The East Quabbin Land Trust

                                               The East Quabbin Land Trust                 

We recently moved to Hardwick, MA, a town which is in the very center of the state.  Hardwick is not well known and never was, but it was once a beautiful dairy town full of hills and waterways, more cows than people back as late as the 1980s. 

Dairy farms have fast disappeared since, unfortunately, but the land is still prized out here, and the East Quabbin Land Trust was formed to preserve donated land across several towns in the area.  The goal of the land trust is to maintain areas where wildlife can flourish, but also to guard recreational areas for hikers, canoeists, bikers and walkers.Volunteers help to create and upkeep trails, clear invasive plants like the Oriental Bittersweet, build kestrel and bluebird boxes and harvest seeds to create more flowers for the Pollinator Pathway.  

Especially during this year of Covid 19, outdoor activities for children and adults have had enormous appeal.  The land trust organized a salvage arts program installed on fences on the MA Central Rail Trail.  The bottom photo is an example of the art, which keeps the trail walkers busy, banging out percussion on xylophones made of old metal and wind chimes made of nuts and bolts. There have been virtual runs for children, story times in the woods, and nature art programs such as rock painting.

The East Quabbin Land Trust broadcasts upcoming activities, such as workdays, group hikes and pizza parties for volunteers on their Facebook page.  Check them out!

Human rights violations in the Middle East and my novel, Taking Cover

My novel, Taking Cover, is partly the story of an American woman who goes to Kuwait to work.  She is distressed by the human rights violations experienced there by foreign workers from poorer countries  and she tries to find ways to help that get her into trouble.  The article below appeared at the end of last month (April 29, 2018) in The Jakarta Post.  While I addressed the issue with fiction,  it is a very real dilemma for poor foreigners who work to send money home to their families. 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday said the temporary ban on Filipinos going to work in Kuwait is now permanent, intensifying a diplomatic standoff over the treatment of migrant workers in the Gulf nation.

Duterte in February imposed a prohibition on workers heading to Kuwait following the murder of a Filipina maid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in the Gulf state.

The crisis deepened after Kuwaiti authorities last week ordered Manila's envoy to leave the country over videos of Philippine embassy staff helping workers in Kuwait flee allegedly abusive employers.

The two nations had been negotiating a labour deal that Philippine officials said could result in the lifting of the ban but the recent escalation in tensions has put an agreement in doubt.

"The ban stays permanently. There will be no more recruitment for especially domestic helpers. No more," Duterte told reporters in his hometown in the southern city of Davao. 

Around 262,000 Filipinos work in Kuwait, nearly 60 percent of them domestic workers, according to the Philippines' foreign department. 

Last week the Philippines apologised over the rescue videos but Kuwaiti officials announced they were expelling Manila's ambassador and recalling their own envoy from the Southeast Asian nation.

Duterte on Sunday described the situation in Kuwait as a "calamity". 

This is your brain on sex

Writing help you to better understand what you really think.Yesterday I was listening to the radio show On Being and thinking about Taking Cover, the novel I wrote about Kuwait.

 Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program.  Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love.  Fisher also does studies for Match.com.

  The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs.  Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey.  Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate.  This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner.  It  would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.

Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti.  She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules,  and parents who have no religious background.  Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do.  Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there.  She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society.  She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.

Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage.  She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad.  Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap.  Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.

Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants.  Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes.  They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility.  She said the young look for a  partnership of  transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness.  They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing.  They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead,  take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.

The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations.  As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races. 

This is your brain on sex

Writing help you to better understand what you really think.Yesterday I was listening to the radio show On Being and thinking about Taking Cover, the novel I wrote about Kuwait.

 Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program.  Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love.  Fisher also does studies for Match.com.

  The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs.  Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey.  Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate.  This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner.  It  would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.

Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti.  She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules,  and parents who have no religious background.  Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do.  Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there.  She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society.  She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.

Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage.  She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad.  Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap.  Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.

Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants.  Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes.  They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility.  She said the young look for a  partnership of  transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness.  They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing.  They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead,  take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.

The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations.  As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races.

On Being a Foreigner--The Subject of My Novels

In the last month, I've finished publishing two novels on Amazon, a feat that has been ten years in the making.  Both novels look at the experience of being the stranger, either to oneself or in a different country.

I spent two years teaching in Kuwait, and all I wrote at the time was a blog.  A novel about it seemed too close to my experience.  Most of the day I worked, and the rest of the time I drank coffee with my friends or we trudged around the city on foot for hours.  There wasn't a lot else to do there.

A few years later, after returning home from a stint in Turkey, I wanted to write a novel but I hadn't found my subject. I decided to join a writing class taught by Laurel King at the Worcester Art Museum in which we participated in a nation-wide writing contest. The requirement for National Novel Writing Month was to produce 50,000 words in the month of November.  The result of producing so much in a short time pushed me into writing about Kuwait.  The book I wrote was too disjointed as I tried to create characters back in the states who intersected with my two American women living in Kuwait City.  It didn't work, so I put the book aside. Finally  I decided I needed to  leave it all in the one setting, the Middle East.

The novel is about a mother and daughter who live in Kuwait during the daughter's senior year of high school.  Since the girl has been out of control at  home in the states, Kathryn, her mother, decides the strict mores of the Muslim country will be a cure.  Instead of keeping Taylor out of trouble, however, the daughter cross boundaries in a culture that maintains strict ones.  Her mother manages to create trouble as well.

The second novel, Falling from the Ladder, is about a private school director on Cape Cod who justifiably expels ten students at once for bullying or using drugs.  Since the students' parents are very powerful and wealthy people, they demand the firing of the director even as their kids stay in school. The gutless board bows to the parents and the director is on the street, suddenly without identity, a foreigner to himself.

I find the theme of being the stranger has not disappeared in a new novel I'm writing.  It's about a female border patrol agent who feels like a stranger and intruder in a world of ex-Army men and very few  women. The main character lives right on the Mexican border in Nogales, AZ with a foot in both countries.  Despite the fact that her job is to hunt down illegals and send them out of the country, she believes in open borders.  Border Patrol Babe is a work in progress.

I hope you'll follow along as I write about writing on this blog.  I particularly enjoy comparing novel writing to cartooning, another interest of mine.  Oh, and if you have a novel sitting in your desk drawer, get it out and publish it.  You'll be surprised at how satisfying it feels.

Under Cover Fish Comics: NEW ONLINE COMICS SITE! Launching Monday!

Under Cover Fish Comics: NEW ONLINE COMICS SITE! Launching Monday!

A 19th Century Life

It's amazing how much time you can waste when you are not working.  I've reverted to the ease  I remember from staffing the printer's house at Old Sturbridge Village where we cooked over a fireplace all morning, and then sat around sewing in the parlors in the afternoons. I'm not doing summer school because of my hip, and there are few concrete goals at the moment. It's amazing to watch myself ride in and out of the tide like a bunch of flotsam, never really going anywhere until I'm beached.  Granted, my life is pretty limited at the moment, so what could I achieve, really?

Here are the details of my 19th century life. I just made coffee at noon, decided it was too hot to drink it, so I put it in the fridge, and then I grabbed fruit salad to eat in front of Julia Child.  She seemed to be cooking a moose carcass. In the middle of the fruit, I heard a light rain on the sunroof, so I crutched out to the clothesline to grab my sheets, then I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out where to put damp sheets to dry in the house.  One sheet mingles in the room with the catbox, and I was worried that might take the freshness out of my clean laundry.

Marcia's cat, by the way, has an odd relationship with her catbox.  She will stay outside for hours, then beg to come in so she can crap in her box.  Yes, it's good of her to use the appropriate facilities, but still...the great outdoors is an excellent port-a-potty, especially out back where the daisies are growing.

My grandniece, Melissa, Ollie the dog, and my great-grand niece, Paige, and my niece, Cheri, showed up yesterday for a visit, a sort of Little Women kind of event.  One of the pleasures of being at my sister's house is being in the same area as my family. Paige is 6 months and I've only seen her a couple of times because she lives in New Jersey.  She's this delicious chunk of a girl--what is this human inclination to suck on those cheeks or toes, or tenderly put your teeth around a plump little arm?  Not that you would--or you'd wait until others leave the room--but it's a primal instinct, one I remember well.  No worries--I never ate my kids. Paige is an extraordinary little girl, the queen of our affections when she pays a visit.  While I often develop a strong connection with my students, there's no comparison to blood, that riveting attention you give to a new baby in the family.  It reduces females, in particular, to their lowest IQ point, because yesterday we all sat around with gaping mouths, discussing the intense blue of Paige's eyes (her dad's), her determination (her mom's), and every tiny detail about this child that could make conversational fodder.

The other time waster these days is trying to think about what I want to do with the rest of my life.  I have no adventures planned this time around, maybe because even the most outlandish places to live become marked by our own habits pretty quickly and, therefore, become like our regular life at home where we hang on to a particular coffee cup or way of waking up and thinking about negative things.  I start to think that, as one meditation teacher once put it, the real adventures happen inside.  I bought a book called "Unlearning Meditation", recommended by a couple of friends.  My next big adventure could be a return to studying my own mind and how it gets me into trouble.

Blueberry Sunday

I was out early picking blueberries this a.m., yelling at the birds who were gobbling down the bigger berries in the next bush.  I should have gone straight to that bush, but I have a thing about order, starting at one point and moving along systematically to complete a good picking.  I was raised on a farm where you didn't abandon a row until it was finished.  My yelling did nothing to scare off the robin who was filling her gullet nearby.  It was still cool when I was out there around 8 a.m. after brewing some Armeno's coffee with its "bright tones" and, indeed, this coffee is superb.  Worth $13 a pound?  Yes.

Yesterday we went to the Wayside Inn, which is, incredibly enough, still located in a rather undeveloped and forested section of the town of Sudbury, despite proximity to Boston.  It's a little bit of Sturbridge Village, but no fees.  There was a wedding in the tiny white chapel on the hill, and we watched from the millpond area where I happily sat in shorts, cooling off on a large, cold rock. Just listening to the waterwheel spinning around was a relief.  A Hispanic family posed their 16 year old in front of the mill.  She wore a long, full, purple dress full of glitter and a purple crown to match; perhaps she'd just won a beauty conterst.

  We are having another heatwave, and riding around in my car with the AC was one solution. Today is even hotter, but there's a nasty blue/black cloud to the south, streaking lightning, that gives me hope of a storm. I envy all those folks at the beach, but did you hear the news report about how the water levels on the East Coast are rising at a much higher rate than expected due to glacial melting?  Scary stuff; Manhattan is going to drown.  Time to head for the Dakotas.

I've been reading "Wild", about a young woman who has done too much heroin and too many men.  She decides to walk the Pacific Coast Trail, although she never trains for it, packs twice as much stuff as she can carry, and ends up hitting the Sierras after a tremendous winter of snowfall.  It's a good book and it carries me away, remembering the Camino in Spain.  I trained a little more than she did, but once your feet start to bleed and blister, it doesn't matter a whole lot. I recommend the book, even if Oprah was partially responsible for me deciding to get it.  I am so sick of Oprah, not that she's on, and I'm even more tired of Gayle King. Gayle acts all chummy during interviews and makes jokes that cross the line. At least Oprah has done a lot for books, despite some of her battered women kinds of picks.

 

I wanna have fun...not gonna happen

I'm trying to stay positive, but with another heat wave bearing down this weekend, I'm not happy.  I can't go to the beach or sit in a chair any lower than a throne for Queen Elizabeth--it's the hip popping problem, as I explained in earlier entry.  I see some old friends are all on a Blue Cruise together off the coast of Turkey and I'm knashing my teeth, mad that the hip problems that began there well over two years ago and have plagued me ever since, are now culminating in this summer of blahness as my ligaments heal around a piece of titanium.  My friend Tanya is in India and she was just bathed in milk at a yoga retreat center. Mary is in Istanbul, no doubt with a cute guy.  Janice just came home from the Cape,  Karen is  off to the beach all week, and Linda back from her Alaskan cruise. I've got to stay off Facebook so I don't incinerate in jealousy and the hot sun blaring down on Central MA.

Meanwhile, it's the Northboro scene.  I've been pawing through circulars trying to find a lawn chair I can use outside that's nice and high.  There is no such thing.  I've become the Queen of Geriatrics, surveying all seats as potential disaster.  The fourth of July heralds all these sales for people buying kayaks for the lake or the beach, people with plans and large storage containers strapped on the tops of their cars scurrying off to enjoy the cheaper gas.  I'm not one of those people!  I'm a grouchy bitch!

I need a big subject to occupy my mind, my usual method of escape.  I was thinking about finding a history of the Lyman School in Westboro, where my dad worked for several years before heading to the book bindery.  He was in charge of the cattle, and teaching the "boys" (who ranged from homeless, abandoned kids to psychopathic killers) how to milk and care for a herd.  I remember him saying that he couldn't turn his back on the kids because they could kill him, as they killed the night watchmen one evening.  I wish I knew more about that era, the days when the virtues of hard work were supposed to cure young boys and adolescents.  Shirley--an institution in Shirley, MA--was where young girls were sent, and our mothers sometimes mentioned that we might like to go and live there.

Berberian's Market Garden

Yesterday I ventured off to Berberian's, which is a farmstand to beat all farmstands here in Northboro.  Except for lettuce, of which there were endless field rows of a vast variety, including oakleaf, Boston, and buttercrunch, the summer vegetables are not quite in.  A signed predicted corn for the weekend.  The Berberian family, of which my old friend Patsy is a family member, always led the way in our neighborhood of market gardens.  This Armenian family fled to the U.S. during their persecution by the Turks, from what I always understood, and they somehow became masters of agriculture in what was then a small Massachusetts town.

Toward the end of his life, Dad even rented out his fertile eight acres to them, as did the Weed family next door.  Although Dad had always raised and sold vegetables at our shabby stand, which consisted of a  table peeling paint and a rickety kitchen chair, he couldn't continue at the end of his life when he'd had stroke after stroke.  The Berberians figured out how to put in an irrigation system from Farr's pond, which was something we'd never figured out to try in our market garden neighborhood.

The large Berberian stand sits behind their old homestead and it employs a lot of young people, who cut the greens off the beets in the backroom, or who man the scales at the checkout.  I was selecting brussel sprouts, my feet and crutches feeling insecure on the wet cement floor, when a woman asked me how to cook them.  Well, the best way, I told her, is to roast them in a little olive oil.  I am surprised when people fear vegetables.  We ate heaping bowls of them fresh from the garden all summer when I was a kid, sweat pouring down our faces and backs. We consumed massive bowls of fresh asparagus, picked only a few hours prior to dinner, and all the sweet corn that couldn't go out to the "road" for sale because it might have a small worm, easily removed.

I walked down the small hill to the mill pond when I left the stand.  Armeno's sits across the street where the old mill used to be.  They roast coffee beans in there.  I was on a bender to get some great coffee to grind at home, but the traffic that careens up and down that hill was terrifying for a woman on crutches.  Still, I got to hobble in and smell all those beans from all over the world.

Norah Ephron

It stinks that Norah Ephron died today.  It's a loaded issue for me when someone so creative dies at the beginning of her 70s.  After I told my sister, she went off on a riff about how we've all got to eat cruciferous vegetables and Dr. Furman style garlic and spinach shakes.  You've heard it all, no doubt, about turning your genes on and off like stop lights because you ate a donut.  I hear that theory as the usual "blame the victim" kind of attitude that people take when bad luck befalls someone they know.  We'd rather believe they slipped up, neglected their vegetables and tofu instead of understanding that life is a crapshoot.

 But, I have the equally illogical view that people who stay creative and love their lives will live longer.  Except for hating her dowager's hump and her neck, Norah seemed to be having a pretty nice life, so what happened--how could she get leukemia at 71?  Apparently even Norah saw the fickle nature of fate because she spoke, before her illness, of doing all you love NOW, while you can, because people get sick randomly.  She said something about knowing what it is that you love and going out to do it generously--that stopped me in my tracks.  How about you?  Do you know what you love and gather it while ye may?  I find my mind interferes with knowing what I love.  I might work on my novel, for example, and really enjoy what I wrote, only to return the next day and reread it with disgust, thereby deciding that I will spend the rest of my life doing yoga, meditating, drinking spinach garlic shakes and renouncing all egoic activities.

If you are in the mood, write to me and tell me what you'd really, really love to do with the rest of your life.  I'm interested, and maybe you can give me ideas.  I don't want to hear goody two-shoes stuff unless you mean it, OK?  By that I mean the way I can sometimes decide that I want to spend the rest of my life walking on my knees to a holy site 2000 miles away.  These thoughts are holdovers from a past life a psychic told me that I'd led, when I was a nun, staring out the convent door. This nun has helped me make a lot of decisions in my life, and most of them were bad ones.  I much prefer that angry adolescent who lurks within, never doing anything except what he wants to do, copping an attitude.  I don't usually function in the world this way, but maybe I should.

Anyway, goodbye to our Harry Met Sally girl.  Norah hand-picked Meryl Streep for the role as Julia Childs.  I love Meryl a lot too.  She'd better hang on!

Morning

Marcia, my sister, was off to line dancing this a.m., so I went to town before more rain fell.  Rain on the bottoms of my rubber crutch legs can end up in disaster as one fall could make this titanium hip pop out of place!  One of the visiting nurses told me horror stories which properly scared me--people cutting their toenails three months into healing and POP...out comes the hip.  A woman flouncing down on a low sofa and SPROING.  One nurse who came here to the house heaped tale upon tale, wagging a finger in my face.

Anyway, I was thinking today of two very good women who recently went through cancer treatment, and how I have no right to complain.  Noble thoughts last about one minute, then I'm off on my grouchy riff, but nevertheless...this is the life in comparison.  I just need to get used to my new life of spiced tea lattes at LaLaJava after a ride to the library where I nab some great books.  Once or twice a week, I pop into the second hand clothing shop, and the woman who runs it tells me I'm getting stronger.  She also gave me a dead cheap price on a brand new Coach bag.  Hey, I like this--attention!  Up at Wegman's supermarket, check-out folks tell me their own horror stories--broken ankles, broken foot.  For once, I'm not in a big rush to get out because I currently have no job, and this is my strange new social life.  I like talking to strangers, holding up the line, fumbling with keys and crutches and being brave.  I give the poor shoppers behind me a big smile with slightly trembling lips, the martyr. 

When I moved here three weeks ago, I left behind Hardwick, such a beautiful town in Western Ma. I moved back here to Northboro, which is closer to Boston and where my sister and I grew up. Of course I miss the Hardwick cows grazing on the hills, the smell of manure (yes, you really do develop a kind of enjoyment for that), those big old farmhouses that sprawl out in every direction back from the time when generations lived together.  But, I would be going mad there now in my current state.  I'm still in wonderment that any store I want is so close.  Despite our proximity to malls and box stores, there are blueberry bushes behind Marcia's house, and I went out and picked some the other night to eat on cereal.  Marcia hangs out her clothes in the summer, and they smell so fresh, even if there are those peaked shoulders from the clothespins.  After my nephew mowed the overgrown lawn the other day, this left the delicious smell of hay flowing through the open windows.  There are fields of wildflowers floating in the breeze behind the house, all the way down to the edge of the woods. There's so much you can name when you're home--black-eyed susans, Queen Anne's lace, red winged blackbirds, and wood turtles.  You don't feel that ease of familiarity in other parts of the world.

Monday, June 25

I've finally made it three weeks past a hip replacement, and I think they removed more than just a hipbone.  Part of my brain, which contains humor, has also been excised.  The only time I've laughed in these weeks was when I was running down innocents with my battery operated shopping chair at Wegman's.  Now, that WAS funny.

I was not built for problems, especially physical problems.  I come from a long line of people who use their bodies as bulldozers or plows.  My first week home with the walker, I devised a system of hauling large objects behind it, like a suitcase, with a couple of ropes. My father, a man who certainly lived a short distance from his body, once saved his van from accidently rolling into the car behind him by placing his entire body between both.  This worked out well as he didn't get sued. Getting his body out of there with the help of the police proved to be a problem, though.

Getting around with two crutches, as I do at the moment, presents its challenges.  Did you know that handicapped folks like me have to have all these handy dandy tools in order to pull their underwear up, haul cans off the shelf, or grapple with the wet bar of soap that fell on the floor when they take a shower (on a tub seat)?  I drop a crutch on the floor, then I have to thump over to get the plastic gripper to pick it up.  If I drop the crutch in the library parking lot, as I did last week, I have to use the other crutch to push the fallen one up my leg, where I can grab it as I hang on to the car.

The crutches did come in handy a few weeks back, though, when my sister's cat came banging into the house with a terrified chipmunk in its mouth.  The chipmunk escaped into a back bedroom, and after Marcia built a track for it out of  long, buttressed walls of shoes and dirty clothes along the edges, the chipmunk came flying out into the kitchen. It was very alive, and I loudly thumped my crutches to serve as further guideposts to the great outdoors.

One of the most interesting devises for Handicapped Happiness is the raised toilet seat.  Mine is pink and plastic and, so deep that it's hard to remember there's water beneath the shoot.  Women who visit the house don't show too much queasiness around it, perhaps because they have less equipment to lose in the mysterious center.  Men come to the house, ponder how to befriend the thing, and then wrench it off to do their business in a manly way. They forget how the thing fitted over the toilet (both seats have to be up).  There are a lot of sounds and swearing  until they emerge, usually in defeat, and ask a woman to put it back on.

Dexter and Programming Away Difficult Feelings

Have you watched Dexter?  I know...I'm way behind on TV shows, still catching up.  My friend Lin suggested that I'd like it, and she described it as being about a guy with Aspergers.  It seems to me that Dexter's inability to feel relates to all the trauma he went through when he was pre-verbal rather than autism, but who cares--it's a TV show after all. 

Anyway, I was talking with a friend over the weekend about autism  and she said something that had occurred to me before as well.  Doesn't it seem as if autism, which multiplies in numbers, is an evolutionary step as we all move toward robots or humans combined with robots?

And concurrent with this evolutionary stage, this step away from deep feeling toward more programmable feeling, is positive psychology.  We no longer spend most of our lives at the psychiatrist's door, like Woody Allen, and  quickly learn ways to change the direction of our thoughts to create more peace and self love.

Let me explain what I mean about programmable feeling. Brain research with MRIs shows that we can deprogram ourselves from negative thought, which seems to be hard-wired into the human brain. We can then  light up more restful and hence positive areas of the brain by switching to more positive thought. This is not a bad thing, believe me, because we all know very negative people (perhaps we're one of them) who could use a switcheroo over into seeing the day as half full instead of half empty.  I guess what concerns me is manipulating ourselves to the point where we're so docile and kind and happy that it's damned easy to round us all up and put us into little pens.

Think about countries like Myanmar where, I daresay, the Buddhist religion has provided great solace to people who are still being ruled by extremely cruel dictators.  Buddhism is a religion for which I have respect, and its practices include meditations that calm the brain and allow it to move into more serenity. But I've seen its dark side.  I lived in a Buddhist meditation center for a few years, and one of the hallmarks of that place was that you couldn't be totally yourself there.  Meditation was the great palliative for whatever ailed you, especially if your ailment questioned established norms of the center. If you had a stick up your ass, you needed to try a variant of kindness meditation to soothe the pain of the stick.  Believe me, there's a lot of wisdom in sending yourself kindness when you are in pain, but what if you have a legitimate political beef that shouldn't be soothed away with mind altering techniques?

Well, this is probably obvious to those of you reading my words, but it boils down to this:  life is a complex balance and no one technique is the answer.  Go ahead and do this positive psychology that's all the rage now and no doubt it will do a great deal of good.  But take it too far without exploring the reasons for negative feeling, and we all turn out like robots.

Driving Blind

More snow is on the way tomorrow, and a whopper comes on Wednesday.  I'm working my late night at school tonight and people are saying that the ice will bring all the wires down and we'll lose power for days on end.  Nothing like pessimistic New Englanders!  Over dinner, which was comprised of big piles of orange squash, chicken and rice, we here at school scared the bejesus out of each other with horror stories about how bad it's going to be. Ah, to be back in New England as I am now again, where suffering is joy. We love this, hugging the woodstove, saving water in the bathtub so we can flush for days on end.  Get the candles out and run to the store for salt to put on the walkway, which will not be seen again for days.  Get ready to eat Spam, cold from the can.

We haven't had any fun in months driving in this,, but bring it on...this is the secret high, this fight for survival.  We thrive on bitter pills, ice-encrusted trees, and snow piled up in mountains that you can't see over at any intersection where you stop and look both ways. We've got cabin fever early this year.  Usually that's around the beginning of March, but this year you see the haunted looks everywhere already.  Life has come to a stop for so many days now--school cancelled, fun classes put off until spring.  Doctor and dentist appointments are rescheduled again and again as it is impossible to make the 10 mile drive to keep them.  Worcester, the nearest city, has run out of snow plowing money, and it has chewed through the emergency fund as well. 

Jared Loughner--Every Parent's Secret Nightmare

One of my friends at work was saying this morning that every parent sees what happened with Jared Loughner and scares themselves to death.  Let's face is, whether we are great parents or rotten ones, our offspring bring some genetic traits that can cause them to get into tremendous trouble or, worse, like Jared, to commit unthinkable crimes.  And it's not all genes, of course.  Sometimes, despite good efforts, we don't do such a hot job of raising our children. We all have our flaws, or we had too many children, or that year when we got pretty depressed and the kids went by the wayside.  Most kids come out of our grasp unscathed, but in the case of people like Jared, environment and genes merged to create unthinkable violence.

No wonder, this friend said, that we can be so codependent with our children.  No wonder that, as teachers, it's easy to feel that it's up to us to be vigilant and save kids from a horrible plight, or--worse--save the world from this kid! We are frightened that, without the next handout of cash we give our child,  an amazing and costly education, and great and inexhaustable amounts of attention, our precious child might wander out of the parental fence and far afield.  They might end up in jail for a little while, or for three lifetimes.  They might end up with a misdemeanor, which wouldn't ruin their career, or a felony that could easily ruin it. This is what hangs in the balance, and it's all ripening when they are young and ridiculous and capable of such poor judgement.

Every family has one or two members with diagnosed problems.  Where were Jared's parents, we might ask with indignity, when he was so obviously unbalanced?  Why weren't they watching out for the kid?  Why didn't the Army do something about reporting his need for mental health assistance after they rejected him?  Somebody somewhere should do something!  But as life goes on, I realize more and more that controlling others still doesn't keep us safe, and it often keeps them even further out afield.   Parents with all the right intentions can coddle kids to the point where they have nothing to give to society.

I feel sad for Jared, even as I know what he did was unspeakable.  I guess his parents are pretty out there, but you know, they could be you or me, average bumbling idiots who try their best.  The kid with mental illness that we had no idea quite how to handle or control could have been dropped in our nest.

Tolkein? Nah....

Opps...I think I just ran out of pictures, at least for tonight.  Anyway, I tried readings the first in Tolkein's series last night and, give me a break, I don't give a damn about a fictional history of dwarfs who are related to royal dwarfs, and what battles dwarfs fought for their ring.  One of my students chided me today that I needed to read longer and get into the series.  Imagine that--one of my ADD students telling me to slow down and be patient!  But I've tried that, forced myself to read long past my interest level, and I never seem to come around.  I read "All the Pretty Horses" over Christmas vacation, and despite my love of the Southwest, and even though I slogged through the first 50 pages of deliberate confusion created by Cormac McCarthy, I didn't end up loving the book even by the end.  I read it because Natalie Goldberg raved about it in one of her books.  Now I'm taking Pat Conroy's advice about trolls?  Forget it. 

Don't ask me how I got the idea that hobbits are rabbits.  Embarrassing...I hope none of you noticed my mistake.  Turns out they are trolls or dwarfs...whatever the difference is, I have no idea.  Which reminded me of Cappadochia, Turkey where you can go through this rather innocuous and back-breaking door in a small hill, which leads to a hole in the ground and it turns out that it enters a vast, cavelike structure of endless floors where people lived in a kind of city.  The early Christians hid there from the Romans, and the people who lurched around up and down floor after floor were called Troglodites.  People called ugly people Troglodites when I was in high school.  The real Troglodites were short and lived inside this vast anthill of people, making their own beer and alcohol in a brewery, living in the endless apartments.  There was even a jail!  I'd rather read a book about that--somebody write me that book!  Maybe I'm sick of fiction.

At work today, one very very nice teacher wrote an email to the maintenance staff, copying all of us, and she raved about what wonderful work those  guys did in getting the iced and snowy campus back into shape for the kids and for us.  And, indeed, they have worked their asses off for several days now.  But then, doncha know, one after another teacher began a game of one-up-man-ship, proving that they, too, were appreciative and compassionate people.  They wrote emails including poems or a song sung to the tune of "God Bless America", all honoring the maintenance crew.  What the hell? Nauseating!  I like kindness, but it can take a bitter corner and become mush and empty words, all said to prove something.  Email exposes us to some of the most ridiculous bullshit.  Niceness taken to this extent has a nasty underbelly; I think we should take a day off from such insincerity, or even send insulting emails to everybody one day of the year, balancing things out a bit.  Just don't send one to me.

Tea and Sympathy

I've dutifully taken Tolkein out of the library because I never read the whole hobbit series and perhaps I've missed out. I remember trying to read about those rabbits when I was young and I soon discarded"The Hobbit" with some disgust, but now in Pat Conroy's book, "My Reading Life" he raves about Tolkein.  We'll see; I'll try. I'm not much for fantasy.

It's a tea day here in snowy Hardwick where we taught again despite the snowfall in the early morning that was cementing via freezing rain for the rest of the day.  OK, I'd forgotten about New England being this ridiculous.  I keep waiting for the gods to call all this weather off, but that's not the way it works. 

I do like teaching on snow days, though, oddly enough.  On a regular teaching day, I feel a little bit nervous.  Really.  Try facing a bunch of teenagers pulling at their faces to parody you and you'll see.  There's not a shred of ego left when these kids get done with you.  But on snow days, after my gallant efforts to make it up the hill to school while wipers are angrily pushing away snow in most windows of my car, I figure it's gravy that I make it in at all .  It's a great disappointment to the kids that we do make it in, too.  "Didn't you want to stay home today?" they ask.  "Isn't it dangerous for you to drive?"  Oh yeah...they are full of concern for my well-being.  The alternative to my classes would be going to the sub, who has lockers full of hand cream, every issue of "People" magazine ever printed, sweet things to crunch on, movies, and a cheerful personality.

So, for more ego-busting, have a roomful of 16-year olds asking why you look so peaked, and don't you think you're feeling poorly and need to go home to bed? I must admit, I relax my standards somewhat on these snow days when all the public schools in Massachusetts are out and we are still in operation at private school.  We talk more about stupid stuff, and we look out the window a lot and make dumb comments about whether that's rain coming down now or has it ended completely? It would be best if we could all stand at the window, holding cups of tea and warming our hands, dreamily watching the weather.

Snow, Snow, Snow

We are teaching here at private school today despite the fact that schools across the state are still closed due to about two feet of snow.  We get out June 3rd, so I'm not complaining; snow day be damned.  But I will complain about so much snow!  And, yes, it is beautiful.  I took a walk around Hardwick Center last night when the flakes were finally coming down lazily compared to the driving white earlier in the day. It was lovely last night, if unearthly, because we're so far out in the middle of nowhere and even the center of town is ghostly and black, that big flag on the common ripping around angrily in the wind, and the lights of only an occasional car climbing up the long, long hills through incredible darkness to finally reach the town center.

Getting cars in and out of the backyard parking area of our B&B staff housing is not fun.  My Subaru is a stead, I've gotta say, and you just shovel a little in front of it and it'll climb out several inches of snow like it's a dry August day. The young teachers aren't paranoid Yankees like I am, so neither of them backed in, and they were nose down on an incline to boot, so it might be a while before they get their cars out of there.  I watched them a little from my bathroom this morning while they struggled away in the cold darkness, with no success, digging into a rut with their wheels deeper and deeper.  After i got my new short haircut all squished and curled and finished my coffee, I went out and did a little shoveling in front of my car, and off we all went in my valiant Subaru. I feel like such a guy because I'd done everything right, such as backing in, the whole rocking process, just the way Dad taught me.  I even made a swaggering remark about how they will be needing sand to throw under their wheels, but unfortunately,  I didn't have any.  It's a wonder I didn't! I'm like Ward Bond at the front of Wagon Train, pulling wooden wheels out of ruts with sheer muscle.

I am kind of sick of this whole macho woman thing, something I developed in the 60s, with a Dad who wanted a son instead of a daughter.  Sometimes I get so tired; I want a heroic guy around who swaggers instead.  Where did those guys go, anyway?  There used to be men who pulled up out of nowhere, car lights flashing,  to help damsels in distress.  Now they are all home, scared to get wet.  They huddle in the window, like my mom used to do, and say discouraging things like, "You'll never get out of that snowbank."  And then you do.

Sunday

Sunday was a little snow and a cuppa at Roses 32 Cafe in Gilbertville, MA.  This restaurant, located in an old gas station turned glass and steel California cool, still brings tears to my eyes.  They actually hired two guys from Spain to come and brick the enormous round oven from which comes luscious bread I can no longer eat (gluten, alas).  But I still get coffee there and continually pinch myself because the middle of MA has nothing like this anywhere, and people will drive from farmhouses an hour away just to sit there with espresso and the NY Times.  Other than Roses, all you get is Polish kielbasa, Cumberland Farms slushies and WalMart baked goods. 

I spent Sat. night at my sister's house where we stayed glued to the TV and all the stories out of Tucson, AZ.  I hope Sarah Palin learned a lesson about putting gun crosshairs on a map that included Gabrielle in Tucson.  Sarah needs to close that mouth of hers permanently and stop swaggering around with her whole Alaska gun-toting Mama image.