Sticky tape and good intentions (circa 2013)

There is a fort under my kitchen table and a 79-year old woman wearing a surgical mask in my guest room.  Mum is undergoing chemo and running a slight fever, my daughter M is in the 1^st grade and sporting a nasty cough. 

Dinner tonight will entail preparing three different meals: hot dogs and snap peas for M, chicken soup for Mum and frozen salmon burgers and steamed veggies for me. 

Welcome to the sandwich generation, where absurdities and inefficiencies abound. Where we are all of us just doing the best we can: awkwardly, with anxiety and the very best of intentions.

An open letter from Newton, MA to Newtown, CT: December 2012

Newton, Massachusetts is not Newtown, Connecticut.  But it could be, easily.  It’s another tree-lined New England community that families choose because of the schools.

Dear Newtown, CT: 

You drew the short straw. We all know it, and that’s the true horror of December 14^th:  it could have happened anywhere.  In any of the other safest places on earth too numerous to name. We are gutted, as a nation, united in our collective grief with a uniformity of soul-sickness and outrage lobbyists dream of tapping into.  We want to know how it happened, seek unfindable, insufficient explanations and yet the how is secondary to the crushing reality of what happened.  Because ultimately there isn’t a way to explain the unimaginable.  Words fail us because the loss, the betrayal of what should be, shakes the foundation of our belief in humanity, in goodness, and in our sense of rightness in this world.

Image credit: Newsweek.com

My daughter is 6. When I hug her, I am hugging her for 20 families denied that simple, precious pleasure. When she laughs, I am struggling not to cry.  We are, as a nation of families, a nation of parents and sisters and brothers, cast adrift by this event, stunned and shaking with grief. And yet, my loss, the loss of those who learned about this as something that happened elsewhere, is nothing, is utterly vicarious to the loss of 20 -- TWENTY -- Newtown families (that’s right, you need all of your fingers and toes to account for the number of households) whose lives have been shattered, hearts have been ripped from their chests.

May no other community ever have to walk the road you are now on. We stand with you and by you and for you, wishing desperately that there was something useful we could actually do, some burden we should shoulder for you, some way to undo the brutal reality of your lives.

Love,

Newton, MA

Floating Lives

The atmosphere in the windowless meeting hall is rife with anxiety.  At the head of the room, seated in a panel, are the 24 members of the New England Fishery Management Council.  Facing them is another body:  the body public, arranged in a series of disorderly rows.  Between them a microphone stands like a spear thrust in the ground.  The Council is proposing a series of sweeping emergency measures designed to curb the continuing decline of New England’s groundfish stocks, a discussion punctuated by periodic hoots of dismay from the ranks of fishermen before them.  Two dozen people sit in a great horseshoe to defend and protect a fish’s right to life; who will speak for the fishermen?

It is 7:00 on a Wednesday night.  These men and women have been seated here since 8:30 this morning, sacrificing a day of work, awaiting details of proposals which may, within a matter of weeks, radically alter and perhaps even eliminate their livelihoods altogether.  They are angry, they are frustrated, they are voicing their concerns to a constituency which is not mandated to take them into consideration.  One microphone to translate what it would mean to lose a centuries-old way of life, one avenue to weigh the gravity of a loss of biological diversity against a loss of cultural diversity.  Unsurprisingly, this single capillary of communication is insufficient for the task.  Who has the vocabulary, be it English, Portuguese or Italian, to explain what it would mean to lose everything you have and everything you understand—not to some whimsy of fate, but because forces, including your own resourcefulness over the years, are conspiring to take it away from you?

There is hostility in the ranks at the far end of the hall, but there is also resignation.  Multiple generations have gathered to face the latest music.  In some huddles a sense of family reunion nearly transcends the day at hand.  Yet much of the pervading mood against the back wall never makes it to the mike.  “Aren’t people as important as fish?” is a query which should not be rhetorical, but is.  Eyes are wide with fear and uncertainty, jaws are clenched, laughter is sour and hollow.  “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” one man bellows in disgust.  A young woman approaches the mike, a college student, and testifies to the psychological impact of the fishery decline upon her family.  The economics of self-esteem.  “They don’t care about us,” one woman whispers to another.  Yet contrary to the popular press, this bitterness does not necessarily equate with uncooperative behavior.  More than one loud industry voice to take the floor today has called for the complete closure of the fishing grounds, maintaining that this is where things are headed; why prolong the agony?

Fishermen know that their knowledge, stemming from experience, is valuable—equally important to that of the scientific community.  “Raise your hand, go up there and tell them it’s absolutely asinine,” one urges another, “do they have any clue what’s going one?”  Why the silence?  Why does neither one of them share his commentary with the rest of the room?

Fishermen are not a vocal lot.  Hemingway found romance in this and fishermen’s wives organizations have toiled to galvanize the industry’s position by speaking in the void left by those who spend their lives on the water rather than in stuffy conference rooms.  These men and women will stand firm in the face of whatever bad news the Council serves up at the end of the day.  They will take it hard, but take it they will.  Pitchers of drinking water are spread out along the bar, sparking one fisherman to comment as he fills his glass, “They should have beer here, for God’s sake.  To calm our nerves.”  His smile reminds that you’ve not lost everything until you lose your sense of humor.

If the industry perspective on the crisis can be characterized as one of stubborn denial, it must be acknowledged that inherent in this stance is the shining thread of resilience, the courage to weather the storm.  In the words of George Putz,

People who have not done it cannot conceive of the hassles involved in commercial fishing, and people who are involved have a 10,000 year-old right to exercise contempt for the terrestrially comfortable.

Gnarled fingers, weathered faces and salt-stained boots cluster together here against the back wall, sizing up the clouds gathering at the other end of the hall.  Here at the back is age, experience, outrage, humor, hope, guts, a wealth of information, a stronghold of opinion, and a cross-section of humanity unparalleled in its dinosaur refusal to change with the times.  They snicker and shake their heads, they leave the room when cynicism loses its cathartic appeal.  But they always return, just as they have to the sea and her bounty for centuries.  The instinct—which fisheries management has yet to consider other than a liability—is to remain afloat.

~Originally published October 2000

Making sense of some tough stuff -- with a little help from Beauty & the Beast

“Mummie, are bad guys real?”

It’s the sort of question you don’t want to answer as a parent.  Up there with am I going to die someday and does Santa really exist.  You want to be honest, but you don’t want to terrify or disillusion.  My daughter, 5, watches enough Disney to know about villains but she also recently learned the terms fiction and nonfiction.  And she wants help differentiating between them.

I tell her they are real, but, hedging, say there aren’t any around here.  I regret the caveat immediately. We live in a safe zip code but I shouldn’t whitewash. Turns out she doesn’t believe me anyway, because it’s not much later that she begins asking me, at bedtime, whether I’ve locked the front door.  It becomes enough of a ritual that I allow her to do it herself, to eliminate the question from her mind, empower her and, hopefully, allay her fears.

So what about villains?  What’s the RDA of evil for kindergarteners? I took my daughter to see Beauty and the Beast in 3D recently.  It’s a hackneyed story, but I like its Technicolor shades of gray.  The Beast is a Beast but also a Prince.  Gaston is a catch but also a big old jerk.  And while we certainly should take all things Disney with a grain of salt, there are archetypal bones in its storytelling. Good vs. evil is a very human framework for understanding the world around us.  And it starts being applied very young.  The challenge for parents is to help tease out that not everything falls into one camp or the other. There are some things, some people, who fall into both.

Which brings me to the 3D experience we’re having at school just now.  A beloved teacher, with a perfectly clean 12-year record, has been arrested on child pornography charges.  We struggle with the impossible question: how could someone perform so well in one role, while simultaneously, truthfully, being so absolutely wrong for that role?  He was a terrific teacher.  And quite the criminal.  He seemed a Prince, but was truly, at his core, a Beast. The story is meant to move in the other direction – what seems bad should turn out to be good.  It’s why, though I allow Disney in my house, I do not allow the TV news. Am I over-sanitizing? Is this the emotional equivalent of too much Purel? Turns out it’s not effective anyway, evil can come in like fog under the door.  Loss of innocence, no matter how incremental, is a one-way street.

So far, my attempts to explain and answer my daughter’s questions have felt half-assed and imperfect.  She has heard certain (sordid) truths from classmates and more general, sanitized explanations from her teachers. She’s afraid to tell me what she knows; it’s embarrassing. “He took pictures of naked people!” she finally whispers, after much cajoling, then buries her head under her pillow. I wish it were only embarrassing.  I tell her he broke the law by taking those pictures, he can never be a teacher again, he will never hurt anyone else. School will go on just as before and yes, you are safe there.  But I can’t promise that. I’d give my life to have it so, but I can’t offer her a guarantee. A fact that will always frighten me more than her.

So yes, Sweetpea, bad guys are real. They come in all shapes and sizes and you can’t tell what they are just by looking at them. So we lock our doors and don’t talk to strangers and speak up when we feel frightened or unsafe or threatened. But know there are a hell of a lot more good guys than bad guys.  This is when I’m glad she identifies more with superheroes than princesses. So I invoke Firestar and Batman and Anakin Skywalker.  And maybe it’s time for a little more Marvel Comics and George Lucas in our lives.