Auntie in Ireland

My music-loving, sporty, rosy cheeked, dimpled and charming nephew, Adam, is not just a bunch of Irish stereotypes rolled into one adorable package. But on a recent trip to Belfast to visit my sister Sarah, bro-in-law Mike and their aforementioned Leprechaun-sized cutie, I realized that Ireland and Irish culture is now a significant part of my immediate family's heritage. It is the home of my sister, and the native land of my nephew, his future siblings and their father. Of course, I've known this for years now (Sarah and Mike have been married since 2003), but it hit me during this trip in a way it hasn't before.

Alas, there is no Blarney in my ethnic make up (it being entirely English, Scottish and Dutch), which has always bothered me. No one ever says, Kiss me, I'm English! (That'd make those stiff upper lips quiver...) In fact, I remember lying outright in middle school, figuring that there must be some renegade branch of the family tree that crossed the Irish Sea (it's not that far, after all), but there is no evidence to back up this claim.

Now, however, I'm Auntie Ray to a true Irish lad who will grow up in the land of green hedges and white sheep, gray rainclouds and old stone. (Ireland, of course, is also home to grocery stores, gas stations, schools, stadiums, concert halls and movie theaters, most of which are super modern as oppose to ye olde.) He will say "boot" instead of "trunk" and "bin" instead of "garbage can" and "ice lolly" when he means popsicle. His American cousins (future children of my siblings) will marvel at his accent, as he will, no doubt, remark upon theirs. When we go to Ireland it will not be to tour old castles and buy bulky wool sweaters, but to visit family, as I did last week. We will take walks around neighborhoods and visit public parks and rec centers. We will run errands, see movies and download coupons to local restaurants. We may even eventually witness school plays and sporting events. Ireland will feel as homey as anywhere else family lives and Sarah's kids will be our guides, laughing at our Americanisms and teaching us about their lives, now a part of our shared family culture.

And this culture may include the following very cool things about Ireland I grew to appreciate this trip:

1) Cool public pools. We visited a rec center in a nearby town with not one but four high-quality and elaborate water slides. Of course, it was all inside since even in July Ireland is not the tropics. But the slides wound all around the building, blue and green tubes that spun, twirled and plummeted. All this and a pirate ship for the little ones.

2) High-quality universal health care. My sister pays nothing to take my nephew to the doctor and nothing for his prescriptions. This eliminates the often-agonizing internal debate parents in the States must have. (Is s/he really that sick? Is it worth taking him in?) It's not a choice we should ask people to make when their children are involved. It cost Sarah exactly nothing to have a baby, and it costs @ 40 Euro for her to visit her doctor (this acts as a co-pay and includes any procedures she may need as a result of the visit). She never has to wait in ridiculous lines and considers her care of the highest quality. What's not to love? (And, yes, let's all keep pushing for universal health care in the States!)

3) Hedges in general and hedge mazes in particular. Drive a mile (or less!) out of any Irish city and you will soon be motoring past a grass-green countryside stitched with dark-green hedges. Ridiculously picturesque. A deep knowledge of hedge cultivation also leads to hedge mazes! We visited one near Sarah's. It was so cool! If I ever win the lottery, I am so building my own hedge maze.

4) Round towers. I love these things. Built to protect people and valuables of a village or monastery against marauding Vikings (of which there were many in the 800-900s). Now, ancient signposts of the Dark Ages, still standing secure amid the rolling hills. I didn't see any this visit, but I have to put in a plug here.

5) Real fries (ie: chips). Fries that are thick and well cut. Fries that clearly were once potatoes and might even have the skin still on them. Fries fried to golden perfection.

6) St. Georges Market, Belfast. A farmers market held in a Victorian market hall (cause things in Ireland can't be held outside. Pretty much ever). Organic everything, a European Union's worth of food, cute, non-kitchy crafts, live music, homemade chocolate, local cheeses. All under one roof.

I'm still getting used to many things in Ireland (the narrow roads, the near-constant gray, the wee-ness of almost everything), but this visit has put me well on my way to being a member of a fully bi-cultural family as Adam's favorite auntie!

(If you want me, I'll be under the table avoiding the barrage of protests from Adam's four other aunties...)

The Kindle report

Will you read it curled in bed? Will you crave a page instead?
Will you miss the booky smell? Will a screen do just as well?

With a tip of the hat to Dr. Seuss, these are all questions I've received from curious bibliophiles since purchasing the Amazon Kindle. As most of you know, the Kindle is much like an iPod for books. You download what you want from Amazon, then can read the books on a specially designed screen. The device weighs less than a pound and stores up to 1,500 texts (be they books, magazines, newspapers, etc.).

My decision to purchase a Kindle was not taken lightly, and it has changed the way I think about books. But not in a bad way. While I was making up my mind, I worried the Kindle was a souless device that takes the bookiness out of books. It is silent (no more rustling pages), odorless and plastic. What in the name of heaven will they think of next?



You may agree. Books are more than the sum of their parts, so how can reading one on a screen be the same as reading a page as Guttenberg intended?

Let me assure you that it is. You're halfway there if you already think of books as more than objects.

Even before we get philosophical, I should add that a Kindle has a lot of features that successfully mimic books. Most importantly, the screen is not back-lit. Unlike your computer screen, you can't read a Kindle in the dark. This diminshes completely the threat of headaches and swimming eyes that we all experience after too many hours in front of our trusty laptops. The words in a Kindle edition book are sharply defined, the screen is many-pixeled and the font is easy on the eyes. I have had no problem reading my Kindle far into the night, as I would with any traditional book.

Moreover, Kindles operated in the good, ol' USA have a direct, wireless link to the Kindle store on Amazon, making downloading books frightfully quick and easy. I mean 'frightfully' in the literal sense. It is scary how easy it is to spend money on books. (Kindle editions cost @ $10 a pop.) This has always been an issue for me, but I was previously limited by transportation, bookstore opening hours, book availability and other now-obsolete book-buying concerns.

But back to the big ideas: if you love books as objects then the Kindle is not for you. On a Kindle, all books look like a sleek, white plastic-and-metal device with a Mac-influenced aesthetic and a cute, round-buttoned keyboard. If you delight in filling your bookshelves with distinctive colors, varying widths and eye-catching bindings, then stop reading now.

However, if a book is what transports you to an alternate universe or state of being wherein the text acts as a guide and bridge, then there might be something to this Kindle thing. If, like me, you love books, but don't quite know what to do with them after you've finished; if your bookshelves are full to overflowing; if you don't have infinite space to expand your library or if you travel a lot, read quickly and/or move more than once every 10 years then you might want to acknowledge that, no, in fact, you don't really love books as objects. You love books as text, as story, as knowledge, as imagination. In short, you love reading.

And you can read perfectly well on a Kindle.

Owning a Kindle has given me greater insight into what I loved so much about books in the first place and what I can continue to love, all the while removing stacks of stuff from my life and saving time, money and paper, not to mention the lugging, moving and shipping I will not have to do. It's one of the best purchases I've ever made, and an excellent use of technology we use every day. I highly recommend it to all you readers out there.

I will read it curled in bed! It was never about the page instead!
I do not miss the booky smell! In fact, a screen does just as well!

Reach out and...

I'm sure there is a term for what happens when a once-universal ability falls into disuse as a result of a technological advance. It's a term we could apply to not being able to start effective fires without a match or sew whole outfits or walk barefoot for very long. All of these skills came in handy a generation or so ago (and remain so in many places today). Yet stop 50 people on the street and chances are, none of them has ever laid hands on a flint or a sewing machine.

We can apply this same term to the ability to meet up with someone when one or both parties is lacking a cell phone. My memory assures me that I (along with most of you) once possessed this skill as recently as 7-8 years ago. I can recall connecting with folks for lunch, meeting people at airports (really!), making and changing plans all without the use of a mobile device--and with very little attendant anxiety.

Yet this summer, I haven't had a cell phone. Mine works on the other side of the world, and I didn't get around to renting one. What this means is that my smart, well-educated and brilliantly reliable friends and family can't reach me while I'm on my way to meet them. It seems like a little thing, but we have had to re-train ourselves to be comfortable with this. In some ways, it's easier for me. After all, I know I'm getting there, even if they don't. In other ways, I've genuinely felt bad for forcing my loved ones back into the days when we just made plans and followed them, without a phone call to say that we're leaving, or have been minutely delayed or have almost arrived.

It's made me consider the true benefit of cell phones, which are legion. I'm not trying to be a cranky Luddite here. But I will make a claim that we overuse them because it really has not been a disaster to arrange to meet with someone one day and connect with them the next. Have we, as a society, become less trusting that things will proceed as planned? Are we simply glad to be able to reach out on the lonely road en route to socializing? Are we less concerned about being on time because we can always call and explain away our lateness rather than risk stranding someone for a few extra minutes? Or are we thankful for the opportunity to be considerate?

It took my mom and I about 10 minutes of conversation (face to face) to figure out how we were going to meet up after I went out to dinner with a friend and she attended her weekly art class. We were both so out of practice, but we eventually realized that if we both did our darnedest to get to the meeting point at the assigned time, then we'd probably be OK. The worse that could happen would be that one of us would have to wait for a few minutes. But maybe that would be a "worst thing" to many people. Maybe this all has less to do with cell phones than with technology in general and its ceaseless drive to save us time, including two minutes when you could be doing __________ instead of waiting around.

Summer challenge: arrange to meet someone in 24 hours or more from now. Do not use a wireless mobile device to communicate with them about this meeting at any point after you make your plans (unless you must cancel). Have the next time you interact with them be face to face at your meeting point. Report any problems here.

Everywhere

Yesterday was Gay Pride Sunday in San Francisco, a day embraced with the same level of near-universal enthusiasm as St. Patrick's Day in Dublin or Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City. The rainbow flag flies from every lamp post up and down Market Street, from the staid Financial District all the way to the heart of the Castro. A large pink triangle is painted at the top of Twin Peaks, and it day-gloes over town for a weekend of celebration that displays nearly as much civic cohesion these days as LGBT pride.

Things have changed quite a lot since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, which pride parades across the country commemorate on the last Sunday of June. This year's Pride marked the 40th anniversary of this watershed event, which is retold every year to remind us that there was a time when, instead of sponsoring huge public events, cities sent their police forces to raid gay bars and arrest the patrons. Instead of the full-color photos, chipper headlines and heartfelt interviews of today, newspapers would print the names and addresses of everyone arrested to encourage public 'decency' by guaranteeing public shame. Rather than mugging for the camera in outrageous outfits or calling for equal rights, gays and lesbians of the pre-Stonewall era, thus shamed, would often lose their jobs, be rejected by their families or, in far too many cases, take their own lives. Until the people of the Stonewall Inn rose up and defied the police, being gay was about as far from a public celebration as anything could get.

Being in San Francisco on Gay Pride weekend makes it easy to forget that a huge wide world exists outside the confines of the Bay Area and a growing number of islands of acceptance around large urban areas and progressive college towns. I was reminded of this while sitting in Grace Cathedral listening to the sermon yesterday. The preacher stood in the great stone pulpit and praised the ongoing struggle against oppression by many marginalized groups and related those struggles to the people of faith in Biblical times. He called for tolerance and assured listeners that God is firmly on the side of everyone seeking to live with integrity, wisdom and love. It was a classic progressive interpretation of the Gospels, one I agree with wholeheartedly.

But then I started thinking about the people sitting around me. Grace Cathedral, in addition to being a bastion of liberal theology is also a tourist destination. People come from all over the country and the world to admire the soaring stained-glass windows and attend a service. I don't know at which point in the sermon I became aware that there would surely be people in the pews who didn't come to church expecting to hear this particular message; who, in fact, might attend church desiring a very different point of view. This led me to remember the legions of churches, towns and communities out there (including, alas, the ex-pat community of Abu Dhabi) where gays and lesbians remain invisible or subject to discrimination, suspicion, social rejection or violent hatred.

The thing about being a minority is that, well, there just aren't that many of you around. I attended the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1994 as a young college student, fresh out of the closet. What sticks in my mind most is the sheer number of homos on the streets of Manhattan. For one weekend, I experienced what it would be like if most people were gay. I don't know if this is a case of selective memory, or if straight people really did clear out of town. But I remember whole subway stations, sidewalks, stores and restaurants, well outside of the Village, packed with gay people. This was post-Don't Ask, Don't Tell and pre-"Ellen" and "Will and Grace." It was the early years of the Clinton era, and there was a palpable sense that change was possible, though the battle was far from won. For two days, I soaked up the gay world of New York, a very powerful experience. I internalized that vision and took it with me when I left. Not because I think the whole world should be gay, but to remind me of the feeling of belonging, a feeling I transferred to the communities where I later lived, a sense of a world where there was no fear of slamming doors, snide remarks or swampy conversational ignorance to wade through.

It's hard to tell now, if the anti-gay rights backlash of Prop 8 in California, among other states, is the last gasp of traditionalists or a potent force to be reckoned with. You can't hold back the ocean, mused one of my older gay friends. Although people seem to want to try. It's hard to believe that kids growing up now are going to become bigots. Even if they don't know the story of the obscure gay bar that fought us all into the history books, they watch TV, see movies, know gay family members and live in the modern world, a world that now wholeheartedly prefers newspaper photos of rainbow boas and dykes on bikes to stark lists of public shame. Thank you, Stonewall.

Common ground

I challenge any of you to find a more wholesome way to spend time than hanging out at a national park. You won't be able to. You might say "church camp" if you didn't already know they are hotbeds of intrigue and sexual frustration. You might say "preschool graduation" if you didn't care to analyze the inaccessibility of high-quality preschool to much of the citizenry. Perhaps "senior citizen picnic on the 4th of July" may quality (though see the church camp sentence for possible issues). But the 4th of July is only one day of the American year. What are you going do the remaining 364?

Answer: visit national parks.

Though I'm sure Rush Limbaugh could think of something, there is nothing a sane person can say against the national park system. It is affordable, accessible, democratic, reliable and stunningly gorgeous. In fact, if you're 62 or older (as my mom is), $10 will buy you a Forever Card that will get you (and whoever else is in your car) into any national park free for the rest of your life! National parks are among the only things left that take the very, very best of something (in this case, the natural environment) and reserve it for everyone. At any time (weather and work permitting), we can go see our redwoods, our reliable geysers, our glaciers, our erupting volcanoes, our old-growth forest, our rugged coastline, red-rock vistas and dizzying canyons. While corporations have fully colonized the spacious skies and the fruited plain, most of the purple mountains majesty still belong to all of us. They are packed with campgrounds, ranger stations, free art classes, intimate museums, interpretive films, well-marked trails (some even wheelchair accessible) and evening campfire programs given in brown-benched amphitheaters under a dazzling carpet of stars.

I spent two days admiring our granite cliff faces, meandering rivers and plunging waterfalls in Yosemite Valley, the centerpiece of Yosemite National Park. I can report that a battalion of college-age workers is taking good care of our meadows and that our wildflowers are particularly lovely this year. My mom and I stayed in Curry Village, an old-fashioned camp (est. 1899) complete with tent cabins, a historic dining hall, an array of low-key snack bars and, of course, a campfire amphitheater. Back in the day, it had a bowling alley and a soda fountain. Today, it has a pizza patio and a latte machine, but not much else has changed. It's still a place people come from all over the country (and the world) to take in a ranger program, rent a bike or raft, walk a trail or climb a rock. The tent cabins are rustic, but you have a metal-framed cot instead of sleeping on the floor, and a shiny green bear-proof box right outside in which to store food and toothpaste. Like a traditional campground, you share the bathroom with your fellow campers. Unlike a tent campground, you have a light bulb in your tent for reading.

My fellow campers were truly a cross-section of America, from retirees in matching t-shirts to earnest church groups and boisterous family reunions. There was a rainbow nation of little kids running and biking and teenagers parading in outfits that screamed "Just because I'm camping doesn't mean I have to let myself go." Moms also tended to move in packs, collectively herding their offspring who were loudly debating whether to go swimming or play freeze tag, while the dads hovered or hauled the stuff.

One popular pastime was renting a raft and floating down the Merced River from Camp Curry to a point about four miles downstream. My mom and I did this and floated through some of the best scenery the valley has to offer. We didn't have to do much more than steer and look around at Half Dome behind us and Yosemite Falls, upper and lower, tumbling to our right. The valley was formed (as most are) from millions of years of tectonic movement and erosion, but what's really cool is that the granite towering over our little raft was originally under the prehistoric ground. It was only after all the sediment was washed away that the granite emerged. (This according to the Yosemite museum, and I'm sure I'm butchering it, but that's what I came away with.) It's mind-boggling to think of the time it must have taken for El Capitan (pictured below) to form and then grow out of the ground (so to speak), as it was gradually exposed by eons of rainfall, earthquakes and glacial melting. Whoa.

The abundance of good family fun and the laws of earth science aside, what makes Yosemite (and other national parks) so wholesome is the absence of the daily static of American life. In national parks, there are no billboards, no hard sell, no concern about your children turning on the TV to who-knows-what craziness. There are no honking horns, squealing brakes or traffic to speak of (Yosemite asks people to park then ferries them around in hybrid shuttle buses). There's no blaring music (it scares our wildlife) and no walking off trail (you could smoosh our native plants). Littering hurts us all, our landscape as well as our ability to enjoy a pleasant vacation.

This focus on preserving the natural environment removes a certain me-ness from even the most myopic vacationer, and, at the same time, keeping our national parks beautiful is one of the most self-serving things an American can do. After all, why would you mess up your own parks? Especially when they are so easy to love.

Cover up

President Sarkozy of France has been on my mind today, along with the politics of showing yourself in public. I realized this week that I'm still conscious of the amount of skin I display at any given time, even here in the Bay Area where pretty much anything goes. It makes me wonder if I've lost (or just misplaced temporarily) my chill West Coast attitude toward dress as I hitch up low-cut tops, change out of perfectly reasonable outfits and keep my knees covered, even at yoga. Sometimes I catch myself strategically placing my book over a v-neck while in conversation with the bank teller or grocery store checker and force myself to lower my Californian arms and proudly expose a small wedge of my upper chest to the world. In my culture, it is OK to show a little skin.

Which brings me to President Sarkozy, who made world news today by banging a metaphorical shoe (perhaps an alluring stiletto?) on the table of cultural uppitiness and declaring burqas "unwelcome" in France. Burqas, as you all know, are full-coverage, sheet-like robes a small percentage of Muslim women wear. Often blue or black, they look much like last-minute Halloween ghost costumes: shapeless and billowy with a mesh eye hole. They are intended to disguise a woman's shape and skin from the eyes of male strangers. Sarkozy didn't ban them, but took a break from the strain of governing long enough to lambast them, and their wearers, calling burqas "a symbol of servitude and humiliation" and "a problem of liberty and dignity for women." (This according to The Irish Times, which was the first newspaper to pop up on Google.)

Now Sarkozy, being French, would no doubt like all women to run around in Chanel couture or Riveria bikinis. The man is on his third wife, and second former fashion model, this one 12 years his junior. These relevant details aside, imagine what it would be like for a woman who has worn a burqa all her life to be "liberated" by the likes of Sarkozy? I, a native Californian with no history of modesty, have become conscious of my dress after a year in a fairly liberal Muslim state. My choice to be respectful of the cultural practices of the UAE while a guest in the country has changed what I choose to wear in public, at least for now. Imagine how a woman who covers all of her body all of the time would feel? Even if she welcomes the change (some women would, some wouldn't), it is quite a step from a roomy bedsheet to a v-neck and skinny jeans.

Given the cultural context in which a burqa is worn (and only a few hundred women in France do, according to the same article), publically denouncing it is more than French snobbery. It's xenophobia, straight up. And lest you think I have lost all my feminist verve, many women choose to veil or wear abeyyas or a burqa. And many women are forced to by male relatives protecting cultural values that are foreign and distasteful to me, Sarkozy and probably most of you. Of course, I don't want women to hide behind a mesh peephole when they could be showing their lovely selves to the world, speaking for themselves, choosing their own life paths. But Sarkozy's comments are no more than polarizing bluster in a society where it is almost impossible to tell who wears what by choice and who is forced to. And--more likely--who is caught in that huge gray area called "cultural expectations," otherwise known as what people expect to see when they look at you, before you even open your mouth.

The politics of fashion are rarely analyzed, but Sarkozy has gone there, so let's go with him. My culture tells me what to wear, too. Does it force me at gunpoint? No. Does it force me under pain of ostracization? Of course. That's what cultural expectations about clothing do--and if Sarkozy wants to tackle those huge bugaboos, he'd have my vote. But, that's not what he's about, as we all know. He might not even know that he himself, along with you and I and (I would argue) many burqa girls are caught up in that choice/no choice every morning when we walk to the closet. We, too, follow rules of propriety and certain imposed standards. Here in the 'non-oppressive' world, our dads and brothers don't protect our sartorial honor, we do it ourselves, with the help of magazines, TV shows, the "right" stores, and the newest colors and styles. If it's uncomfortable or weird looking (like ties or panty hoes--and don't get me started on those pointy-toed shoes), we do it anyway. We spend money and time, feed multiple industries to meet those expectations, and we certainly notice (perhaps with less vehemence than the French government) when people don't fall into line. We can catagorize them in any number of ways, including 'poor' or 'clueless' or 'alternative.' But it would be recognized as discrimination without a doubt if we called the media and ranted about how "unwelcome" torn clothes or embroidered peasant blouses are. A burqa labels someone as a conservative Muslim. People who wear burqas know this, especially if they are wearing them in France. They are making a statement, much like I would if I walked around in a leisure suit or a t-shirt that said "Those pointy-toed shoes...WTF!" Far from being oppressed, these women and/or their male relatives are sending a very conscious message of who they are. The thing is Mr. Sarkozy doesn't like the statement they are making. He sees it as menacing, even scary. It is too foreign, too different. (This cartoon makes my point so much better...)

The thing is, it's not if you take a deep breath and think about it. When you are in an environment where the cultural expectations are different, you change. It might take awhile to adjust (or readjust) because when you do one thing the same way for a long time, it becomes part of who you are. I would argue that wearing a burqa in France is no more menacing than me replacing a tank top with a t-shirt. Again, only a few hundred women in France even wear a burqa (and the number would probably drop faster if the government would shut up about it). Many have already adapted to their host country's norms. Trying to change few who remain will just make them hold on all the more. They are probably wearing Chanel under those billowy tents anyway. Or maybe even a Riveria bikini. Sarkozy will never know...

Holding children. Together.

We held a child together.

This phrase has two meanings as it is written. One meaning implies that a child was somehow falling apart and you and another person kept the child from coming undone. The second meaning indicates that you and another person held a child at the same time, in a united act of love and care. Both senses of this phrase contain powerful imagery. But it is the second sense that I want to talk about here. I think it's best written like this: We held a child. Together.

There is a powerful bond created among teachers who hold the same children. I have been searching for a way to describe this relationship for years, and here it is. The act of holding a child, literally or figuratively, is what a teacher does. And I don't mean hold as in hug. I mean hold as in stabilize, hold steady, hold on to. A teacher provides a base, a safe haven from which to explore the many pathways to growth and knowledge; a reliable hand in time of need; or even a tug in the right direction. Teachers who share in this act of holding with other teachers create an even stronger structure of support, for both the kids and each other. These bonds are powerful and build an architecture of relationship with a different texture and deeper cohesion than that of congenial friendship among colleagues.

I first heard this phrase (hold a child. together) from my former principal, who is stepping down after six incredible years at the school she founded. This is the same principal who hired me fresh out of ed school to be the first English teacher at her school. It is safe to say that no one has had more of an impact on me as an educator. Not usually given to flights of metaphorical fancy, she uttered this phrase in response to an incident in which she literally held on to the t-shirt of a child in distress with another colleague. But for this same colleague, relating the incident at the principal's going away party this week, the literal grasp to bring a child back from the brink was the moment when she truly understood what being a part of a school is about. It is about holding children together. Together. One t-shirt or one field trip or one parent meeting or one lesson at a time.

I could go on forever about how much I love this principal as a person and as a leader of teachers and kids. But what I want to say here (related to my previous post below and a lot of the pondering I've been doing this year) is that there is so much power in holding kids together that a school feels empty when this isn't the case. Because in order to hold kids, you have to reach out, no matter what kind of kids you teach or where you teach them. And I cannot believe that sustainability or finding a work-life balance involves keeping your hands at your sides, literally or figuratively.

I know it's summer, but I welcome your thoughts...