You run into some odd people on the Appalachian Trail (when, that is, you run into anyone at all). My daughter Gayley and I once shared a shelter with two women who were through hiking from Georgia, and we occasionally met someone heading in other direction, but for the most part we had the trail to ourselves.
Read MoreRereading A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s riotous account of hiking the Appalachian Trail with the delightfully curmudgeonly Katz, made me think of two things.
Read MoreNinety-two years ago yesterday, Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of V1, the first star anyone had ever seen in a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. Called “the most important star in the history of cosmology,” it turned our world upside down. Piers Sellers died on Dec. 23rd at the age of 61. Vera Rubin died two days later. She was 88. Both were scientists who spent a lot of time out among the stars, an experience that made them feel humble about humankind’s place in the vast cosmos, stunned by the beauty of the earth and, and yet ever hopeful.
Sellers, a naturalized American citizen who made three trips to the Atlantis space shuttle, died less than a year after being diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He spent much of that year trying to awaken people to the reality of global warming.
Still, he said of his short life and looming death, “I’ve no complaints. As an astronaut I spacewalked 220 miles above the Earth. . . .I watched hurricanes cartwheel across oceans, the Amazon snake its way to the sea through a brilliant green carpet of forest, and gigantic nighttime thunderstorms flash and flare for hundreds of miles along the Equator. From this God’s-eye-view, I saw how fragile and infinitely precious the Earth is. I’m hopeful for its future.”
Rubin was an astronomer who looked out from the earth as far into space as she could see. She saw so far she reached the limit of her sight; and that was when she realized that most of what was out there – literally millions of other galaxies – was invisible to her. “I’m sorry I know so little,” she once said. “I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?”
Far from being the center of the universe, we are infinitesimal, fleeting blips on a vast cosmic screen. And yet, for Rubin and Sellers, that fact is not a reason for despair, but for hope, even fun. In these times of strutting egomania, perhaps realizing how small we really are is the first step toward wisdom.
“Each one of you can change the world,” Rubin told the 1996 graduating class at Berkeley, “for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe.”
Happy New Year.
My granddaughter, Calliope, age 5, has a motor with only one speed: full. She doesn’t walk, she runs; and she talks without ceasing, using words in ways only a poet could imagine. And while she’s been reading me stories for years, it turns out she actually can’t read.
Read MoreThe Vatican’s vigorous denial of the details of the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis as described by her lawyer – and its emphasis instead on his embrace of a gay friend who arrived with his partner – made me think of the increasingly fluid definition of family. As did the story of Chris Mintz, the man who put himself in the line of fire at Umpqua Community College and took several gunshots in his body. It was, he told the gunman who then shot him again, his son’s sixth birthday. Tyrik is autistic, not yet toilet trained and unable to speak, and he is the apple of his father’s eye. The Mintz family is not a conventional one: he and Jamie Skinner, Tyrik’s mother, were never married and have since amicably split up. Chris now lives with Jamie’s sister and brother-in-law while he goes to school and works odd jobs. He also stays at home with Tyrik, which allows Jamie to work full time.
“All happy families are alike,” begins Anna Karenina; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy was wrong, I think. No two families are alike; each adapts – or fails to adapt – according to its particular circumstances, and what the intransigent defenders of the “traditional” family fail to understand is that, as with almost everything else in this world, it is their diversity that enriches families, and their adaptability will ensure the survival of an institution which cannot be reduced to a single definition imposed from without.
My granddaughter Calliope turned five yesterday, which was a huge deal for her. It had taken her her whole life to get there, and you could feel the excitement building throughout June (“my birthday month!”). At my age birthdays have a more bittersweet taste, reminders of how quickly the numbers have added up. It seems but a moment since Callie was born, and I wonder much of this extraordinary child’s life I will get to watch unfold. As we seek simultaneously to shield our children from the dangers of the world and to expose them to life’s wonders, we overlook at times how connected the two are. As I grow older I become increasingly aware of how little power I have to change the world; but I do have the choice of how I experience it. I can focus, as I often do, on a world hurtling toward catastrophe – a world of global warming and ISIS, of desperate migrants and mass murders and depleted aquifers. I can also focus on a world of possibility – of human ingenuity and natural beauty, of small kindnesses and enduring friendships, a world in which my granddaughter’s uncontrollable tears turn suddenly to bright laughter.
I believe that Calliope knows plenty about the sadness and capriciousness of life, but she wakes up each morning alive to its sparkle. And while it may not come as naturally any more, so can I. Because before we can solve the world’s problems, we must embrace life’s possibilities.
I won’t be posting next week, as I won't have access to the Internet.
In what some might consider an odd approach to parenting, whenever a friend of mine came down with the mumps, my mother took me over and plopped me on his bed. I never got mumps, although I got all the others – measles, German measles, chicken pox, rheumatic fever (which almost finished me). But mumps was special because if you got it as an adult, you could go sterile. So, before the arrival of the MMR vaccine (1971), my parents engaged in a kind of homeopathy, believing that once I’d had these diseases (except rubella), I would be immune. Precisely the theory behind vaccinations. In early 1950s America, many common childhood diseases were no longer the killers they had once been (with the lethal exception of polio), and many parents thought it better to get over them while young than worry about them later.
In the current measles outbreak, parents give all kinds of reasons – from religious beliefs to irrational fears – for not vaccinating their children. Those that jump out for me are the “largely wealthy and well-educated families” who, The New York Times reported, "are trying to carve out ‘all-natural’ lives for their children.” The descendants of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement, they try to immunize their children against the “toxic” products of pharmaceutical companies and corporate agriculture – of modern life.
They're easy to ridicule – certainly my first reaction – until I remember our own anguished dilemmas about how best to keep our children healthy and safe.
My father was dead at 51, a casualty of the manic depression he had fought for years. The New York Times, citing its suicide policy, declined to print his obituary. He lived in a time when mental illness was an embarrassment for families and a weakness for men. For Dad it was a crushing blow.
Read MoreCalliope is Homer’s muse and also my granddaughter – all wrapped in a single package I sometimes think. She was the wisest of the muses and the most assertive, which seems at least half right about her current reincarnation. She’s in my mind this morning, the end of the first week of a September filled with late summer days when the skies are clear and the crowds have gone home, and loons calling across the calm water bespeak the solitude that has settled on Maine's coast. It’s technically not yet fall, but the cool air has a whiff of the sadness that makes poets write of their impending death, while the more mundane relive the gloomy memories, which the intervening years can’t obliterate, of going back to school.
On Wednesday Calliope started “big girl school,” and although she is only four, it’s quite a step up from “Little Angels,” where she spent her childhood years. Unlike those of us who remember the anxiety of our first days, Callie is unfiltered enthusiasm in a tiny body. She has only one worry: “But Mom, I won’t know the names of my new friends.”
She hasn’t read the reports on bullying (because she can’t read). She’s not desperate to fit in. She doesn’t know she’s starting a long march on which she will be assessed, graded, pigeonholed, sometimes literally disenchanted. She shows hopeful signs of resistance. At four you don’t look back. You look ahead, excited, ready for what Calliope calls “an adventure.”
I have had a good life. Whether it has been a useful one is for others to decide. But of the value of four gifts – five, really – bestowed both on me and from me I have no doubt. My life changed completely from the moment my children – Gayley, Jake, Annie and Daniel (and little Joanie, Jan. 3-5, 1979, who struggled mightily for her whole short life) – appeared. They are the legacy I will leave. So, I bristle when I see a father pilloried by mean and ignorant people because he loves his child. Bob Bergdahl grew a beard and learned to speak Pashto during the five years his son was held captive by the Taliban. It’s OK, apparently, not to shave before the big game or until you have achieved some personal milestone, but not in solidarity with your son, who, by the way, speaks only Pashto now.
“He has learned to speak the language of the Taliban and looks like a Muslim,” said Bill O’Reilly, “actually thanking Allah right in front of the president.”
"If he wasn't so light-skinned, he actually looks like the terrorists,” echoed grammatically challenged radio host Laura Ingraham. (Actually, if he were any lighter-skinned he’d look like Timothy McVeigh.)
“Your son's out now,” said Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade. “Are you out of razors?"
What began as a celebration of a son’s return turned quickly into a nightmare. It’s an old story, first told by a bearded man in the Gospel of Luke.
We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know where we’re going. And we don’t control what will happen to us along the way, much as we like to think we do. When John Vigiano, a retired New York City firefighter, woke up 12 years ago this morning, he had no idea that his only two sons would be dead before noon. John Jr., 36, was a firefighter and his brother Joe, 34, was a police detective, and both men lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Their father recorded his memories of that day in a four-minute video, animated by StoryCorps, which my daughter Annie sent me. Watching it, listening to the father’s voice, is how I imagine a religious experience – a four-minute moment of awe, without any false emotion. John and Joe each called their father as they were heading to work. The calls ended with the words, I love you. “We had the boys – John for 36 years and Joe for 34 years,” said Vigiano. “I wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s not many people that the last words they said to their son or daughter was ‘I love you’ and the last words they heard was ‘I love you.’ So, that makes me sleep at night.”
There is no mention of heaven or hell, of Christians or Muslims, of vengeance or the American flag. This is the ultimate resurrection story, the triumph of love over the tragedy of life.
Annie’s message with the link said simply, “I love you.”
Today is the 55th anniversary of my mother’s marriage to my stepfather, who ultimately became an important and beloved part of the lives of my sisters and me. It wasn’t easy at first. I was an awkward teenager, unsure how to relate to this man who had just entered our family, and I was saddened by the divorce that had made it possible. Divorce was unusual in 1958 and carried a hint of scandal. It was even more of a scandal when my grandparents had divorced 40 years before, and it was front-page news when my great-grandparents divorced in 1892. My great-grandfather, the son and namesake of the most prominent political figure of the day, was 17 and seemingly unstable when he eloped with an older woman, an aspiring actress who, according to news reports, had quite a flair for the dramatic. What followed, as the boy’s parents sought an end to the marriage, was truly soap operatic: the publication of bristling letters carrying such lines as “for an impure girl can never make a pure woman;” accusations of spies posing as hotel guests; a charged trial in Deadwood, South Dakota – and my three-year-old grandfather caught in the middle. I thought of all this as I read of Tuesday’s enactment of a same-sex marriage law in Minnesota, the 12th state in the country and first in the Midwest to have one, amid prophecies of doom for the American family and the republic itself. From where I sit, I think we’ll be okay.
We called Erbold “our Mongolian,” not in a patronizing way, but because we had never met anyone quite like him or from so exotic a place when he came to spend a year with us and our youngest son, Daniel. Assured that he spoke English, we quickly realized that a smiling “yes” really meant “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he was gritty and determined. We bought him the first ice skates he had ever seen, and after the last game of the JV’s season, he raced home to announce he had scored a hat trick. He came to us through Clyde Goulden, a scientist married to Erbold’s aunt, who spent half his year studying Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, and the other half in his office at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Erbold’s favorite stories were about summers spent with his grandfather, a nomadic herder on the Mongolian steppes. He loved that life and was devastated when his grandfather died.
Yesterday NPR reported that Clyde Goulden has received Mongolia’s highest award, the Order of the Polar Star, for his work on climate change. He and his wife, Tuya, traveled the country, where the 4-degree temperature rise since the 1950s is four times the global average. They interviewed Mongolia's herders, who told them “everything is changing” – particularly the rains, which have shifted from long-lasting silky rains to short, inundating showers.
Mongolians have many words for rain, Tuya told NPR, but the words for good rain are disappearing. “That rain is gone,” she said.
"Beware the big lie!” the 1951 American propaganda film of the same name warns us. “Beware the dove that goes BOOM!" We have seen a lot of big lies lately from people in high places who have looked into the collective face of America and told bald-faced lies so often and so insistently that you think they must be telling the truth.
It was dark when I got up this morning, and the ground outside was frozen. Death is much on my mind. The sadness of it. And the wonder of it. As we plan for our mother’s service and burial, I remember our second child, who was born 34 years ago today and lived only three days. My mother, who was not born to grow old, lived for 90 years, almost all of them filled with a zest for living. I have never known life without her. My daughter I barely knew. She lies in a Quaker graveyard overlooking the peaceful hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a plot she shares with her maternal grandmother, who died too young at 62, and grandfather, who lived fully for two more decades; her cousin Dallas, who died suddenly at three months and whose parents I first met at her graveside service; and, in unmarked graves, Leonid Berman, the painter who fled the Russian Revolution and survived the Holocaust in rural France, and his wife, the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe.
It’s an eclectic community, so resonant of life’s caprices. For reasons I don’t really understand, I feel connected to all of them, as much now as when they were alive. I wonder where they have gone and why some of their lives were cut so short, while others survived wars and shipwrecks.
The daylight has come, and the ground will thaw. But I still wonder why, with all the sadness death brings, we inflict it so wantonly.
Several of you wrote me wonderfully kind notes about my mother’s death. Many who didn’t know Mum seemed to grasp her essence, which was heartwarming to me. She was not your standard-issue mother, but, of course, nobody’s is. Over the last weeks I have learned something about the American health care system and the bureaucracy of death, on which I will undoubtedly pontificate in the months ahead. I learned that people matter. Mum’s doctor was more than her medical professional. He was her friend, and he made house calls. And when staff members of all levels at her assisted-living residence embraced me in tears this week, I knew that people really cared for my mother.
The health system is a mess because too often it crushes that caring, and people don’t seem to be its focus. When Mum was in the hospital, I said to my sister, “we seem to be the least important people in the process . . . except for the patient.” To those who say, if you think it’s bad now, wait for Obamacare, I say, I can’t wait for Obamacare because there is something inherently incompatible between corporate demands and patient needs. Our lives should not be “measured out with coffee spoons.”
As Hospice shows. At every step of the last days, the people of this extraordinary organization were sensitive to the dignity of Mum’s life and the dignity of her death – something that seems too often absent in the political debates about when life begins and how it ends.
Mum couldn’t eat pizza any more because she had pulled her teeth out one night a while ago (which is another Mum story). So she set out before dawn yesterday morning in search of more celestial food. She went alone, leaving her worn and wracked body behind. Mum was not born to grow old, and yet she lived to be 90 with grace, anger at times, and some bewilderment.
“How did I get to be so old, Jamesie?” she asked not long ago.
I urged her to get up and walk to help her failing legs. But she was in pain and she was stubborn.
“They won’t let me walk here,” she said.
“Who won’t let you walk?" I asked incredulously.
“The people who run things,” she answered mysteriously.
“A woman comes here every morning for three hours, and she would be happy to help you walk.”
“I don’t feel like walking in the morning.”
“Well, we can ask her to come in the afternoon.”
“Oh . . . I don’t feel like walking in the afternoon either.
“Anyway,” she added, “all the people here tell me I look 50.”
“Fifty?”
“Well,” she conceded, “maybe 60.”
And in truth, she had barely a wrinkle on her face.
We were silent for a while, and then she said,
“Now I live only in my dreams?”
“What are your dreams?” I asked.
“Whatever I want them to be.”
“How are they?”
“Wonderful,” she said, as a smile came to her lips and she closed her eyes.
The phone rang late Thursday. “The doctor called from the emergency room,” my sister said. “Mum has huge clots on her legs and no pulse in her lower body. He said to come soon.” Our mother is 90, and while her spirit is irrepressible, her physical health has long been failing.
At the hospital the dire news was reiterated: her legs were virtually dead, she had a barely discernible pulse, and gangrene seemed imminent. While diagnosis was based on palpable visual evidence, it had not been vetted through her personal doctor, who is affiliated with a different hospital. His note explaining Mum’s history had inexplicably disappeared on its way to the ER, which was too bad because she has endured her startling symptoms for many years.
The doctors were good. The diagnosis was wrong. The system, which is corporate- rather than patient-centered, made understanding our mother’s unique situation almost impossible, and we, who have no medical expertise, had to translate between medical systems that did not communicate with each other.
Still, Mum’s health is failing, and we tried to prepare for what was to come. By 3 p.m. yesterday we had arranged for her return to her apartment with 24-hour care and hospice. She had eaten nothing in four days and slept a lot. “Let her know food is available,” the doctor said, “but don’t force her. She’ll know what she wants.”
“Mum’s had a good run,” I added portentously. “I think she’s trying to tell us something.”
At 3:15, she woke up and asked for a pizza.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy I thought of the opening lines of Anna Karenina as I watched my ecstatic son and daughter-in-law marry each other on Saturday. I thought about all the histories that had brought them there, about the future they envisioned together, and about the meaning of the seemingly simple ceremony that joined them. And I thought that each family creates its own balance of happiness and sadness as it faces the vagaries that life throws its way.
We spend much of our lives navigating between individuation and communal attachment, between asserting “I am” and longing for “we are.” In a civil ceremony in a non-denominational church, Jake and Emily spoke of a marriage in which each of them could grow and both of them could grow together. They spoke of the role of the “we” in preserving the “I” and the importance that each as an individual brings to both of them as a couple.
That concept of marriage often gets overwhelmed. In some cultures it remains little more than the transfer property. In others it is solely for dynastic or religious procreation. In our own, it has spawned an ugly debate about who can marry whom. Marriage is not bondage. It is a celebration of the most intimate of all love – that between two people, often but not always young.
After the ceremony we all marched through the streets of town behind a brass band playing songs of joyful celebration.
Our granddaughter, Calliope, will be going home today, having spent almost two weeks with us while her parents were in Alaska. We have fallen in love with this small person, who eats practically nothing, hears instructions selectively, and has more energy than we can bottle. Yet I was the last person who looked forward to grandfatherhood. For one thing, I wasn't old enough. For another, I had thrown my life into raising my own children. I still do – and they are still my reason for being every bit as much as I am, literally, theirs.
So how could I possibly have the time, the energy, even the love for the next generation? I had the rest of my life to lead.
But I now see that my role is different. As a father, I was intent on my children – on loving them, on helping them grow, on protecting them from harm, on preparing them to go out into the world – ever conscious that my desire to protect them from the world might be a disadvantage in preparing them for the world.
It is Calliope’s parents’ role to prepare her for the world. Mine is to use whatever wisdom I have acquired and whatever energy I have left to prepare the world for her.
Maybe we have the cycle of life backwards. The young must navigate the world as they find it. It is up to us, who have been through that, to change the world, in whatever small ways we can, so it becomes a little closer to the kind of place we wanted it to be when we were young.