Author Archives: Ginger

emotion vs. reason

Posted on by
Reply

In my dream this morning, a business-suited high-school teacher was lecturing to the class (mine?). He stated that in the past – and in many cultures today – people fought or even murdered others because there was too much hatred. He then went on to explain that this hatred grew directly out of the directive to love your neighbor and even to love your enemy. It’s hard enough to love your neighbors, much less your enemies, so naturally most people fail. But if they believe they are supposed to love these people but they don’t, then they are faced with a dilemma. Either they have to accept the idea that they are in some way inferior or deficient, or they must turn against the ones they were trying to love and blame these others for the failure. But cognitive dissonance works against finding the fault in oneself. Therefore, people naturally blame others. And if the others are to blame for making a person fail, then it’s natural for that person to hate them and feel he must destroy them, so that he can eventually succeed.

So, the teacher proceeded, it is clear that as long as we have the injunction to love others, we are doomed to have hatred and murder in the world. Clearly, the system of relying on emotion to obtain right behavior is fundamentally flawed and primitive. But here in America we have a better system. We require only that people learn to live with the presence of others. Live and let live. And he wrote on the board, “Love = getting along”. It’s the only reasonable thing to do. We have replaced emotion with reason. If we don’t have to try to love, at least we can avoid outright hatred.

At my side, the student teacher shook her head and whispered that somehow, she was not sure that was right. She couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with it, because it seemed, somehow, so reasonable. But she felt there must be more to love than just toleration.

Somehow, it seemed a fitting dream for Yom Kippur. Asleep or awake, it is a time to examine the roots of our beliefs and to consider whether we are living the lives we ought to be living.

To me, this dream speaks of the cheapening and trivialization of values in our culture. Let’s just schmear over the differences and all learn just to get along. Let’s not make ourselves look or act so different that we are too hard to get along with. Let’s all dress more or less the same (within normal cultural, age, fashion variances), speak the same, do the same kinds of acceptable things. We try our best to tolerate the people on the edges of acceptability, but we know we don’t have to like them (much less love them!) or even have much of anything to do with them. In all fairness, it’s not a bad compromise. Most likely, there will be no krystalnacht in America. We have probably come further in learning to live together than most places in the world. I am not putting it down. I’m glad to be living here.

But let’s not fool ourselves: This is NOT love. This is not what Jesus and Hillel and Gandhi and other men of God were talking about when they urged us to love our neighbors (and even enemies) as ourselves.

God made ocean beaches and the rugged mountains of the Andes. Luminous icebergs and sweltering jungles bejeweled with birds. Rivers of grass and oceans of sand. We can love and appreciate all these things, in their (sometimes deadly) beauty, for just what they are, without wanting to change them. God also made people and cultures and religions in profuse variety. We find it much harder to see the (sometimes deadly) beauty in these, and to love them. But surely, THIS is the task we are called to. Not to change them. Not to bring them to the inoffensive norm. But to revel in our differences. To love one another.

Too much travel

Posted on by
Reply

It started with an odd coincidence of events. I had just finished transcribing into my kitchen calendar Dan’s schedule for the next couple of months, which involves an exceptional amount of business travel (even for him). We were unwinding with a couple of fresh-lime margaritas. And Dan was getting ready to grill the bluefish; we had bought enough for an additional person or two and then decided we’d rather not have company.

“You’ll have leftover bluefish,” he warned me solemnly. “You’ll have to remember to eat it while I’m gone.”

“I can hardly remember anything these days unless I write it down,” I moaned. My common complaint.

“Well, you’d better remember me.”

I love it when he says things like that. “Not likely,” I retorted. “You’re going to be gone too much.”

And the next thing you know, we were off and running. We could see it clearly….

“Hello,” asks the telephone caller, “Is Dan there?”

“Here?” I echo. “No way. He’s never here. Call American Airlines.”

“Hello, American Airlines? I’m looking for a Mr. Daniel Kenney.”

“Daniel Kenney? Yes, he’s booked on several of our flights this week. Just one moment, please, and we’ll connect you.”

Segue to an airplane somewhere over the North American continent. The telephone located in the back of the middle seat of a row in the middle of the plane starts to ring. Dan, in the aisle seat, says to the passenger next to him. “Could you please get that? If it’s my wife, tell her I’m not here. I’ve changed seats with someone at the back of the plane.”

The Incas

Posted on by
Reply

Everyone loves to love The Incas. This includes their descendants and those of their close neighbors, the Quechua peoples. Quechua is one of the two official languages of Peru (along with Spanish). In the highlands, there is a certain look to the people. Quechua blood is strong here. But even our tour guide in Cuzco – gentle, erudite Marco with his necktie and umbrella, Spanish-looking and European educated (with a degree in anthropology) described an event as “good for the Spaniards, but bad for us.” Us. Although Marco and most of the people in Cuzco are of mixed blood (I asked), it’s very clear which side they identify with. I was fiercely glad about this.

Okay. So why do we all prefer the Incas to the Spaniards? On the surface of it, the answer is obvious. The Spaniards were illiterate, intolerant bullies who arrived with their superior weapons and their European diseases to decimate a civilized culture, and thought so little of it that they melted down the brilliant Inca artwork and crafted items in silver and gold for bullion to pay their armies. They enslaved the people. They not only forbade them to practice their religion, but also made them tear down their own temples (rather than which many of the Incas preferred to commit suicide). They obliterated their culture and never even knew what they had destroyed. We value that which has disappeared, especially since the little we know of it has beauty and wisdom.

But on the other hand. The Inca empire was less than a hundred years old when the Spaniards destroyed it. All the evidence indicates that the Incas did to other, earlier civilizations exactly what the Spaniards did to theirs – obliterated religious practices; destroyed whole towns as well as temples, sometimes demolishing them stone from stone; transported entire peoples into slave labor in remote regions. The Incas destroyed a pre-Columbian and relatively advanced civilization in Equador so thoroughly, dismantling entire cities stone from stone and relocating entire populations, that had the events not happened within the living memory of some of the people met by the Spaniards, we would have no record of it at all. Like the Spaniards, the Incas ultimately extended their empire too far and, overextended, helped bring about their own downfall.

I think the main thing one can say about the Incas as opposed to the Spaniards is that they took from the peoples they conquered arts and culture, not just material wealth. They were willing to learn. Much of the art of stone-building at Ollantaytambu and other Inca sites (such as Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman, among others) clearly came from the Tiahuanacu people, whom they conquered. The Incas forceably relocated the Tiahuanacu stonebuilders and others to Ollantaytambu, thereby solving two problems at once. The Tiahuanacu had not wanted to join the Inca empire (as had many other groups), and because they had fought against the Incas, they had to be subdued and punished. The Ollantaytambans had also fought rather than submitting, and since they were close to home, the Incas had to keep them under control. The Incas decided that a significant structure (Incas seemed to combine monument, fortress, and temple into one concept) was needed at Ollantaytambu, and the Tiahuanacu were the people to build it.

Ollantaytambu, Sacsayhuaman, and Machu Picchu were never finished. The Inca empire lasted less than a hundred years and had only four emperors before the Spanish came. Building projects involving thousands of people over fifty years ground to a sudden halt when the smallpox swept down, ahead of the Spaniards, followed shortly by civil war. By the time the Spaniards themselves arrived, it was already over.

The other factor that keeps the Incas so alive in our hearts and spirits is the interplay of light and heaviness. It’s hard to comprehend a culture that had such a love of stone and such a mastery of its workmanship, while at the same time worshipping the sun. Yet only the dominance of both of these factors can explain the magic of the structures we find. Machu Picchu is magnificent – but it is not unique (except in how well preserved and how [relatively] accessible it is). The Incas built on the shoulders of the mountains, where they could mark and celebrate the rising and setting of the sun. Watching the sun set or rise over Machu Picchu shows clearly how inconceivable it is the Incas would have built in the dark river valleys, or on the unsubtle, exposed peaks. At the same time they built of the material of the mountains, fitting and polishing each unique stone, rejoicing in the size and power of the rocks, and working their structures right into and around the natural stone formations.

One more thing. Quechua (and perhaps even specifically Inca) culture is far from vanished in Peru. Our deeply Christian guide at the convent in Arequipa spoke not only of Christ as Love, but also of the power of the earth as manifested in certain root vegetables (long, phallic ones). The condor representing heaven, the puma representing the earth, and the serpent representing the world below the earth are all carved into the stone façade of a church on the main square in Arequipa. One of the chapels of the cathedral in Cuzco, beautifully carved of native wood, has deliciously fertile naked women carved into every armrest of every seat. Tour guides point out these features proudly. We are Catholic, they seem to be saying, but in our own way and on our own terms. The computer geek who copied my camera’s full flash card to CDROM in Cuzco paused to admire a photo of a condor in flight. Condors, we were told more than once, are the guides of the soul from this life to the next. Our guide in the Sacred Valley carried an Inca cross, the three-stepped cross representing the worlds below, on, and above the earth, and the four directions of the Inca roads out of Cuzco, the navel of the world, to all the world’s quarters. (I love this elegant symbol of the entire universe, and now have one of my own, with a jewel representing Cuzco, which means navel in Quechua, in the center.)

I don’t know

Posted on by
Reply

I just don’t know. Why does all this emotional stuff pile up all at once?

I sure do love my family. I would do just about anything for them. One of the hardest things in life to learn is that what I can do for them is precious little. (Interesting phrase, that. Precious little. Maybe so.)

I sure would do a lot more for Margot, if I could. I worry tremendously about her black rages, about how very 2-years-old she is at those times. I fear for her sanity. I think it’s getting worse. Does it have to get worse before it can get better? Will it get better?

Am I just being overemotional? Even though I was not very close to Fred, death has a way of reaching out to people that little else does.

I was stuck in one of the worst traffic jams ever today. Newton Corner was backed up for blocks in all directions. Further backup heading up Galen St; Soldiers Field Road blocked off by police, forcing us through this mess a second time. Tried to avoid it by getting on the Mass Pike inbound, and it was backed up past West Newton because of the exit at Newton Corner, effectively forcing us through the mess a third time. Made Margot late for tennis. Only by 10 minutes, but maybe this was one of the reasons she lost it today the way she did.

I lost my pocketbook today – left it in a shopping cart in the parking lot of the Star Market in Brighton. Waited for Margot at tennis, drove home before I discovered it missing. Given the neighborhood, I figured it was gone forever. But the Star Market had it, and not only it but also the credit cards and drivers license inside, and not only these but also every dollar of cash. A small miracle: an honest person.

An ancient Tamil poem came in email today: Every town our home town.

It puts things in perspective.

Adam’s museum

Posted on by
1

Today, Dan and I went to see the movie “My Architect,” which is about the architect Louis Kahn. The film was made by his (illigitimate) son Nathaniel, who knew his father very little during his life, and twenty-five years after LK died, was trying to understand just who he really was. Despite some quibbles I have with it, the film is overall excellent and very moving. I recommend it.

But that’s not why I’m writing this journal entry.

As part of this project, Nathaniel visited every building that Kahn created. This includes the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been to the Kimbell twice. When the movie first showed sweeping shots of the museum’s beautifully lit, timelessly elegant interior, it all came flooding back to me.

The Kimbell is a gem of a museum, not only because of its architecture and light, but also because it has a small but completely first-rate collection. To quote its Web site: “The Kimbell Art Museum’s holdings range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including masterpieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, Caravaggio, El Greco, La Tour, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Houdon, Goya, David, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.” One or two of just about everything that any museum would give its eyeteeth to have. All displayed in perfect light, in uncrowded harmony.

The first time I visited the Kimbell, Adam was just two years old. Dan had gone off to live in Texas for several months to help in the start-up of his firm‘s then-new Dallas office, returning home only on (most) weekends. But this particular week, I had a conference to go to in Dallas myself, so I took Adam and went to live with Dan at his apartment on Turtle Creek. On this particular day we didn’t have to work, so we went to the museum.

I remember carrying two-year-old Adam through the galleries, and stopping to look at the pictures and sculptures. At each one, Adam wanted me to tell him its story. Not who painted it and when, but who is that woman in the picture, and where is she, and why is she there, and why is that man looking at her in that funny way, and what’s going to happen, and…

And so we stopped at various pictures and sculptures, and at each one I invented a story for Adam that would be as long as it needed to be so that I could really look at the object and that would incorporate elements that might draw his attention too to some of the significant aspects of the object. And so we spent a pleasant afternoon at our own pace, my two-year-old son and I, going through the Kimbell Art Museum.

Today, twenty-one-year-old Adam is working on a capstone project at Brown University. It is a hypertext Web site in which a group of people meet and go through a museum. They stop and look at various objects. The reader can click on the highlighted objects if he wishes, and can then read a story associated with the object.

Now I have to ask you: Do you think this could possibly be a coincidence?

Being where you are when you’re being there

Posted on by
Reply

The protagonist of many of my early fiction stories, a young man named Roderin, had the ability to Shift from one reality to another. I grew up wishing I had this talent. At heart, I didn’t want to have to inhabit the reality I was in – a characteristic that perhaps many readers (and writers) of fantasy stories share.

In the world of my bickering parents, I learned early and learned well how to get by while actually being there as little as possible. I read. When I ran out of horse stories in my branch library, I fled to the stars. When I ran out of astronomy books, I turned to fantasy and science fiction. I was light years away all the time. Alternative universes were even better.

My personal reality is a lot better now, and I don’t mind inhabiting it. Most of the time. But I can still walk down a path on a beautiful Florida campus, surrounded by grass and flowers, water vistas and gracious white buildings shining in the warm February sunshine, and feel within myself the potential to be someplace else.

Or at least, not to be here.

Not completely.

If I were Roderin, all it would take would be a focused act of will and an acceptance of a small wave of nausea that passes quickly enough. There’s always a price, after all. It’s not too bad as long as the price is not too steep.

But that’s the catch, isn’t it? For the possibility of what existence in what world in all of the heavens would I be willing to give up this world’s long-legged daughter for whose sake I am walking this campus path?

I guess I’m going to stay right here.

Sometimes I just hate social workers

Posted on by
Reply

Wow. Is this subject line going to get me into trouble with someone. But it’s true. My experience of social workers has been of petty bureaucrats who just revel in the (ab)use of their petty power, especially when the people over whom they exercise this power are most emotionally vulnerable, which, regrettably, often they are. Apologies to all the kind, people-oriented sensitive social workers who I’m sure must exist somewhere out there.

The first adoption agency Dan and I went to specialized in international adoptions from Korea. We would have loved to have our second child be a child of the world – different from us. Because we felt that the world is a small place and growing smaller, and to feel the love of a parent for a child so genetically different would be a privilege and a joy. Regrettably, when we began the home study (a humiliating process in which a, yes, social worker determines whether you are fit to be a parent – unlike the process by which any rape or one-night stand can result in an un-studied parenthood), I stupidly mentioned that in addition to trying to adopt, we were still also trying to conceive a child, though without much hope. The logic was clear and not at all ugly. We wanted a second child. Adoption is not the world’s most pleasant process (diplomatically expressed understatement here). So if by some miracle conception actually occurred, we’d go with that instead. If not, well, on with adopting. The social worker immediately concluded that we hadn’t sufficiently grieved for the child we were unable to conceive. This was so far from how we felt that it astonished us, but there was no arguing with her. She put the home study on hold and required us to see a “grieving counselor”.

The grieving counselor told us that many couples adopting their second child after giving birth to their first do not go through a grieving process, the way those who are unable to conceive initially often do. She also said that the social worker, who had recently adopted a child after being unable to conceive, had gone through considerable grieving and might have thought it applied to everybody. She (the grieving counselor) feared that our chances of a successful home study with this agency were ruined because of the social worker’s view of us. She advised us to see an adoption-agency expert regarding what we should do.

The adoption-agency expert confirmed that our chances with this agency were ruined because of this social worker, and she pointed us toward another agency.

Eventually, through a fairy-tale story not relevant here, we successfully adopted Margot, our much-loved, difficult, beautiful, inventive, smart, contrary daughter.

Now we want to find Margot’s birth mother. We are working with a thoughtful and sensitive counselor in this process, but the search has naturally led us to the adoption agency that Margot came through. And its current social worker.

I will quote in full my report to our counselor (from today), leaving out only the actual names of the agency and its staff. Perhaps other adoptive parents have had better results with these people.

—————
“I called [X Agency] again. This time I got a different person – one M. She was much nicer to deal with than the other person I talked with before (N), who never called me back. Unfortunately, it appears that N is the boss/social worker and M is only the assistant. So in dealing with them, I still would have to deal with N. However, as N was not in the office, M looked up the file for me while I waited on hold. (N could have done this easily, and probably did as she had also put me on hold. But she had been unwilling to tell me anything, saying that she wanted more time to look up the file. I’m pretty sure she must have been lying to me, but I don’t understand why.)

“There was nothing there from any of the birth family. (That is, the file did not exist, and it would have been created had any communication been left for us from any of them in the last 10-12 years.)

“I left another message for N asking her to call me back regarding what they would see as next steps in trying to contact the birth mother. However, once again, N has not called me back. I am thinking that I neither want to nor need to deal with this agency any more.”

—————————
We will find Margot’s birth family. Fortunately, we don’t need this agency and are not at N’s mercy.

But someone maybe ought to remind me what social workers are good for exactly, if anyone has any concept of it. Because I don’t.

Authors

Posted on by
Reply

Here are the rules: Take a list of ten authors, remove any that aren’t on your shelf, and add enough that are (preferably ones you like) until you have ten again. Mainly, this is a “see who lasts the longest” game.

Ursula Le Guin
China Mieville
John Barth
Rainer Maria Rilke
Homer
Nikos Kazantzakis
William Shakespeare
Marcel Proust
Doris Lessing
Toni Morrison

Pass along.

The house in Truro

Posted on by
2

Once, when Dan and I were younger, we built a house in Truro.

This wasn’t just any house. Through various fortunes and misfortunes, we had come into a little bit of money, and we decided to build a vacation home on Cape Cod. Our dream was to be on the ocean. We narrowed our search for a suitable piece of land to the towns of Truro and Wellfleet. It didn’t take too much looking to discover that most of the land on the market was either priced well beyond our means or was unappealing in one way or another.

But there was this one lot. Located in a subdivision high on a bluff overlooking Cape Cod Bay, this one oceanfront lot had not sold rapidly as had the other oceanfront lots in the subdivision. The problem was the hill. It was bad enough that the lots were high on a bluff – 110 stairs down to the beach, 110 stairs back up again, every time. But this lot also had a hill on top the bluff, which blocked the ocean view from the natural building site on the lot. Who wanted that? The price was discounted accordingly.

We studied the lot and studied the lot, and Dan thought he could see how to build the house into the hill on top of the bluff. We bought the land.

We designed the house ourselves. We were young enough that the days still lasted a long time, and we could fit a lot of activity into them. Into the nights we drew working drawings on drawing boards on top of our desks. Dan marked up a set of construction specifications – red pencil everywhere – and I typed them on my Osborne computer.

We grew the house and our son Adam at the same time. I have photos of myself silhouetted first against the framing, then against the openings where windows and doors would go, and finally against the installed doors, increasingly pregnant as the house went up.

Of course the construction was late. Fortunately, so was Adam. Expecting tenants the next day, we moved the furniture in on my due date. The contractor was still laying the hardwood floors in the living room, still building the front porch stairs. My father, who helped us move, advised that we find good motel accommodations for the tenants. Dan and I set things up all night long, and the next day, our arriving tenants agreed to come back later in the afternoon as we finished work.

I never considered the danger of going into labor at any moment. (By gosh, this WAS labor!) I naturally assumed, this being a first pregnancy, that I would have hours and hours of labor in which we could safely get back to Boston, if labor were to start while we were on the Cape. Two weeks later, Adam made his appearance after only two and a half hours of labor. As nearly as I can tell, if he’d decided to get finished at the same time as the house that he grew with, he would have been born somewhere on the Southeast Expressway.

What a feat of design! The driveway climbed the back side of the hill to an entryway that appeared at ground level, but was actually on the landing between the main living level and the master bedroom level. Enter the house, and from the landing you looked down into the cathedral-ceilinged living room, down into the rounded window corner and through the windows, and down into the blue ocean over a hundred feet below.

A deck spread out along the living room, where we could watch the sun set over Provincetown.

On the lowest level were three more bedrooms that walked out onto a patio along the base of the hill. The house was beautiful. The site was stunning.

We should have been happy – but we weren’t. There were problems. The subdivision had annoying covenants. For example, you couldn’t hang your wet towels over the deck railing to dry; it was considered unsightly. To the east side of the house, ugly houses in the subdivision popped up from the moors like giant prairie dogs frozen in their holes. There was no escaping looking at them.

Also, it was perennially windy on top of the bluff; the wind whipped sand up the side of the bluff with such force that it penetrated our closed windows and storm windows and piled up in the corners of the windows inside the house. One night we had guests and cooked chicken on the grill on the deck, keeping the grill almost vertical against the wind to keep it from blowing away. “Gale-force chicken.”

Worst of all, the beach access path and stairs for the entire subdivision went along the side of our property. Not just our neighbors but all kinds of strangers made use of this access – at all hours of the day and night and often quite loudly.

We decided that we could do better.

Real estate values on the Cape had been going up considerably, and we could more than double our investment by selling the house. We would then have money to buy something else someplace else and do something better. Somehow, the decision was made. Maybe it had something to do with the time that teenagers from heaven-knows-where drove their vehicles loudly around and around the house of our neighbor on the other side of the walkway at three in the morning. It was kind of scary. We weren’t comfortable.

The house sold quickly.

But meanwhile, the value of everything else had gone up as well. We had thought we’d find some other creative opportunity to build value, but we couldn’t. We lost a bidding war well over the asking price for a lot surrounded by Cape Cod National Seashore, where only a small house could be built on the existing footprint of a ruined cabin. We searched in Nantucket, where lots with only distant ocean views at best sold for more money than seemed possible. Nothing we found could replace what we had given up.

We grieved.

We blamed each other.

We had never imagined that the loss of the house in Truro would hurt us so much.

After four years, Truro still hurt deeply. The house on Block Island was a gift that grew from the pain of that loss. Because of that pain we were willing to overextend ourselves on the land on Block Island, paying for the land alone an amount that had been our budget for the whole project, house and land both. We needed to do it to become whole again.

When I think about meeting with Margot’s birthmot…

Posted on by
Reply

When I think about meeting with Margot’s birthmother Peggy, I picture the last meeting we had with her… 16-1/2 years ago. The motel room, dark because the curtains were drawn. She was so young, only slightly older than Margot is now. Her parents were with her. They were good people, and very supportive. She had a close family.

I have to remind myself again and again that a meeting now won’t be the same. Peggy is almost twice as old now as she was then. She’s a grown woman. She probably has a husband, a family. She’s had so many more experiences. And, almost certainly, her mother and father won’t play the same role with the same importance for her now as they did then.

On the positive side, I believe she’ll want to see Margot, and that she will love her. I believe that it will be very good for Margot to know the real human being that is her birthmother, rather than mythologizing her. I believe that it will be very good for Margot to have the support network of a family of people that are physically and in other ways like her, that she won’t have to work so hard any more to make herself different from us. Because I believe she’ll find a family that isn’t all that different from either her or us.

I worry that Peggy will see Margot’s faults – her lack of manners at times, the chip that appears at times on her shoulder – and blame us. Why do I think she would *blame* the parents for normal teenage behavior? Do I blame myself? Well, yes, sometimes I think I could have done/ could do better with her.

I guess I have the normal adoptive parent fear fantasy that Margot might feel so much that she belongs with her birth family that she will drift away from us. That we will lose her to them. Part of me knows this won’t happen, that I have been a good parent to Margot, that beneath the teenage stuff, she loves me. But part of me is crying as I write this paragraph, so I know that somewhere inside this fear is only too real.

Anyway, afraid or not, I do think this is the right move for Margot, and that she won’t feel whole inside herself until she reaches a resolution with this. And I want this for her. The birthmother myth cripples her because she clings to the fantasy. But having a real flesh-and-blood birthmother could be a wonderful support for her in learning to engage reality. However it turns out.