Calliope

I am the co-minder of our granddaughter, Calliope, while her parents are in Alaska. The original Calliope was the Greek muse of epic poetry, She was Homer’s muse almost 3000 years ago when he composed the first enduring works of Western literature. The current Calliope is almost 2. Sometimes when I am with our granddaughter, I think of the future and wonder about the world she will inherit from us. This morning I think of the long arc of history between the first Calliope and ours, and how, through all the immense upheavals and changes in that history, our urge to tell stories and pass them on, to try to make sense of the world and our role in it, of war and peace, of love and death, has persisted. It is our culture, our guide for understanding our past and for charting our future.

Every politician who has ever run for office has talked about making the world a better place for the generations to come. But their conception of the future is too often how much of it they can sacrifice to protect their next election. Long term? It took Odysseus 12 years to get home – the equivalent of six terms in the House.

The promise of Barack Obama, at least for me, was that we could have a longer and a larger view – one that bridged the old divides that threatened to destroy us: race, wealth and poverty, religion, environmental destruction. I believe we can get there. For Calliope’s sake, I know that we must.

Memorial Day

There is no easy way to write about Etan Patz. We were living in New York’s east village, just a few blocks from where the six-year-old boy disappeared 33 years ago. Our first child was almost two. So the news reports hit close to home. In those days the abduction of a child seemed a rarity. It was before Megan’s Law. Before Brian David Mitchell took 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart to be his “second wife.” Before 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard spent 18 years in a series of sheds and gave birth to two children.

Etan was the first missing child to have his face on a milk carton, and for many of us he will always be that impish and innocent little boy – the adventurous first grader who begged his parents to let him walk alone to his school bus stop just one block away – until they finally relented on May 25, 1979. Now designated National Missing Children’s Day, it was also the date last Friday that police charged Pedro Hernandez with Etan’s murder.

But while Etan’s smile has remained stopped in time, our lives have not. We have grown older, perhaps had our own tragedies. But I will not forget that face.

The death – or worse, the disappearance – of a child puts unimaginable pressures on a family. At first, it draws them closer, but people cope in different ways, heal at different rates, if at all. For many couples the death of a child ultimately brings the end of their marriage.

Etan’s parents still live in the same loft on the same street in Soho. In 33 years of indescribable pain, they have given us an image of extraordinary grace.

Remembrance

I have taken to reading . . . and beginning to chronicle . . . the plaques on New York City’s park benches. There are thousands of stories on these small bronzes, and there is probably, too, one huge story about a city and its people. Several of the plaques are in memory of victims of World Trade Center victims, such as this one to Derek Sword, so poignant in its aching simplicity.

I had intended to write about Sergeant Robert Bales and the killing of 16 people, mostly children in the village of Panjwai, Afghanistan, having as little insight to shed as others. The story became even more difficult with this morning’s news that a gunman had killed four people, three of them children, outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

I have no generalizations to offer, other than we don’t need generalizations. For days, the U.S. government did not identify Sgt. Bales, which seemed such a contrast to the almost immediate release of the name of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. With the identification of Sgt. Bales has come an effort to humanize him, to wonder how he could have committed such an atrocity. This is a consideration we must extend to Maj. Hasan.

For the perpetrators and the victims are people, not members of a group, Abdal Samad lost his wife, four young daughters and four young sons at the hands of Sgt. Bales. A father and his two children were killed in Toulouse.

We need to look through the categories and see the people. And we must not, as Kate Wenner wrote yesterday, “lose our memory when it comes to the consequences of wars fought far from home.”

Both/And

My daughter has both a small child and a demanding career. That is to say, she has two full-time jobs. It isn’t easy juggling her schedule, but she wants to do it, she needs to do it, and she does it well. She lives in a world made possible by the feminist movement, but I don’t think of her as a feminist so much as a mother and a nurse practitioner who struggles every day to balance two roles that define her life. And I am awfully proud of her. So I have followed with interest the flap over the part in Rick Santorum’s 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that says: “Many women . . . find it easier, more ‘professionally’ gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children.” The passage goes on to blame “radical feminists” for refusing to acknowledge the equality of work done in the home, and ends up calling for “both fair workplace rules and proper respect for work in the home.”

I think Santorum and his critics have both missed the essential point – for many women the issue is not “either-or”, it is “both-and.” They want – and more often they need – a family and a job, just as men do. And we need what they have to offer on both fronts. So yes, it takes a family. But it also takes a village.

2020

Notwithstanding the fact that he was only the second-best looking Mormon in the race and was trailing even Stephen Colbert in the South Carolina polls, Jon Huntsman’s decision to drop out of the Republican primary is largely due to the reaction to his August tweet: "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." The second sentence makes clear that he knew what was coming, and that perhaps it was crazy to go public with such bizarre beliefs. But do we really want a president who does not believe in evolution and maintains that global warming is a hoax? So, what does the probable candidate say on the matter? Virtually nothing. Only three issues appear on Mitt Romney’s website: Jobs, Healthcare and Foreign Policy. But scroll down under Jobs, and you come to this: “Amend Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its purview.” Short-term economic growth once again trumps long-term environmental health.

An old friend of mine, a businessman who has been deeply involved in the issue, told me recently that the scientific consensus is zeroing in on 2020 as the critical year in global climate efforts. “After 2020,” he said, “it’s game over.”

In 2020 my granddaughter, Calliope, will be 10 years old.

Santa

It is said that the embers were removed from the fire place in the Stamford, Connecticut, house that burned to the ground early Christmas morning because the three young girls worried that Santa Claus would not be able to come down the chimney. Every child has that thought, and yet Santa always comes. Except last week in Stamford, when those embers caused a searing, tragic fire that engulfed the house in minutes and snuffed out the lives of the three sisters and their grandparents. For a parent the death of a child is an unimaginable horror, one that defies the accepted order of the world and leaves a hole in your heart that can never be filled. You bring children into the world to give them life, to love them as you have never loved anyone before – without measure and without expectation – and to give your own life purpose and continuity. To lose them is to lose a part of yourself forever. Santa did come that Christmas. The girls’ grandfather, Lomer Johnson, spent his retirement playing Santa Claus to all kinds of children. It was, he said, the best job he had ever had. “If you want to talk about a good time,” he wrote, “try listening to and talking with kids at Christmas.” Mr. Johnson died on the roof, trying desperately to rescue his granddaughters.

Her Whole Life

Today is the 33^rd birthday of our second child, known as little Joanie. She was born more than three months prematurely and weighed under a pound. She lived almost three days, finally giving up her fight for life on January 5^th. She lies now in London Grove cemetery, next to her grandparents and her cousin, Dallas, who died of SIDS in 1974. Joanie’s gravestone reads simply: “Joan Blaine, January 3-5, 1979, “God’s own, the earth’s and ours.” It is not our custom to bear our sadnesses in public, but I think it is also important to acknowledge a life that was lived to its fullest, however curtailed it was. Joanie never got out of an incubator, never drew a breath on her own, never probably knew where she was and why she was here. But she lived, and we rooted for her to live longer, although the odds were always prohibitive. When a child lives such a short time, it sometimes seems self-indulgent to talk as if the grief at her loss could compare with those who lose a child they have known far better and loved far longer. And so the tendency is to say nothing, to say, I have four children, knowing that I have five. In this I think the pro-life people have a point. Life is precious, and no one can judge when another’s life begins. But to make that belief a litmus test of political ideology is as shameful as to fail to recognize the sacredness of life – all life – itself.