Beth's Take

Moving On...

2011-09-26T05:05:00.000-07:00

We are now a month into a major transition at our house. My son has started college at UMSL (University of MO-St. Louis) and has moved into his dad's house, which is a stone's throw from campus (and only about five miles from me). He moved for a variety of reasons, including spending more time with his dad, needing to feel like he was really "going away" to college, and needing to be close to campus in the probable event that his 14-year-old car breaks down.

I suspect that his father's much more lenient approach to household rules also played into his decision. I don't blame him for that. In fact, I was the same way at his age, itching to get out of the house and away from my mother's ridiculous rigidity, but just because I understand it doesn't mean I was willing to back down and let him stay out all night or throw loud parties in my basement.

The move has been amazingly more complex than I would have imagined. He moved some things to his dad's house, left some things in storage in the basement here, and together we packed up a lot of stuff for Goodwill. Of course, I cried through a lot of that, and even today, when I walk past something in the grocery store that I would not buy for myself but that he loved, I can still get a bit teary.

Now that his move is done, the other part of the transition has started. My daughter, who had been away at college for four years and who we expected to be moving to Los Angeles has unexpectedly (and delightedly, for me) decided to stay put in St. Louis for a bit. She is a writer (here is her blog), so she has settled into her brother's room to write her first novel. Until he had finished moving out, she was living partly in my room, partly in the basement, and partly in the dining room, so both moves have resulted in a much less cluttered home, and the joy that brings me is not insignificant (and just in time for the fall holidays too).

I had fully expected to be living the life of an empty nester this fall, so these changes, unanticipated a year ago, have led me to rethink a few things. For one, I'm eating more of the foods I like since I no longer have to spend so much time cooking for a teenage boy with limited culinary interests. For another, I have a young roommate who has grown out of the habit of cleaning up after herself (four years of college living will do that to you) but who likes to watch the same kinds of TV and movies I do and, even better, likes to talk about them afterwards.

Also, all of the moving has made me realize that we have TOO MUCH STUFF. I have saved a ridiculous amount of crap from their childhoods, and while I plan to keep some of it, I need to whittle down the piles so that the hoarder police don't pay us a visit. (Lest you think I exaggerate, here is a photo of my garage I took, in an effort to capture my cedar chest on film. Alas, I could not get close enough to it to take a better picture.) So in addition to writing this blog post and saying, wow, I'm okay, I'm also gonna use the space here to sell some stuff. First, I'd like to sell my son's loft bed (with attached desk), and here is a picture of it:

I also have a desk to sell, but that requires a bit more storytelling. When my daughter was three years old, I quit working to be a stay-at-home mother. I was very excited about this big change in our lives, but I was also worried about losing my intellectual and professional self to be a full-time mommy. I planned to do a lot more writing, so what was needed, I decided, was a desk. A space of my own. I started looking in the newspaper ads (this was the pre-Craigslist era) and finally found one for $75 that sounded like it would meet my needs. I went to look at it before borrowing a truck and rounding up some mover friends, and what I found was actually quite amazing.

The desk was huge (and heavy, I admit, five moves later), but the woman selling it had an extremely familiar face, one I had seen recently. On the phone, she called herself Mona Thurston, but as soon as she opened the door, I blurted out: "You're Mona Van Duyn!" Mona was a local poet and I had seen her give a reading just two weeks before, so her face was fresh in my memory. This was 20 years ago, and she was old then, but a few months after I purchased her desk (how could I not!), she was named Poet Laureate of the United States. She was the first woman to hold the post (and actually only the sixth ever, the post being somewhat recently established - see the link for more history) and the second St. Louisan, after Howard Nemerov. (This region has a long literary history - both T.S. Eliot and William Burroughs were born here - and a strong, world-renowned community of poets so the St. Louis component should not be surprising.)

I'm sure Mona was as surprised to see a poetry fan at her door as I was to see her opening the door. As we were moving the desk out a few days later, I mentioned that I was starting a new stay-at-home career and that I hoped to do more writing, and it seemed to please her that her old desk was finding a new home with a another writer. I never saw Mona again - she died in 2004 - but I have felt her spirit with me over the years, and her desk has stayed with me and inspired me, even though it has been a monster to move and has largely, in recent years, become a magnet for clutter. However, at this point in my life and writing career, I do most of my work on a laptop computer, in a rocking chair, so it's time to let another writer's spirit find a home with my and Mona's huge, old, green metal desk. I'm sure she would approve. I am posting a picture here, but buyer be warned: My garage is overrun with STUFF, so getting close enough to get a good shot (again) was impossible. From the picture, it looks like there are some rusty spots so it may need to be painted, but seriously, if you will give me $5, and move it, it's yours!!

Finally, I have a cedar chest for sale that was my very first piece of furniture. I bought it for a song during college. It had been marked down at JCPenney, where I worked, and my employee discount cinched the deal. My boyfriend (now ex-husband) and I had just started living together, and other than his twin-sized bed, we owned nothing other than our books and clothes. Over the years, I have used the chest to store holiday decorations and miscellaneous junk, and it provided great kid seating at the table for holiday meals, but it has never really been used for its intended purpose - to keep winter clothing moth-free. It still smells incredible (and will definitely safeguard your clothes), but the seat needs to be reupholstered and the knobs replaced. Again, if you will come get it and make a small donation to my household fund, it's yours (picture above, amidst all the garage debris).

These last two items are heavy (the buyer must remove them) and I don't expect them to produce enough revenue to buy dog food, but it is important to me that they find a good home, that I get to move on, and that I do not have to move them again.

I also have two or three 20-gallon tubs full of record albums. I have great taste in music so you will find some amazing things in this collection. Alas, the covers may not be in great shape, but if you've always wanted an original copy of George Harrison's orange, boxed "Concert for Bangladesh," look no further.

So, if you're interested, send me an email: evonbehren2@yahoo.com, and I promise not to talk your head off about the history of these items (that's what this post was for) or my kids or politics or movies or anything else other than the stuff I have to sell.

The Ties that Bind Us

2011-09-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

In exactly a week, I will attend my high school reunion. It is our 35^th. If that seems like an odd year to celebrate, you should know that since our 20^th, we have met every five years. Apparently, we genuinely like each other.

People who have moved to the St. Louis region from other parts of the country seem stymied when they are asked where they went to high school. Contrary to popularly expressed opinion, I don’t think we ask this question to assess each other’s socioeconomic backgrounds. I think it’s because we tend to connect with others starting with which football team we cheered for as teenagers and continuing with how many kids we have, where we like to vacation, and which coffee shops we frequent. For St. Louisans, asking a new acquaintance about their high school is a starting point in a conversation about community.

I realize that for many people, high school is a memory they would like to obliterate. To be sure, there were popular kids in our school who were both resented and admired. As time has passed, however, those distinctions have become largely lost to memory. As for bullies, I’m sure they existed, as they always have, but I have no idea who they were. I tend to think we were nicer to each other than my children’s generation is, but that too may be a measure of diminished memory.

I sometimes wonder if the era in which my classmates and I started our high school education had something to do with how well we get along today. It was 1972. We grew up seeing war and riots on the evening news every night. Social unrest was the language of our childhood. We were literally the children of the 60s. Martin Luther King was more than just the name on a holiday to us.

We entered high school just as the racial issues that had plagued our school district were dying down. We spent four years together, walking the halls, sitting in the quadrangle, going to homecoming dances and football games, and generally just being kids together. When we graduated, our class was down-the-middle, 50/50, black and white. It never occurred to me that our experience was not the norm, but it has influenced my belief that integrated education is the best way to overcome our nation’s racial divide. Spending my formative years in such a diverse environment taught me to see race very differently from the way my parents’ generation did. When I see a black person, I just see a person.

When I entered middle school (when did we stop calling it junior high?), the first real friend I made was Janice Hollis. She was the smart, funny black girl who sat in front of me in math class. She has recently reminded me that we first met at the bus stop, where we discovered we were both “new” kids on the block. I had come from a Lutheran school, so this was my first public school experience, and she had come from another school district. We have now been friends for 41 years.

Just as so many other Americans have done, many of my classmates (Normandy High School, Class of ’76) have reconnected on Facebook, but even before our generation stole that social networking goldmine away from our kids, my high school classmates were getting together every five years. Janice has spearheaded many of those reunions, including this year’s, because in addition to (still) being smart and funny, she is also a great planner.

So, in a little over a week, we will get together at Cardwells in Clayton to eat, dance, and be merry. We will show off pictures of grandkids this time around and talk about our empty-nester vacation plans. We will welcome many classmates back who have moved to faraway states. Hugs and cameras will be everywhere. We will take a minute out of our reverie to silently remember the classmates who are no longer with us.

The ties that bind us, fused in an era marked by assassinations and protest, connect us, but they are not all that we are. New generations, 35 years of history, a changing world, and personal stories of loss and growth too intricate to explain in paragraphs, are part of who we are too. And it’s all part of the conversation that started so many years ago and that continues when we reunite next week, as a class, as a community, as friends.

A Family Coming Together

2011-08-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

Most families have colorful stories that get passed down from one generation to the next. In my family, there is the one about my great-grandmother who allegedly crossed the Arkansas River in a covered wagon as a baby, across the frozen river. No bridge was available, or so the story goes.

Then there's the other one we can't authenticate, due to conflicting census records (according to my brother, the family genealogy geek) that says my great-great grandmother's father was a native American Indian (tribe unknown) who took his wife's name after marriage (John Kelly) and who disappeared at some point and was believed to have been murdered by a pair of "maiden aunts." Nobody is really sure whose aunts they were, but they apparently then raised my great-great grandmother.

This comes to mind because that segment of my family, descended through the Hardin lineage, will come together again in September for our annual family reunion. This year, in addition to barbecue, gossip, and photo-taking, we plan to produce a family cookbook, complete with recipes, photos, history, and anecdotes. None of us is getting any younger, and in fact, everyone from my grandparents' generation is gone, with just one exception, so before we lose any more history (or memory), it's time to start documenting.

The project started as a simple collection of recipes, but my cousin Sharon was unable to generate much enthusiasm. Then last year I foolishly volunteered to coordinate. Now that I have started to seriously think about it, and after reading this great article about reunions and family history by the legendary former Post-Dispatch writer and editor (and now Beacon editor) Robert Duffy, it has become something else. Something bigger and, admittedly, much more ambitious.

There are stories I think we need to tell, both the ones we can't substantiate and those we heard firsthand. My grandmother really did pick cotton during the depression, and she did so with the most recent baby (she had five) nearby so she could nurse if the baby needed her. My grandmother also repeated eighth grade, not because she was held back, but because there was no high school and she wanted to stay in school. As the first-ever college graduate in my family, that story in particular always brings tears to my eyes.

Our family is both better educated and more affluent than it was 50 years ago, which means that much like other families, we are increasingly spread out. Most reunions see only a smattering of each generation of each branch. Every time I go, however, I am astonished at how many children under the age of 10 there are to whom I am genetically related.

For the past four years, my daughter has been away at college and unable to attend so this will be her first one in as many years. She will be bored. She will beg me to leave after an hour. She has better things to do (I can hear already). No doubt she is right. She and her sibling did not grow up in as close proximity to my maternal family as I did. As kids, my siblings and I spent summer vacations hanging out with cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. We went to the homes of second cousins for family get-togethers fairly often. We had about 15 first cousins. My kids have two (on my side).

Someday, there will no longer be a sufficient number of people left who are interested enough to go to all the trouble of organizing this huge event we call the annual Hardin Family Reunion (named for my maternal great-grandmother, Laura Jane Hardin). It is already a shadow of its former self. Someday, too, my children will be older and they may have kids and grandkids who may have questions about their heritage. I'm hoping the Hardin Family History and Recipe Book will be there to help, so that they too can hear the story about the maiden aunts and the Indian named John.

This Very Special Mother's Day

2011-05-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

I've been teetering on the brink of depression for months now at the realization that my days as a hands-on mom are just about over. I loved being a mom of little kids. I gladly and without any regret left full-time employment to stay home with my babies and only grudgingly rejoined the work force as they approached school age and we needed the income. I love my career, and in many ways it allows me to be creative and to walk a path I feel privileged to be on, but I loved being a mom more.

I even loved it when each of them entered adolescence, because I was ready for that maturational stage too. The funny thing about parenting is that you grow up with them. You are really ready for school when it happens, and if you’ve done it right, you’re probably ready for high school when it happens too.

But I was not ready for college or for the leave-taking that followed. Wiser people than me have said it takes about six months to get over being sad when the first one goes off to college, and that is partly true. I found, however, that every time she went back to school after being home for a week or more, I re-experienced the sadness and tears that I’d experienced that first September in 2007.

Now she is graduating from college, ready to move on to the next stage of making her dreams a reality, and her younger sibling is graduating from high school and preparing to start his college experience. They will both be gone by September.

I’ve been pulling together photographs to use on Facebook and in graduation announcements and the result is I’m remembering how incredibly happy those early years of motherhood made me. I never expected to be a full-time, stay-at-home mom. As a teenager and as a young adult, I always assumed I would have a career and put the kids in daycare, but when the time came, the reality hit me like a sledgehammer. I couldn’t do it. I had to work for the first few years of my firstborn’s life because we had not planned on me not working, but I managed to finagle night-time shifts and part-time work, so I could be home with her during the day, before eventually quitting completely.

BEST THING I EVER DID. It surprised everybody, myself not the least, that I wanted to be a full-time mom, but still: BEST THING I EVER DID.

So, I am celebrating this particular Mother’s Day with gusto. I know the future holds great things (I can see it through the tears), and that this is just the next stage in our (mutual) development. I am happy for both of them, and I am grateful that they gave me the time they did. I will hold it in my heart and treasure it forever.

Happy Mother's Day!

Things I Will Likely Never Do

2011-03-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Every morning on the way to work, I drive past a 30-foot tall photo of a woman in a beautiful, lacy wedding dress. The photo is an advertisement for the bridal shop beneath. The dress is the stuff dreams are made of, and at one time in my life, I aspired to those heights. Today, as I drove past, it occurred to me that I will never wear that dress or any like it in this life time. The time for frilly, gushing dresses is past. Even if I were to remarry, it would likely be in blue jeans in Las Vegas or in a tank top on a Mexican beach.

This is not a bad or a sad thing. I will never wear that dress because I really have no interest and because I am older and wiser and know that those funds would be better utilized sipping wine in a Parisian cafe. But it got me thinking about all the other things I probably will never do now that I have reached a certain age (52). Here is my list:

1) Go to medical school: Clearly, I must accept at this point that I will never go to medical school. At one time, and actually for many years, I went back and forth about this: Journalist or Doctor? Doctor or Journalist? Hmmm...I was still trying to decide at 30 and at 35. That little I-really-don't-like-math-and-science-very-much problem kept getting in the way. I think at this point I can cross medical school off my to-do list.

2) Visit Prague: My friend Laurie has been to Prague, which I think is amazing and cool, but with so many places still on my "must visit" list, I just doubt that I will ever make it to Prague.

3) Sing in a rock band. This one is probably self-explanatory (I can't sing), but it remains every rockin' baby boomer's fantasy, doesn't it?

4) Skinny dip. It's just never gonna happen, folks.

5) Live in a house on the beach. This one is still possible, but given all the natural disasters that befall beaches and coastal communities, my interest is waning.

6) Climb Mt. Everest. I actually have never wanted to do this, but that shouldn't keep it off the list.

7) Meet my biological father. I've pretty much given up on this, and it doesn't bother me at all. I had a great Dad and a loving adopted family, and that is enough.

8) Win an Academy Award as Best Director. Yeah, well, I wanted to be a filmmaker for years, and while I guess technically this is still possible, it is much more likely that one of my offspring will win an Oscar and provide me with my first ticket to the show. And that's not a bad thing either.

9) Own a bookstore. I have always dreamed of having a bookstore-cafe, with poetry readings and great music playing in the background, and only pizza, chocolate cake, and wine on the menu. A girl can dream.

10) Read "Ulysses" or eat a snail. See #4.

So that's my list. Other items may occur from time to time, and I guess I may re-assess at 60 (which is why I didn't put skydiving on the list). The good news is there are hundreds, if not thousands, of items left on my list of things I really have to try before I'm too old to think. But that is a post for another day.

So, what's on your list?

Laura

2011-02-26T06:55:00.000-08:00

When I worked for Youth In Need, my friend Laura Harrison, who was also my boss, used to stop by my office periodically and say to me: "So when are you gonna decorate your office?" She was a big believer in making your office a home away from home. For Laura, her office was her home.

Laura was no workaholic. She liked to play, and she liked to have fun. But when you talk about somebody being dedicated to their work, well, Laura was the epitome. In her years as an advocate for kids and in her job as the head of Head Start in the St. Charles region, Laura was known for her get-out-of-my-way drive to save children and families.

Laura died on February 17. Her big heart apparently finally gave out, and at a very young age. She was only 54. Her brother David wrote this about her: "There is no doubt in my mind that Laura's first questions to St. Peter were 'Where's the kid's section and how can we make it better?' Her next question to St. Peter would be "Where can I fish?'"

On my return trip from her funeral in Jefferson City, I realized that someday I will have to return to JC and find her grave and place a pair of socks on it. Laura never wore socks. Even on frigid, zero-degree days, she walked in to the building where we worked with her ankles bare. She said they wouldn't stay up. I kept telling her I was going to buy her a pair of socks that would stay up, but I never got around to it. I still owe her that pair of socks.

The other memory that hit me on the drive home, and the one that brought me to tears, was of her insistent reminders that I put something on my office walls, that I bring a bit of "me" to the space where I worked. I had my kids' photos on my desk, and at one point I built a display on a shelf of toy dinosaurs I had collected over the years (being a mom and a fan of dinosaurs), and in a building dedicated to kids, I thought that was appropriate. Laura liked it, but she still said "you need stuff on the walls."

I tend to work in a context of messiness, papers and folders and newspapers and pens and coffee cups spread out everywhere, so clearly decorating does not come easy. And during the two years I worked for Laura, I just never seemed to have enough time to do that decorating thing she kept talking about. But just this week, in the job I have now, I realized that my office actually looks, well, like a human being works here. I have a framed poster of the Beatles on one wall and a Monet print on another. I have pictures of my kids, a plant that I adopted six months ago and have managed to keep alive, and next to the plant, I have one toy dinosaur. A reminder of another time and another job.

When I bought the Beatles poster, I had planned to hang it at home, but it sat on the floor of my office for a while and I kinda liked having it there. Our facilities guys hung it for me this week. I'd like to say that Laura would be proud, but I rather suspect she'd just shrug and say "well, it's about time." Then she'd grin and walk off to the mountain of work that awaited her. I hope St. Peter gives her some space to work, space that she can decorate and make her own. I imagine he has his hands full.

Yes I Did Work at the Arch

2010-12-29T11:02:00.000-08:00

As I came over a rise today on Page Avenue, I was able to see the downtown skyline, and the Arch, for a couple of seconds. I always forget that this high point exists on Page, so it always surprises and delights me. There is just something really wonderful about seeing the Arch, in the distance or up close. It is a marvel.

For two summers during college, I had a great job at the Arch as a motion-picture projectionist. They paid me prevailing union wages, which was good money for a college kid, and I didn't really have a lot to do other than start the film, switch reels, and manually rewind the film. So after closing the theatre doors and starting the automated projector to play "Monument to a Dream," I often wandered around the place. Sometimes, I found myself sitting on the steps under the Arch, just staring up at it.

From every angle, the design is captivating. As a non-mathematician, I often wondered that it didn't just fall over. I read an article in the Post-Dispatch once in the early 80s that depicted with graphic detail what would happen to the Arch if downtown became ground zero during a nuclear attack. It would essentially fold backwards into the river with the force of the blast. Short of a cataclysmic event, however, the engineers who designed it expected it to stand for hundreds and hundreds of years.

More recently, the Post-Dispatch has investigated and reported on some serious care-taking issues at the Arch. One article, "Corrosion Goes Unchecked," was accompanied by photographs of rust and pools of water at the base of the legs that maintenance crews try to keep cleaned up. This occurs in an area workers can access. Other corrosion, higher up and on the outer side of the stainless steel skin, is more difficult to reach.

The problem was first noted in 2005. A structural engineer told the Post it was possible that corrosion inside the steel walls is “bleeding through failed welds and staining the glimmering outside surface." It could be an aggressive corrosion, the article said, but there is no way to know because no maintenance records exist. The 2005 report recommended regular photographs be taken to document the problem over time, but apparently this has not been done.

There are plans in place to overhaul the Arch grounds, build access to downtown across Interstate 70, and add amusements and other things to the riverfront. But the anchor for all this is supposed to be the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, that structure we lovingly call the Arch. It doesn't take a genius to see the futility of planning to improve the grounds if you don't first make sure the Arch will remain standing.

My two summers working at the Arch coincided with the first two years of Fair St. Louis, then called the VP Fair. The early years of the Fair were problematic. In 1982, severe rain and huge crowds reduced the Arch grounds to a gigantic mudslide. People waded in the reflecting ponds, killing the goldfish. The grounds were covered in trash and broken glass. The irrigation system was damaged. Trees and grass had to be replaced, at a cost of about $120,000 (in 1982 dollars). Eventually, civic leaders promised to repair the damage and put plans into place to make sure it didn't happen again.

Our boss at the time, the park’s superintendent Jerry Schober, wrote a letter to Arch employees. The complete contents of what he said are now lost to time, but the part I remember is this: "I know how much you all love this park." The funny thing is that I didn't realize how much until I read his letter. I do love that park. I think most St. Louisans love it. Ask any native and he or she is very likely to have a story about the first time they took the tram to the top, or the first wedding they attended under the Arch, or how wild the river looks from the top of the staircase when it's at flood stage. Or maybe they will tell you, as I would, about the Chuck Berry concert under the legs of the Arch during that 1982 VP Fair. Any native will tell you they love this city, they love Chuck Berry, and they love the Arch.

Fixing the corrosion problem may not be easy. The original engineers made no plans for exterior maintenance access. Use of scaffolds, cranes, ropes, or a helicopter all have serious drawbacks. Here's what I think: We are a smart species. If we could figure out how to build such an amazing thing, we can figure out how to fix it, and we can figure out how to pay for it.

I remember seeing the partially built legs of the Arch when I was four years old. My children have never known a time when the Arch wasn't there to welcome them home from a journey. I would like to know that my great grandchildren will be able to tell their children stories about the first time they rode to the top and what a majestic and beautiful thing it was.

The Man in the Wheelchair

2010-12-22T18:18:00.000-08:00

[Parts four and five in my Opinion Shaper career - transferring this column over here before it its deactivated on the Suburban Journals Website]

OPINION SHAPER: Man in wheelchair offers lesson in government

By Beth von Behren | No Comments Posted | Posted: Tuesday, November 2, 2010 12:00 am

We live in an era when people from different political perspectives spend a lot of time squabbling over who's right, who's got the higher moral ground, and what's better for our nation and our planet - bigger government, less government, higher or lower taxes, etc.

I know what I feel personally, but I admit that I don't always have the answers or a solution to what ails us.

I do, however, know when I see something that works. Today, I saw a man in a wheelchair in the grocery store. He seemed to have some kind of muscular condition. His arms were bent at the wrist, and he didn't seem able to use his hands. He also wore some kind of breathing apparatus, and he needed assistance in the store. I saw him several times, and I noticed people were helping him, which was cool, but not what got my attention.

As I left the store, I saw the guy again. He was tooling along in his motorized chair, by himself, cutting through the store's parking lot and then through a restaurant's lot, to get to the sidewalk on Olive. I drove slowly so I could watch his progress.

He had a backpack on his chair but no bags, so he clearly did not buy very much, but he was speeding along, enjoying the 88-degree weather and the sunshine, rather than taking any number of public transportation vehicles that are no doubt at his disposal. He must live close, I thought. Then I checked the sidewalk to see if it had wheelchair access. It did.

In fact, all along Olive there are sidewalks with wheelchair access. They all looked fairly new. I work in city government, so I know how much it costs to rebuild a sidewalk. And then it hit me: We did that. We built those sidewalks. As a nation, as a society, we decided a few years back that we needed to make our world more user- friendly, more accessible to folks in wheelchairs.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was initially passed in 1990. I looked it up. Here is just a little bit of what the original bill, which was updated in 2008, says under "Findings": "Some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities … Historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate [these] individuals … [who] continually encounter various forms of discrimination, including … relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities."

These were the findings of Congress, which essentially said: Shame on us. But here's the best part: "The Nation's proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency … to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous…"

This part reminds me first that we are a nation and second that as a nation, we have ideals, beliefs and goals designed to ensure our common prosperity. The problem is we can't agree on how to achieve that. The fight has gotten so loud and so negative that it looks increasingly like we may never agree on anything again.
So maybe what we need to do is remind ourselves of what we have done in the past, what we have achieved when we worked together on a common goal.

Together we decided, as a nation, that even though it was going to cost an awful lot of money to rebuild sidewalks and make them handicapped-accessible, it was the right and smart thing to do.

Together, we made it possible for the guy in the wheelchair to get outside, enjoy the nice weather on a beautiful fall day and experience just a fraction of the independence that the rest of us take for granted every day. We did that. We did that together. There is something to be learned from that.

The Grateful Life

2010-11-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

Last year on Facebook, I started writing a daily status update on November 9, with the goal of writing one each day until Thanksgiving about something or someone in my life I was thankful for. This year, instead of redoing that, because I think I hit all the major points the first time around, I'm simply going to repost it here in its entirety in my blog (having painstakingly copied each post into a Word document last year; sometimes it pays to be anal). In re-reading these a year later, what I like most is that they cover the gamut of life, from every day inventions, such as space heaters, because sometimes it's the mundane that touches us the most, to ideas and (of course) the people I love. Some were hard to re-read, especially the one about my dad. (Note: There isn't an entry for my mom, because I wrote a whole blog post about her, which I posted on Thanksgiving last year.) I thoroughly enjoyed writing each and every one of these. Starting at the beginning...

November 9: Borrowing from Kate: "Let's see how many people can do this. Every day this month until Thanksgiving think of one thing that you are thankful for and post it as your status." Today, I am grateful for: Kate.

November 10: Today I am thankful that tomorrow I am going home. I love traveling, but I like going home even more (and in fact I wrote a blog post on that subject on the plane here but when my wireless thingy died...aarrgh...guess I need to buy a flash drive before I ship it off to Asus)...okay, back to being thankful :).

November 11: Beth is thankful today for all the women and men who serve in the armed forces currently and for all those who have done so in the past, my father and my Uncle Fred included. I'm also thinking about their families, especially the families of the soldiers who come home wounded and broken and need a lot of care. Heroes, all. Happy Veterans' Day.

November 12: Today, I am thankful for my dog Molly who faithfully scares away potential intruders with her big booming ferocious bark, even though she wouldn't hurt anyone (but they don't know that, as my mom used to say), and who is usually more happy to see me when I get home than my kids are. Good doggy.

November 13: I’m a day early but inspired by Laurie's friend Vicki, who posted a video of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," I want to say that on Friday I will be thankful for the members of Monty Python and all the laughter and joy they've given me over the years, in this amazing and expanding universe. Eric says it so much better than me [link to the Galaxy Song].

November 14: Beth is thankful for my Aunt Virginia, who taught me the importance of spoken language when I was about eight or nine years old. One day, in front of her, I said, "I seen," and she corrected me. Nobody had ever done that before, and I have made every attempt, ever since, to treat spoken language as if it were the holiest gift, which it is.

November 15: Beth is thankful that my brother Jeffrey has beaten back the leukemia monster and seems to be doing very well. Robust, even. (Photo with his wife Nancy on Halloween - he didn't wear a costume; she did.)

November 16: Beth is thankful today for my brother Michael who periodically just jumps in and fixes something on one of my cars. Yesterday he replaced the serpentine belt in about two minutes on the old Buick. Two years ago, when I was unemployed and getting ready to take Sara to college, he replaced the timing belt on the Elantra. He also brings laughter and foolishness into my world when I need and least expect it.

November 17: Today I am thankful for my other brother Jeffrey, who keeps up with me in the wise-ass-remark department quite efficiently, who is always there when I need him, and who shouldered the other half of the burden of our mother's caretaking in the last years of her life right alongside me. Not too bad for the baby of the family.

November 18: Beth is thankful today that somebody once upon a time invented the space heater, two versions of which have kept my son and me warm for the last two nights as we first waited for a furnace repair and now await a fuel line repair and a re-inspection and (hopefully) our gas being turned back on. I can kinda understand why my grandparents liked electric heat.

November 19: Beth is thankful today to have a great job. So many don't have jobs at all, and I have one where I get to do the things I love (write, talk, plan, create, develop, and write some more). And I do it alongside some pretty amazing folks. Good job. Great colleagues. I am thankful.

November 20: Today I am thankful for coffee.

November 21: Beth is thankful today for weekends ... so I can reduce my sleep deficit.

November 22: Today I am thankful for my sister-in-law Nancy, who keeps my brother happy and sane, and who is hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year (my first one without my baby girl at home). It's nice to have a sister, especially one who's funny and a good cook.

November 23: Today, I am thankful for my dad, who married my mom when I was seven months old and adopted me, giving me a name and a home and a wonderful, loving extended family who accepted me and never let on that I wasn't one of them. I cherish my memories of Saturday afternoons spent watching Charlie Chan movies with him and all the political arguments we shared over dinner. He taught me to think for myself. I miss him.

November 24: Today I am thankful for my son, Simon. It has given me the most unexpected joy to raise a son, now teetering on the edge of adulthood, and to watch him grow into a compassionate and thoughtful young man. From the little boy who couldn't sit still to the funny, laughing teenager who swims miles every day (and who came in 5th at conference - yay!!!), he has been a delight every day of his life.

November 25: Today, I'm thankful for my daughter Sara, who brought magic into my life when she was born and who continues to transform my life as a person and a parent with her imagination and creativity and insight. She is just an amazing kid. Simon and I will miss her this weekend but she'll be home for a month very soon...yay!!

Remembering Mr. Adams

2010-08-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

A discussion with my daughter the other day about how bad public schools are, as evidenced by how poorly most of the population writes, led to a discussion of sentence diagramming. My daughter and I are in that peculiar, geeky segment of the population that not only enjoyed diagramming in school but still likes to talk about it. I admitted to geeky already, ok?

We then proceeded to compare our experiences, and she humored me as I launched into a description of my 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Adams. Charles Adams was a cool, middle-aged, black man who didn't hide his cultural blackness to fit into what for him must have been an overwhelmingly white world. It was 1971-72, and our school district was pretty well integrated. Even so, he was the only black teacher I have ever had, from grade school through college.

I learned a few years ago that he had died of a massive heart attack, and it made me very sad. Mr. Adams taught me how to write a decent sentence. I was an okay writer when I entered his class, but his emphasis on the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, which he illustrated by forcing us to diagram our sentences, dramatically improved my command of language. It is because of him that I was tracked into accelerated English in high school.

He clicked his heels as he moved around the chalk board and spoke in quick, punctuated sentences, with a rhythm to his speech that I can only describe as jazzy. I have a vague memory that he liked jazz music and couldn't stomach the pop sounds of the day. He wore a short afro and a mustache, with just a hint of a beard, which I like to think he grew out during the summers.

I suspect if I hadn't been at such an awkward, self-obsessed stage in my own development, I might have appreciated him more at the time. I wish I had more pronounced memories from that year, but I know I enjoyed his class a lot, and today, almost 40 years later, I still hold him in the highest regard, and I still love to diagram sentences. What a nice legacy.

One Year

2010-08-09T17:51:00.001-07:00

525,600 minutes, goes the song. "525,000 moments so dear."

I love that song, and clearly I'm not alone. People walk around singing it. It's catchy and rhythmic, and the title isn't bad either: "Seasons of Love."

I've been singing it a lot lately because I find myself with a one-year deadline. It's a deadline I've known intellectually was coming for 17 years but emotionally have assumed would never arrive. In one year, give or take a few weeks, I will send my second (and final) child off to college.

Just three years ago, I sent his sister off to college, and that was excruciatingly hard, but next year, 525,600 minutes from now, she will be living somewhere on her own (Europe or Los Angeles, she tells me), and he will be away at college. They will both be gone, and I will be here.

Just this past week, I found myself filling out paper work for school and commenting out loud that this was the last time I would ever do this. The paper work started the year the older one started preschool, which means I have been completing these ridiculous forms for 18 years now. The last contact information sheet, the last school photo order form, the last health form. I don't think I will miss any of that.

In fact, I won't miss the chaos and stress of school at all. I won't miss dealing with awful teachers or the cruelty of other children. I won't miss arguing with public school bureaucracy. I won't miss the fundraisers or the committee meetings or the peevishness of other parents who think their own children are saints.

I will miss him.

But I still have this last year. "How do you measure, measure a year: In daylights. In sunsets. In midnights. In cups of coffee." I will measure it in the morning when I make his breakfast and take it in to him. I will savor that sleepy look on his face, under the covers, up on his bunk, when he asks for two more minutes. I will measure it in the annoyance in his voice when I tell him nope, he cannot have that friend over who I know drinks and smokes. I will measure it in the stress we both experience as we journey through the college application process together and try desperately not to miss any deadlines.

I will measure it in the look of joy on his face when he wins a video game, or talks to his girlfriend on Skype, or realizes I've made his favorite pasta meal after a long, hard afternoon swim practice when he is clearly exhausted. I will measure it when I watch him bake cakes with his friends, or hold his cat, or pry the contacts from his swollen eyes after sleeping in them too many nights.

I will measure it when I come home to find he has fallen asleep on the sofa, and I will sit in my rocking chair and watch him sleep, as I have done his whole life.

The irony of the next year is not lost on me. I would slow it down to a snail's pace, while both of my children would like it just to be over. They are ready for the next big thing. They were ready yesterday.

So how will we spend our last 525,600 minutes together? I will probably make him have dinner with me more often than he would like, and I will no doubt force him to build one final snowman with me, chop down one last Christmas tree together. I will sit anxiously with him as we await acceptance letters, and I will help him pick out a suit for his senior picture and a tux for prom. I may let him get his other ear pierced. I will certainly want the privilege of driving him to register to vote next June. We have four seasons left to us, and I intend to savor and measure as many of those minutes as I can.

Please Don't Ask Me to Hold Your Baby

2010-08-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

I hate babies. Okay, don't get me wrong. I don't actually hate babies. I just don't always love them. I love them in theory. I think they are adorable. Mostly. You gotta admit there are a few ugly ones. But mostly they are cute and cuddly and we ooh and ahh over them, and everybody wants one or two. Except me. I never wanted any and could be heard saying, for years and years, I am NEVER having children.

Of course, I did have kids, and I love them beyond words. Beyond sanity even. I have done and would do anything for them, including throw myself in front of a moving train to protect them or pick up their moldy dishes and disgusting socks. And if early results are any indication (they are 17 and 21), I did a pretty good job at this whole mothering thing.

But other than my own adorable offspring, I have really never loved babies. I am quite unusual in that regard in my family. Nobody waited as long as I did to have kids. My second child was born when I was 35, and my cousin, who is just seven months older than me, became a grandmother a few months later. In my family, I am the black sheep of motherhood.

When I was a teenager and forced to go to those family events that I now force my kids to attend, and the babies were rolled out, I oohed and ahhed and gushed with the best of them. I believe there even exists a photo someplace of me, at 17, holding one of these babies. I remember it fondly because it was a really good photo of me, unusual in those days and, well, ever since, but I couldn't tell you who the baby was. That's because I did the gushing and holding out of a sense of duty and to save my mother embarrassment. Not because I liked babies.

From a very early age, I can remember my mom expressing great concern and worry that I would never propagate the species. She had good reason to worry. I never played with dolls, which frustrated my mother, who believed that all girls loved dolls. She LOVED to play with dolls, so every birthday and every Christmas, I got new dolls, black ones, white ones, Indian ones, big ones, little ones, soft ones, rubber ones - dozens and dozens of dolls over the years, in the hope, I assume, that they would look adorable and cuddly and I would throw aside all toys to play with them. I was a great disappointment to her.

Then, as a teenager,I did my best to devise clever excuses for not being available when asked to babysit. This was partly about the money. I understand the going rate today actually exceeds minimum wage in some areas, but in the 1970s, that was not the case. My first job, at 15, involved washing dishes in a nursing home, for ten cents over minimum wage. So it made no sense to me to agree to change some kid's disgusting diapers, listen to him scream at me when it was time for bed, or eat those really awful TV Dinners his parents left for me, for HALF the money I could make in a real job. Of course, it wasn't just the bad pay. It was also because I, well, I really just hated babies. I had absolutely no interest.

My niece will hate me for telling this story, but when she was about a year old, and my mother was babysitting her during one of my visits, my mother asked me to change my niece's poopy diaper. Now, I dearly love my niece, and she is the most beautiful young woman today, but at 12 months old, she could fill a diaper with the most foul-smelling excrement. Seriously foul. Reader, I tried. I really tried. And I gagged. I got about halfway through the diaper change before I ran from the room with my hand over my mouth, gagging, and screaming that I would never have kids. My mother finished up. And she told me something that I have never forgotten and that has turned out to be completely true: It's different when it's your own child. What she really meant was, when it's your own baby, well, their s@#t doesn't stink.

She was right. I don't know if it's because we share the same DNA, or if it's because I carried them inside my own body for nine months, but truly, my children's poop has never made me gag.

Not only did I change their diapers with joy and a certain degree of, um, eagerness, I did a couple of other things that surprised my entire family, and we are talking jaw-dropping surprise here. I breastfed both kids until they were ready to take their SATs (well, actually only 2.5 and 3 years, respectively), and I quit working to stay home with them. I was the quintessential SAHM (that's stay-at-home-mom for you neophytes). I baked bread with them, built houses out of blocks, and made valentines from scratch. We had a playgroup and I joined La Leche League. The whole nine yards. Devout feminist that I am, I could actually be heard, during those years, criticizing daycare kids and working moms (i.e., wage-earning moms). Sad but true. I guess my college professor was right: The reformed types are the worst.

I remember my brother, who has for years told anyone who would listen that I am the educated one but he is the smart one, saying to me one day that he always thought I would do more with myself, that I would do great things. I tried to explain that staying home to raise my kids was the greatest calling I could think of, but I could see that he didn't get it. This is the same brother who caught me in the kitchen at my mom's house when I was seven months pregnant, shoeless, and scrounging for food in the fridge, and said to me: I finally get to tell you that you are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Yes, some things never change.

Including my inability to love babies. As my kids got older and I went back to work, I began to realize that once again, I had absolutely no interest in holding babies or taking care of them or being anywhere near them. I could and do admire them from a distance. Babies are beautiful. I love taking pictures of babies. I even love hearing their squeals of delight (you never get over loving that sound). But do I want to hold your precious baby? No I do not. Please don't take offense.

There likely is a very good reason for this. I am menopausal. This means I no longer have those mother-baby-feel-good-let's-nurture-everybody-in-sight hormones flowing freely through my blood stream. I am, in some ways, back to being pre-pubescent. The human body is an amazing thing.

My daughter, who loved to play with dolls as a child, much to her grandmother's delight, has picked up my mantra. I AM NEVER HAVING KIDS. She cites lots of reasons. "They stink. They scream. They are selfish and time-consuming and we don't have enough resources on the planet for more babies. It's the selfish thing to do. I may adopt. No, I won't adopt because babies are hard. And they stink."

And what do I say to her in response? You know what I say.

It's different when it's your own child.

The Wonder of Unstructured Time

2010-06-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

My mother was very good at robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep our tuition paid at the Lutheran grade school my brothers and I attended. It was the 1960s and she did not yet work, so every extra penny went into our education, which meant there was no money for summer camp. In fact, when I was a young adult and began reading about other people's experiences at summer camp, I was mystified and jealous that they had had such great childhood summers.

Our summers were pretty much spent sleeping late, riding our bikes, playing ball, swinging and sliding on the rusty swing set in the back yard (and building a fort under the slide), climbing trees, and watching TV on the ever-revolving set of black and white televisions that my dad would buy cheaply and keep in working order for a while. Once in a while my mom would spice things up with a little barbecue, and for two weeks every summer, we would visit our grandparents in southeast Missouri, where our summer "vacation" really took off (my grandmother had a real soda machine on her carport, a way for her to make a little spending money off the neighborhood kids, so we got more soda at her house than we ever did at home).

There were no video games, cell phones, or computers (we "googled" at the library). I spent a lot of time reading in bed and daydreaming at the top of the tree in the back yard. We didn't complain of being bored because if we did, some kind of physical work in the house or the yard would be found for us to do.

When I was a young parent and had stopped working to be home full-time, I would hear stories from working moms about how difficult it was to get a summer camp schedule all plotted out and arranged. Most camps didn't run all summer, and the best ones offered two-week sessions, back-to-back, but with separate themes, registrations, and requirements. One mother told me, with a great sigh of exasperation, that she kept a calendar on the refrigerator beginning in March and filled it in as she filled up each week with camp, vacation, or time with grandparents. I had a hard time not looking at her in horror. If it's hard on you, I thought, what do you think it's doing to your kids?

It was often difficult to arrange play dates for my kids with school friends because they were literally booked up, and you know, if you're paying several hundred dollars a week for a camp, you don't want to interrupt it for a two-hour play date on Tuesday. So since our family could not afford these gold-plated camps, we improvised. We went to the pool a lot (an improvement on my own childhood, when there was no pool close by and no money to join the Y), and we slept in, played ball, painted with finger paints, rode our bikes, went for walks, cooked together, read books, went to the library, built fortresses out of couch cushions, and watched TV (color, with cable, another improvement).

And it was wonderful. I wouldn't trade my childhood or my kids' childhood for anything. As a kid, I had a lot of "down" time to think and play and to just be. Even today, I find myself craving those moments when I know I am scheduled to do absolutely nothing. I am productive at work, spend time with friends, write a lot, work out at the gym, talk with my kids throughout the day and spend as much time with them, now that they are young adults, as they will give me.

But...but I would not be able to do any of these things very well, if I didn't recharge, if I didn't give myself time to be alone, to do nothing, or to do nothing important. Everybody needs that. I have had people tell me that they don't need it, that they hate being alone or they hate having nothing to do. They try to fill up every minute the way that mom from years ago filled up her kids' summer calendar. They make me want to reach out to them, take them by the hand, and walk them to a park where they can sit and do nothing but watch the kids play on the playground while the church bells peel in the distance.

I readily admit that there is no secret formula to raising kids, and I would never claim my parenting style was the best way or the only way. In fact, I'm absolutely certain my kids have watched too much television, eaten too many frozen pizzas, and played too many video games. I'm also sure that my friends' children who spent their summers in camp got a great deal of benefit from those experiences, and I know that some families just have no choice. But I truly believe that happiness lies in finding some way to have the kind of unfettered, unstructured time I and so many of my generation enjoyed as kids, when the only deadline we faced was waiting for darkness and the arrival of "lightning bugs" that we captured in jars and then released...

It was wonderful.

The Caveman Life

2010-06-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

One day last week I found myself driving to nowhere after I missed my turn. That sounds like a cool song lyric, except that it's less about finding a metaphorical path and more about forgetting what I was doing in the middle of doing it. I literally, not figuratively, forgot to turn, forgot that I had a destination, forgot, in fact, that I was driving.

This week, I sampled some bread and butter at the grocery store and decided that it really was excellent butter and I should buy some. It was on sale AND there was one of those immediate coupons (55 cents off in this case) for extra savings, which sealed the deal. I am enjoying that butter this week, but I completely forgot to use the coupon at the check-out lane.

I could go on and on, listing things that should have been easy to remember that I completely forgot to do. Or I could just let my kids write this post. I keep them in stitches with this stuff.

I have only really JUST entered mid-life so of course my big worry is, well, if it's this bad now, how bad's it gonna be in 10 years? Or 20? So I find myself reading all those magazine articles about keeping your brain in good shape and what to do to minimize your chances of early dementia.

Turns out that our ancestors, those hunter-gatherer types, were on to something. It turns out that some of the best things you can eat to keep your memory in good shape are, you guessed it: Nuts and berries. Blueberries, strawberries, walnuts, and almonds are great at reducing inflammation and protecting the brain.

Of course, fish, chocolate, and wine are all good for us too. Fatty fish, such as salmon and sardines, eaten once a week, will help to keep Alzheimers at bay, and chocolate - containing at least 70% cocoa - will improve blood flow to the brain. (Source: MORE Magazine, June 2010). We've been reading about fish, chocolate, and wine in lots of magazines for several years now. But berries and nuts? Really?

I find it amazing that primitive man (and woman) was so good at eating the right things, while we - modern man (and woman) - can't seem to figure it out. With all our gadgets and leisure time and gym time and our ever-increasing life span, we still need magazine writers to tell us that all we really need to do to keep our brains healthy is to eat like a caveman.

Good Friday Thoughts

2010-04-02T16:04:00.001-07:00

“He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't go to church, and I am not a religious person, but I do find meaning in two particular religious holidays, or observances: Passover and Good Friday. I learned about Passover during college from my friend Ellen, who taught me that it was, in a way, a civil rights observance. Ellen gifted me, a novice to Jewish tradition, with containers of her grandmother's mouth-watering matzo ball soup. She also told me that Passover was the one time of the year when she actually enjoyed being the youngest of four daughters (because it is the youngest who gets to ask the four questions during the Seder).

I attended Lutheran grade school, and while everyone else was getting excited about new Easter clothes and getting a couple of days off from school, I was captivated by all the black that got draped over everything in church for Good Friday. The purple of Lent would be stripped from the altar and replaced by black, and the wall-mounted crucifix would be covered in black as well. Imagine walking into church on Friday morning and being greeted by a building shrouded in black. It had an appropriately solemn effect on me.

Apparently, it is no coincidence that my two favorite holidays fall so close together on the calendar or that Good Friday frequently occurs during Passover. Many theologians believe it was a Passover Seder that Jesus was celebrating when he was captured during the "Last Supper." Also, the date for Easter, as established by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 (according to Wikipedia), is not a fixed date on the Gregorian or Julian calendars, such as Christmas is, but is instead a "movable feast," the date determined by a lunisolar calendar similar to the Hebrew calendar.

As a non-worshiper, I appreciate the literary and symbolic meaning of these two important events on the Christian and Jewish calendars. This makes me a bit of a pagan, I guess. I think of Christmas as an end-of-year rite of passage, but also as the pagans saw it - as a warding off of the coming darkness of winter (thus the candles and lights of Christmas). Easter, of course, is just the opposite - a celebration of life and rebirth. But before we get to Easter, we have to get through Good Friday. Unlike Christmas, this passage is a somber one.

For practicing, faithful Christians, Good Friday is the holiest of days because all that God does for them is predicated on the sacrifice he made on this day. For me, it is a reminder that the gift of life is not without pain and suffering and sacrifice. God gave his only son. Likewise, Passover is no party. The Jews delivered by Moses suffered greatly, during captivity and after. In the end, only their descendants actually got to live in the promised land.

Of course, Good Friday as a stand-alone observance would not fulfill either the religious or the literary requirement of resolution and catharsis. It is a sacred day to Christians because of what comes after: Resurrection, salvation, forgiveness. For the faithful, Easter is about the sacrifice God made for them. For me, the story of Easter is an affirmation that life has meaning and love can save us.

Still, you don't get to Easter without passing through Good Friday. No get-out-of-jail passes allowed. It is a day to be felt. Even non-believers such as myself can appreciate the importance and mood of the day. So, I won't wish you a happy Good Friday, but in two days, it will be a different story.

The Medium is Our Life

2010-03-25T06:51:00.001-07:00

I sometimes wonder what Canadian-born media thinker Marshall McLuhan would think of today's Internet-based culture. I like to think he would be fascinated and captivated, and I wish he were still around to tell us himself.

I first learned of McLuhan in the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall. Woody is standing in a movie line listening to a pseudo-intellectual in front of him talking about McLuhan's theories. Allen, no pseudo-intellectual novice himself, disagrees with the man's interpretation and then, because he is the omniscient filmmaker, produces McLuhan (in a cameo) on the spot, with the comment "I have him right here." McLuhan proceeds to back up Allen's interpretation.

Annie was made in 1977, and McLuhan died just three years later, so by the time I started reading Understanding Media in college in 1980, his body of work was a fait accompli.

After his death, and with the changing complexity of media communication over the next 30 years, McLuhan's theories fell out of vogue. Still, even if you disagree with everything he wrote, he remains the father of media theory, in the sense that we talk about media theory today because McLuhan said we should. He is the guy.

So I wonder. Would he think the Internet is a cold or a hot medium? McLuhan said that movies are a "hot" medium because they require less effort to participate - we use one primary sense - vision - and we don't really have to fill in the details much. In contrast, television was a "cool" medium because it required more engagement on the user's part to understand and interpret the message. It's more complicated than that, and frankly, I never really understood this part of his theory very well (or maybe I just didn't agree).

The part of his stuff that I liked best was his "medium is the message" theory, his complicated assessment that the medium used to convey the message affects society in fundamental ways because of the nature or characteristics of the medium. For example, when Gutenberg first developed his printing press, the impact of the medium (greater mass production of books) on society had the effect of dramatically increasing literacy, which, of course, changed the world.

Fast forward 574 years, and ask yourself these questions. How many hours a day are you on the Internet? Where do you get the majority of your news - television, radio, newspapers, or online? When you need a new pair of shoes, do you go to the mall or do you visit macys.com? When you need to remind your teenager of something important, do you scotch-tape a note to his door or send him an email?

Most of us probably do a combination of these. For work, I still read the daily newspaper and I still run to the bathroom to wash off the newsprint (I will miss that experience some day), even though I spend much more time reading online news sources. I use Facebook to send out event invitations, group-message friends or "chat" with "peeps," and for content from unusual sources, such as NASA and the American Film Institute. I am more informed today, I'd say, than I ever have been in my life.

I do probably 75 percent of my non-food shopping, pay all of my bills but two, and bank online. If I could see the doctor online, I probably would.

You might think that all of this ease-of-access would be shaving hours off my day and that as a result, I'd have more leisure time, and I probably do, but guess where I spend a good portion of that leisure? Uh huh.

So what would old Herbert Marshall McLuhan think of this Internet stuff. Would he say that the Internet is the medium that proves his theory? Well, wait a minute, I have him right here...

Opinion Shaper: Parenting by Text Message

2010-02-19T06:43:00.000-08:00

I am an "opinion shaper" for The Suburban Journals in St. Louis. So far, I have written three columns for them, and we'll see if they want me back in 2010. After they publish the column, we writers have the option to re-publish elsewhere. So, I am re-printing them here on my blog, before they disappear forever from the Journal's Website. This was the first one I wrote, back in June 2009. If you would prefer to jump to my personal blog posts, click here.

OPINION SHAPER: Parenting by text message has its advantages

By Beth von Behren

Monday, June 1, 2009 5:11 PM CDT

Text from daughter: Got 87 percent on the German Cinema test.

Response from mom: Not too shabby.

Text from son: We flooded the darkroom today by accident.

Response from mom: Did you help clean up?

When I first re-entered the workforce after five years at home, my kids would call me frequently with a new question or complaint about their sibling. "Can I have a cookie?" or "She won't let me watch Blues Clues." Later it was "He won't get off the computer and I have a paper to write" or "It's her turn to load the dishwasher and she's making me do it."

I call this period in my professional life the "parenting by phone" years. It often felt like a high-wire balancing act. Projects at work were interspersed with calls from home and trips to school to pick up sick kids. I had amazingly patient and understanding bosses, or it never would have worked.

Today, one kid is in college and largely self-sufficient, while the other is in high school with multiple commitments he manages with minimal reminders. And yet, the shorthand parenting I put to good use during the early years continues to serve me well, but in a new context. I call these the "parenting by text message" years.

I have friends and family members who think text messaging is for kids or is a hassle and refuse to add it to their cell phone plans. Others never use it even though they're paying for it. Some people I know get messages from their kids, but the technology confounds them. I am not in any of those camps.

As soon as I discovered it, I instantly loved text messaging and the ability it gave me to communicate a quick idea without the need to make a phone call that might turn into an hour-long conversation. It was also the perfect way to graduate from being the mom of children to being the mom of teenagers and young adults who may have lives even busier than my own.

I'm not exactly what marketers call an early adopter - someone who buys new technologies as soon as they are available. Early adopters serve as a kind of guinea pig for companies, working out the early kinks of products. Remember the people who stood in line for days waiting for the first iteration of the iPhone? I would never do that, but I do gravitate toward technologies that make my life easier.

And I'm not alone. The Obama presidential campaign announced its vice presidential choice by text message.

I originally thought texting was a waste of money and overly cumbersome, but with the aid of a QWERTY keyboard, it makes communication both more portable and more immediate. I can take my phone anywhere, so I can reach my kids at any time, including when they're in class or when I'm in a meeting. My son recently texted me from a friend's house at 1:30 in the morning to tell me he was sick.

I like that I can contact my kids surreptitiously when they're visiting friends without their peers knowing they're being checked on. I can text them from the grocery store to see what they'd like for dinner or send them quick reminders that make all of our lives easier. Best of all, I can send them little notes that let them know I'm thinking about them when they're away or experiencing stress, such as during final exams. "I love u" takes just a nanosecond to type.

Beth von Behren of Olivette is one of 17 West County area Opinion Shapers. Opinion Shapers are guest columnists who submit a column three times a year on areas of interest to them. von Behren is a public information officer for the city of Kirkwood.

Opinion Shaper: The Cool New Thing

2010-02-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

This is Opinion Shaper #2, published in September 2009:

Opinion Shaper: The cool new thing

By Beth von Behren

Thursday, September 24, 2009 12:15 PM CDT

As I was leaving Trader Joe's, I noticed an elderly couple entering the store. They were carrying their own reusable grocery bags.

This surprised me somewhat because my experience with the senior members of my own family is that they tend to carry out mundane tasks, such as grocery shopping, in the easiest manner possible. I have always assumed that this reflected the common-sense attitude that they had paid their dues and worked hard and were entitled to be cut some slack.

But here was an older couple who had assumed the arduous task of purchasing, keeping up with and remembering to use their own grocery bags. "Aha," I thought. "This has caught on." Using your own grocery bags is clearly the cool new thing to do.

There have been lots of cool new things over the years, some of which have benefited us individually and globally. Certainly, using reusable grocery bags is one of those.

In the '80s, when the fitness craze was the cool new thing, and everybody was buying Jim Fixx's running books and Jane Fonda's work-out videos, the cool new thing served a great purpose. We got in shape. Or at least, we knew we should get in shape.

Of course, there have been many cool new things that turned out to be not so good for us. It turns out that anti-bacterial hand soap, the cool new thing just a few years ago, kills off good bacteria too. So the really cool thing is to simply wash your hands for 30 seconds or more and any soap will do.

Designer flip-flops with sequins and animal-prints have been the rage for several years now. Then just last month somebody reported they weren't really good for your feet. Now there's a big "Well, duh."

It also turns out that while organically grown produce remains less toxic to our bodies than produce grown using pesticides, it's not so good for the planet. If you factor in transportation and the carbon footprint of bringing organic peaches to your table from California, locally-grown may be better for you than organically grown.

My personal list of cool new things that are not good for us would include reality TV and the iPod. I find it painful to watch people making fools of themselves while they eat spiders or to watch extremely talented people performing mediocre music.

And I guess I'm entrenched enough in my generational values that I still enjoy hearing an artist's work in its entirety and in the order and context in which he or she intended for me to hear it. I don't like it shuffled. I know, you don't have to shuffle it, but most people do, and that - along with buying a song at a time rather than an album full of songs - has been the cool, new thing to do with music for a couple of years now.

While we're making lists, let's not forget all those cool old things that we thought were bad for us until we realized they weren't. Eggs, red wine, chocolate, avocado, salmon, and even coffee, apparently, contain nutrients that, if consumed in moderation, are good for our hearts. Go figure.

So when a cool new thing spreads like wildfire, does that tell us that we are a culture of wannabes, or that we know a good thing when we see it? I don't know, but maybe someday I'll figure it out. I'm actually too busy to think about it right now because I have to finish uploading photos to my Facebook page.

Beth von Behren of Olivette is one of 17 West County area Opinion Shapers. Opinion Shapers are guest writers who submit a column three times a year on areas of interest to them. von Behren is a public information officer for the city of Kirkwood.

Opinion Shaper: The Pursuit of Creativity at Mid-Life

2010-02-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

This is Opinion Shaper #3, published in January 2010:

Opinion Shaper: The pursuit of creativity at mid-life

by Beth von Behren

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 1:15 AM CST

One of the best books I've ever read, "A River Runs Through It," by Norman Maclean, was published when the author was 74.

It was his first work of fiction, written at an age when many people are pricing retirement homes on golf courses. Maclean spent his life in academia, teaching others how to read and write and find their creative muse. He had been an avid, life-long storyteller, but he did not pursue a writing path of his own until late in life.

When he retired, his children encouraged him to put pen to paper. He continued to write fiction until his death in 1990. I find his story as inspiring as his writing, which is lyrical and beautiful. He didn't stop living at retirement. He found purpose and joy on a new path. He found his voice.

My friend Kevin Renick found himself on a similar journey over the past several months. A friend from college, we had lost touch, but reconnected this year on Facebook. I remembered Kevin as a creative guy, a writer, a poet, a musician and a journalist. We had many discussions about music, and Kevin always seemed knowledgeable.

Of all my classmates, many of whom were talented and ambitious, Kevin was the one whose name I fully expected to see in lights some day. As I raised kids and pursued a career of my own, I often wondered where he had ended up.

It turns out that like so many of us, his life didn't exactly turn out the way he may have envisioned it. He suffered through a series of disappointments - a lost love, a failed musical partnership, several dead-end jobs, some bouts with depression - but eventually did become involved in several creative enterprises.

He continued to write songs, and he did some freelance writing for local publications. Eventually, he became a driving force behind Noisy Paper, a local alternative monthly magazine, and when it folded, he co-founded Playback:STL, which still exists in an online version.

In 2000, he started working for a local company and threw himself into it, setting aside outside creative goals in an attempt to find some professional and financial stability. He was laid off last year, just about the time the movie "Up in the Air" was filming in St. Louis.

It was at about that time that I reconnected with Kevin, who in the wake of unemployment had started writing songs again. I saw him perform and followed his posts on Facebook during what turned out to be both the worst and the best time of his life.

Kevin had written a song called "Up in the Air," about finding purpose and meaning in the aftermath of losing a job. He wrote the song long before learning about the film of the same name, which is about a man who flies all over the country handing people their layoff notices.

Realizing that there was huge synchronicity afoot, Kevin attended a speech by the film's director, Jason Reitman, at our alma mater - Webster University. He handed him the song on a cassette tape - a technology so out-of-date that Reitman had to track down a car stereo to play it on - and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. It's a history that has now played itself out in both local and national broadcast stories, and yes, in lights: Kevin's name appeared recently on the marquee over Vintage Vinyl.

The worst part of the story, the part you won't hear about on NPR, happened just a few days after Kevin's fateful meeting with Reitman, when his mother took a bad fall, from which she never really recovered. She died two months later, before Kevin got the e-mail from the film's producers saying they wanted to use his song in the movie.

So, at the age of 52, in a year when he both lost and found inspiration, when the worst happened, but also the best, when the weirdness of celebrity turned his life upside down, Kevin Renick found his voice.

He has penned dozens more songs - two albums' worth, the first of which is titled "Close to Something Beautiful," and he continues to perform locally, where if you're lucky, you can hear him sing the song that changed his life: "I'm up in the air ? choices drifting by me everywhere. And I can't find the one that would help me do the work I've left undone. 'Cause I'm up in the air." - words and music by Kevin Renick. I think even Norman Maclean would be inspired.

(Note: Kevin will perform at the Iron Barley restaurant, in their downstairs club, Fred's Six Foot Under, on Feb. 26. You can download the title song from his first CD at his Website www.kevinrenick.com).

Beth von Behren of Olivette is one of 17 West County area Opinion Shapers. Opinion Shapers are guest columnists who submit a column three times a year on areas of interest to them. von Behren is a public information officer for the city of Kirkwood.

Why I Love Science Fiction TV

2010-01-24T09:45:00.001-08:00

Of all the arts I enjoy, movies and rock music being at the top of that list, I get the most unique and unusual delight from watching science fiction on television. TV sci-fi shows are at the top of my list of things I probably shouldn't be spending so much time on, along with playing on Facebook and eating chocolate chip cookies.

My kids and I polished off the entire 10 year run of Stargate: SG1 on DVD (which we own) last year, and that was on the heals of catching up on all the episodes of Battlestar Galactica (own). Previous years have seen us breezing through the entire seven-year run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (own). Of course, I have seen every episode of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation and many episdodes of the other Trek franchises. My son and I are finishing up the first season of Stargate: Atlantis (own), the subsequent seasons of which I will be Netflixing.

Add to that list the new series, Caprica, which just debuted on the Sci-Fi channel on cable and which brings me to the motivation for this blog entry. While watching Caprica, I have been salivating over the previews and promotions for other Sci-Fi (or SyFy as they now prefer) "original" offerings that are currently on hiatus but will be coming back, specifically Eureka and Warehouse 13. SyFy also runs Doctor Who. And if you have never encountered the Doctor, well, you really do not know what you are missing.

I don't think I'm your typical science fiction fan. I have read a few sci-fi classics (can't recommend "Stranger in a Strange Land" enough). I have read almost everything Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote and consider him one of my earliest and most important influences, and Michael Crichton is also on my list of best reads ever. I'm no slouch when it comes to sci-fi movies either (you have to see "Brother from Another Planet"). Still, I've never thought of myself as a sci-fi nerd. I totally dig NCIS, for example.

But when I say that the promos for Eureka got my heart racing, I'm not exaggerating.

Which brings me to my point: I love a good dose of "what if" in the stories I read or watch. I also like a good mystery and an upbeat ending (with said mystery solved). Most of my favorite sci-fi stories have involved both. Doctor Who, for example, is always trying to figure something out (and it usually results in saving the known universe). Jean Luc Picard, in stark contrast to his counterpart James T. Kirk, uses the muscles in his brain more than the ones in his arms (yeah, I know, no muscles in the brain, it's a metaphor, get over it).

I also tend to like stories that teach us something, or reinforce something, about human behavior and the importance of doing the right thing. So Captain Kirk will always be a hero, as will Ian in the Jurassic Park franchise ("Life finds a way").

The sci-fi I gravitate towards, then, captures all of these elements. Thus, while I could appreciate Battlestar G, I wouldn't put it at the top of my list. Too dark. Eureka, on the other hand, is pure delight. Lots of really smart, nerdy scientists working on ideas that will probably never come to fruition in my lifetime, but which seem to pretty consistently get their creators in trouble. And who saves them? The dumb sheriff who may not know the difference between string theory and single-stream recycling (they sound alike!!), but he saves their asses every single time, and sometimes he saves the planet from destruction too. And they love him for it. In fact, they depend on him saving them, which leads them to even greater risk-taking. I love the characters (the brave, dumb sheriff; his exuberant, ninja sidekick who is also beautiful; the thoughtful, serious scientist-leader who is also a mom; the list goes on). I also love that their connections to each other is also what saves them.

And I love the gadgets, because that's where the "what if" comes in. As a culture, we Americans love to ask "what if." We love crazy ideas. We love heroes, both the military and the scientific kinds. We love risk-takers, especially when they succeed. We also like to know that the future holds greater promise than the present. Right now, we face an uncertain future, and our leaders keep disappointing us. But in the world of science fiction TV, the leaders get it right, and the heroes are us. What could be more fun to watch.

The Parenting Life

2010-01-17T11:11:00.000-08:00

As parents, we devote 18 years of our lives to one goal: Getting our child(ren) into college. We work hard at it. We investigate and select the best preschools. We choose a dwelling for our household on the basis of how the neighborhood schools will treat our child (or we live where we want and spend a fortune on private school tuition). We sign them up for soccer and ballet and scouts and then worry if we've over-scheduled them. We fight with teachers. We wrestle with mathematics homework we don't really understand. We miss movies we'd like to see because they need us home with them. We advocate for them. We encourage them. We put their needs above our own.

And then one day we realize the fruits of our labor. They leave home to go to college. And we beg them to come back.

Don't deny it. We all do it. Many years ago, my mother dropped me off at college, helped me move my possessions into my room, and then stood there weeping, annoyed at herself because she'd sworn she wouldn't. She rushed herself and my brothers out of my dorm room, blubbering the whole way, and then waved at me from the truck she'd borrowed from my grandfather, parked in the unloading zone seven floors below, and I waved back, never even beginning to fathom that I would repeat her performance just 30 short years later.

I was the first in my family to go to college, so my mother had no real role models for what she was about to experience. She had no way of knowing that sending me to college and thrusting me into the middle class would create a divide between us that we would spend the rest of her life trying to understand and bridge.

What she did know was that college was my ticket out of poverty and toward independence. So she persevered. She started prepping me for college before I even started kindergarten. We did numbers and letters on a chalk board, and she coached me: "Beth, you are going to college so you will never have to be dependent on a man."

Years later, my middle class existence firmly in place, I realize I have done much the same thing with my own two children, one of whom was successfully admitted to an elite college three years ago and is now a junior at Wesleyan. The other is a high school junior trying to pass AP Gov while figuring out majors and colleges and prepping for college entrance exams and all that jazz. The parent-child divide, however, is no less intense. The older one plans to move to Los Angeles after graduation to make her mark in films, and the younger one just slammed his door at me when I told him he could not go to South America alone over summer break. The words are different, but the tune is the same.

I cried today after I waved goodbye to my daughter, who is driving herself back to school, a two-day drive from St. Louis to Connecticut, during which I will be existing on coffee and nerves. Her college experience is very different from mine. I attended a public university, and she goes to one of the most expensive private schools on the planet. We share a love of movies, which we watch on Netflix with lots of interruptions to discuss acting, dialogue, set design, and whatever. It would drive my mother nuts. Still, her politics are way to the left of mine, which are already fairly left-leaning, and I can hear "you just don't understand me" in her tone when we disagree.

My son is a swimmer and an absent-minded student. I remember the day I realized that he did not share my intellectual curiosity or my love of learning for learning's sake. His motto, "why do I need to learn this - I'm never going to use it," still brings tears of frustration to my eyes. Still, he is good at math and enjoys astronomy, and did I mention he swims miles every day? I could never do that, but I love to watch him do it. Our divide exists, but it is not as deep as our love.

And that is essentially what my mother taught me before she died. We want our children to do better than us, to have better lives. The test of our success is theirs. Sometimes their success takes them away from us for a while, but if we do it right, if they know we love them, they will always come back.

The Joy of Christmas

2009-12-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

We have a new dog at our house. He looks like he weighs 10 pounds soaking wet and most of that is hair. He likes to hide shoes, pull trash out of the trash cans, and pee in the kitchen. He is our Christmas mutt. Technically we got him in November, but I like to think that he brought the joy of Christmas with him.

It has been a year of upheaval at our house in many ways. For starters, we moved our house. Well, we moved our household into a new house. Biggest kind of upheaval there is. Then our cat died, and my brother was diagnosed with APL (acute promyelocytic leukemia). Lots of other stuff happened too, good stuff aplenty, but it seems as if it's the bad stuff that takes hold of your memory the hardest and refuses to let go.

So our Christmas mutt, Chester, is something of a bright spot in the rear window of 2009. He is cuddly and energetic and leaves little black fuzz balls in his wake. He is full of joy.

And he reminds me that instead of focusing on how much I have yet to get done before the BIG DAY arrives - instead of preparing, always, for the future, I need to live in the present. I need to sit and smell the cookies, cuddle with my kids (and the new pooch), sniff the wood smoke as it wafts through a crisp, cold winter's night, enjoy the sounds of a baby's delight (my new grand-nephew Dylan's will do nicely), and hug the people I love. Because today, this moment, is the only one there is.

Merry Christmas.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T10:51:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving. It is also the 7th anniversary of the day my mother died. In 2002, she died on November 26, two days before the holiday, so each year on this national feast day, I think of her. It is ironic and sad that she didn't make it to Thanksgiving in 2002 because it was her favorite holiday. She loved to cook. She loved to eat. But most of all, she loved to be with her family. She loved cooking for her family. She liked Christmas too, but that was a day of gift-opening and other things. Thanksgiving was about family. Nothing was more important to my mom than her family.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to our mothers for giving birth to us, but my debt is especially huge because of what my mom had to go through to get me here. She was unemployed and unmarried and living with her grandmother when I was born. She had worked until about her sixth month of pregnancy because she was petite, and the pregnancy wasn't obvious until then, but as soon as she started to show, she knew it was time to go. Even married pregnant women didn't get to keep their jobs in 1958. Unmarried women were banished to obscurity and talked about in hushed tones for years afterward.

Appearances were very important to my mother. She taught me a lot of things in our years together, but two that stand out were 1) Get an education ("You're going to college, Beth, so you never have to be dependent on a man"), and 2) Never air your dirty laundry ("We may be poor, but we are middle-class because we have middle-class values"). No matter how bad it gets, she believed, always pretend that you are on top of the world. That's how you get and keep respect.

Knowing this about my mom makes her situation all the more amazing to me. Add to her unwed, pregnant state the fact that she lived in a poor, rural area, and that her father was a southern Baptist preacher ("We read the Old Testament, Beth, but we live by the New Testament"), and you have a situation that says everything you need to know about my mother's resolve.

My mom was a talented artist but did not finish high school and had never really wanted anything more than to have a baby and be a mother. Despite a context that would give most 23-year-olds deep anxiety, my birth gave my mother nothing but joy. She told me many times that having me was the best thing that had ever happened to her. When my own daughter was born 30 years later, I understood exactly what she meant.

So on this day when we dedicate ourselves to giving thanks for life and love and happiness, I give thanks for my mom, who looked her hellfire-and-brimstone father in the eye and told him she was pregnant, who raised me and my brothers on her own after her marriage failed, who pushed me to go to college, who taught us to reject hatred and racism and embrace compassion and forgiveness, and who never, ever expressed any regrets about her life or the path it took. Thanks, Mom.

The Traveling Life

2009-11-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

Birds have the best view of the earth. Well, birds and God, I guess. And humans who fly in planes. Today, I realized that seeing that long line of snow-capped mountain peaks from a plane, stretching into the horizon, reinforces for me that the Rockies really are a range, something that’s just not as obvious when you drive through them. I was similarly overwhelmecd the first time I noticed the Mississippi-Missouri Confluence from the air (the spot where the two massive rivers come together). It is truly the most amazingly beautiful sight from the sky. Maps don’t do it any justice, and you can‘t really see it from the road.

I guess I’d mostly flown westward from St. Louis prior to my first sighting of the Confluence or had never seen it or noticed it previously, but on a flight home from New Jersey we went right over it, just before landing. When I was a kid, when we were returning from a car trip and saw the Gateway Arch from the car, we knew we were home. It was both a peaceful feeling and an excited one. (And sometimes we even had contests to see who would spot it first.) When I see the Confluence from a plane, it’s a similar feeling. I love to travel, but I love to come home.

Of course, travel during my childhood was pretty much limited to car trips to my grandparents’ home in Sikeston, in southeast Missouri. Today, that drive is about a two and a half hour trip, but before Interstate 55 was finished between St. Louis and Memphis, it was more like a four or five hour trip along winding, two-lane highways with top speed limits of 45 mph.

For many of those years, we drove it in our baby blue 1962 Chevy station wagon, although I have a vague memory of taking the train once when I was very young. The car trip itself was never that much fun, and I often slept through it to avoid the motion sickness that plagued me in those years (and that still prevents me from enjoying carnival rides), but arriving on my grandmother’s doorstep vanquished the nausea and headaches the way a nice chocolate souffle after dinner will make a bad day better. I loved those weeks I spent with her, sitting in her lap (even when I was too big to do so, really), rocking in her rocking chairs (she always had a couple), watching her “stories” with her, and playing with my cousins. Leaving was always hard to do.

Today, travel is easier and more comfortable, even by car - better seats, sometimes with lumbar support, high-quality stereo options, air-conditioning, sun roof, working seat belts, better fuel economy, and cup holders. Oh my God, how did we ever survive without cup holders? Air travel is somewhat easier too, even in this era of high security.

I often wonder what my grandmother, who picked cotton, raised five kids during the depression, grew her own food, never saw an ocean, and certainly never flew on a plane, would have thought of seeing the Confluence from the sky. I imagine she would have thought that she had seen the face of God.

The Smoking Issue We Can't Ignore

2009-10-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

My mother was a life-time smoker. She started when she was about 15 and was probably completed addicted by the age of 18, so much so that she lit up in her parents' house without even thinking about it when she visited them after being out on her own for some time. This freaked her out so much that she jumped up and ran outside to put it out.

As far as I know, the only times in her life that my mother stopped smoking were during the periods when she was pregnant with me and my brothers (thanks Mom). We used to tease her that she would die with a cigarette between her fingers, and that is very close to what happened.

She was heavily addicted. She had bypass surgery in 1995 and came to live with me during her recovery period, which was, well, hairy. "Hairy' is a word I have heard soldiers use in movies about Vietnam, when they want you to understand that death may be imminent but you really shouldn't panic. She had to be taken back to the hospital three times in the first two weeks, once by ambulance when her blood sugar dropped so precipitously that it was obvious, in retrospect, that the nurse practitioner who called for the ambulance was not convinced she would survive the ambulance ride. He realized he had been too calm with me in his description of the problem, bless his heart, when I said I could drive her and he said, well, yes you could, but I really think she needs oxygen and someone to administer it. Oh, I said. So, its kind of serious. Yes, he said, it is.

During the time she lived with me following her surgery, she acquired a staph infection that required Vancomycin, a serious anti-biotic that at the time was the drug of last resort. There was nothing else available. The drug was given to her via IV, and we won't get into a healthcare debate here by drudging up the fight I had with the Medicaid folks who wanted me, a writer, NOT a nurse, NOT a doctor, NOT even a technician, to administer the IV. In any event, the Medicaid folks relented (after I refused). At the time, I lived in a house where the only bathroom was on the 2nd floor, and since she couldn't make that trip (she slept on the couch on the 1st floor), we had to have a portable toilet brought in for her. The Vanco killed the staph but along with it pretty much all the good bacteria in her intestinal tract. Needless to say, the stench was almost unbearable, and we, my now ex-husband and I, had to take that toilet upstairs and dump it every day.

I also had to cleanse her wound. I will never forget, as long as I live, putting on the sterile apparel, standing in the shower with her, she naked, cleansing her wound, toweling her off, and re-bandaging (using sterile techniques), all while my two-year-old son howled outside the bathroom door. The wound was so infectious, I had to lock him out of the bathroom for his own safety.

During this time, I was also battling a tenacious case of head lice on my seven-year-old daughter's head (and eventually, of course, on my two-year-old as well). I spent mornings taking care of my very ill mother and evenings wearing out my already-bad eyesight with hours of nit picking. Literally. That year was one of the worst the CDC had ever seen for resistant lice infections. The school kept sending her home, and I kept insisting there was nothing I could do. I read the literature. I read a lot of the literature. I knew more than the school knew, including that while lice are disgusting, they do not carry disease, but in the long run, the only course of action was to simply cut her hair off very short. She lucked out (i.e., she got to keep some of her hair). Her brother got a head shave. To this day I can still hear him telling people "the bugs got my hair."

So, visualize all this, and imagine my consternation when, in the middle of it all, just as I had re-entered the workforce part-time, and only three months after her near-fatal surgery (her lungs collapsed twice during recovery), I discovered her smoking on my back porch. Her lungs had collapsed because the doctors did not completely comprehend the extent of her habit. They preferred to believe her (oh, I dont even smoke a full pack a day) over me (uh, more like almost three packs a day). That was the last time I allowed doctors to not to listen to me.

So she resumed smoking. She had been a non-smoker for three months. She had almost lost her life. She had survived withdrawal. She had placed a burden on me for her caregiving that was threatening my marriage and my very health. And here she was smoking again. I called my brother that day and told him to come pick her up. I couldn't do it anymore. I didn't speak to her for months.

Smoking did eventually kill her. The average survival rate for bypass patients at the time of her surgery was five years, and with good medicine, great doctors, and extremely supportive children who made sure she took her meds and got to the doctor, she made that milestone plus two more. She was a fighter and a tough old broad. She had a great will to live. If she had not resumed smoking, she might be alive today. She has missed so much in the last seven years.

This is all coming back to me today because in the next two weeks I have a decision to make, as do all St. Louis County voters who actually vote. On the November 3 ballot is a question about smoking in public places. Should we allow smokers to continue to smoke in restaurants where it is allowed by the owners, or should we take the decision out of the owners' hands and make it unlawful everywhere with just a few exceptions (casinos, bars where 75% of the revenue is not from the sale of food, tobacco shops, etc.).

This is a very hard question for me. I believe completely in personal freedom. If you want to smoke yourself into an early grave, I believe it is your prerogative, as long as you don't take me with you. I believe restaurant owners should make the decisions for their restaurants. Same for bar owners.

On the other hand, I have had meals ruined by smoke. The older I get, the less I find that I can tolerate smoke. Maybe it was all those years of living with two smoking parents, but today I find that I am as sensitive to cigarette smoke as I am to heavy cologne. They both make me sneeze and make it hard for me to breathe.

And then there is my mom. I saw cigarettes take her life away. In the end, she didn't care if she had food in the house, as long as she had cigarettes. My loving, gregarious mother became so demented by her habit that she once called me on the phone and left a voice message, after discovering that I had paid her bills and left her not enough money to buy a full carton of cigarettes, that said "You lying, thieving bitch. You better give me my money back." She thought I had stolen her money. She sounded the way I imagine a crack addict might sound. To this day, the memory is fresh and brutal.

So how am I to make this decision? How am I supposed to separate my personal family experience from the broader cultural issue? The personal and the political have never been closer for me. I just wish it would go away. For the first time in my life, I feel the burden of my responsibility as a citizen as if it were a knife in my gut. I have about a week to make a decision, and I'm not sure that I can. I'm not sure it's enough time.

Good Hair Days

2009-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

I was born with curly hair. It runs in my family. My mother had it. My daughter has it. It has been both the bane of my existence and the object of admiration from complete strangers. I sometimes feel the way pregnant women must feel when strangers walk up to them and rub their extended bellies, as if a pregnant woman's belly is somehow publicly owned. Total strangers will walk up to me and tell me how wonderful my hair is and ask if they can touch it. (On good hair days only, of course.) During college, I once had it cut at a beauty school for $3, and the student who cut it couldn't stop playing with it and exclaiming over it. They asked if they could keep the shorn hair and use it to demonstrate to students how to work with "virgin" (at that time it had never been colored) curly hair.

About two years ago, just before I turned 50, I finally learned the secrets of other curly-haired girls who have managed to straighten their locks. Jennifer Aniston reportedly has extremely curly hair, but Jennifer Aniston probably has a full-time hair stylist on her payroll. One might wonder why it took so long for me to figure out how to straighten my hair, but the answer would lie in my lack of patience with all things, especially those involving my appearance.

Before I had kids, I prided myself on being able to get up, eat breakfast, shower, get dressed, and get out of the house in 30 minutes. I don't iron if I can help it. I used to wear skirts a lot but at some point switched to pants because I got tired of dealing with stockings. When I was younger, I wore no makeup at all, and today I only apply three things because anything more would require getting up much earlier.

One of those items, mascara, I only started wearing about six months ago when I finally accepted that I am my mother's daugher in the eyelash department. By the time she hit 50, the loss of pigment in her eyelashes had left her looking like a burn victim on the days when she didn't apply the black stuff. So I began the ritual of adding mascara to my otherwise-invisible eyelashes, and immediately my impatient nature erupted. Make no mistake, mascara is crap. It is hard to apply evenly. It cakes up. It sticks to everything, including the area under your eyes if you blink before it dries. I had lunch once with an otherwise lovely woman who had clearly applied her mascara in such a rush that it looked about to slide down her eyelash and drop into her soup. It took all my willpower not to reach up and slide it the rest of the way off. I hate mascara. It's a good day when I only have to wipe it off and start over once, which tries my already-in-short-supply patience. Ah, but the topic here is hair.

Everybody loves curly hair. Men, especially, love long curly hair, and if they try to tell you otherwise, well, then YOU explain Farrah Fawcett. But it's not just men. Most of the people who walk up to me to exclaim over my curls are women. "Oh, I'd give anything to have your hair" and "Is that natural? I get perms to make my hair look like that" are the most common comments. I have only had one woman in my whole life tell me that she loved her straight hair and didn't envy me my mess of a head at all. I hugged her.

The problem with curly hair that most people do not appreciate is that it has a mind of its own. It never looks the same way twice, it is NEVER symmerical (something my particular, chaotic mind seeks out), and it frizzes way more than straight hair. There are days when I arrive at my office looking like Phyllis Diller. I keep the barrette companies in business.

Most people also don't realize how much the arrival of graying affects curly hair. Gray curls become wiry. I found myself at 40 battling gray hairs that stuck straight out. I'm not exaggerating that I was starting to look like Albert Einstein. So I started coloring it, which took care of the wiriness but added a whole new component to my life. Did I mention I have little patience for this kind of thing?

It occurred to me when I was younger that my unruly hair fit my temperament. My grandfather had curly hair too, and he was a hellfire and brimstone southern Baptist preacher. In my younger days, I was known for, ah, having opinions and, ah, well, not keeping them to myself. I am my grandfather's granddaughter, in other words. As I approached 50, however, I learned to moderate myself better, and so, I figured, my hair should get with the program, right? Yeah, right. Short hair seemed the only solution.

Just as my half-century birthday was starting to really get to me, and just as I was giving serious thought to chopping it all off and going with that 80s punker cropped look, I noticed that the actress Holly Hunter - who is my age - wore her hair long and wavy down her back. She even braided small sections of it sometimes. All I could think of was - wow, my hair could look like that. Longer hair is heavier so the curl becomes more relaxed. The problem with the whole process, of course, lie in that little problem I have with patience.

Because, after 50 it becomes increasingly difficult to grow your hair that long. Holly has had long hair for years - since before she made "The Piano" in 1993. And who knows? She may be using extensions - AND, she probably also has her own full-time hair dresser. So I knew I needed to be realistic about this. And yet, there are men and women who run their first marathons after the age of 60, and somebody told me a couple of years ago that a friend of hers had finished medical school at 50. So I decided to try.

At first, I continued with the straightening. Then I got tired of it and cut off three inches. Then I started growing it out again and, well, cycled back and forth for a while, losing my resolve and then getting it back, telling myself that women in their 50s don't wear their hair long and then asking myself, well, why not? Finally, I persevered. It is now down to my shoulder blades and I've stopped straightening it.

There are still days when it looks like crap and when I envy my brother Michael who started shaving off his curls years ago, but those days are what scrunchies are for. And there are days when I see attractive women with short curly hair that looks great and I think - ah, there, I could do that. But then I think about how much time I've invested in getting it to this length, and I think, no, no, not just yet. Let's see where this goes. Let's see where this takes me. I should try to be patient.

So, enough writing for now. I need to get my butt into the bathroom and open that box of hair color. Albert would be proud.

An Invitation to Share: Hey, all you women out there - post your favorite hair stories here.

The Physical Life

2009-10-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

Pain gets your attention. Doctors are fond of telling you that if it hurts, something is wrong, and you should not ignore it. Pain is the body's way of telling you something. Of getting your attention.

Well, my body got my attention this week. It told me on Friday that it didn't want me to move much. No walking, no standing. Even sitting was somewhat painful. Going to the bathroom, well, we won't go there. The pain seemed to be emanating from my low, low back, and when I did manage to get up to move from my desk, my waddle resembled the walk of a very pregnant woman, hand on lower back, grimace in place.

Pain pretty much makes you forget everything else in your life. It obliterates all other thoughts. All that remains is how do I get this to stop. Please, just make it stop. Give me something. Give me anything.

Serious pain stops regular, everyday activity in its tracks. At work, I couldn't pick up the magazine I dropped near the secretary's desk as I passed by. "Sorry," I said. "I can't get it - can you pick it up next time you're on this side of your desk?" Yes, I actually said that to her.

I was in so much pain Friday that I was a little afraid to make a Facebook post or even send an email. When you're in pain, there's no telling what you'll say.

It quickly became obvious that leaving work and going home to cry in private was the best option I had, but I was also very hungry at that point, and I knew I wouldn't be able to stand long enough to make lunch for myself. So in the car on the drive home I tried to think of a drive-thru restaurant that would have something I could eat that would keep me on my diet, but you know what? Pain pretty much says screw it when it comes to your diet or your good intentions. Healthy food? Sorry, buddy, but that's just not gonna happen today. Any kind of calories will do. Just eat and sit, ok?

I could write down all the boring details about what I did to myself that got me into this situation, but, really, does it matter? Pain is pain, and who really cares how it started. The point is to MAKE IT GO AWAY. Nothing else is important. Need to pass health care legislation this week? Who cares? Got a nuclear weapon pointed at New York? Ah well.

It's two days later, and I am feeling better. Some ibuprofen and a muscle relaxant, a night of TV with no movement, plus some heat and several jiggers of single-malt whiskey Friday night, and I was feeling up to walking on Saturday, although I didn't venture off the couch very often or very far. By this morning, I could walk well enough to do some grocery shopping, although not without a cart to lean on.

The other thing about pain is that once it subsides, it's kinda hard to remember how bad it was. I think that's why women can go on to have a second baby after the first. Unlike the memories of wonderful or pleasant experiences, the memory of pain fades amazingly well. I remember telling anyone who would listen after my daughter was born that I was NEVER doing that again, and yet today, the memory of how she looked and smelled in the moments after birth are as heady and rich for me today as they were 21 years ago, but the pain I endured to bring her into the world is really just a shadow of a memory. I remember it only because I made such a big deal of it at the time. I remember the memory.

And so it is this morning. I am stiff and my gait is still a little rough, but even as I write this, I have no real memory of the pain that has now subsided, only the way I felt about it at the time (MAKE IT STOP!!). The human brain is an amazing thing.

The Driving Life

2009-10-15T11:09:00.001-07:00

I have always loved cars, even though for most of my adult life I've pretty much not been able to drive the cars I really wanted to drive, mostly due to affordability issues. But I read about cars. I follow the trends. I pay attention and can tell you the difference, for example, between the newest Mustang body style and its predecessor (mostly it's in the grille). And although I admit to being the girliest of girls, I can change a tire and spark plugs, thanks to dear old dad, and I know when a mechanic is trying to upsell me. I know what a solenoid is.

I'm now at middle age and at that time of life when I am suddenly not the only driver in the family. I have a 16-year-old driver and a 21-year-old driver in my household, with all the attendant insurance costs and "can I borrow the car" issues that that entails. A friend of the family has loaned us a 1992 Buick for the older child, and the younger child drives a 1988 Toyota Corolla handed down to him from his father. I drive a 2001 Hyundai Elantra hatchback, or at least I did up until two months ago when, on impulse, I told the 21-year-old she could take my car back to college with her and I would drive the Buick until winter break.

To understand the extent of that sacrifice, you have to know how much I like my car. It has leather upholstery, a sunroof, a great stereo, cruise control, and a rear fold-down seat that transforms it from a sporty sedan to a sporty station-wagon in minutes. I have always loved hatchbacks for this very reason. How do you get a Christmas tree home in a Buick Century sedan? In any event, it is very likely my favorite car ever. Or at least so far. I see an Audi TT convertible in my future.

The older child goes to school and lives in a small college-town in the east, where transportation to even the most common and necessary of places, such as Target or the grocery store, involves walking for miles or hitching a ride with someone, because there is very little mass transit, if any. She also periodically works on student films in a production capacity, so having a car has made her life easier in multiple ways. We didn't think the Buick would make it across the country, and I wasn't particularly looking forward to driving both to and from Connecticut this year. I guess I'm getting old, but cross-country road trips are less fun than they used to be, so a one-way driving trip with a three-hour flight home was exceptionally appealing. Plus, she plans to spend a semester in Europe beginning in early 2010, so I knew she'd only have my car for four months. Thus the switch.

The situation that now confronts us is one of both necessity and desire. I would love to have a new car, and both kids will continue to need reliable transportation (i.e., there is no going back). The younger child is in love with his first car, but having owned several old clunkers myself, I can see the writing on the wall. If this car holds up for even a year, I will be exuberant.

So by next summer, we could find ourselves in the position of needing to buy one, two, or three cars, depending on how things go. The Buick goes back to its owner. The Hyundai either goes back to school with older child in Fall 2010 and I get a new or newer car, or older child buys a used car and I keep the Hyundai chugging along. And younger child may need to buy a newer car. Complicating all this are a variety of issues. Will younger child choose a college that doesn't allow freshmen to drive cars (and, if so, what do we do with the third car)? If older child takes Hyundai back to school, and I buy a car for myself, should it be brand new or slightly used, and should it have cargo space (for taking younger child off to college the following year), or should I indulge my desire to own a convertible? And how much in debt do I or all of us want to be for all of these various transportation needs? How much do we need to save? Should we switch to bicycling?

Most likely, it will be May or June before any of these issues gets resolved, but for me it's the thrill of the hunt. I'm eying new car lots, talking to people who've bought cars recently, walking into showrooms to feel the soft leather upholstery and discuss options (GPS built into the dash? Really?). I'm keeping an eye on everything coming out of Consumer Reports these days, but I'm also thinking seriously of subscribing to Car and Driver. So much fun. So much trouble.

The Dieting Life

2009-10-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

I am nearing the end of my second week following the Weight Watchers' diet. I've done WW a few times before. Each time I left "the program," I did so on the assumption that I could continue to lose weight on my own. I was wrong.

I went back this time because I realized I needed help and that a structured format probably works best for me. A structured format, that is, with some flexibility. I am determined to succeed so in addition to counting all those holy points, I'm journaling on my laptop and, now, blogging as well.

The first week I lost 3.6 pounds. The first week I had no problems sticking to the regimen, weighing my food when necessary, tracking my points using the online tools, drinking the kool-aid, I mean water, and generally being a pretty good little dieter. Second week, I got annoyed and depressed. At first, I realized, it was just hormonal. Then I had some kind of virus that resulted in a sustained headache for days, along with two days of intestinal distress. Diets are hard under the best conditions, but they're almost impossible if you have the least little thing going on in your life that even slightly resembles stress. Worse, they're extremely hard to resume once you've fallen off the wagon.

So I fell off. Too many meals out, too many glasses of wine, and too little exercise, for about four days. Part of that time I also spent helping my former live-in boyfriend relocate to a new apartment. During his move, I relocated the rest of my belongings from the house we had shared, and which he was leaving, to my new house. Breaking up is never harder to do than when you don't really know if you're broken up. Yes, we no longer live together, but, no, we don't know if we are still in a relationship. That's not exactly correct. We're in some kind of relationship. We just don't know what it is or how to describe it. My brothers and son helped me help former LIBF move, which just reinforced everyone's confusion. I can't very well answer their questions about our relationship when I don't know the answers myself.

This is important because it causes the afore-mentioned stress, which affects the dieting efforts. So, in conclusion for today, I took a day of vacation from my job this week to 1) make up for the time I spent moving everybody's stuff this weekend (i.e., to catch up on laundry and grocery shopping), and 2) re-assess and reinvigorate the dieting efforts. After a good breakfast and an on-target lunch, I chopped up some grape tomatoes, which I LOVE, added salt and pepper (the southern way), and ate them along with my afternoon coffee. Yes, I'm weird, but also yes, I am back in the swing. It's Monday. I weigh in on Wednesday. My goal for the week is to simply not gain back anything I lost the first week and to accept that the diet, the no-longer-live-in BF status, and my attitude, are all a work in progress.

Update on Thursday, 10/15/09: Yesterday's weigh-in revealed an additional 2.2 pound loss, for a total of 5.8 pounds. Yay for me.