An Independent Young Lady

Today I went off to work and left my daughter on her own for her last day of summer vacation.  She was to drive herself out to school for the team bus to a soccer game, and drive herself home afterward.  Unfortunately, neither her dad nor I could have made it to the game before it was over.   

I called in the early afternoon and she wasn't home.  (When I reached her later, I learned she'd gone to the drugstore -- a place she's walked many times, but much more fun in a car, of course.)  I was about to go out for lunch and it suddenly dawned on me -- my daughter could have met me for lunch!  She's as independent as any of my friends.  She's on her way to becoming one of my friends!  I have some of my very best times having Saturday breakfast out with a group of women friends, and meeting individual friends for lunches and dinners.  But going out with my daughter -- that's going to be the best!  

I saw a pregnant woman pushing her cart across the parking lot at the grocery this evening, and a mother pushing a baby in a stroller on my way home afterward.   The women across the street have a child who looks like he's in preschool, and the girls further down are in middle school now.  All those stages were wonderful.  I loved having a little girl with white blond hair who danced through the house in pink dresses, purple tights, and glittery shoes.  I loved having a middle-schooler slouching down the hall in overalls and a t-shirt.  I love this high school senior whose face lights up with a dazzling smile as she trudges up the front steps in her soccer uniform, her bag slung over her shoulder.    And now I love what's coming next: a young woman out and about and managing beautifully on her own-- and meeting me for lunch. 

Haystack Rock off the coast of Oregon - where my daughter and I took a long walk together a few weeks ago.

Walked: 3 miles.

Walked this month: 69 miles -- pathetic.

Walked since beginning this journal: 440.7 miles.

First Day of School

1.  My husband messed up the alarm clock and it went off at  4:45 instead of 5:45, so I've been awake for awhile.

2.  I get a daily dose of contemplative readings via email.  Many days I don't even glance at them, but I did this morning, and here's what I found -- exactly what I needed:

"In the muddled mess of this world, in the confusion and boredom and amazement, we ought to be able to spot something — an event, a person, a memory, an act, a turning of the soul, the flash of bright wings, the surprise of sweet compassion — somewhere we ought to pick out a glory to celebrate."  — Samuel H. Miller in The Dilemma of Modern Belief

3.  One of my honors students from last year came up to me in the hall to tell me that he's in AP English this year and feels well-prepared for the writing, in large part thanks to me.  (Yes!  Celebrate!)

4.  One of the 8th grade boys told me that his older sisters had told him that he would learn a LOT of history in my class.  (Yes!  Again!)

5.  As I was leaving school, my sweet daughter, who had driven to soccer practice (a half-hour trip) all by herself for the very first time, called to tell me that she had just locked her keys in the car.  MY keys, to be precise -- meaning that I could be of no help to her.  Her dad had to drive out there from his job -- an hour's one-way trip for him.  OK-- so that wasn't one to celebrate.

6.  And as I was arriving for my first night of my grad school class, she called again, this time to tell me tearfully that she had done the OTHER thing I had warned her about on this grey and rainy day -- she had left the lights on and the battery was dead.  Hmmm....the day was falling apart there.

7.  There was a football game going on at her school so she was able to find someone with jumper cables and get home on her own without further incident.  (Yes!  Now we can celebrate!)

All in all, not a bad day.  But I am sort of tired.

 

Walked: 3 miles.

 

Pre-School Wistfulness

I'm a little down tonight.  I shouldn't be -- school starts tomorrow, I'm pretty much ready to go, and it will be exciting to see all the kids again.   I think I'm a little bummed out for a couple of reasons.  For one, I see my free time slipping away.  I need and crave time alone, time in the outdoors, time to think and write and take pictures -- and it will be much harder to carve that time out of a day as the school year gets underway.  And secondly, our school has a certain frenetic quality with which I am increasingly at odds.  Over the past few years, I have done some work on being attentive and in the moment, trying to be more appreciative of whatever is.  That state of mind is hard to maintain in a fast-paced school environment.  

Tomorrow, for instance.  The powers-that-be decided a couple of weeks ago that, instead of a regular day, we would have abbreviated orientation periods in the morning for the purpose of handinjg out books and syllabi and then, at least for the middle school kids, games and discussions in the afternoon.  All grand ideas -- except that you can accomplish very little in 15-minute increments with bouncy 14-and 15-year olds who don't know you, are bursting with first-day energy, and are full of apprehension about the demands of the new year. 

In each 15-minute period I am supposed to:  

*settle down a group of kids, probably half of whom will be late;

*find out who each one of them is;

*collect summer assignments;

*hand out books;

*get them to write their names in their books;

*record who has which book;

*hand out and explain the syllabus;

*remind them that yes, there is a short reading assignment for the next day;

*calm their fears about said reading assignent;

*let them know that I have demanding expectations but am not an ogre; and            

*answer at least three questions from each one of them (no- that's not in the offical list; I just know what to expect).  

All I really want to do is set a tone of calm attentiveness -- not possible, given what we've been instructed to accomplish.  Calm attentiveness may be one of my priorities, but I don't think it's widely shared.  

So....back to the last national party convention, when I was in Michigan; back to my early walks in a world not seen by my seminar colleagues; back to the morning when I found myself standing in a field that seemed a sea of spider webs.  Spiders live very much in the moment.    

Walked today: 3 miles.

Across the Ocean

I got an email from my boys today; they are together and headed for Prague tomorrow, so it looks like that's where they might be when they turn 20 on Wednesday.  I've never been to Prague but it looks just amazing:

(www.gumbopages.com/ festivaltours/prague.html)

And, in the midst of the architectural distinctiveness of the past are some contemporary gems, including a Frank Gehry building!

(http://www.ambushmag.com/is1797/images/p3.jpg)

I think they'll have a great time just wandering around.

Patrick's Saturday Six

1. What was the last thing you lied about?

Ummm....nothing too recently.

2. What do you most hope to accomplish by the end of the year?  

 I have a couple of stories I would like to clean up and submit to editors.  And I want to get the family photos of the last two years organized and into albums.  And clean out the attics and basement.  And get the plumbing and electrical repairs out of the way, and the sunroom ceiling replaced.  And the water-damaged plaster repaired.  Oh, you shouldn't have gotten me started... .

3. If you could see a film of any moment of your childhood so that you could relive it,  what event would you like to see?  

I'd pick any day at the beach with my family.

4. What talent do you wish you had but don't?  

I wish I could sing! 

5. What are you wearing as you answer these questions.  If someone pointed a camera your way right now, would you duck out of sight?  

Walking shoes, green khaki shorts, and the Reed College t-shirt I slept in last night.  And no, I wouldn't duck -- I always look this good first thing in the morning.

6. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #20 from Danielle: Have you ever found a journal that interested you so much, you read all the way back to the beginning?  If so, how many? If you'd like to share, whose journal and why?  

Right now I am reading this one from start to finish:  http://journals.aol.com/hope5555/AmIThereYet/

 

Walked: 3 miles.

Amoebae, Euglenas and Paramecium (Week-end Assignment #21)

    

My favorite class?  That's so easy: sixth grade science with Mr. Curran.  

I attended a small school in rural southwestern Ohio: about 200 students in grades one through six.  Most parents farmed or worked in ag-related businesses; few had attended college.  Our teachers focused on the basics, and there was little money for anything else.  Two field trips: the first-graders went to an apple orchard and the sixth graders went to the zoo. In my own sixth grade, year, three trips to the Cincinnati Symphony were added to the schedule, as well as a weekly gym class.   We presented an elaborate Christmas program every December and celebrated Arbor Day outside every spring with a reading of Joyce Kilmer's Trees.  

 In most grades, science was a pedestrian affair: one afternoon a week we read from an elementary text about topics like the weather.  I'm sure the weather can be an exciting topic -- witness the success of movies like Twister -- but it wasn't exciting the way we learned it.  Most of us heard about the weather endlessly anyway -- soy beans standing in wet fields in November seemed to be a disaster repeated annually.  Science just wasn't a subject likely to galvanize our interest.  

But in sixth grade, our young and first male teacher ever brought incredible energy to our little enclave when he introduced to us the phylum Protozoa.  We still had science only once a week, but the boring textbooks were gone.  In their place appeared microscopes, slides, and tiny one-celled creatures.  We moved up through the animal kingdom and, by the end of the year, a female frog had offered herself up for dissection, her eggs glistening in the slanted sunlight of the afternoon classroom.  I started reading biographies of famous scientists and began to plan my medical career (one of several that never materialized).  I loved everything about sixth grade, but science was the highlight, week after week.  

I went to well-regarded private schools after that year, to excellent colleges, and to professional and graduate schools.  I never had a better teacher or a more exciting class.  Mr. Curran, if you're out there somewhere: you were an extraordinary teacher from the very beginning.  

  

So Far So Good

My son, forgetting about the time change, called early this morning from France.  He sounds ecstatic -- nothing at all like a world-weary college cynic.  He and his French parents spent yesterday visiting Dinar, which looks like a fine place to me:

All of his apprehension about seeing his family after two years had evaporated.  He said it was like he had never left.  (I had sort of thought that that would be the case.)  Today he left them and returned to Rennes, the city where he had lived with them:

He was calling from a phone booth in the suburban part of the city, outside the apartment where he had lived for a year!  He really does have a sentimental streak.  He is going to spend the day visiting his old haunts, and then take a train to meet his brother tonight.

The rest of us are living a more humdrum existence.  My husband has to have a crown replaced today, so he decided to take one of his many unused vacation days, but he's been working at his computer for an hour already.  My daughter is sound asleep, enjoying soccer practice's move to afternoons.  And I'm off for a walk.

 

Walked: 3 miles.

 

You're Not a Lawyer Anymore

It's been been just about 25 years since I embarked upon my career as a lawyer.  Law school and the bar exam were behind me as, with more than some trepidation, I pushed open the mahogany doors of the firm where I was newly employed.

Let's make no mistake about this: I knew how to do exactly nothing.  New lawyers have been trained to research reams of material and to think with a certain analytical bent, and have memorized enough basic material to get through the three days of the state bar examination. But new lawyers seldom have the vaguest idea of how to write a will, probate an estate, draft a contract, initiate a lawsuit, or try a case.  It would actually be extremely difficult to overestimate just how little new lawyers know.

Nevertheless, and completely in spite of our utter incompetence, we are provided for.  On my first day of work, I was escorted to my office -- my very own 10' x 10' space, equipped with a desk, a chair for me, two chairs for other people (Clients?  Would I have real clients?  People with legal problems?  Problems that I was supposed to solve? ), a bookcase, a phone with two lines, a window, and a door that closed. (No computer. Hard to believe, but such was life 25 years ago.)  Outside my office was a secretary, a woman who was designated to work for me and one other attorney, a woman who knew more about the practice of law than I at that time could even imagine existed.

Fast forward 25 years.  I have changed careers -- another story which perhaps I will tell someday.  I did learn how to do all those lawyerly things, and I did them well -- but I was meant to be a teacher, and a teacher I am.  I am not a great teacher -- give me a few more years, at least -- but I am a competent teacher.  I have taught students from preschool through law school, and I am beginning my fourth year in the same high school.  I am at least far more capable as a teacher than I was as a lawyer on that first day of work so long ago.

So you tell me: why is it so hard to get one of these???

When I began my present job, another teacher and I commandeered a large desk in a room that also housed two special services teachers and an after-school math tutor.  We drew a metaphorical line down the middle of the desk and we were satisfied -- we each had some space for books, one side of drawers, and a surface on which to write.  We were usually free at different times, so the situation worked well.

Last year, that room having been remodeled for other purposes, I became one of our school's nomads, working out of briefcases, the back of my car, and piles on other people's desks, piles which were most definitely irritants to the owners of the desks.  The principal kindly had a desk installed for my use in the classroom where I taught.  Problem?  Four other teachers taught there, too -- so the room was never available as a quiet work space.

This year, a classroom has been cleared for teacher use and I was assigned the task of planning the space.  No doubt because of my endless whining, but I was thrilled. A goal, a series of tasks, an end in sight.  I quickly surveyed the teachers, discovered that ELEVEN of us have no permanent workspace, compiled a list of needs, created a diagram, and drew up a requisition list: desks, file cabinets, a bookcase.

Am I being wholly unreasonable here?

Today I asked the head custodian how we were doing.

"Oh, I don't have any furniture for that room.  It's all been used elsewhere."

(Sputtering): "But I thought that we were going to BUY furniture."

"Well, I can't do that.  You need a PO for that, and no way is the principal going to pay for that."

"But that was the whole idea!"

Shrug.

So we have an empty room and eleven homeless teachers.  Oh, wait -- the room isn't empty.  It has a couch.  The custodian keeps referring to the room as "the teachers' lounge" and I keep telling him that we don't WANT a lounge.  We WANT a place to work.

I am beginning to understand why teachers so often  complain about salaries ( usually quite good), benefits (usually incredible), and demands upon them (usually intense).  It's the working conditions.  It's the fact that teachers are expected to balance an almost overwhelming number of distinct tasks, some large and some minute and many unrelated to one another, without adequate tools to accomplish them.  In our case, the necessary tool is a workspace.  Exactly the same tool that we are always encouraging parents to supply for their children: a place dedicated to work, a comfortable and well-lit and quiet place where materials can be stored and projects can be organized.

The esteem in which teachers are held and their needs recognized was summarized succinctly by my daughter the other day.  After listening to my litany of workspace complaints, she shrugged and said,

"Mom, you aren't a lawyer anymore!"

En Vitre

I haven't talked to him, but my son left a message with my daughter today that he was safe and sound with his French family in Vitre.  That means that he changed planes in Detroit, figured out the train schedule in Paris, activated his Eurailpass, and found his way around a new city to his family's home -- not bad, I'd say.

Chateau Fort en Vitre (11th century)

Of course, he gave my daughter virtually no information about his trip or arrival, and she asked for none.  So I am left with nothing but the knowledge that he is safe.

Which is actually a huge piece of information.  I was up at 4:00 this morning with a splitting headache, so I decided to go online while I waited for the meds to take effect and see whether he had perhaps emailed me from Charles de Gaulle airport.  What I found, of course, was the news of the two downed Russian airliners.  I have been sick about that all day.

My son was supposed to leave for his year in France from Logan Airport on September 12, 2001.  He and his father were en route to Providence via New York City when the planes hit the towers.  They went on to Providence to stay overnight with my sister-in-law and then came back home to wait out the decision making process.  About 10-12 days later he and I drove, with a friend of his and his friend's dad, to JFK, where the group took off for Paris.   Their program had high school students going to France, Italy, Spain and China for a year, and only two of them backed out in the wake of September 11.

It would not be possible to describe how difficult it was to leave my son at the airport that day.  I was sure that, even if they weren't all killed in flight, we would be at war shortly and he would be drafted.  My husband's response to those fears was that if our son was going to be killed in a war, then he'd better hurry up and get his year in France under his belt.  Perhaps he would never have another chance.  I had to agree with that line of reasoning.  In addition, I think we need to do all that  we can to fill the world with curious and generous young people who want to learn about and share in the lives of people of other nations and cultures.  We cannot allow ourselves to be held hostage at home by those who seek to fill the world with hatred and destruction.

All brave words -- words that rang completely hollow at 4:00 this morning when it was brought home to me that there are probably terrorists in the air again.

 

Walked today: 3 miles.

Oh-h-h-h-h-h.........

I am so tired that I can hardly move. 

I need a complete transformation in body rhythms in the next few days or I simply will not make it through next Monday (which happens to be both the first day of school for our students and my first class at night for the semester in my master's program.  I'll get home around 10:00 p.m.).

I went out for a walk at 6:30 this morning but then, woe is me, I couldn't say, oh I'll get that stuff together by 10:00.  Or 4:00.  Or maybe tomorrow.  No no no no -- I had to shower, dress, copy a lot of stuff for my son, and get out of here for a full day of meetings. 

I see that I much prefer the summer lifestyle.  The one where nothing ever has a deadline.  The one where you have almost complete control over the number and often the temperaments of people with whom you will interact during the course of the day.  The one that is nothing remotely like a high school lifestyle

I'm sure my stress level peaked, albeit completely unconsciously, when I took my son to the airport at the end of the day to put him on a  plane to Paris.  Well, Detroit, actually.  But Paris sounds so much more romantic.  And if all goes well, he will, in fact, be getting on a plane to Paris once he gets to Detroit.  Anyway.  I am so excited for him.  The sophisticated (if you can call it that) college man was practically dancing down the airport passageways.  Tomorrow he will be having dinner with his French family of two years ago and, the next day, getting a tour of Vitre, the city to which they have moved from Rennes, where he lived with them.  Tonight, though, he has to get across the ocean.  This is my spaciest child.  Thankfully, no one on that plane is dependent upon him to get them there.

I've been to the grocery, where I mostly wandered around in a daze, and now I'm going to have a muffin and curl up somewhere and pass out.

I hope that all of you with kids starting school this week are saying a prayer of gratitude for their teachers, who are no doubt comatose on couches across the country.

 

Walked: 3 miles.

The Last Day

End of Summer: Chautauqua Boys' and Girls' Club

 

I'm not ready for it to be over yet, but it is. My daughter and I spent more than an hour with her college counselor this afternoon and then picked up her (21- yikes!) books, so senior year is definitely upon us.  And I spent some time at my school, where teacher meetings start tomorrow, dumping a pile of books onto a tiny carrel in the middle school that I am staking out as My Personal Place since the promised teacher workroom has never materialized. 

All of this organizing has got me thinking of all the places I ever started school in September.  I decided that it would be more entertaining (for me, not for anyone else) to write those down rather than to continue to moan about my impossible working conditions.  So....

I started kindergarten at the local in-town elementary school.  We lived two miles away and my own rural school district didn't offer kindergarten.  My mom must have driven me, but the next year...

I was off to first grade in my own school, this time seven miles away by bus.  The county line runs pretty much down the middle of our road; hence, we went to school further out in the country and the kids down but across the road went to school in town.

In seventh grade I started boarding at a Catholic girls school run by Ursuline nuns.  It was only 20 minutes away, but I seldom came home -- think Wicked-Stepmother-In-Residence. 

In tenth grade I began another boarding school career in western Massachusetts.  There really is no place like western Mass. in the autumn, and I should know, because...

I began college in South Hadley, Mass. ...

and my junior year in Williamstown, Mass. ...

before moving on to Providence, Rhode Island -- also a fine place to go to school.

A few years later and I found myself in law school in Ohio, and that was it for the moves.  I've gone to graduate school and taught at schools and colleges in northeast Ohio, but I haven't budged from this house in 20 years.

After my adventures of this summer, I'm thinking that autumns in both northern Michigan and the Pacific Northwest have a lot of potential.

 

 

Summer's Winding Down

Tomorrow is my last official day of summer vacation...My daughter's been practicing soccer for two weeks and we have a visit with her college counselor tomorrow...My son in France will be done with classes at the end of this week...His brother will be joining him for a week of European travel to celebrate their 20th birthdays...Summer's almost over...

The highlight of my day: Listening to my son's telephone call to his French mother of two years ago as he made plans to spend two days with her this coming week.   There he stood, all six feet of him on a Sunday afternoon in a midwestern kitchen, wearing the college t-shirt he had probably slept in and a pair of baggy, rolled-up jeans that have for sure seen better days, speaking elegant French without a trace of hesitation.

You just never know how they're going to turn out.

 

Walked: 3 miles.

Walked so far this month: 51 miles.  I have really slacked off!

 

Ok, I Found Something to Wear...

and so I'm coming to the J-Land Anniversary Ball (http://journals.aol.com/viviansullinwank/AOLJournalsstAnniversary/entries/369)!    I'm not really much for events where there are lots of people, so I've done just what I would do in rl:  procrastinated as long as possible, went to Talbot's because even though I don't really wear Talbot's clothes anymore, I thought they might have something; found a jacket and had them put it on hold; went across the street to Nordstrom's where the clothes are slinkier but my bod still isn't; went back to Talbot's and put this together:

So I'll be there, lurking along the edges with my Limonata, talking to my several internet friends of many years who have also shown up in J-land, and looking for some of the intriguing writers I've encountered here for the first time. 

Marion, you'd better show up in your Chinese outfit!

 

Great Walks #4 Continued: Chautauqua

My daughter got her driver's license yesterday, so a walking community looks even better to me this morning!

Alumni Hall, home to classrooms, offices, apartments, and the oldest book club in the nation!  Hanging from the porch are banners from a few of the annual "graduating classes" (since sometime in the 1870s) of people who have read a specified group of books over a four-year period:

One of the banners:

Chapel of the Good Shepherd:

My personal favorite Chautauqua house -  imagine sleeping on that second floor and waking to a view of the lake every morning!

Oh, yeah: Lake Chautauqua:

Walked: 3 miles.

Great Walks #4: Chautauqua

I started this Great Walks series awhile back, and stopped after three.  Our trip to Chautauqua, which is a community from which cars are largely banned, gives me a good excuse to pick the series up again.  It's about a three-mile walk around the perimeter of the Institution, which began as a tent-camp for a brief summer period in 1874.  Eventually people built their tents, and later small cottages, on platforms on tiny parcels of land leased from the Institution.  A bankruptcy scare after the Depression was solved in part by  a decision to sell off the Institution owned lots to private owners.

My husband and I met as college employees of one of the hotels in the 1970s, a decade in which Chautauqua was clearly in decline.  Something happened in the next decade, though: wealthy babyboomers looking for second homes in family-friendly resort environments materialized, followed by Victorian re-habs and reproductions and, more recently, massive four-season homes and expansive condos.

Although a much wealthier community than the one that originally attracted teachers and ministers for education and relaxation, the Institution retains much of its original architectural flavor.

Musicians play on the Plaza outside the Bookstore:

The Summerhouse Inn, where we've stayed several times:

The ubiquitous Kids on Bikes:

The Octagon House overlooking Lake Chautauqua:

The Bell Tower and the Children's Beach:

I have too much for one day!  I'll continue this walk later.

I didn't walk today -- every time I had a free hour, it was pouring.

What, Oh What?

So girl, what on earth do you do all day?  These journal entries aren't so scintillating that they're taking up all that much time.

OK, here was yesterday (excluding the never-ending journal):

3:00 a.m. My son comes in and wakes me up so I know he's home.  He has a very sweet story.  All of my kids attended Montessori school through 8th grade and have retained their closest friends from their middle school years there.  There were six boys (and nine girls) in his graduating 8th grade class and he was out with all of the boys except his twin brother, who's in France.  The five of them -- college students across the country and world travelers all -- had been sitting around their old Montessori playground (yes, at 2:00 a.m.) swapping memories of elementary school.  They are really big and hairy and darling guys.

6:30 a.m. I get up, take the dog for a walk, wake my daughter up, go out for bagels, and take her to a friend's for the trip out to soccer practice.

I spend a long time washing the tub, which is pretty disgusting.

I stop by my school, hoping to check out new classrooms and work space.  There are some beautiful new classrooms, so I am discouraged to discover that I have acquired the least desirable of the old ones.  And the promised new teacher work spaces remain just that -- promises.  The custodian guys have clearly been working their tails off, but they aren't fast enough for the teachers -- we want our stuff OUT OF OUR HOUSES.

I take the daughter of one of my best friends out for a back-to-senior-year-of-college lunch.  She is a delightful and enormously talented young woman who has just taken a year off and I figured she could use some encouragment for the journey back.

My daughter gets a ride home, so I go out to the mall to do some birthday shopping for her.  I want to get her things she would never buy for herself, and I find a black sundress and a black velvet jacket at the Gap.  It's somewhat difficult -- I personally find it a bit of a challenge to distinguish between  sizes 0, 1 and 2 (!!).  I settle on 2s and hope that the 0s will still be there tomorrow if my guess is wrong.

I take a long long walk in the cemetery.  By late afternoon it's really hot and sticky.  I see a small black cat down at the bottom of the hill, whom I watch for awhile.  Totally wild -- when I give in to the urge and start calling "kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty," she looks up, apparently sees me all that distance away, flattens herself almost completely to the ground, and takes off at top speed.  I also pass a funeral which, from the logos on the hearse, I think is for  yet another young man in our community.  Not someone I know, but he had a lengthy obituary in the morning paper -- he died at the age of 47 of what I presume was melanoma.

I fool around for what's left of the afternoon.  I have to leave by 6:45 for church, and my son has gone off to an amusement park with his friends, so I suggest Chinese to my husband and daughter, which seems quite acceptable.

I'm at church to lead a Lectio Divina group if anyone shows up, and in fact three other people do.  Lectio is a form of prayer that involves using a short section of Scripture as a focus, and some of us have started to do it as a group a couple of times a month.  Summer attendance is erratic, so it's nice to have two completely new people, both of whom are enthusiastic after they've tried it and wondering if we can get together next week.  In the end, we conclude that the demands on our time over the next two weeks are such that we do need to wait for the church year to start up again.

Home for a tiny bit of Olympics, a tiny bit of reading, and falling sound asleep really early. 

So, how am I supposed to fit work back into my life?  You tell me.

Total non sequiter:  Trees in Oregon are Really Big:

Willamette College, Salem OR

Why, Oh Why?

Why, oh why, am I doing this?  Why am I spending so much time on this journal?

I am doing my usual end-of-summer reassessment of my activities, because in a few days my school year as a teacher begins and little of my time will remain my own.  I have four preps this year -- 2 sections of 8th grade American History, 9th grade World History, 9th grade AP World History, and 11th-12th grade Government (to be replaced by Econ in the spring).  All of my classes are writing intensive so, in addition to the preps and 5 classes most days, I'll have piles and piles of papers to read.  I can see my own personal writing and photography time evaporating before my eyes.

In addition, since I teach in a religious school in which the kids have a full slate of Judaics classes as well as their secular ones, my schedule is a bit odd.  Most Jewish schools save the secular stuff for the afternoon but, in an effort to impress upon the students the equal importance of both programs of study, our school mixes them throughout the day.  As a result, I teach two classes before lunch, then have a two-to-three hour break, and then teach three more, ending at about 5:15.  I've never had to teach so late before.  As a morning person, this new schedule will pose major challenges for me.  I'm usually nodding off by 4:00, regardless of what time I got up.  No more.  The 8th graders will be showing up just as I'm ready for a nap.  (Nooooo....I don't usuallly take naps.  But I do slow down considerably from about 4:00-7:00 p.m.)

And finally...I haven't accomplished nearly what I wanted to this summer.  I never did get going on yoga, and last night I stacked up a pile of books to focus on in my vast amounts of personal free time over the next few months.  And I have  many ideas for writing that never see the light of day.  Much of my lack of accomplishment has to do with this journal -- I spend a lot of time thinking about it and planning it, and playing around with my photos.

I think I have decided to alternate walking days with yoga days.  The walking by itself, despite miles and miles of it, has had a negligible effect on my weight and, to my utter dismay, on my blood pressure.  Clearly the problem is food.  So I need to focus more on that bothersome little issue, and I need to develop some flexibility.  I cannot BELIEVE the stiffness and pain I experience when I try to get up after reading in bed or on the couch.  I sleep on my side, so I just kind of roll out in the mornings, but if I've been lying on my back, getting up again is a Major Life Challenge.  I think, given my time limitations and certain physical realities that must be addressed, I need to embark upon a major flexibility program, which means cutting out some of the walking.

As far as the journal goes -- the problem is that I find that I want to write more, not less!  Now that I've finally begun to shape some of my ideas and experiences onto the printed page, instead of letting them all flap away, I'm pretty well addicted to the process.  I am just going to have to find some extraordinarily disciplined way of doing it.  If anyone else out there is fitting their non-professional writing into an already crammed existence, I'd love to hear how you do it. 

In the meantime, I have a few days to play:

Oregon Rain Forest

Walked: 1 mile.

Happy Birthday, Beautiful!

It has been just about seventeen years to the minute since I FINALLY got my grandmother to pick up her phone.  My grandmother, who complained endlessly that she couldn't sleep past 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., was nowhere to be found at 7:00 a.m. that day!  Well, yes, she was, of course, somewhere -- she was ASLEEP!  So what were all her complaints about?  Sound asleep, while I was trying to tell her that she had a new great-granddaughter.  My husband was asleep, too.  Honestly, what a pathetic crowd.  My daughter and I were WIDE awake.

Our daughter was born at 2:01 a.m. after a tumultuous two days of laboring toward a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) in an era in which virtually every woman who had given birth by caesarean section got the opportunity to repeat the experience for all subsequent deliveries.  As I recall, I had interviewed something like 18 doctors and midwives before finally settling on one I thought would be able to help -- and help he did.  Typically for me, I had more serious complications with a singleton than I had ever had with a twin pregnancy, but everything worked out in the end.  Besides my husband, I had both a wonderful doula and a terrifically restrained doctor with me every second of the way.

But today is my daughter's day, not mine.  When she was born, she looked at us with the most wonderfully limpid blue eyes, utterly calm and attentive.  She moved on quickly to a first birthday with her family in attendance at Chautauqua, to backyard parties with a dozen little kids, to capture-the-flag and swimming and dinner parties.  When she was five, she managed to have four birthday parties -- one at preschool in May, since she has a summer birthday; one on her real birthday at family camp in North Carolina; one at my stepsister's in Georgia; and one at home shortly afterward.  Last year she hosted 15 friends at a Mexican restaurant.  This year she's elected to forego the party -- the girl who loves a crowd has finally been stumped by her conviction that her friends are too diverse and, therefore, don't get along well enough to spend an evening together.  So it will be cupcakes for the soccer team after scrimmages this morning and a family dinner tonight.

I am not overly sentimental today.  I can see that the passage through senior year and on to college is going to be a tough one.  In fact, I suggested this morning that, having abandoned "Sweet Sixteen," she had perhaps reached "Sarcastic Seventeen."  She agreed that my description was apt.

Nevertheless, she's still a lovely, talented, generous and giving young woman, and I'm delighted to claim her.  Happy Birthday, sweetie!

 

The Spiral Staircase: Book Review No. 2

I have practically inhaled this book over the 48 hours since we returned from Chautauqua.  I had decided to embark upon a 12-step program designed to quell all further book-purchases on my part, but my timing was sadly off.  You can't go to Chautauqua and avoid the Bookstore, and you can't go into the Bookstore without being lured by the siren calls of all the books written by the summer's speakers.  I guess I had known that Karen Armstrong had written an autobiography entitled The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004), but I had managed to suppress that knowledge successfully until I saw her name on the program and her book practically reaching to me from its display.

Karen Armstrong

I first encountered this author and her work several years ago at Chautauqua.  She had already embarked upon her prolific career as a writer on the three Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- and was there to speak on some aspect of her work.  However, her first autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate  (1981), had also been displayed on the authors' table in the Bookstore.  In that book, she tells the story of her decision to enter a Roman Catholic convent as a 17-year-old English girl, the seven years she spent there, and her traumatic decision to leave, all of which occurred during the 1960s.  I was fortunate enough to encounter her for a brief conversation after I finished the book, and told her how enlightening it had been to me.  During the 60s I had been a middle-school  student in a Catholic boarding school run by nuns -- a non-Catholic and entirely non-religious girl dropped into a world of sweeping black habits, swinging rosary beads, stiff wimples, smoky incense, and masses intoned in Latin.  Over the course of my stay there, Vatican II "happened," right along with the Beatles and miniskirts, and the nuns, like their sisters around the world, transformed their lives right before our eyes.  As I told Ms. Armstrong, her book, with its insights into the portions of the nuns' existence that we never saw, opened my eyes considerably.  "I never had much of an idea as to what was going on," I said.  "I don't think we did, either!"she laughed. 

Despite her formidable intellect, she is a completely down-to-earth and gracious woman -- all qualities which have no doubt contributed to her career as, I believe she sometimes calls herself, "a freelance monotheist."  Her Oxford training is in English literature; however, her background as a nun provided a springboard from which she moved, quite by accident, into a life's work as an investigator, commentator and writer on world religions.  Because of her expertise on Islam, she has been much in demand since September 11, 2001 as a speaker and contributor to various types of programs.

The Spiral Staircase is, for the most part, a riveting account of the years following her departure from the convent.  During that period, she started off on several career paths, experiencing varying degrees of failure with respect to all of them.  She also suffered several years of misdiagnosis and, therefore, ineffective treatment for what was ultimately (and easily, by the right physician) determined to be a form of epilepsy.  Anyone with any interest at all in spiritual autobiography or the difficult emergence of women as respected professionals in the 1960s and 1970s will find this a hard one to put down.

The last chapter of the book, in which she attempts to summarize what she has imbibed from her studies of the three major monotheistic religions over the past decade, is superficial and unsuccessful.  She alludes to the criticism, sometimes quite personal and disturbing, aimed her direction as a result of her attempts to elucidate Islam for a western audience, but does not address her critics in any substantive way.  Having heard her speak several times and having read much of her writing in recent years, I know that her critics make legitimate points and that she is capable of great depth in response.  I can only guess that her publisher asked her to address these issues but to "keep it short."

The ending notwithstanding, the book is a great read and Karen Armstrong remains one of my personal heroes.

I was there, too!

Columbia River Gorge

Thanks to my daily Writer's Almanac mailing courtesy of Garrison Keillor, I have learned that Meriwether Lewis was born outside of Charlottesville, Virginia on this date in 1774.  Keillor states that on this day exactly 200 years ago, William Clark wrote:

"Captain Lewis' birthday: the evening was closed with an extra gill of whiskey and a Dance until 11 o'clock."

Meriwether Lewis himself wrote:

"This day I completed my thirty-first year, and ... I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future to redouble my exertions to ... live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."

Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon

Walked: 4 miles.

The Annunication of Francesca Dunn: Book Review No. 1

Since reading is one of the main things I do, I've decided to throw in some book reviews.  This is my journal, after all, and if I leave out what I'm reading, it's really not my journal at all.  I tried a reading journal a couple of months back, but it was too much of an effort for me to keep up with TWO journals and I let that one slide.  I need time for reading, after all.  I'll probably move those entries, from the beginning of the summer, over here eventually.  But for now I'll just work on what I'm reading at present.

The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn by Janis Hallowell (2004) is the tale, told through the voices of four of its major characters, of an ordinary middle school-aged girl who is transformed into a Virgin Mother for our age.  The most fully drawn of the four narrators is the homeless man whose schizophrenic delusions, usually originating in what he believes is a heightened, almost mystical, sense of smell, bring Francesca to the attention of the public.  Francesca's lonely and unsurprisingly self-absorbed best friend and precoccupied paleobotanist mother complete the picture gradually; we never really understand either of them, but their reactions are sharp and focused by the end of the novel.   Francesca herself is less convincingly portrayed than any of her entourage.  The source of her detachment and disturbing illness is unclear, and her own thoughts and emotions, as she is put through the paces of public sainthood, adored as the Mother of the Saviour and subsequently reviled for a supposed abortion, are seldom articulated.  She is observant but not insightful.  That others are even less so is driven home by tragedy at the end.  It's a quick read but ultimately an unsatisfying one.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's Annunciation (1898)

Chautauqua Day

Bestor Plaza Fountain at the Chautauqua Institution

Yesterday I took my two children who happen to be home and accounted for off to the Chautauqua Institution for a day.  We used to vacation there as a family every summer, but the shortness of the Chautauqua Seaon in combination with the many demands on the lives of teenagers have shortened those trips considerably -- down to one morning and afternoon this year, and nothing at all for the child in Europe.

Chautauqua is an unusual and extraordinary place.  It was founded in 1874 by visionaries who dreamed of a summer school (initially for Sunday School teachers, who in that era were often the only conduit available to most adults for furtherance of their education) in a beautiful location where reacreation and the arts might play prominent roles in the program.  Over the next decades, the term "Chautauqua" became synonympus with adult education in the form of traveling tent lecture and entertainment platforms, and several other permanent Chautauquas sprang up.  The orginal, nestled on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in western New York State, thrives today for nine weeks each summer as a mecca for family vacations, outdoor recreation, programming and education in the performing and visual arts, a potporri of adult education in the form of daily, weekly, and longer classes; an outstanding ecumenical religious program, and a lecture platform that pulls in luminaries from across the national and international community every weekday morning.

Chautauqua Transportation

Yesterday there were a couple of speakers whom I wanted to hear: David Saperstein, a rabbi and lawyer who heads the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C. and whom I have heard previously there, is an enormously inspiring speaker and was the lecturer for the daily morning series.  His brother Marc Saperstein, also a rabbi, and a professor of Jewish History at George Washington University, was speakingin the afternoon religious lecture series.  To my surprise, I enjoyed the Rabbi Mark Saperstein the most, and I'll write more about that on another day.  I also enjoyed just being at Chautauqua, a summer vacation spot where thousands of people arrange their golf, tennis, and boating around lecture schedules.

Chautauquans Listening to Rabbi Marc Saperstein on Connections and Distinctions Among Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Yesterday: Walked:  3.5 miles.

Home!

I'm so happy that I'm just kind of loopy -- my son The Camp Counselor is home!  His dad picked him up in Chicago and they got here last last night, just after my daughter got home from The Feast of the Assumption Street Festival in Little Italy, down the hill from us.  We are almost all back together.

I really don't have much to write about -- I'm just incredibly thrilled to have him home.  He spent his junior year of high school in France, his senior year away at school in New England, and started college in Chicago last year, so he hasn't  been here for more than a couple of consecutive weeks in a long time.  And then his summer seemed to be getting off to such a disappointing start, with mono and the threat of several weeks in bed.

So I am thrilled for him that he got what seems to have been a wonderful summer in North Carolina, with many challenges as a counselor and many new friends from around the world, and equally thrilled to have him here, curled up in the living room this afternoon and helping his dad make dinner right now.  He has such a relaxed and sunny disposition that I think he would brighten any household, but especially ours!

He got a digital camera this summer so we had fun showing off for each other this afternoon.  I have a new short series to share here and there:

Oregon Rain Forest

Oregon

Multnomah Falls (top half, above the portion pictured yesterday), Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

One of my friends commented that we really got around when we spent our three days in Oregon, and I guess we did.  Three college visits, one each morning.  An afternoon of wandering around Portland, taking the trolly, visiting Powell's Book's (incredible!), eating gelato, and then driving a little way down the Columbia River Gorge. An afternoon trip to the coast, with a long walk down the beach and a fun walk through the artsy little shops.  An afternoon lunch with two internet friends of five-plus years -- a wonderful chance to connect names and voices and children to longstanding screen names and personas.  An evening at the Portland Timbers' soccer game -- a young man whom we have watched play soccer from grade school through college has realized a lifetime dream of going pro in Portland.  The only thing we missed from my list was dinner with friends who recently moved to Portland with their son who is a friend of my boys.

And yes, I would love to climb to the top of Multnomah Falls.  Next time I'll know to arrive earlier and bring food!

Walked:  4 miles.

Offbeat

This is a strange evening.  My daughter's at a soccer team party -- "a bonding experience," she told me, before their first scrimmage tomorrow.  My sons are in Amsterdam and Chicago.  My husband is en route to Chicago -- the Camp Counselor went from work in North Carolina to friends in Atlanta to friends at college for the summer, but he's coming home tomorrow!  So the animals and I are home alone, and this is what's happening in Florida:

Thursday Thinkers

A new game to play, this one courtesy of Aunt Nub's Empty Head!  OK...

1)  When did you last sing to yourself?  Where was it (shower, car, etc?)  What sort of songs do you usually sing?

"And I dreamed I saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the sky; They were turning into butterflies above our nation."    Claire's slightly nutty aunt was playing Joni Mitchell''s Woodstock  in an episode of Six Feet Under   that we watched a day or two ago, so I guess that's what I've been singing to myself.  I don't actually sing to myself, being pretty much tone deaf, but I do, kind of.

2)  Would you rather be a member of a championship sports team or be the champion of an individual sport?  What sport would you choose?

I would be a Wimbledon champion, I think.  I last played tennis more than 20 years ago, so we all know how likely that would be.

3)  If you were at a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner & found a dead cockroach in your salad, what would you do?

I would surreptiously slip it into my napkin, excuse myself to go to the bathroom, flush it, and never say a word to anyone, except maybe my husband, who wouldn't be interested and would forget about it immediately.

4)  What was your best Halloween costume ever?

Santa Claus.

5)  What's the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you & how did it make you feel?  What's the nicest thing you ever did for a stranger & why did you do it?

My friends and I used to hitchhike some when we were in high school.  So probably the nicest thing a stranger ever did for me was give me a safe ride to a safe place with no hassle.  I can think of one occasion in particular that it would be better to forget.

I think maybe the nicest thing I ever did for a stranger was to take a set of photographs for her during her Cesarean.  This was maybe 18 years ago (ok, so I don't do nice things all that often) and I was supposed to be her labor support person fer her second childbirth experience.  I did it because someone asked me and I like going to births. Her first delivery had gone well, but her husband was a cardiac surgery resident on call and she couldn't count on him showing up.  As it turned out, she had a breech presentation and her OB made a very quick decision to go with a Cesarean.

We had talked about about the photos I would take during her planned natural delivery, but we hadn't anticipated the surgical turn of events.  I was a little nervous about taking pictures of the surgery without her permission, but I remembered how much the pictures of my twins' Cesarean birth had meant to me, so I snapped away like crazy.  I got them developed that night, and hesitantly took them to the hospital the next afternoon. 

I don't think she and her husband could have been more thrilled.  She had had a rough time with pain during the surgery, and her surgeon-to-be husband had been completely traumatized by seeing his own wife shaking and crying through most of it, so neither one of them remembered much about the actual birth of their child.  They poured over those pictures with utter delight.

I haven't thought about that day in a long, long time. but it's a really nice memory for me.  That baby must be in college now!

And a little present for anyone who waded through all of the above:

Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

Whoooooaaaaaaaaa.......

Both Hurricanes (Yesterday) from www.nasa.gov:

Raging Ocean

Today:

(http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20030905222709990001)

In my search for some images of the power of the ocean as it is making itself known today, I discovered that exactly eight years ago another Hurricane Charley was wreaking havoc on the East Coast. 

Stay safe out there.

Oceans

A dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,                                

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth

And time and place are lost  

                                                                John Milton, Paradise Lost  (1667)    

I didn't think I was going to make it to the ocean this year, and I didn't know what I was going to do about that.  With the three kids and I all having completely different school vacation schedules, our annual tradition of spring break in St. Augustine has evaporated.  The last time we had been there was for New Year's 2002-2003.  The beach was no less beautiful for being cold, and the outdoor hot tubs were evening more inviting, and the Ancient City beckoned with tiny white lights shimmering everywhere, but the teenagers pronouced it too chilly for a beach vacation.   

Of course, the ocean does not have the same meaning for them that it does for me.  They take it completely for granted, having been there every year as a family.  They take the family for granted, too.  But I don't.  

When I was in kindergarten and first grade, we lived a couple of blocks from the beach, in Vero Beach,  for the second half of the school year.  My father was trying to get going in the construction business; we moved into the house that he built for usin April or May of my first grade year. After school let out we headed back to Ohio.  My mother and baby brother were killed in a car accident the following October and we never returned to live in our house.  Florida became for me that magical place where my family had lived together for part of the abbreviated time that we had.  

When I was 15, I started going back, to spend a week or two of spring break with my grandparents, who spent the winters there.  I was usually alone -- my brother and cousins had different vacations -- and I walked for hours and hours on the beach.  It became one of the treasured places where I had time with my grandparents, who lived next door to us in Ohio and had taken such good care of me after my mother died.  Regardless of the condition of my family -- which was repeatedly reconfigured, with the death of my first stepmother, my father's remarriage, and the resultant new set of step-siblings and a half-brother -- the power of the ocean was relentless.  

My grandparents were there for the last time the winter after my boys were born.  My grandfather was close to death, so my husband and I took our three-month old twins down to spend a week with him.  He was moving in and out of periods of dementia -- in the evenings I listened to him ramble on, late into the night, about his business worries (he thought it was the 1930s); in the mornings I bathed and played with the babies in his room during his periods of lucidity; and in the afternoons I walked on the beach.  It was really cold and windy, but we took the babies down to dip their toes in the ocean, telling them that their grandfather had played in it as a boy and someday they would, too.

The next year we initiated our annual family trek to St. Augustine.  Sometimes I wondered where my sanity had gone -- packing up a double stroller and 2 Port-a-Cribs to drive 16 hours to spend a week in a condo where I couldn't find anything and shop in a grocery where I REALLY couldn't find anything was hardly relaxing.  But those little kids sure loved the beach -- every shell and washed-up ray equalled adventure.  As they grew, the ocean was at once a source of  peace and playtime and terror; peace at 6:00 a.m. when I took my walks, playtime in the mornings when the kids ran around in the shallow waves and collected shells and starfish, and terror as they grew older and scoffed at my warnings of the undertow.   

Now that we are in this period of transition-to-adulthood, everything is changing, and beach vacations are no exception.  Teenagers stay up all night and sleep all day, and have to be practically dragged down to the ocean (the pool is just so much more convenient!).  And they are in constant motion -- long and lazy family days, let alone weeks, are almost memories from the past.  

But I did get lucky, as it turns out.  I've been to THREE sets of beaches this summer: Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Pacific.  It seems that, while I have a lot to miss, I have nothing much to complain about.  The Atlantic was at rest the whole week we were there, much to the chargin of the would-be surfers, and Lake Michigan was a sheer surface of glass.  But the Pacific; that was something else entirely:  

Cannon Beach, Oregon

Walked: 4 miles.

Terrific Journal Entries (Week-End Assignment # 19)

I have been having such a blah day.  I did finish cleaning, or at least picking up, the first floor of the house this morning, and threw in a couple of more loads of laundry, but it's getting cloudy, I haven't been for a walk, and I had to do 2.5 hours of carpooling today, a task I really hate.  Plus -- and this might be the real reason for my funk -- I'm in the middle of watching the second season of Six Feet Under, and it seems like an entirely dark and haunting series this time through. 

But this assignment has perked me up a bit.  I've read some excellent writing since I've started following a smattering of journals -- some of it thought-provoking, some lively and fresh, some bizarre and some heartbreaking.  And I've seen some photography that should be commanding the big bucks.  But I've decided that my favorite entry so far, the one that pulled me out of the doldrums today, is this one:

http://journals.aol.com/staceyandbern/NomadicMusings/entries/520.

It's the June 23, 2004 mostly-photos entry from Stacey's journal about her through-hike on the Pacific Northwest Trail.  No politics, no family angst, no college application process -- no, this one is a reminder to focus elsewhere, at least some of the time. 

And the trip that she and her companion Bernie have made is the focus of a trail assocation newsletter series -- exciting for them and for us, too.

 

Our Side Needs Someone This Smart and This Articulate

I have admired Peggy Noonan and enjoyed her writing for years.  If you don't know her, she was the Bush I speechwriter responsible for the "1000 points of light"  speech.  Shortly after she left the White House, she wrote a book about her experiences there, and today (well, a few days ago, anyway) she's a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

I can't think of much that Ms. Noonan and I have ever agreed upon.  But I thought that her description of her boots-long-skirts-and-long-hair presence in a buttoned up Republican White House full of women employees wearing little suits, pumps, and sensibly bobbed hair was a stitch.  And I was bowled over by her descriptions of preparing speeches by first spending hours in the library pouring over the words and actions of the presidents who preceded her boss.  There's no question but that she's a dispassionate analyst and brilliant wordsmith with a passion for conservative politics. 

Peggy Noonan has just taken an unpaid leave from the Journal  to volunteer the next three months of her time working for the President's re-election. She says that "Every four years everyone says 'this is the most important election of my lifetime,' but this year I believe it is true."  I guess I have  found something that she and I agree upon, after all.  I've been thinking about this for the past few weeks and I don't think there's been an election of this importance during my lifetime, and I doubt that there will be again.  We are setting a tone for who we are at home and what our place is in a world that has spun in a completely new direction in the past 20 years.  Presidential leadership is all about setting that tone and I, for one, hear dissonance and confusion under our current Commander-in-Chief.

The Republicans have a new weapon of extraordinary intelligence and skill in Ms. Noonan.  I hope the Democrats have someone who can take her on.

OK...

Pamela did a fun entry the other day; a list of "I AMs...".  So I thought I'd just lift her idea, since I am feeling completely unoriginal today:

I AM...

wearing a Kenyon College t-shirt, a relic of one of our first college visits several years ago to what I have decided is hands down the most beautiful campus in the United States (and I've seen a lot of 'em)...

listening to Traffic's John Barleycorn  on folkalleys.com...

cleaning the house today instead of preparing for classes that start in a few weeks...

and paying the bills neglected for the last several weeks that I've been in and out of town...

frustrated by yet another set of school permission forms that I apparently overlooked, these having to do with driving, for heaven's sake...

in complete denial that my daughter (and youngest) is beginning her senior year of high school...

wondering exactly why my son in France stayed up all last night (which I know thanks to an uninformative email this morning) and what he is planning to do in Amsterdam this coming week-end (on second thought, maybe I am not wondering that)...

chuckling over last night's voice message from Son the Camp Counselor, who is spending a few days in Atlanta with other Camp Counselors and called from the Atlanta Braves game...

frustrated that I spent a lot of time planning an 8th grade history class earlier this summer and found out yesterday that the schedule has been dramatically altered...

wondering why, since I went to the store for laundry detergent and light bulbs this morning, I ran out of dishwasher soap as soon as I got home...

wondering why a trip to Walmart (which I am supposedly boycotting) for a box of detergent and some light bulbs ended up costing $94.00...

about to share this photo of the Reed College library tower in which all the senior theses (required of all students) since the 1910s are stored:

suddenly remembering that Traffic was playing nonstop during a Dartmouth Winter Carnival Week-End at which I had a perfectly awful time one year when I was in college and went with a blind date to accompany a good friend who was in the process of falling madly in love with someone we had known in high school....

listening now to a new Neil Young song, Good to See You, and thinking that there have been many many excellent Neil Young moments in my life...

also going to share this photo of some of the Reed theses:

enjoying Season Two of Six Feet Under...

going for a walk in the cemetery after lunch...

a terrible typist (but you knew that)...

reminded that the aforementioned college friend and I had a brilliant idea to drop out of school for awhile, support ourselves as secretaries in Boston, and earn enough money to go to British Columbia for several months...

reminded also that we were completely undeterred by the fact that we did not know how to type, because we were planning to exchange college for Katie Gibbs...

wondering if Katie Gibbs still exists...

trying to find the title of a book that I purchased in the Portland airport and then left in the pocket of the plane seat in front of me...

never on time for anything anymore...

relieved that my daughter's suitcase showed up yesterday (did I mention that she left it in the hotel room in Portland?)...and

on my way to pick her up from soccer practice.

Walked:  3 miles.

Walked so far this month:  30.5 miles.

On the Breastfeeding at Starbucks Controversy

For anyone who missed it, Patrick started a bit of a controversy by supporting Starbuck's right to ask a customer to refrain from nursing her baby while patronizing its establishment.  All I can say, after another day's thought, is: people need to get a grip. I am frequently waited on at coffee shops and restaurants by young ladies wearing clothing several sizes too small who have apparently given inadequate consideration to coverage of their undergarments and bulging portions of their anatomy.  It would seem that no one has suggested that their appearance renders them unacceptable for public employment.  But a mom nursing a baby sets off fireworks?

One of my friends put it best and most succinctly: the madonna/whore complex.  It's ok for women to expose themselves without a thought to modesty as long as they have no functional purpose in doing so.  But let those same women remind you that their breasts exist for a reason other than sexual enticement and people just FREAK OUT.

I admit that I don't have the whole story -- maybe the lady was flappin' 'em all over the place.  Or maybe Starbucks decided that it preferred catering to someone who protested a lady's activities, instead of the lady herself.  Their loss: I know from two decades of experience that groups of mothers can be extraordinarily loyal and extremely frequent coffee shop customers -- a lucrative market indeed. 

Well, that was kind of fun.  I haven't had that discussion in years and years.  And, in the interests of full disclosure: I would have been personally and deeply offended had someone asked me to "cover up" while breastfeeding (although I doubt that too many people were ever aware that I was). 

In fact, I've just crossed Starbucks off my list. 

Walked:  5 miles.

This is Incredible

So I was over at Patrick's Place (see tomorrow for further commentary on breastfeeding in public) and I took a look at his Favorite Sites and this is what I found, from NASA.  Good night and sleep well; it's an amazing universe out there (here).

                                                                2004 August 9

The Dark River to Antares
Credit & Copyright: Loke Kun Tan (StarryScapes)

Explanation: Connecting the Pipe Nebula to the bright star Antares is a flowing dark cloud nicknamed the Dark River. The murkiness of the Dark River is caused by absorption of background starlight by dust, although the nebula contains mostly hydrogen and molecular gas. Antares, the brightest star in the frame, is embedded in the colorful Rho Ophiuchi nebula clouds. The Dark River, pictured above across the upper left, spans over 20 times the angular diameter of the Moon and lies about 500 light years distant. Other types of nebula visible here include red emission nebula and the blue reflection nebula.

College Visits

Three days in the Pacific Northwest -- a beautiful trip that may have actually accomplished something.   First stop: Reed College in Portland, a school with a national reputation for academic excellence, a traditional and rigorous approach to education, and a student body with a generally alternative approach to life.  The campus is attractive and our guide was a tiny young lady from Michigan ready to explode with energy.  Reed is intensely scholarly, intellectual, and individualistic.  My daughter did notice that every student on campus lives in some form of a single and that only 20% spend time abroad, both aspects of life at Reed that left her with the impression that it might be more insular than she would like.  I was impressed with its rigor, thought the people we met were delightful, was taken aback by the small percentage of students who go abroad, and left unconvinced by the admissions representative's response to my questions about the Eurocentric focus of its core humanities course.  (More on that in another entry...someday.)  In philosophy and approach, it's a lot like the University of Chicago, where Son the Camp Counselor goes and is extremely happy, except that Reed is a small liberal arts college in a quiet suburb and Chicago is a big research university in the city.  

Reed College  

The next day:  Lewis & Clark College, also in a Portland suburb.  I wish I had known about this one when I was applying to college; if I could, I would enroll immediately.  The campus, originally an estate built in the earlier part of the 20th century, made me think of a Hansel and Gretel setting -- brick buildings with curving walls, towers and turrets; animal carvings and sculptures everywhere; elaborate gardens and views; contemporary buildings carefully designed to blend in with those that were more traditional without sacrificing a nod to the future.  Our guide was an enthusiastic (aren't they all?) young woman from California who told us that she'd be happy to talk endlessly about her semester in Spain -- more than half the L&C students spend time abroad and everything about the college seems to encouarge a focus outward.  The admissions counselor told us that while the vast majority of students in the U.S. attend college within 500 miles of home, at L&C the statistic is approximately reversed.  

  Lewis & Clark Window  

Our final visit was to Willamette University in Salem, the small (135,000 people) capital of Orgeon.  My daughter felt comfortable there immediately; she liked its location in the city and across the street from the capital and its feel of being part of the larger community.  Again, more than half the students study abroad -- this time our friendly and articulate guide was planning  her semester in Spain.  The interior of the campus is exquisite, with a contemporarty library and clock tower overseeing a green space through which a stream runs.  While most of Willamette's students are from the Pacific Northwest, my daughter didn't see that as an impediment, since that's not where she  is from.  She was also happy to hear that the college can arrange good internships in psychology and anthropology, two fields she thinks sound interesting.  

Willamette Clock Tower  

While we were visiting the smaller colleges, a classmate and friend of hers was visiting the University of Washington.  It will be interesting to listen to the girls compare notes with each other and their other friends as school begins.  I'm hopeful that we will see a sharpening of focus sometime in the next couple of months.

Walked:   3.5 miles.

America the Beautiful

OK,  this is great.  I gave up on walking or doing anything else today.  I think that both the reality of yesterday's funeral and the jet lag from our trip hit me simultaneously this morning, so I took one look at the magnificent day outside, curled up on the couch to watch the first episode of Season 2 of Six Feet Under, and then went upstairs and slept the rest of the afternoon.  After dinner, I went off to our semi-weekly friends' Sunday night porch gathering, thinking I'd stay maybe half an hour, but I caught my second wind about three hours ago and just got home from an evening of nonstop raucous conversation.  I am WIDE awake and I have to get up at 6:30. 

So...one entry and then I'm going to bed with a 12:15 a.m. reading deadline.  I mentioned that flying across our country when there are no clouds is an extraordinary experience.  I wish I could have hung from the bottom of the plane with a camera.  From the mountains of Idaho to the plains of Montana to the hills of the Dakotas back to the plains of the Midwest to the greenery of Minnesota eastward:  in this time of international unrest and national fear, it is truly moving to see our country from the air.  No flags or billboards or bumper stickers or campaign banners or protest signs visible from 35,000 feet up -- just an astounding expanse of natural beauty and wealth.

None of those pictures are available, so I'll just offer another of the Columbis River Gorge from our trip: