, what control she had over her hunger. I was always thin, without trying. I would drink a frappe in Boston on my way back from a dance class. But approaching 40, I was unhappy about moving from MA, I had put on about 10 pounds (don’t laugh, I was a size 10 and these things seemed important at the time) and took my anger out on food. I found an aerobic dance class I loved and started restricting food until I got down to 118, a size 6, with my clavicle protruding. Oh, the attention I got. People said I looked so good and yet I was desperate inside. Thankfully, my self-abusive relationship with food didn’t last long. We moved out of a suburb I hated to live close to the beach, in a town that was very much like New England. And I started writing again for another newspaper.

My feminist brain just loves to think – would this ever happen to a man? Do people ask men how they will juggle this new job with a family? Does that shirt make them look fat? So, here is a little play on that Dove commercial about women and body image. Enjoy!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/dove-real-beauty-parody-b_n_3191883.html

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A Tale of Two Sisters

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on May 5, 2013| 7 Comments »

I found out yesterday that my half-sister Shirley died. My sister Kay called to tell me. It was peaceful enough, she died in her sleep after refusing to be hospitalized for “low sodium.” I asked Bob what that means, and he said basically your system is shutting down. I have absolutely no memories of Shirley; she was 24 years older, she was having a baby at the same time I was born which I guess happened frequently back then. So, just as soon as I was born I became an aunt. She was out of the house long before our Year of Living Dangerously.

Shirley was the Flapper’s first child. The product of a dare, yes my mother married Shirley’s father on a dare. They met at a wedding in PA, and got along so well their friends dared them to get married. She was 16 years old, and I assume that kind of thing happened all the time too – the getting married at 16 part. Gi Closeup 20130505 Web

Before the Flapper’s first husband died, she had a son, Brian. At 21 she was widowed with 2 children. At first I thought their father died in the Great War, later I learned he died of a ruptured appendix, before penicillin was discovered. The Flapper moved to NYC with her sister in order to work, and left her children with their grandmother, my Nana.

And this is when the troubles started with Shirley. After awhile my beautiful mother moved back to PA and caught the eye of a young pharmacist at her street car stop. Enter my father, who promptly married her and insisted on adopting her 2 children…although maybe he didn’t since they never took his name. He raised them just like his own – the 4 who followed, Kay, Mike, Jimmy and then me. I told you this is all third hand knowledge.

The family folk tale is that Shirley never forgave the Flapper for taking her away from Nana, the woman she loved and considered her true mother. Certainly holding a grudge was a time honored tradition in our family. The result of this grudge fest is the eternal rift between Mother and Shirley. Show me a family that hasn’t experienced years of ‘not talking’ between relatives; still this mother/daughter feud was stellar in its length and complexity.

Recently I found out that Shirley contracted TB as a young, new mother. She was sent away to a sanitorium and her baby boy, the one who is my nephew, came to live with the Flapper after her accident. It was while looking through old pictures with Kay that I wondered who the baby was, the one who wasn’t me. The Flapper never told me – which is telling in itself – that after giving me up to foster care, while she was still in the hospital, she ended up caring for my nephew at home. Even Kay has no explanation for how this happened.

I was always told that I was never taken from my foster parents, Nell and Jim, because Mother was afraid of losing another daughter to a grudge fest. I have to think, considering our level of poverty, that we were lucky in avoiding placement in an orphanage, all of us. So maybe it was just the Flapper’s pride, which was fierce, that kept her from placing her first grandson in an orphanage. And even though she was bed-bound, crippled by that drunk driver, she would fight to keep him. Kay was 15, so she not only helped Mother with her physical rehab, she helped care for her younger brothers and her nephew. Without Kay, the middle of this family would not hold.

In this picture Shirley is on the far left, and Kay is on the far right standing. I wasn’t born yet.

Lynn Siblings 20130505 Web

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Racing for a Finish

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on May 4, 2013| 1 Comment »

Women are making history left and right. Today Rosie Napravnik, a 25 year old Jersey girl, may just be the first woman jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. When she started out as a teenager, she was told to list herself as “A R Napravnik” in 2005. “A trainer suggested that listing so as not to advertise she was female and perhaps diminish her opportunities to get mounts. He said, ‘We can’t let anybody know that you’re a girl.'” Even after Julie Krone won a Triple Crown race in 1993 by finishing first at the Belmont Stakes; Rosie still had to go all Victor Victoria.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/jockey-rosie-napravnik-aims-to-be-first-female-jockey-to-win-kentucky-derby-aboard-mylute/2013/05/03/c0320c98-b3c1-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html

And for another first, an American woman has landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List. Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) was a Black Panther and later a leader in the Black Liberation Army. In 1979 she fled to Cuba after making a daring prison escape. She was serving a life sentence for her involvement in a police officer’s death on the NJ Turnpike. “The FBI is offering a reward of up to $1m (£640,000) for information leading to her capture, while the state of New Jersey is separately offering another $1m. FBI agent Aaron Ford said that the agency would ‘pursue justice, no matter how long it takes.'” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22397295

I’m figuring she must be a grandmother by now. In her defense, Chesimard argued that she was shot with her hands up in the air, and so she didn’t – or couldn’t – pull the trigger. The medical evidence seemed to validate her view of that fateful traffic stop. She was shot in the right arm and collarbone: “Dr. David Spain, a pathologist from Brookdale Community College, testified that her bullet scars as well as X-rays supported her claim that her arms were raised, and that there was “no conceivable way” the first bullet could have hit Shakur’s clavicle if her arm was down.” Still, in NJ to be an accomplice in a shooting is enough to be found guilty.

So all my feminist hackles have been raised this week, a first running in the Derby and a first to run from the law… and live. And I thought I’d share a chuckle from an editor at Upworthy, a talented young writer I’ve started to follow on twitter. Rebecca Eisenberg writes a blog called “Never Sarcastic.” She tweeted

“How to dress for your shape? Are you human-shaped?” which led to one hilarious riff back and forth regarding women’s magazine headlines. This was one of mine: “How to get a hot body? Run outside or take a hot yoga class.” http://ryeisenberg.tumblr.com/post/48204810905/agentotter-islandofmisfitt0ys

“Want a bikini body? Put a bikini on your body!” And RUN Rosie RUN!
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Poetic Vision

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on April 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

On my long drive home this past weekend, I listened on and off, between mountain ranges shrouded in fog, to an interview on NPR with New York’s Poet Laureate, Marie Howe. It turns out April is Poetry month and this was a repeat of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air program from last year. Somehow I knew she was a kindred spirit. Howe grew up in a large Irish Catholic family, and attended the Convent of the Sacred of the Heart. As my BFF Lee from the Berkshires likes to say, we went to different schools together.

“Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die,” says Howe. “The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.”

Howe has written 3 books of poetry: What the Living Do, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and The Good Thief. She talked about teaching poetry, about describing the way water looks in a glass that has filtered sunlight streaming through it. About getting her students to bring their focus into the world of everyday things without using metaphor. Saving metaphor for much later, like a gift left under the Christmas tree. Yes, I realize I didn’t wait.

Howe’s father was an alcoholic, which she states as if this is the most common thing for a family, which of course it is. How many fathers in the 50s functioned fine enough by day, only to return home to drink and brutalize their family? There is, “A sense of retroactive dread…so many of us are afflicted with addictions,” she says. One of her brothers, Johnny, died of AIDs in the late 80s, and she memorialized him with this poem:
What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do.

Johnny, who ran away from his father but found his own demons, finally found AA and used to tell her that, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice.” She loved him dearly and said sometimes he would just stand in the middle of her kitchen and say, “This is it.” And she would say, “What?” He would just raise his arms, look around with a smile, and say, “This.” I was reminded of my brother Michael, who died last year. Every time I would see him, he would smile and tell me, “This is the good life.”

The Flapper would read poems aloud to my brothers and sisters from an old anthology, “101 Famous Poems.” First written in 1929, I remember its well worn blue binding, and managed to find a revised edition from 1958. Shirley, Brian, Kay, Michael, and Jimmy heard about the sea, and a cautionary tale about a spider and a fly while doing household chores. Poetry was the music that accompanied everyday life while the Flapper could only sit and read, her legs broken in so many places. As Marie Howe said, art allows the heart to break open.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/13/150495862/poet-marie-howe-reflects-on-the-living-after-loss
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When the Spirit Leaves You

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on April 27, 2013| 4 Comments »

The first night in Nashville I left my book club book in the car. Not wanting to go downstairs and back outside in my nightgown, I picked up a little paperback I found on the bedside table, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. Little did I know how much I would enjoy reading about the Hmong people of Laos…currently living in California.http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/19/reviews/971019.19konnert.html

It’s a story about seizure disorder, and about the many ways modern medicine can fail a refugee population. Cultural dissonance is bound to happen when doctors want to order invasive tests for a baby who’s only problem is that her older sister slammed the door coming in and so an evil spirit invaded her body. For the Hmong, animal sacrifices, amulets, and strings around the wrist should cure her, but instead her parents, who speak no English, are supposed to dose her with a varied cocktail of drugs many times a day. You can see where we’re going.

But it’s not all medicine. I’m almost done with the book and I’ve had quite a history lesson on Southeast Asia. I was talking about the book to one of the Bride and Groom’s friends, an academic internist at Vanderbilt. She said it was required reading in her medical school. “Which medical school did you go to,” I asked. “Yale,” she said.

This morning, after working all night, my ER doctor asked me to read this article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/how-not-to-die/309277/

Have no fear, yes, it is about dying. Let’s face it, the spirit eventually does leave us and we all have to think about this stuff, unless of course denial works for you. It’s about a doctor who becomes an educational/documentary film maker. He makes short films that actually show people what advanced dementia (among other maladies) looks like, and he tells us to have “The Conversation” with our doctors:

“In the health-care debate, we’ve heard a lot about useless care, wasteful care, futile care. What we”—Volandes indicates himself and Davis—“have been struggling with is unwanted care. That’s far more concerning. That’s not avoidable care. That’s wrongful care. I think that’s the most urgent issue facing America today, is people getting medical interventions that, if they were more informed, they would not want. It happens all the time.”

Which made me think. Sometimes, even when you speak the same language, you still can’t communicate.
black_hmong

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My American Life

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on April 24, 2013| 2 Comments »

My journey lasted all of 9 hours. Along the way I passed a church billboard that read,

“Never give up, remember Moses was a basket case,”

and I listened to Ira Glass on NPR’s This American Life. That’s right folks, no audiobook on this trip. Just when you’re ready to give up, the Bat Building appears around the bend on 40 West. Nashville was welcoming me back. Music to my ears, I could hear the Love Bug from the street; the front door was wide open and she was enjoying her dinner punctuated by boisterously loud “Ummmms,” and Arghhhhhs.” Hooray, I thought, she’s going to be a good eater…and a great talker!

Over the past year, The Bride had told me repeatedly how much she enjoyed listening to This American Life. The Groom also listened to their podcasts on his iPhone, so before my trip, I downloaded the App http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ and plugged my cell into my car’s auxiliary outlet. The first story was about 2 doctors with the same name, and it was a medical/murder mystery too, called “Dr Gilmer and Mr Hyde.”

“Benjamin (Gilmer) starts to get very curious about the murder Dr Vince Gilmer committed, so he begins asking questions and poking around. Soon he develops his own theories to explain the murder, that never came up at Vince’s trial.” You’ll just have to listen in, I’m not spoiling the suspense.

This should be a fun week. The Bride is off for most of the time and we’re planning to celebrate her first Mother’s Day a little early – Nashville style. Maybe some fried pickles along with our blueberries and avocado?
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What if…

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on April 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

One of the most insightful questions we might ask ourselves, when confronted with a big decision, is how would one feel afterwards. A year from now, ten years from now, would we regret that decision or be happy we made it, no matter the outcome?

It was simply serendipitous that I signed up for twitter this past week. And I had to stop looking at one point, because the things people say in the aftermath of a tragedy like the Boston bombings left me numb. And I wanted to feel for myself, think for myself, not be bombarded with everyone else’s thoughts, in real time. Plus, instead of spurting out the first thing that comes to mind, I’ve discovered, with age, that I need some time to reflect, to analyze my thoughts before putting pen to paper, or tongue to teeth…or fingers to keyboard for that matter. I realize that once dementia sets in, all bets will be off.

Only one tweet rang true to me. It had to do with our failure in the Senate to pass a meaningful background check bill that would help stem the tide of gun violence in our country, compared to locking down a city like Boston to look for a nineteen year old terrorist. Bob tells me that approximately 80 people a day die on our streets and in our homes because they could easily pick up a gun; about 2/3 of these people are suicides. On Monday 3 people died in Boston. I know, it was a cynical calculation, a malevolent ratio 80:3 – with a whiff of truth. I wondered how Americans would feel ten years from now. Sometimes it takes someone outside of our culture, to articulate a different point of view.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law?CMP=twt_gu

“After all, it’s not as if this is the first time that homicidal killers have been on the loose in a major American city. In 2002, Washington DC was terrorised by two roving snipers, who randomly shot and killed 10 people. In February, a disgruntled police officer, Christopher Dorner, murdered four people over several days in Los Angeles. In neither case was LA or DC put on lockdown mode, perhaps because neither of these sprees was branded with that magically evocative and seemingly terrifying word for Americans, terrorism.”

This week the lilacs bloomed in memory of my foster mother, Nell. There were lilacs outside my bedroom window in Victory Gardens. I always had to kiss her goodbye whenever I left the house, because she said we never knew if we’d ever return. Certainly I knew accidents could happen, I was living proof, because a drunk driver had hit the Flapper’s car a few months after my father died. At the age of 10 months, about the Love Bug’s age, I left my PA home and became a Jersey girl.

But I never thought terror could happen here, until I heard about my Jersey neighbor’s husband. He left one morning to go to his office at Cantor Fitzgerald. She didn’t wake up before dawn to say goodbye to him on that beautiful morning in September for some ridiculous reason. At another wake without a body, I saw “what ifs” playing out again and again. Someone had dropped their child at school first and was running late, another friend was on a ferry that docked at Wall Street and picked up its fill of ash-covered commuters before returning to Highlands. And I knew that asking “what if” was a futile exercise in blame.
photo copy

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Pretty Shameful

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on April 18, 2013| 2 Comments »

What happens when Gabby Giffords writes an op-ed that says it better than anything else I may think of? My post this morning is short, because it’s never a good thing to write when you are mad. The Senate chose to give the American people the finger yesterday – claiming it’s criminals who need to be controlled, not guns. Well, guess what Senators, I’d like to suggest you look for another line of work. Because your actions yesterday were criminal, and the voters will retaliate when your seat comes up for re-election.

“I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.” Gabby said this and more.

Democratic Senators Heitkamp, Pryor, Begich, and Baucus all voted to kill universal background checks. Shame on you. Granted we still would have needed a couple more Republicans to pass this common sense bill, and I have to think not all of them thought of the Sandy Hook parents as “props.” Here are all the Senators who voted against universal background checks, whose hands are in the pockets of the NRA.
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Want to help get Washington working again? http://represent.us

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Why

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on April 16, 2013| 3 Comments »

Yesterday brought me to tears, unexpectedly. I was replying to a friend on Facebook who had told me that her daughter was moving to Nashville, when I noticed a new tweet from Carol Costello of CNN about the bombing in Boston. Boston, my first foray into adulthood: attending Emerson College on Beacon Street; taking the MTA to Harvard Square for a Garbo festival; watching the swan boats in the Boston Common; walking to Filene’s Basement.

When Bob and I married, he accepted an offer in the Berkshires because I felt like a New Englander at heart. I wanted to go back, our children were born in MA. Bob was running the medical tent at the Josh Billings Memorial Run (aground) when the Bride was born. He tended to the usual ailments of elite and weekend athletes. He even entered a few marathons as well back then, when his back was cooperating. Last night as we watched an interview of yet another ER doctor, he said, “I know him.”

“From the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP)?” I asked, since he was the MA chapter president. “No,” he said, “from Shock Trauma.”

This morning I am trying to make some sense of this horror. But the reporter in me gets frustrated. There are too many news organizations swarming over those historical cobblestone streets. Everybody wants a new lead to the story. It’s so close to the WACO anniversary, so maybe it’s a domestic terrorist. They are searching an apartment in Revere of a Saudi nationalist. And always the same question, why?

Does it matter if the “reason” is domestic, anti-government terror, or jihadi fundamentalism? One racist, religious group wanting to avenge a perceived danger in the US vs another racist religious group trying to dominate the Middle East? They both think God is on their side, and there is no reasoning with someone like that. Asking why makes no sense. An 8 year old boy died yesterday because?

Today is the 6th anniversary of the VA Tech shooting. It’s a reminder that violence is a thread that runs through every state, every country. Boston, our hearts are with you as you heal from this. Sandy Hook, our souls are forever yours, and Blacksburg, we are still in mourning. Yesterday I felt helpless, in the same way I felt when the planes hit the Twin Towers and I heard there was one heading for DC where the Bride had just started her new job. Tears came spontaneously, because now we are all Americans, united in every city, on every street corner. Here is the MIT green building sitting across the Charles River last night.
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