Which Way Is Up?

Every once in a while, life sort of turns on its head. Not necessarily because of anything dramatic, but because of slight changes that make everything seem a bit off kilter.

Like after weeks and weeks of waking up when we please having to set an alarm clock for Jack's 8:00 a.m. departure to a school space camp program that started this morning. It will run for two weeks and will apparently include making an edible solar system!

And when I drove to pick them up in a borrowed truck (our Wrangler is going in for repairs this week), I could barely make out the mountains across the valley for all of the smoke from the state's largest wildfire ever, burning about 100 miles south of us.

Lately I've been listening to a lot of Diane Rehm Show podcasts, pulling from the archives. Last night after Jack went to sleep I found a 2002 interview with Thomas Friedman about his then new book Longitudes and Attitudes. The interview was conducted shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq, when popular opinion wasn't yet sold on the idea. He articulated with such clarity so many of the issues that we are now facing. I will never, never, never understand why we invaded Iraq. And it feels like we're in a thick cloud of smoke, our vision obscured, rendering us incapable of finding our way back out again.

Maybe my life will turn on its head once more and when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning I'll wake up and find we're back in 2002 with another chance to prevent the war.

Damn linear time!

Let the Professionals Handle It

I went with my friend Rebekah to get my very first professional pedicure the other night. I'm totally sold on having someone who knows what they're doing take care of my feet for me! I think I can justify doing this once or twice every sandal season.

Maybe I have pretty toes after all!

High Adventure

Last week we had a fabulous day trip to the High Uintas. We spent hours on the flat rocks of the Upper Provo River having a picnic and wading in the shallow water. We hiked on the trail around Mirror Lake. We scrambled on the Provo River Falls. Perfect weather. Perfect company. And except for a few scrapes and bug bites, a perfect day!

Afghanistan

Welcome to my first country report, which will basically consist of random facts that I found interesting in my research. No dry historical accounts here!

I've been reading and learning about Afghanistan this week. I chose Afghanistan because it came first alphabetically, but I will not be going alphabetically. I will be selecting countries to study as the spirit moves me.

So, Afghanistan. As I searched for information I felt very compelled to find personal stories, and I also felt myself responding to anything that added color to the stereotypical pictures we often have in our heads of gray, dusty, unyielding landscape.


In addition to news and encyclopedia articles, I've been reading The Bookseller of Kabul and I've discovered a couple of blogs, including the blog of an Estonian photographer who is living in Kabul while her husband works there and the blog of an Afghan interpreter for the U.S. Army.

Here are some tidbits that have stuck with me:

• Afghanistan is the place to find lapis lazuli. Jack, a budding geologist, was excited to learn that. He's got a special place in his heart for lapis lazuli.
• By law, of the 102 members of the Upper House of the National Assembly, at least 17 must be women. And in 2005, 68 women were elected to the 249 member Lower House!
• The tourist trap area of Kabul is on Chicken Street.
• More than half of Afghans are under 18.

One of the heartbreaking, somehow symbolic remnants of so many years of war and unrest are all of the land mines still buried in the earth, rendering whole valleys unliveable. I read in a 2007 UNICEF press release that they provided "training for 50,000 primary school teachers with a 10-day refresher course on language arts, pedagogy and landmine awareness." How wretched to have to make landmine awareness an educational priority!

In The Bookseller of Kabul, author Asne Seierstad refers to the land mines buried in the Shomali Plain north of Kabul, “Over the death traps the ditches are full of wild, dark red, short-stemmed tulips. But the flowers must be admired at a distance. Picking them means risking blowing off an arm or a leg.”

What always astounds me when learning about people who have suffered war and oppression is how they adjust, so quickly create a sense of normalcy, and squeeze as much living as they can out of life.

The spirit of Afghanistan is bold and colorful, not bleak and hopeless.



P.S. I stole the pictures that I included in this post from Õnne Pärl, the Estonian photographer. One of the projects she chronicles in her blog is photographing an architectural restoration project in Kabul spearheaded by the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. In her honor, I will be studying Estonia in the coming week.

Meeting Julia

Yesterday I got to meet one of my favorite authors at The King's English bookstore. Julia Glass who wrote National Book Award winner Three Junes, was there to read from her her second novel, The Whole World Over, which is now out in paperback. I'm going to save it for our vacation to Lake Geneva in a few weeks. Ooh, it'll be a book to be savored!

I was so happy to be driving up to Salt Lake City to meet her. I'd just found out the day before that she actually grew up maybe 20 minutes from where I grew up in Massachusetts. I had also listened to a fabulous local radio interview with her, in which she talked about how important it was to her to see the ocean every day.

I don't usually idolize people or get all excited to meet them, but I confess I was a bit giddy! She seems like the kind of person I would so like to be friends with, to live next door to.

So as I'm driving past Ikea, one of my favorite old songs comes on the radio (Da Da Da by Trio. I was an early fan--I actually own it on vinyl!). Then all of a sudden I'm passing one of my favorite cars in the world--a mini cooper, pepper white with a black roof. In my mind the planets were totally aligned for me!


I got to the bookstore early to browse and chat with some of my friends there, including Shelley who used to work with us at the Read Leaf.

And they introduced me to Julia Glass before the reading started. She was just what I expected-- warm and intelligent, charming and funny.

But I felt like I was in junior high--hoping to make an impression on her so that she'd want to be my friend, too. Ah, well, authors meet so many people on tour. At least I have her books for company!

Weighty Issues

I keep wanting to be ready to write about this very personal issue, and I finally realize that I just need to do it. I will never be ready, but maybe writing about it today will help me on my way. A leap of faith, perhaps.

I am always struggling with my weight. Well, more accurately, I mostly ignore my weight and from time to time struggle with it. I believe that if I was actually always struggling, I'd have gained power over it by now.

Several times in my life I have focused very well on exercising regularly and eating healthfully, and I have enjoyed the fruits of my efforts. Then little by little I fall into habits that are not so good for me and the weight creeps back on.

I'm currently about 20 pounds below my all-time high, and except for a bit of weight loss and regain here and there, I've managed to stay at least 20 pounds below my all-time high in 1995, which I hit after several long, mismanaged years of corporate life.

But I'd like to lose 40-50 pounds from here.

There. I've said it. I'll report back.

Digging Deeper

As a followup to a comment in my last entry, Agitation, that "we've become a culture that expects simple solutions to everything and prefers sound bites to complexity and nuance," I confess that I am often part of the problem.

People who are acquainted with me probably think I'm quite politically aware. People who really know me are more likely to know that I'm generally politically aware, but that I'm often short on specifics.

I generally know about things like the trouble in Iran, Darfur and Gaza, President Bush's veto of funding for stem cell research and our lack of progress on the immigration issue, Salt Lake mayor Rocky Anderson's efforts to make city government greener, etc. But I'm pretty sure I could not engage in deep, meaningful discussion about any of these issues.

Like many people (if they'd only admit it), the things I do know have pretty much come to me by way of sound bites. (And frankly it scares me that there are plenty of people who spend a whole lot less time paying attention to the world around us than I do who have far more entrenched opinions about things than I do!)

So I hereby pledge to dig more deeply.

I'm going to listen to more in-depth interviews, read whole newspaper articles rather than just skimming headlines, and read entire books on subjects like the Middle East. I might even take notes.

Each week I'm going to focus in depth on one country. I plan to visit the websites for Unicef and Infoplease (I've added the links to my side bar) for an overview of history, politics and culture and any humanitarian issues facing the country. I'll also spend time reading any current news articles I can find and looking for photos online. Initially I was going to focus on one country a day but quickly realized that I'd never get out of the soundbite mentality that way.

Maybe one day, I'll not only be able to name every single African, South American, Eastern European, Asian, Middle Eastern country on a map (something I'm ashamed to say I can't do today), but I'll know something about the unique history and cultures of each.

(An aside: as I write this I realize how totally biased my childhood education was--by the time I finished sixth grade, I could--and still can--easily name every Western European country and I had a fairly clear sense of each. And the only other countries I really knew anything about were countries where the US had fought wars or that someone in my family had visited.)

Agitation

Two of my favorite radio shows (which I most often listen to as podcasts) have included interviews this week about the war in Iraq that have renewed my agitation. We're just digging deeper and deeper holes for ourselves!

The other day Diane Rehm interviewed Dina Rasor, author of Betraying our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, who discussed the dangers involved in relying so heavily on private contractors to wage our military actions. Cynic that I am, I've just assumed companies like KBR have padded their expense reports as they bill us for services rendered. But my naive self was shocked to hear reports of human trafficking of cheap labor, employees who are not under the control of the military walking off the job at critical moments, refusing to provide vital services due to payment disputes (which makes sense in times of peace, but, hello, we're in a war here!). Our military is basically at the mercy of private companies, and we should all be angry as hell!

This morning (while I put a second coat of paint on our Adirondack chairs, which was also agitating!) I listened to Radio West, produced by KUER here in Salt Lake City. Doug Fabrizio interviewed General Tony Zinni, author of The Battle for Peace. His view is basically that we invaded Iraq and have subsequently mismanaged the war as a result of an utter lack of well thought out strategy that should take into account culture, history and an understanding of human nature. We have failed as a nation to figure out how best to participate in the world since the end of the cold war. We've become a culture that expects simple solutions to everything and prefers sound bites to complexity and nuance.

As I listened to these interviews, I realized that I am truly a product of my time. My world view is very much informed by the fact that I came of age in the late seventies and earned my degrees in international relations and political science in the eighties.

Much of what I learned and discussed in classes and with friends during those years was a direct result of our national debriefing of the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement. Lessons learned had started to crystalize: (1) You can't just export democracy. By definition it has to be a grass roots movement that people understand and embrace on a personal level. (2) You can't change people's hearts and make them stop hating simply by passing laws. And (3) we should be extremely suspicious of the military-industrial complex, in which revenue inevitably trumps morality.

Why, why, why don't we ever seem to learn from our past?

Country Living

Saturday night I was outside painting our Adirondack chairs. This effort was not, by the way, meant to fulfull any of my creative yearnings. Painting chairs like that is a matter of sheer endurance. I'm psyching myself up for putting on the second coat later today.

Anyway, I had the radio on and decided to tune it to a country music station just to shake things up. I don't listen to much country music, but some of my friends do, so KBULL 93 it was.

One song stood out. I don't know who was singing, or what the name of the song was, but it was obviously meant to romance a girl. My favorite line? "I want to search you for tics."

Creating

My urge to create is slowly blossoming again after a long wintering over. So much of our book store business was about creating atmosphere and relationships, building something tangible and reflecting our aesthetics and values. Even figuring out how to keep track of all the bits of information we needed to keep track of required creativity.

When we closed the store, my creative side went dormant--definitely not by any conscious or deliberate choice on my part. In retrospect, I think it may have been a bit of a defense mechanism. I'd poured so much of myself into the store for so long and now it doesn't even exist. The whole experience has made me very tentative about putting my soul into something new.

I'm trying to nurture these new yearnings and to figure out what direction they might take me. I fall asleep imagining what sorts of projects I might like to try. I've become addicted to listening to podcast interviews and reading blogs written by artists and musicians. Twice in the past few weeks I've visited art museums. I think I might take guitar lessons, learn how to use Roger's new camera and, gulp, figure out how to thread the sewing machine I haven't used in many years.

As I move forward in this, I'm finding that the awakening of my creativity is a sort of spiritual awakening. I believe that our human desire to create comes from the part of us that is divine. As children of God, the ultimate creator, doesn't it makes sense that it would be in our nature?

Sunny Days

An afternoon at the pool. Bike rides to the park. Hikes up the canyon. Chatting with neighbors until the sun sets. Fireworks. Late nights with friends. Walking home in the dark with a lantern. Waking up without an alarm clock, curtains blowing with the cool morning breeze.

Summer is in full swing and I am choosing to embrace it.

Rainy Days

The cold (in the 40s!) and rainy weather arrived yesterday and continues today (though not as cold and rainy).

Although it was very chilly, it cleared up enough yesterday evening to go on a few rides at Springville's Art City Days carnival. Jack hooked up with friends Johnny and Benny, who didn't like as many rides as Jack did. Benny hates heights and Johnny can't do rides that go up and down fast. The only ride that gave Jack the willies was the Ring of Fire, and that was only because there wasn't a line so the ride operator made it go three times as long and kept pausing them upside down at the top of the loop. They all agreed that their favorite ride was the Starship--they're shoved up against the wall with cetrifugal force as it spins.

This morning Jack and his friend Rex had plans to go to the Fun-a-Rama (the city sets up huge inflatable slides and things at one of the parks for Art City Days), but it got rained out. Rex went off to the movies with his family instead and Jack spent the morning building very intricate Lego models of the three challenges in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

We've been playing game after game of Uno waiting for Rex to come over, and he has just arrived. Yay!

Tonight we're heading out to find a new bike helmet for Jack. He starts cub scouts tomorrow morning and will be learning all about bikes and bike safety in preparation for a big bike ride at an upcoming den meeting.

Even though we've had to wear socks and hoodies instead of sandals and short sleeves, summer is in full swing!

I Made It!

My mother-in-law and I left Jack and Grandpa playing happily and drove up to the new Ikea store south of Salt Lake City today. We had a very pleasant time browsing the store and lunching on Swedish meatballs and red potatoes in the cafeteria.

I made it out of the store for under $100. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Duvet covers for Roger and me. One of our secrets to a peaceful marriage, inspired by our good friends Scott and Carolyn, is that we each have our own twin size duvets so we never fight over blankets. Several years ago my friend Wendy and I spent a night at the Four Seasons hotel in Boston (a birthday present from her husband) and at night they made up the beds with all white cotton linens, including duvets with white covers. So that's what we've had at home since then. I was so pleased to find solid white covers with some visual interest. You can't see the pattern on the photo at the Ikea website, but every inch or so they've tucked the fabric with a straight seam across the width of it. So it has lines, but it's still solid white.
• A cool red cardboard box to store Jack's papers and projects from school (click here for an account of recent related trauma). I actually found a box that is slightly longer than the link to the Ikea website shows (21 3/4" instead of 17 3/4") so it can accommodate more odd sized projects.
• An alarm clock for Roger, who is seriously alarm clock impaired. Really, he has at least three different alarm clocks, all of which are unreliable. The cool thing about this alarm clock is that we can record personalized messages for him to wake up to.
  

Jack's Brother

It was such a joy to finally meet Jack's half-brother, an adorable 10-month-old almost toddler now (pictured here with his mom, Jack's birth mom). What a happy, beautiful child!

I'm trying to sort through all kinds of feelings. Not surprisingly, it was one thing to deal with a theoretical baby who almost joined our family last summer (click here for more info), and it is now something else to deal with a real baby that we've held and fed and laughed with.

How amazing it would have been to have him in our family. It would have been a very, very good thing. But I am also thrilled that he has been such a bright spot in his mom's life, and it is clear that they are thriving together. (BTW, she is no longer with his father, who is leaving for Iraq this week with his National Guard unit.)

What I know for sure is that Jack's three siblings hold a very special place in my heart (click here for pics of Jack with his two older sisters). I imagine I feel so strongly about them because I love Jack so much. They are always welcome in our home, and I hope Jack develops a good relationship with all three of them through the years. Maybe Roger and I can be like an aunt and uncle to them.

Baptism Day

Jack's big day today! In our church, children aren't baptized until they are eight and it's clearly presented to them as a choice they make. Jack has been looking forward to this day for a while, and it has been a happy time for him.

Also in the tradition of our church, Jack's dad had the privilege of baptizing him, confirming him a member of the church and giving him the gift of the Holy Ghost. I had the privilege of speaking at the service about what it means to have the gift of the Holy Ghost.

Lots of special people were able to share the day with him, including:

• Nana, Gramps and Aunt Linda who all flew out from Massachusetts
• Grandma and Grandpa
  
• Aunt Carol and Uncle Greg
• Cousins Anne and her baby Hyrum, Jenny and her husband Kyle, Evan, Bethany and Sarah
• Good friends from our neighborhood, best friend from school Rex and his mom, Erica, and best friend of all time Gracie and her mom, Diana
• Jack's birthmom and his baby half-brother (who is about 10 months old) who drove up from New Mexico

Here are pictures of Jack and Grace and Jack and his half-brother (who has the same spark in his eyes that Jack has!):

We Are What We Own?

We read Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter for book club the other night. It includes three novellas, one of which is about a relationship between Miranda, a journalist, and Adam, a soldier on leave just before being shipped overseas.

Someone in the group brought up the following passage that I've been chewing on for the past couple of days:

He had showed her snapshots of himself at the wheel of his roadster; of himself sailing a boat, looking very free and windblown, all angles, hauling on the ropes. . . . Miranda knew he was trying to tell her what kind of person he was when he had his machinery with him. She felt she knew pretty well what kind of person he was, and would have liked to tell him that if he thought he had left himself at home in a boat or an automobile, he was much mistaken.

What is it about us humans? We're always getting our identities entangled with our physical stuff. I know that I have spent the better part of the past year trying to unravel myself from my identity as a bookstore owner and from my daily routine of chatting with customers, mining for treasures to order in and share, and keeping the back office from spinning out of control.

Who on earth am I without my happy little bookstore? Intellectually I know that I didn't leave myself behind when we closed up shop, but spiritually and emotionally there are many days I'm not so sure.

Busy

It's amazing how quickly my life goes from zero to sixty. Two weeks ago I was living a life of leisure. Jack was in school, and I could procrastinate chores to my heart's content.

Now Jack is out of school, we're having house guests three weekends in a row (which I love, but which means I need to pay a bit more attention to housekeeping), and we've got oodles of family events including birthday parties for both Roger's dad and mine and Jack's baptism this coming Saturday.

Yesterday I had to scramble to get a book finished for book club with Jack jumping on top of me because he never hooked up with friends. I took breaks from reading to play Uno with him and to take him out for milkshakes. Then I stayed out with book club friends until nearly midnight.

Today I've been trying to focus on a proofreading project for Mom (a 140-page genealogy called The Pierponts of Roxbury, Massachusetts). I took breaks from working to do laundry and mow the lawn.

I'd better get back to it!

A Visit from Sarah

We've just had a fabulous weekend with my cousin Sarah, who is in Utah doing field research with some of her students. She's a geophysics professor at the University of South Florida, and they are here mostly studying volcanic formations in the San Rafael Swell a few hours south of us.

It was fun to hear about her research, but it was more fun to just hang out with her. Sarah is a few years older than me, and I've looked up to her as long as I can remember. We don't see each other very often, but when we do, we just fall into this great, comfortable relationship. Despite the fact that we've always lived at least a thousand miles apart and usually more, I've got so many good memories of experiences we've shared and the conversations we've had.

Lots and lots of summers at Lake Geneva--swimming, sailing, making up plays, watching marathon slide shows of trips our grandmother took all over the world. Traveling in Europe together when I was 17 and she was spending her junior year in Munich--visiting Dachau, hiking for miles along the coast of Wales and in the mountains of Switzerland, hitching a ride with a crazy Scotsman and his wife, lots of museums, trains and beer gardens.

Meeting up in Seaside, Florida, with our kids and on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Hanging out with her in Boston whenever I was home visiting my family and she was studying at MIT. Crashing for the night on the boat she and her family lived on when she was teaching at William and Mary in Virginia and Roger and I were on a year-long runaway adventure in our red Jeep.

Celebrating when she and her husband adopted their two children, and relying on her wisdom and experience as we adopted our Jack. Both envying and being inspired by her passion and tenacity as she kept herself in fabulous shape with lots of long distance biking and running, expertly sewed her own clothes in high school (in contrast, I spent most of my efforts at my mother's old, old sewing machine cursing under my breath every time it jammed), learned to speak German fluently, earned her Ph.D. and then subsequently earned tenure.

I think, though, that one of the reasons I love hanging out with Sarah is that while all of her achievements are genuine, she is also very genuine. She's willing to share the frustrating and nerve wracking bits of her life with me.

I love knowing people that inspire me to be a better person. And not only do I know Sarah, I get to be related to her!

Am I Reading Him Right?

I can't be completely sure because he won't talk about it, but I actually think Jack is sad that today was his last day of school. When I picked him up at noon, he looked totally dejected and it took nearly an hour for him to perk up.

Every year one of our neighbors hosts an end-of-school bash (water balloons, games, etc.) on the last day of school. Jack didn't want to go and asked why they would have a party when some people are sad. He wouldn't actually say why he was sad, but we talked about how people often have mixed feelings about things.

All of a sudden Jack changed his mind and decided to go to the party after all. I am choosing to believe that maybe second grade wasn't all that bad.

Coexisting

I think Jack and I have had one of those pivotal moments that may scar him for life.

Last night he discovered that I haven't been keeping every single paper that he's brought home from school. (I figure he's brought home a ream's worth of paper representing all of the busy work he's been assigned over the course of the year, which is a whole other issue to blog about someday.)

As he descended deeper and deeper into a pit of despair over this ("Mom, my work means NOTHING to you. You threw it all in the GARBAGE! I won't remember ANYTHING I learned, and now I can't live my dream of becoming an engineer and designing stuff. Mom, you've destroyed my DREAMS!"), my guilt-o-meter was off the charts.

Now that we've recovered from our irrationality, I'm hoping that Jack and I can have a rational discussion about this fact: By nature I am a purger and he is a hoarder. Somehow we need to learn to respect these differences in one another and to coexist in peace.

I promise that when Jack starts third grade next year, I won't throw anything out without letting him know up front. But if ever one day Jack becomes a compulsive hoarder (you know, the kind they profile on 20/20), I believe that behavior can be traced back to May 2007.