What was I thinking? Chapter 37,592

Yesterday I found a stack of photographs from the 1975 dedication of the Poland, Ohio time capsule (at that time my mother was president of the Poland Historical Society). They were in a just-discovered time capsule of my own.

I am deaccessioning, because after 20 years it's time to bury my parents (No, they're not in the time capsule) so I am cleaning out my storage unit. There was a box labeled OLD STUFF. It was a big box, a heavy box, a sealed box. It was a sleeping dog I would no longer let lie.

Here are some of the things I found inside the sealed box:
The photographs from the time capsule dedication. I wonder if anyone in the village knows it exists!
Programs from celebrations at Poland Presbyterian Church in 1927.
Original membership applications for the Poland Library and Historical Society, probably from about 1924. The one shown is Mr. Steinfeld's.
Youngstown Vindicator roto section clippings about old-house tours (featuring, among others, my grandparents' house on College Street and my parents' house on Water Street) for years between 1945 and 1975.
Two half page roto section pictures from the mid 30s. One shows a group of girls, including my mother and her sisters Billie and Betsy, in Poland Woods. The other shows a group of young people, including Mother, her cousin Weedie, and other people on a horse-drawn sleigh at Zedakers' farm.
Programs from annual Junior Achievement awards dinners for my junior and senior high school years.
Programs for plays produced by my Junior Achievement company -- the only J.A. theater group in existence.
Programs for four years of high school academic awards banquets.

Six years of the Seminarian, my high school paper.
A program for the installation of new officers for the Poetry Club my junior year.
Aunt Betsy's first grade class photo from about 1927.
Letters from and newspaper clippings about a boy I had a massive crush on for years.
Pictures of me, My Hair, and Duke the Dog at the Grand Canyon during our grand tour of the U.S. and Canada.
An envelope containing My Hair. [When I lived in England, I cut it all off. The guy who did it went chop, chop, chop. I saved one hank and sent one to my ex-sweetheart, who still had Duke the Dog. I sent the third hank to my dad, from whom I received a telegram reading AWAITING RANSOM NOTE STOP]

A first-generation photocopy, on horrible paper, of a headline in the London Evening News, January 3, 1972. It appeared in only one edition, then the sub-editor woke up.
Hand-written notes on the contents of the rijsttafel at Garoeda in The Hague.
Hand-written notes on wild boar with juniper berries, after a meal in rural Luxemburg. (Afterwards I was asked to dance by two young men, Siegfried and Adolf.)
Two feet of very heavy chain.
Two empty water pistols.
One unbroken brown egg whose insides have evaporated.

I ask "What was I thinking?" because I cannot imagine a time when all those articles would ever have been near each other. Much less, why are they very carefully packed together in one box? And the chain? And the egg? Some of my past decisions have subsequently mystified me, but this leaves me beyond mystification.

Incidentally, everything listed down to Betsy in first grade is being sent to the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

Working Latinas

Latina Worker
by Doren Robbins
Then I notice through a triple-Americano-awakening moment,
in the mall food court, a young Latina cleaning around by the chrome rail
at Sbarro Pizza. Maybe a Guatemalan, possibly Salvadoran or
Honduran—

could've been Argentinean or Columbian, Chilean, Bolivian,
Panamanian—good chance a Peruvian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Mayan,
Toltec, Sephardic, Huichol coffee plantation or U.S. Fruit Company

or tobacco company or auto industry slave labor robot or CIA-trained
death squad Guardia Nacional butchery massacre survivor.

Several tables down from mine--roughly stacking chairs on tops
of tables—cussing in Spanish, in the mall food court, she hates her job,
I hate her job.

This poem is on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac* today. Two working Latinas immediately tumbled through my mind.

As the whole world knows, Sonia Sotomayor faces her second day of Senate questioning about her fitness to serve on SCOTUS. Her appointment may not be a slam dunk, but near enough.

Not many people know of the other Latina worker whose face came to me. Eridania Rodriguez, a handsome 46-year-old, came to New York from the Dominican Republic more than two decades ago. She’d raised her three kids in Inwood, the neighborhood surrounding the Cloisters at the northern end of Manhattan. She vanished from her job last Tuesday, leaving her purse and cell phone behind.

Rodriguez cleaned offices in a Wall Street-area office building and thought her working conditions were dangerous. A man working in the building had exposed himself to her, and she was frightened enough that she planned to leave at the end of last week. She was missing for four days before her body was found jammed into an air conditioning duct in the building.

I was struck by Rodriguez’s good looks. She was an attractive, strong-looking woman, and her children have been reported as ambitious and hardworking.

She could be Sotomayor’s mother. One Puerto Rican, one Dominican, one story. Ambitious for her children, hard-working, minding her own business. A day’s work for a day’s pay, sensibly knowing that if you’re scared it’s for a reason, and dignified enough to know there are things you don’t put up with. Being responsible and working out her notice. But, being unlucky.

When Sotomayor’s appointment was announced, in the New York area it was no surprise. It’s amazing (since Hispanic surnames are everywhere) that we’re still saying it’s time. After all, these are people who have been here for generations now. Its time was years ago.

But that it’s noteworthy for two Latina workers to be in different headlines the same day? It should be noteworthy that it’s noteworthy. It’s time.

*"Latina Worker" by Doren Robbins, from My Piece of the Puzzle. © Eastern Washington University Press, 2008.

What every cat owner knows, even without knowing

Now we know for sure that cats manipulate their owners. We knew it before, but Not Exactly Rocket Science has the data.

Too lazy to click on the link? Or -- let me guess -- is Hecate or Horatio lying on the mouse? Here's how cats tell you they're hungry.

Apparently you cannot hear this with your unassisted ear, but a hunger cry is hidden in an apparently otherwise standard purr. Recorded properly, it can be played back and separated out from the standard purring sounds, and when that's done it sounds like the cry of a human baby. How on earth did that evolve?

Of all sad words of tongue and pen

Like every retail outlet in the U.S., Bookstore C currently has a display of Michael Jackson material -- in our case, commemorative zines. A table near the cash desk has stacks; each is different. Cover photos are all different too -- among them a close-up of the small boy Michael, with glowing unblemished skin; dancing Michael, in black pants and white shirt and socks; in a bright red uniform with lots of gold, looking astoundingly like a young, dark Elizabeth Taylor, with one random lock danging over his forehead; and an almost skeletal Michael, wearing sunglasses and beige lipstick.

Last night an African-American family came in together: Mom, Dad, big sis, little brother. He must have been about eight, and restless -- swinging off the umbrella stand, crouching under the display tables. He crawled out from under the display and stood up next to the zine with the young Michael cover. He looked from one magazine to another, and his baffled little voice piped up: "Mommy, Daddy, was Michael Jackson black?"

He was lifting one issue after another, now talking to himself. "No -- look, he was white. No --" and then his voice raised again -- "Mommy, Daddy, Michael Jackson was black. Look here -- you can see it yourself!"

A short quarter century and a long 25 years

Today is Lydia's 25th birthday. It being Saturday, she went to town and ducked into an internet cafe to send a brief email.

She said, "I'm doing fine. They are giving excellent training, and although I've had some low spots I'm very glad I came. All is well, don't worry... I don't think I'll do anything much for my birthday. I might get myself something small, like a slice of cake or something, but I have no idea what I'll be able to find here." I predict that a year from now she will know the source of every sweet available in Swaziland.

A list followed. I will be scouring the internet for non-oily sunscreen in large quantities (you'd think the PC would have a source for all their pale volunteers in sunny lands). And perhaps I'd better just buy a case of Red Zinger and be done with it!

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I awoke and the presence of this other person in the room was huge. Her big dark eyes were open and she was watching, taking it all in. Many of the pics we have of Lydia that first day show her eyes open and alert. Her father and I were hushed and humble in the presence of this new intellect.

Yes! Ned Silverman's flowers arrived. And so did a nurse with a hypodermic. "What's that for?" I asked, shrinking away. The nurse uncovered my hip and started swabbing. "This is one time we know you're not pregnant," she said. "It's your german measles immunization."

What can get lost in Ürümchi

War is hell on history. Destroying places in order to save them has a long, sad, dirty tradition. One of the great shames of Bush 43 is Donald Rumsfeld’s blowing off the Baghdad looting with the idle words, “Stuff happens.”

Which is why I am all the sadder to hear of mob violence in the ancient Silk Road city of Urumqi. There are treasures there — not, perhaps, fabulous treasures of the sort that vanished from Baghdad, but treasures of culture, treasures of human industry.

Treasures of fabric, woven treasure of wool is what quite amazingly has been found in [then spelled] Ürümchi. One of humanity’s earliest manufactures, woven, dyed, ornamented clothing has been found in desert caves, preserved for thousands of years. At left: Mummified three-month-old baby in elaborately made, brightly-colored clothes. The nursing bottle is manufactured from a sheep's udder. The robe on the man (below right) is also woven, but is a less sophisticated weave than that of the child's swaddling. You can't see it here, but the edges of his robe are carefully piped in a brighter red.

Just as startling as what was in those caves wearing the clothing: blue-eyed, blonde, Caucasian mummies, mummies of Turkic peoples whose descendants are still seen among the Uighur people in the region. In 2000, Occidental College archaeologist and weaver Elizabeth Wayland Barber published The Mummies of Ürümchi, about the people, the mummies, and their manufactures, dated to 1500 BCE. They are 3500 years old.

Ürümchi has long boasted of being the world’s major city farthest from the sea. For eons it was protected by that desert distance. The discovery of its mummies was the first time anyone other than China hands ever heard of the place. However, in the past decade, the Chinese government has been building up industry in Ürümchi and moving in whole communities of Han Chinese.

Inevitably there’s bad feeling between the Han from the east and south, and the Muslim natives. It’s reasonable, I think, to fear that ethnic hatred and rivalry could lead to the destruction of the materials that have been recovered from the desert’s caves, and ending their continuing exploration.

Barber hooked me on her explorations with her book Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. She examined the history of textiles and the wealth they created in early societies, not only as an archaeologist but as someone whose avocation is weaving. Because of that and her other writing, I felt partnership and immediacy. I seemed to be in the room she entered in Ürümchi, examining the garments on the mummies. Noting their dyes, noting how the brightly striped socks were not woven or felted but simply carefully wrapped inside the white boots. Barber is a terrific teacher and the care and love with which she examined the mummies, their clothing, and other tomb textiles came right through her pages. Above: 3500-year-old plaid from Ürümchi mummy tomb.

So she made me her ally in wanting to find more caves in China’s western desert, and learn more about these out-of-place, out-of-time people and their manufactures. I dread the idea that ethnic jealousies could destroy these fragile relics. And unless there are bodies of outsiders paying attention to them, that is probably just what will happen.

My demon lover, Ned Silverman

My demon lover Ned Silverman might not have been a demon and was most definitely not my lover. He was also not many other things.

Long ago, in a kingdom very far away but near 51st and 1st, on a balmy spring Sunday I set out for the neighborhood park with Bleak House under my arm. When I arrived at the park, there sat neighbor Bob (from the next apartment) reading the Sunday Times. So I settled near him. Periodically Bob would read to me from the arts section and we would talk of opera and Carnegie Hall performances. People near us came and went. One fellow, about my age, looked up as we talked music and finally he joined the conversation. He was very knowledgeable.

I left and returned in a while and Bob and the other guy were still talking. Bob explained that his new friend was a conductor and composer. In those days I had an English accent, so when Bob got up to leave for a while, the fellow asked if I was English. I explained that I had lived in London for several years and only recently returned to New York. A coincidence! He too had recently returned to New York from the Netherlands — so recently that he didn’t even have an apartment yet but was staying with friends. He was a vice president of Philips and had been working in Europe for several years. He wasn’t sure about getting an apartment since he’d be spending the summer in Portland as conductor of the Portland Symphony’s summer program.

When Bob returned we continued to speak of music. The stranger was an Eastman graduate and been a fellow at McDowell. I mentioned an old friend who’d gone to Juilliard and written advertising jingles on the side. Another coincidence! He too had written many jingles, working a lot for BBDO. He sang some of his jingles, which Bob also knew. “What a great guy!” Bob said when he left. “He knows his stuff.” Bob went home, I dug into Bleak House, and the mysterious music man reappeared.

“Say, I’d like to call you,” he said to me. To my immediate and irrational panic. I was a single woman living alone in New York and this strange man might be an axe murderer! But I conquered my panic and gave him my card. Since the office was at 44th and 6th, I felt that my business card preserved my privacy somewhat. “By the way,” he said, “I’m Ned Silverman.”

A good tactician, that Ned. He didn’t call Monday, but he did call Tuesday. “I’m just leaving for Portland so I can’t chat, but are you free for dinner Thursday evening?” Well, hey — he was smart and knew a lot of cool stuff, and was nice looking and cosmopolitan. What was not to like? Of course I said yes, and (blushes with embarrassment) told him where I lived.
Just as I was hanging up the phone it occurred to me: what if something happens and I have to cancel? “Ned? Ned?” Dang — he was gone.

For some reason, knowing how to reach him “just in case” suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world … and I was stuck. But no! I called the Portland Symphony to leave a message, asking him to call and leave me a contact number.

“I’d like to leave a message for Ned Silverman,” I told the person who answered at the Portland Symphony.
“There’s nobody here by that name,” he said.
Oh, of course — the board had probably contracted with Ned and he wouldn’t be known to people in the office.
“He’s coming to Portland today — he’ll be conducting your summer program this year,” I explained.
After being connected to one person, than another, who did not know Ned would be there in just a few hours, I spoke with the executive director. “We’re not having a summer program this year,” he said.
Well, in a word, ????? Had I misunderstood? “Perhaps I misunderstood, and he was conductor of your summer program last year,” I suggested.
“I’ve never heard of Ned Silverman, ma’am,” said the executive director.

So I called Neighbor Bob. “You remember that fellow we talked with in the park on Sunday?” I asked. “His name’s Ned Silverman, and he called to ask me to dinner Thursday, and I didn’t get his number. Didn’t he say he was going to be conductor of the Portland Symphony’s summer program?”
“Well, congratulations,” Bob said enthusiastically. “He’s an interesting guy. Bring him by for a drink after dinner! And yeah — he did say he was going to Portland. You could always call him there if you have to.”

I looked out the window at 6th Avenue and drummed my fingers on my desk. What to do, what to do? So I called the alumni office at Eastman School of Music. After some waiting, I learned that nobody named Silverman, with a first name that could possibly be shortened to Ned, had any degrees from Eastman, and in fact no such person had ever even taken a class at Eastman.

Nobody like Ned Silverman had ever been a fellow at McDowell Colony either. Ned Silverman didn’t work for Philips Records, in this country or in Europe.

My last hope was Mu Murphy, who had been my aunt Billie’s roommate decades before, and who had spent her career booking various types of talent for BBDO. I explained the whole thing to Mu. “Honestly, this sounds like something Billie would have done,” she said dryly. She agreed that the world is full of crazies and you can’t be too careful and told me she would take some time after the office closed to go through old files. The next day she confirmed that Ned Silverman had not been employed by BBDO and had not been a contractor either.

I had all day Wednesday to think about it. When I got home from work Thursday, I talked to the doorman, Avi. “A guy named Ned Silverman is coming by at 7.30,” I said. “Before calling me, give him this note. If he leaves, buzz me when he’s out of sight.”

Avi buzzed me at 7.40 and I went out to the front door. “Your friend gave me a different name — I think he’s Israeli,” Avi said. “So I told him I had a note for Ned Silverman, and he said, oh, yeah, that’s me, so I gave him your note.”
“And what did he do then?” I asked.
Avi pointed to the front garden’s retaining wall. “He sat down there and read your note.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And he laughed and laughed and shook his head and said he couldn’t believe you went to all that trouble, and he went down toward Second Avenue.”

My note had told him that I had learned that he wasn’t who he said he was, and I listed all the places I had checked. However, I also told him that I would be happy to meet him for dinner, but he would have to have his passport and driver’s license and proof of employment. And so Ned Silverman disappeared from East 51st Street. Neighbor Bob was really disappointed!

Years passed. I was married and pregnant with Lydia, renting office space in Boston from A Better Chance. The ABC ladies and I often ate lunch together, and one day talk turned to Strange Situations With Men. I told of my encounter with Ned Silverman and pretty much walked off with the prize for weirdest story. Months later, several hours after Lydia was born, I was dozing when an aide bustled in with a lavish flower arrangement. “It must be from your husband,” she said. “It’s really beautiful. He takes good care of you.”

I reached for the card. “Yours always, Ned Silverman,” it read. Even with stitches where you shouldn’t have stitches, it was worth a good belly laugh. The ladies of A Better Chance remembered!

More years passed. On Lydia’s birthdays I always tell her when-you-were-born stories, and (when she was old enough) I told her about Ned Silverman, adding the coda of the wonderful flowers. Sometimes she’d ask me to tell stories when her friends visited, and the story of Ned Silverman was always a hit. A few years ago, I had surgery in Mount Kisco. Waking up in the hospital the next day, I found a lovely arrangement of flowers.

I reached for the card. “Eternally yours, Ned Silverman,” it read. Lydia in action! The card is on the fridge door even now.

So, two weeks ago when Lydia left for Swaziland and I found a lovely bouquet of snapdragons waiting at my door, my first, wildly irrational thought was: Ned Silverman! But then it appeared that the card, which read “Moms need flowers” was from Lydia’s dad. But no — it was an additional layer of mistaken identity. Having thanked the wrong person here, I want to give a shout-out to my college sweetheart Green Tanager (left), who has known me so long he used to remember my mother telling him not to wake the baby, i.e. me.

Whoever the Israeli music man might be, I have had infinitely more fun telling that story than I ever would have had if I’d gotten to know him. But inquiring minds want to know: was The Man Who Wasn't Ned Silverman a demon?

Long ago and in a kingdom far away, that thought hadn't occurred to me (axe murderers were the then-current trend). But now that I work in Bookstore C, I see all around me proof that there are indeed demons, and vampires too. I could look it up! But I like my story better, not knowing.

Bookstore update: Evolution for Dummies

The customer approached me on the sales floor. "I can't find Evolution for Dummies," she explained. "You must have it, right?"
We chatted as I checked the computer inventory. "What are you using it for?" I asked.
"Actually, I'm kind of insulted," she answered. "I'm a grad student in education, and we're a classful of science teachers who have all been teaching this stuff for years. But the prof thinks we need this in addition to our other reading."
"Well, the Dummies books are generally thorough groundings in whatever," I said, thinking positively.
"I know! I'm using the one for bridge*, and it's terrific, but we were all science majors, and besides, we're also reading Origin," she replied.
She'd really caught my attention now. "What else are you reading? Any Ernst Mayr?"
"Yes," and she named a couple other writers vital to any sound discussion of evolution today. It sounded like a heavier reading load than you might expect, and the customer agreed that the prof has a good reputation and people come out of his classes well prepared.

She was right! We didn't have the book on our shelves, but I found it for her at the Bookstore C branch in White Plains. I reflected that the customer's true objection to buying the book was being told that she needed a Dummies as a text.

Dummies books are scattered through the store, shelved with others of their subject matter. I resolved not to hesitate about using them for my own classes should the need arise. There's a Bible for Dummies and a New Testament for Dummies. Probably not a UU Church Polity for Dummies, though.

*Full disclosure: from where I sit right now, I can reach out to Dummies books on Digital Photography, Photoshop 7, Excel 2003, Word, eBay, and starting an eBay business.

Swaziland update: First impressions

So: Lydia is training near Piggs Peak, and Swaziland is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. She recommends Google Image and I have saved you the trouble by posting some here. SiSwati has eight kinds of nouns. The PC handbook has 38 acronyms and is missing quite a few. She misses Red Zinger tea. Above: From the Piggs Peak home page.

Image of a Swazi village by Fosters4, found on Flickr.

When do I leave? Round-trip Jo'burg is about $1k. I can hardly wait! Of course -- and these are Lydia's doubts, not mine -- first she has to complete her training. Above: Another posting from Google.Image.

Access to Water is a Human Right. But …

The story of the New York City water supply is actually one of the Great True Stories. The quest for good drinking water is as old as the city (approaching the end of its fourth century) and involves Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, banking law, Irish immigrants, transported communities and abandoned villages, wile, guile, imagination and ingenuity. Photo at left: Many homes from old Katonah were moved to a new site a mile away, to allow for the construction of the Croton reservoir.

And as a resident of Westchester County, New York City’s water comes out of my taps — and it’s probably the best municipal drinking water in the world. Why any of my neighbors wants to buy bottled water is beyond me! Our water really does come from giardia-free crystalline mountain streams and is rigorously protected, not just by the city but by the people who live in the hundreds of square miles of the watershed. NYS DEC map at right: You can be hours from New York City (shown in purple) deep in the mountains and still have an NYC reservoir nearby.

The UU Service Committee is promoting a movement for water rights in California. And that's a grand idea ... but wait a minute. What does California do with the water it's got? Does California -- do most communities in the arid southwest use water wisely? Why should UU energy be directed toward providing more water to people living in a part of the country that cannot support the population it had forty years ago, much less today?

This question has several parts. One relates to public policy about a part of the United States that has far exceeded the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. One of the parts relates to public policy that continues to promote settlement there. And a third part relates to the goals of the UUSC. Yes, I believe that access to drinking water is a human right. But before we encourage Californians to take to the streets and the airwaves to demand more of the world's resources -- and given that nobody is lying dying in a dusty Marin street as I write -- why not assess the true starting and ending points of any suggested policy change?

In the first place, why should our denominational energies go to supporting anything as unsustainable, in any guise, as development in the southwest? Here we have a direct collision of long-term goals. The western and southwestern states need a water policy that goes further than water. The UUSC should be lobbying for a clear-eyed evaluation of today's real water management in the southwest in terms of future water needs across the continent.

Here's what I believe the UUSC should be working for. 1) Acknowledgement that access to clean, drinkable water is a human right and a government responsibility. 2) Therefore, government provision of trucked-in (if necessary) water to communities that lack other access to it. 3) Making equitable distribution of existing water a first step in any water-provision plan. As long as existing water supplies are unfairly priced and inequitably distributed, no state should be looking beyond its own borders for water. 4) Making desalination of sea-water the second step in any large water-provision plan, rather than a someday step. 5) Acknowledging that the abandonment of existing communities in unsustainable locations will happen, and plan for it -- starting now -- as a rational solution.

It's been only a year since the Great Lakes Compact was finally signed. The eight states and two provinces that surround the Great Lakes agreed on their management, today and into the future. There have already been legal challenges to companies wishing to bottle water from the GL watershed and sell it outside the watershed. It's hard for me to believe that politicians in the arid southwest don't have their eyes on GL water as a solution for their own foolish overdevelopment and bad management. The Compact pledges the signers to wise management (which includes effective use, reuse, and even re-reuse) and I predict that it will come under pressure from the arid southwest. Sending Great Lakes water south and west is not good management, wise use, or sustainable. I also believe the UUSC should have, as a goal, support for the Great Lakes Compact.

Which is the story of a large international community that made a good-faith, successful plan for resource management long into the future. It's kind of like the story of New York City's water supply! And nothing at all like the we'll-think-about-it-tomorrow greed that has characterized planning in the southwest.

The English call it "bodging", Part 1

ChaliceChick posted a link to There, I Fixed It, a website of unlikely repairs. It doesn't really remind me of 26 Water Street in Poland ... and yet, and yet, there are certain similarities.

When I was 15, my parents bought a house in the center of the village. Oh happy day! Yellow Creek flowed behind the house. I was ecstatic! We could walk everywhere and the property had beautiful trees. Only then did my mother warn me that the house had been neglected for many years.

My parents bought the house from Mr. L, who for three years had been living in another town with the second Mrs. L. The first Mrs. L had been very sick, bedridden, for a number of years before her death several years earlier, and the house had been unloved during her illness and afterwards.

Some of the house's issues were honestly a matter of taste. Like the silver woodwork, for instance. Yes! All the interior woodwork was painted silver. Every last bit of it including the kitchen. All the ceilings had been papered with silvery designs on white, and every room had different, dark, surly wallpaper with silver in the design. My bedroom was dark green and mustard-yellow and silver paisley (30s vintage, perhaps); the dining room was striped navy, dark red, and silver. But wait -- both rooms were papered on only three walls and the fourth wall was knotty pine paneling in its full orange spotted splendor.

Then there were issues of age. The house started out as a one-room cabin for the Methodist preacher. It was added to, a room at a time, as he married and his family grew. So every room was differently proportioned, no two doors were the same size or design, the windows had been installed one at a time, no two fireplaces matched, there were relics within the walls of abandoned structures, and each room's floor was at its own level. Of course there wasn't a plumb line or level surface in the place. And we won't mention closets.

So there's taste and age, and then there's neglect and weirdness. Take oven cleaner, for instance. Beneath the kitchen sink we found dozens of cans of oven cleaner. The housekeeper had apparently tried every brand manufactured over more than a decade, to little avail. I once ventured into the house to find my mother, aunt Billie, and Mr. B all gathered around the open oven, trying vainly to imagine what could have happened in the oven to make it like that.* Whatever had happened had happened often. Billie suggested that a baked alaska had exploded, which seemed overoptimistic considering the L family's probable cooking skills.

So that was neglect. Somewhere on the cusp of neglect and weirdness came the installation of the house's water supply -- possibly in the house's fiftieth year -- in which every left-hand faucet was for cold water and every right-hand faucet for hot. But the first truly weird thing we encountered was the kitchen cabinets.

The house was such a shambles that at first we lived partly at the farm and partly at my grandmother's, on College Street. I was the first to actually try to organize the kitchen, and it occurred to me that the kitchen cupboards were shallower than they should have been. We saw that at some point, cupboards had been built directly in front of, and screwed to, the built-in cupboards. So the additional ones were pulled away, and we found cupboards directly behind them, with the doors nailed shut. Removing the nails, we found shelves still stocked with plates, cups, baking powder, and a few other things in tins and jars. The old shelves were exactly the same size as the ones that had been added and we could never guess why they had so carefully been replaced: a totally meaningless change.

*When as a Hastings trustee I learned that the heaviest pollution on the waterfront's old Anaconda site was where a vat of PCBs had exploded in the early 40s, I saw a possible answer. Mr. L was an industrial chemist. Home manufacture of PCBs?

As you boil your bed sheets in bleach to get out the mildew, ponder this

And keep pondering as you scrub the mold off your bathroom walls and maybe from behind your ears: our reservoirs are still not at 100% of capacity.

Well, the Schoharie Reservoir (at 91%) is the farthest away. Maybe they didn't get our 19 days of rain up that far north. But lookit: the Croton system, just a half hour's drive from here, is two percent empty. I'm baffled, because we can all remember when it's been full to 100% of capacity.

Delighted with Peter Morales's election win

Over the weekend, the Unitarian Universalist Association elected a new president. Peter Morales — a latecomer to the UU ministry and a former newspaper publisher — was elected with about 58% of the vote. It was the first UUA election in which absentee ballots were cast, and I was happy to cast one of my congregation’s. (The UUA is an organization of congregations, not of individuals; this was specifically established at one point in our history.)

At the end of the General Assembly at which he was elected, President Morales (the UUA’s first Latino president) presided over his first board meeting. Notes from the meeting have appeared on many blogs, and it seems that relations were a little stilted. I’m not operating with any inside info here, but UUA Convener Gini Courter, who was reelected herself, endorsed Morales’s opponent Rev. Laurel Hallman, the favorite of many who might be perceived as an east coast establishment within UUism.

I am sure that the Hallman endorsers will deny that there is an east coast establishment inside the UUA. When I moved to New York from Ohio and San Francisco more than thirty years ago, I could see (and feel!) a real difference in Unitarianism in the east. And that’s not mentioning New England, which is even more different. There are sound historical reasons for these differences and it doesn’t do right by our history to pretend they aren’t there, even though congregations in the far west are just as likely to be in the eastern tradition as they are in the midwestern.* Incidentally, nobody including me is painting this as a sectional upset or anything like that.

I supported Morales precisely because he was out of the mold. The two candidates did not have opposing visions, but their emphases were very different from each other. It seemed to me beforehand that we would be defining our history to date — especially late 20th century events — by the choice made in this election. At left: Peter Morales as a Knight International Press Fellow in Peru.

Peter Morales won my heart with a speech he made in 2006, describing a study reported in the American Sociological Review a year earlier. I will spare you the numbers, but the point was that between 1985 and 2005, Americans lost relationships. That is, they went from having three people to whom they felt they could confide close personal matters, to having less than one. The sociologists doing the study were so shocked by the results that they didn’t publish for a long time, while they reexamined their data.

Or, in Peter Morales’s own words: Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life — and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been. The close friendships that are so essential to us are being eroded at a frightening rate. One in four Americans has no close personal relationship at all. Zero.

At the risk of tedium, I will continue quoting. Let me throw just one more statistic at you. At the end of the Second World War about half of all American households had three generations in them. … Today there are almost no three generation households left. The two or three percent of multi-generational households that exist are almost all poor recent immigrants. … Today, one out of four households in American is a single person household. Let me say that again. One quarter of American addresses today has only one person living there. …You and I are relational creatures. We become fully human in a network of relationships. We desperately long to belong. We need community the way we need food and shelter [but]... we have created a society that systematically rips apart human relationships. Yet our need for deep relationship never goes away. Above, standing at left: Seminarian Morales with other members of LUUNA, the Latino/a UU Networking Association.

This oppressive and painful reality presses in on me no matter which of my most important hats I wear. As myself growing older, as the mother of an only child, as a student in ministry, and as an elected official, this social reality is terrible. And the future of today’s reality is even worse. I don’t believe people evolved to live the way Americans do now, and the longer I see myself as a person preparing for ministry, the worse the issue appears.

Peter Morales saw that study and he knew, from his own life and ministry, that it told a real truth. He’s within a very Anglo tradition, yet he comes to it from outside that tradition, which is perhaps why he can see it so clearly. He sees UUs as having good news and wants to lead us to a greater understanding of what we’ve lost, where we can take ourselves, and who we can be for people who need us.

*Mark Harris of Watertown, my UU history prof, told me that one defining characteristic can be that eastern congregations have communion sets. Communion sets! As an Ohioan, I was shocked.

Thinking of der Lenny*

Millions of words have been written on Leonard Bernstein's magic, and the mythology doesn't need my addition to the bulk. But I remembered today an LP record my parents bought for me when I was in grade school, Leonard Bernstein and What is Jazz?

In two sides of one LP, Bernstein used the text from several of his broadcasts. I particularly recall his explanation that the blues used iambic pentameter. First he played Bessie Smith singing,
"I woke up this mornin' with an awful achin' head.
Oh, I woke up this mornin' with an aaaawful achin' head.
My new man had left me just a rooooom and an empty bed."

He appended some lines from Macbeth, singing
"I will not be afraid of death nor bane.
I said, I will not be afraaiid of death nor bane.
'Til Birnam Forest cooomes to Dunsinane."

It worked! And it must have been a good lesson for me to remember it all these years.

*As the adoring Viennese called him.

It's too easy

I just can't bring myself to quote Mark Sanford's icky email to his mistress, Maria of Argentina. The point is being made that nowhere does Sanford use a feminine pronoun, so ... given the text, could it be that "Maria" is a guy? After all, Sanford is a Republican.

No, what I want to tell you about is the Ohio kind of illicit lovin'. Dr. Harding's eldest child Warren became an influential newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, then a state senator*, a state lieutenant governor, a U.S. Senator, and finally, President of the United States. It helped that he married well.

Wasn't he handsome? He looked like a President. Unlike a good president, however, it was said of Harding that "If Warren had been a girl, she'd always have been in the family way, because that man just couldn't say no." It must be acknowledged that when 15-year-old Nan Britton wrote him fan letters and mash notes, Harding counseled her to wait until she grew up and found a nice young man her own age.

But he didn't take his own advice! No. The Ur-Monica, minus the thong, Nan subsequently claimed to have enjoyed (I use the word lightly) knee-tremblers with Harding in his Senate office and later, in White House closets. She also claimed that her daughter, father otherwise unknown, was his.

And she produced love letters to prove it. They sizzle -- that Ohio kind of sizzle! "Oh, my girlie -- tell me my kisses don't disgust you." Show me the woman who could resist such talk! Please note that Nan Britton let fragments of his letters, like that one, out in public to prove their love. To the right: Handsome Harding, looking left, a vile canard. He'd never do that. But what of Harding's wife Florence? Some averred that she'd killed him. Alas for conspiracy theorists, he probably died of just the same thing that took William Jennings Bryan, a busted gut.

*Imagine Harding in Albany today.

Google + Blogger = censorship

Censorship. What a dirty word and what a surprise.

Octavian Coifan, a leading blogger in the area of perfume and fragrance, was told today by Blogger.com that it removed from 1000 Fragrances a posting found offensive by the House of Guerlain.

Guerlain, one of the oldest surviving fragrance houses in the world, is currently owned by LVMH (stands for Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy), a holder of luxury brands. LVMH's lawyers apparently made a complaint to Google and Blogger.

I and many of Octavian's other fans read the offending piece a few days ago. No matter how I try to view it with marketing eyes, I cannot see it as offensive. Octavian was comparing a new Guerlain fragrance to one manufactured by another company. He compared the scent itself as well as the packaging and the advertising, and showed the two bottles and two advertisements.

It doesn't matter, in one sense, which was first; the market will choose the survivor. If the other company (named in Octavian's piece, but I forget it) believes the Guerlain product infringes on its own, it has every legal right to take Guerlain to court. Taking out a blog and blogger doesn't affect the first company's rights at all, and that company certainly has both grounds for a suit and the money to pursue it.

Fragrance blogs are what you might expect of enthusiasts about anything. The blogmeister is very knowledgeable, and many followers, equally so. Their blogs discuss the histories of fragrances, stories of ingredients and inventors and copies and names and top notes and formulations and trends, and and and. Blogger and followers blog and follow because they live for the topic! It would be the same for wine or beer lovers, model train enthusiasts, or camera-crazed photographers, Kindle users, BlackBerry users.

Like many, many perfumistas, Octavian loves the older Guerlain fragrances. Like many perfumistas, he dislikes what has happened to them as LVMH has substituted cheaper ingredients. Many bloggers discuss this. Guerlain is not the only offender, and greed is not the only cause -- the European Community is also forcing substitutions because of contact allergies among consumers. Many bloggers discuss that too. So why is LVMH singling out Octavian?

And more pressingly for the thousands of us who have blogs on Blogger.com -- why did Google and Blogger buckle under to LVMH? Followers of newspaper blogs know that newspaper business offices are excruciatingly vulnerable to pressure from advertisers. Given the difference in financial stability (etc.) between Google and LVMH, I'd have thought all the power was on Google's side, and ours.

Mike Ullman -- formerly of Canfield, Ohio -- was Directeur General, Group Managing Director, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (luxury goods manufacturer and retailer) from 1999 to 2002; President of LVMH Selective Retail Group from 1998 to 1999. I knew him when: he was in eighth grade and I in tenth, working backstage at the Youngstown Civic Children's Theater.

9.30 p.m. in Jo'burg, Mbabane

Our household Peace Corps volunteer touched down in Johannesburg a couple hours ago, and I hope the PC fed her team of 10 and put them to bed after a flight that started at 5 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday.

After writing my weepy blog entry Monday morning, I did what you might laughingly call "roused" Lydia. We got out of the house in time to miss the Chinatown bus* to DC, so she got onto a Metroliner, for a much more relaxed ride. One last phone call: did I leave several checks behind? How about my Peace Corps handbook? No and yes. And another call yesterday from Dulles: is my phone charger there? No. And off she went for her two-year adventure.

Next up: three months of language training in-country. Country = Swaziland. There will be no Peace Corps blog; everyone does it, she probably won't have internet** access, and she has two other blogs to maintain if and when.

*"What is the Chinatown bus anyway?" I asked as we hit 138th Street. "The Chinatown bus" is a definite thing -- cheap bus lines that link Chinatowns around the east coast. Who knew that Buffalo has a Chinatown? $55 one way. This is not a ride that goes to a bus terminal. Look outside your nearby Waffle House, though, and you might see it. The Fung Wah bus has "longest history chinatown bus".

**One suggested purchase that did make it into Lydia's luggage was the Solio, a solar-powered charger for various electrics up to but not including a computer.

4.15 a.m.

The room is only just not dark. Through the open window, the Hudson Valley sighs, a long drawn-out exhale that accompanies a single drift of rain. (Rain, entering its sixteenth straight day.)

Another long drawn-out exhale beside me, and my daughter Lydia stirs in her sleep. In the near-dark I can just see the long ripples of her hair against the lighter sheet. One breath of her Lydia mandarin-cinnamon smell drifts past me.

Somewhere not too far away, late-home revelers laugh and call out. The sound echoes through the neighborhood and is cut off as they remember that their neighbors sleep. A single car growls uphill.

I rise and go to the window, moving the lace curtains aside to let the warm-cool damp breeze into my face. Through the apple tree's ghostly branches, I know the Palisades can be seen during the day but it's dark and misty still.

4.29 a.m. The dawn chorus begins. One, two, three separate birds call out to their mates, and morning is officially underway: June 21, 2009.

Shame, scorn, and the UU quest

Imagineering Faith was Rev. Christine Robinson's sermon at First Unitarian in Albuquerque last Sunday. I find it a remarkable sermon, because it examines feelings common to many UUs, and provides the first sound explanation for those feelings I've ever encountered.

As someone who was brought up in a Unitarian household (both parents became Unitarians) I am a rare bird in most any UU congregation. At least three-quarters of American UUs came to it as adults. In my own congregation of about 170, there are eight of us UUs from early childhood.

The path from being a UU child to being a UU adult is not necessarily a smooth one. Lots of our Sunday school classmates wandered off in other directions, and most of us rediscovered the religion for ourselves when we were grown. A congregation of questers and doubters, most of whom do not agree on the same definition of anything, is not likely to produce kids who ask no questions but move forward into its adult ranks.

But back to Christine Robinson's sermon. Why is it meaningful? And what's this about shame and scorn? I invite you to read it for yourself, but in a nutshell: Robinson suggests that shame is the feeling that something is wrong with you. Not that you have done something wrong: that's guilt. Shame is about who we are. Shame damages us forever.

Scorn, says Robinson, is the kind of rhetoric used to engender shame in another person. She goes on to observe that the kind of political commentary enriching Rush Limbaugh and others of his breed uses scorn as its weapon.

Robinson goes on to point out how, as children -- whether we were active UUs or simply the kind of children who would grow up to be UUs -- we were likely to be questioners, having doubts, not fitting into the sets of beliefs that those around us seemed to hold. For our friends or for most of the adults we knew, their faith was totally natural -- but we didn't have it. And what those transactions induced in us was shame.

Shame breeds anger. And that anger in many UUs and religious "liberals" is all around us. Attributing it to shame, and attributing our shame to having to deal with a world of faith when we ourselves did not have faith, seems to me to be a masterly understanding of many UUs. And that anger against people of faith -- and even people who simply use the language of (usually) Christianity -- is a corrosive element in many of our congregations.

A few months ago, my minister was absent one Sunday and his stand-in a) wore a stole over his suit, b) used the words "God" and "faith," c) prayed, d) spoke a benediction at the end of the service, and e) lifted his hands, palms out, when he gave that benediction. Some members of the congregation were unhappy; one or two were furious and rude. As my congregation's unofficial intern, I subsequently apologized for the rudeness he encountered. He said, "We must learn to be gentle with one another, and we have not always been so."

UU-ism has changed a lot in my lifetime. When I was in school, Unitarians were often WASP-y intellectuals, mirroring our early New England spiritual ancestors. Newcomers were generally escapees from orthodoxy, like my parents -- one from an Irish Catholic family, one from a Scots Presbyterian family. They admired and embraced the tradition and were relieved to have left their families' certainties behind.

Converts anywhere carry their own baggage, though. No matter what discovered universe you embrace, you are also an ex-something. Early 20th-century religion went deep into the personalities of its children, so mid-century UU congregations had large numbers of ex-Lutherans, ex-Catholics, ex-Presbyterians; being an "ex" was significant to them. Across the U.S. there was also a significant cohort of European Jewish immigrants, prosperous, well-educated, often atheists, and generally wary and in shock. Often the significant characteristic Unitarians shared with each other was the sense that they didn't belong anywhere else. This nourished anger too.

So it's no surprise to find, in the old 1964 blue hymnal, shame and anger institutionalized. I periodically return to the blue hymnal for readings no longer in broad use, but what I find are works by apologists like him who wrote "Let us cherish the state that her mighty ends may be achieved." There is little worship and praise and exaltation; there is sackcloth and ashes and guilt. Shame is just down the road. So is anger.

So how have we changed in that half century? People coming in the door now may be in a mixed marriage seeking a place to bring up their children to value both traditions. Equally often, these parents will come from families virtually without religion. They are not escaping from generalized oppression. So what is their anger about?

Here's where Robinson makes an interesting leap from political culture to religion. The Limbaughs, she notes, have used scorn as their significant weapon. We -- their opponents -- are not just wrong, we are bad. We are not just bad, we are evil. Rhetoric leaps high as the speakers' ratings must; without high ratings, these entertainers will wither and die, and shock gives high returns on investment. So the language of scorn and hatred escalates. The wounds go deeper into everyone's hearts, and even people who are not out on a theological limb feel shamed and the anger spreads.

I think we UUs have gone wrong by not acknowledging anger that lies among us and doing something about it. Our hymn We Are a Gentle, Angry People for some unfathomable reason celebrates this anger ... but does nothing with it. It simply states that we are angry, one of the most impotent statements you can imagine.

How much better off we would be, and how much better people we would be, to get to the root of this anger and do something with the knowledge. I like Robinson's sermon immensely, because she does confront the reality, she examines its meaning, and she begins the discussion.

Christine Robinson's pic comes from the Albuquerque UU website, and the offending stole is shown at the UniUniques website.

My hair #1: The golden anniversary of the man with the golden hands

Admit it -- you have no idea what this entry will be about. Am I letting you into my inner kinkster? Unfortunately not.

Clyde told me this morning that he is celebrating his 50th year in the hair dressing profession this month. Last year he sold Chou Chou to Vera [Omigawd! My hair! What will happen to My Hair???] and decided to take it easy by working only three days a week as an employee.

In addition to being a genius -- and I don't use the term lightly -- with scissors and color, Clyde has had an ... interesting life. Some of his friends are famous, some are glamorous, all are smart and interesting. Clyde is not (his his words) "some asshole hair stylist." More than that, he's a good friend who lends me books (most recently, Francis Collins) and CDs (such as his old pal Stan Getz).

Are he and his intellectual wife Ervene going off into some retirement sunset? No, although their passports are waiting to for even more use, what Clyde is doing with his time these days is creating a new modern arts museum in the lower Hudson Valley. It's his story to tell, not mine, but they have a building and a scintillating board and you will be hearing more from them in surprising ways.

I will tell more about both Clyde and My Hair in the future. But you can listen to the man himself at Clyde's Corner. Clyde can still be reached at 914-478-HAIR. I know the number well.