Wonderment

In 1989 I began serious research in order to edit a collection of 19th century letters written between my great grandmother and my great, great grandmother. I read books, traveled to Brooklyn, Chicago, Keokuk, Iowa, Topsfield, MA and various libraries and historical societies in NH. My big purchase to aid in my research was the first laptop made by Apple which came out right around 1991 or 92. The battery lasted a very short time and most often I didn't have a cord long enough to reach the closest plug. It was (and probably still is) a time when the Chicago Historical Society made you wear white gloves in order to handle documents in their archives. I loved all of that travel and research and finally in 1996, the book was published by the University of Iowa Press.

Fast forward to 2014. I have just finished transcribing the letters of my great, great, great Uncle Cyrus, who was born in 1793. His letters begin in 1818 and conclude in 1836. There are 19 of them. If I proceeded to conduct research in the same way, I would be traveling to Mumbai (which was Bombay when he went there as a missionary in 1827) and to various locations all over the state of Massachusetts. Whereas it is true that I am not going to write/edit a book similar to the one I did before, I still need to educate myself on the context of his letters and discover as much as I can about his life. You are no doubt wondering how any of this connects to the title of this post.

Here it is: I have not budged from my house, but because of the vast difference in the internet and the digitization of books, magazines, and archives, I have read the articles he wrote that were published in the Missionary Herald; have found his second wife's journal which was published in 1876 by their son and digitized by Google, and found citations about him in many different sources online. He was not a famous person, which makes it seem all the more remarkable to me that so much information is available. Gone is the laborious note-taking - I can just download or bookmark these items and refer to them at will while I have multiple documents open on my laptop.

The one thing that remains constant from my experience from 1989 to now, is the importance of people in this whole process. My good friend and colleague, Kathy Kentner investigated online and sent me in the direction of Google Books, where I found Cyrus's second wife, Abigail Stone's journal. The archivists at both Andover-Newton Seminary where he received a divinity degree, and at what is now Kimball Union Academy, where he studied for a year and a half before going to Dartmouth, both responded immediately to email requests with excellent information, and in the case of KUA, we have discovered that our fathers both taught at KUA at the same time, and because it was an all boys school then, her brothers were able to attend KUA, but she was sent to Gould Academy and because my father moved to an all-boys school in California to teach, my two brothers went there to school while I attended the local public schools. These serendipitous, and somewhat extraneous coincidences bring me great delight. One source the KUA archivist sent me today revealed that Uncle Cyrus and his first wife sailed to Bombay on the ship "Emerald" out of Salem. Now that made my day.

Who Put the Plastic in Plastic Surgery?

Going to the plastic surgeon for a consult this morning (no, I'm not getting a facelift), I found myself experiencing a doctor's office unlike any I'd ever been in before. First of all, I was surprised that the door was locked when I arrived at 8:15 for my 8:30 appointment. What doctor's office doesn't ask you to be there ahead of time to fill out paperwork?? Since it was about 10 degrees outside, I walked into the office next door, an MRI Imaging place. The receptionist was quite welcoming and alerted me to the fact that the folks in plastic next door wouldn't open until 8:30 on the dot. This office was warm and comfortable and offered coffee. I had to force myself to walk back out into the cold when 8:30 rolled around.

When I walked through the door into the spa... I mean doctor's office, I thought I had walked into a beauty salon. Well, I guess, in a way, I had. Glass showcases elegantly arranged featured different lotions and skin creams and the whole decor was elegant and fit for a queen. Or someone not exactly me. I only had about five minutes to observe my surroundings before I was called in to my appointment, but in that time, I was horrified by the video playing on a huge flat screen t.v., featuring the best way to get rid of the muffin top fat around your waist. It started with a woman wearing shorts and a jogbra in a doctor's office and the doctor (at least he was wearing a doctor's white coat) squeezing her fat between his fingers. This was bad enough, but then it went to a picture of all the little fat cells swarming around inside the fat. Fade to treatment, where she was sitting in a lovely reclining spa chair with a wide belt around her waist and some metal contraption pressing down on the flabby muffin top. At the same time it was lowering the temperature of the area - killing fat cells?? Not sure. The next scene showed how svelte her body was as she jogged off with her boyfriend (or maybe it was the doctor in his jogging shorts?) and on the screen it flashed "Get your swagger back."

Fortunately, I was called in to my appointment to find out the details of having a squamous cell cancer removed from my face. The nurses were all impeccably made up, and the doctor seemed like an ordinary guy, making gobs of bucks off of people like me who actually have something wrong, and others, who have been convinced by the culture that they have something wrong because they don't look a certain way. It was on my way out that I wondered why all of this is called "plastic" surgery. Is it because they are producing people who look like they've come out of a plastic mold? (I couldn't help thinking about Barbie dolls made of plastic.) Is it because back in the beginning of the specialty they were using real plastic as breast implants? Or, more likely, because what they do is so costly, most people have to pay for it using their plastic.

I am grateful for their expertise, but I am genuinely puzzled by their name. Please leave your own understanding of this specialty in the comments!

The power of music

Hearing the news of Pete Seeger's death gave me my moment for today. I learned to play the guitar with some of his most famous songs: This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone, to name some. I can still see the multi-record boxed set of long-playing records featuring the great early folk and blues singers in my brother's apartment where he gave me my first guitar and taught me the basic chords needed to play these songs. I had fallen in love with the whole folk music scene, and even ironed my semi-wavy long hair to try to achieve long straight hair that would swing back and forth like Mary Travers' hair when I played. Hearing those songs can transport me to college and early adulthood in a way that no other music can. Thinking about the power of the music of those years and how it accompanied the major social movements of two decades makes me wonder if there is music today that could fill that role. The world could once again use music that helps achieve social justice, the end of war, and brings people together to lift their voices in common cause.

Sunset

When I walked into the kitchen late this afternoon, this is the sight that greeted me. The phrase "rosy-fingered dawn" flew into my head, but of course, this wasn't dawn. More like flaming fingers of night, not dawn. Whatever it was, it was the most beautiful sunset I have observed in recent days and I decided that to try to capture it I would have to brave the cold and go outside to take the photo, not try to shoot through the grimy kitchen window.

Tonight, I googled the phrase, "rosy-fingered dawn," which I thought came from Shakespeare. Shows you what I know, or don't know; it is from Book XII of The Odyssey: "Then, when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I sent some men to Circe's house to fetch the body of Elpenor.” Homer!! Huh, I thought. How about "Red sky at night/Sailors delight/Red sky in the morning/Sailors take warning. Delight, indeed. In seconds, the brilliant red disappeared into the graying end of the day, waiting a few more moments for the black cloak of night.

Practicing Yoga

I have managed to do yoga for five of the last six days, and I find that the 45 minutes or so that I am doing yoga are the most mindful of the day. Quieting my brain is one of the hardest challenges for me, and I think it's paying attention to my breath and coordinating breathing with movement that causes me to abandon conscious thought and just "be" in the moment with my breathing and the awareness of the position of my body. There is a particular CD of "yoga music" that I play, and like Pavlov's dog, when that music starts, I click into yoga mode. My mat faces the east, and I have the empty sky to look at, though most of the time my eyes are closed. On the days that I do yoga, I find that I have a much better attitude about life and I am more willing to adopt an optimistic approach to problems I may be facing. Yoga makes me feel so good, in fact, that I can never understand how and why I let myself fall out of the habit of doing it each day.

The fabric of my life

My moment today occurred in the fabric store where I was looking for a lining fabric for a jacket I am about to make. I could spend hours in a fabric store, and have been known to, on occasion. The colors, the patterns, the textures all reach out to me. I have to touch every bolt. I was in the slippery fabrics, letting them slide through my fingers, holding pieces up to the light, matching it to the scrap of wool I carried with me.

In the peak of my sewing career, when the kids were small, I made down jackets, snow pants, turtlenecks, overalls, pjs for them and for me. I accumulated a LOT of fabric and even more remnants. When we moved out of the house in Littleton and down to Durham, the hardest part for me was going through all the fabric and thinking about the memories each piece evoked, and needing to get rid of most of it (fabric, not memories).

A few days, I unearthed one of the pieces of wool I kept and found a tag on it from the Dorr Woolen Mill in Claremont, which means I probably bought it about 35 years ago. I paid $3.50 a yard for 3 1/2 yards. I have no idea what I planned to make - perhaps I had no plan, I just loved the color and the feel of it. Of course it had moth holes in the outer layer, but inside, at least 2 yards was still good, and so I'm going to make the jacket I mentioned above. All this is in preparation for making a jacket out of some Italian wool I bought in Rome in 2008 (I'm determined that fabric won't sit for 30 years). The Italian wool will be lined by a piece of silk brought back for me by Todd from one of his China trips.

Fabric is not just fabric to me. It is bound up in memories of learning to sew on my mother's treadle machine; of the breathtaking delight of owning my own machine and of the many hours spent happily browsing fabric and imagining and eventually executing various projects. In doing some family research, I discovered that my paternal grandmother's maiden name, Sherer, comes from the Middle English scherare which meant “one who dresses the pile of cloth; a shearer." In Latin this was rendered by cissor or scissore. This could explain my love of all things fabric-related. The first photo is the old wool; second photo is the Italian.

Summer Kitchen, 1956

An email from Conn. College yesterday which included a link to 6 essays written by young women in a gender studies class caused my small stone moment. The first essay I read focused on the woman's relationship with her grandmother and in her very fine essay, she retold some of her grandmother's stories. In the process of writing, she discovered the important relationship between her grandmother's stories and her own identity. It made me wish for the millionth time, that I had paid more attention to my mother's many stories, instead of rolling my eyes and tuning out. I spent my writing time revising a poem which captures one of my memories of working with my mom when I was about ten years old.

Summer Kitchen, 1956

The knife slips
inside the jar edge
forcing amethyst plum halves
against the tempered glass.
Bubbles rise through sugar syrup
past stained glass plums
to meet air and merge.

In the womankitchen,
my mother executes
this summer ritual
teaching me the art
of compression, importance
of preservation,
the secret code of womanwork
behind glass, steam, and bubbles
bursting into invisibility.

My Ukraine

I am torn between writing about the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and writing about the current violent turn of events in Ukraine. Ukraine wins out. Most of the time it's easy to feel that what's going on across the globe is too bad, but since we can't really do anything about it, it's somehow not our problem. Tonight when I saw the police in Kiev banging their riot shields together as they stood shoulder to shoulder and the protestors setting tires on fire and throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police, my heart sank. This is how the horrible strife in Syria started, I thought. If it grows, I have no doubt that Viktor Yanukovich will move to ever harsher methods to put down the protests. Two people were killed today, and the escalation of violence on both sides scares me.

Eight years ago I arrived in Kiev to start three weeks as a State Department sponsored "Teacher-Ambassador." I lived with a very dear family in Southwest Ukraine, near the Carpathian Mountains, in an area geographically much like New Hampshire. I was the first American that people in the small town of Kelmentsi had ever seen. In my short stay there, I became another member of the family and a member of the teaching staff at the local high school. It was a life-changing experience for me, and I have followed any news from Ukraine with great interest. Now I follow it with great dread.

When I arrived, a year had passed since the non-violent Orange Revolution had taken place, bringing Viktor Yushchenko to power. He had managed to survive Dioxin poisoning that nearly killed him in the lead-up to the election. The overnight train ride from Kiev to Kelmentsi gave me the chance to talk (through the interpretive ability of my host teacher) with others in our train car, and it became apparent right away that people were disillusioned with Yushchenko because he hadn't been able to spur the economy in his first year of power. Given all that had transpired since the break-up of the Soviet Union, my opinion was that they would be lucky to turn things around in ten years. When the Soviets left, they took all their heavy farming equipment with them, and the system of collective farms had completely collapsed. What I remembered of Ukraine from my grade school education, was that it was known as the bread basket of the USSR. No more. Massive unemployment and no clear idea of what it meant to suddenly be a democracy had led to a difficult situation by the time of my visit.

It is probably too simplistic to say this, but my observation of the educational system which emphasized rote memory and offered no chance for critical thinking was not preparing younger people for citizenship in a democracy, and older people were used to being told what to think and how to carry out their daily lives. Couple that with the fact that the country seemed divided down the middle, with residents on the eastern side favoring ties to Russia and those where I was on the western side leaning much more toward Europe. In my family, the oldest child had found employment in Austria, and I met many people whose spouse or child had found work in Italy.

Yushchenko lasted about one more year before he was unseated by his former running mate, Yulia Tymoshenko. She survived about two more years, when Yanukovich, who had originally been the Russian puppet leader before the Revolution was voted back in and Tymoshenko was thrown in jail for alleged corruption. The pro-Russian faction was too entrenched, and from this far away, and not knowing much, I never thought he would go along with joining the European Union. I'm sure he is under terrific pressure from Putin, but he has apparently turned a completely deaf ear on his people. I've been wondering how the leader of a country (namely Assad in Syria) could deliberately kill his own countrymen rather indiscriminately, it seems to me. I fear the same outcome in Ukraine. Will my host family, who were pro-European be forced to flee? Will the protests spill out into the countryside? Will Russia send in tanks to help put down this new "Revolution?"

I am sick in my heart as I think of how proudly I was shown Independence Square in Kiev (spelled in Ukrainian Kyiv) and how it has become a place of violence and bloodshed. This is not a small stone moment, but a large boulder moment for me.

The watcher and the watched

Small stone moment for today. Photo does not do justice to what I saw!

The Watcher and the Watched

A Sharp-shinned hawk holds me in thrall,
rapt with disgust, awe, love. He meets my gaze,
as he tears bleeding flesh from his prey,
hapless bird or rodent, indistinguishable now
no hint of feathers or fur, I cannot look away.
Judge, jury, executioner, he is magnificent
as a robed tyrant is magnificent. He is Thomas Cromwell,
in the court of Henry the VIII, rusty orange striped vest,
dull gray hooded cloak perfect for lurking in shadows.
I, Anne Boleyn watch his every move. An invisible chain
holds us all afternoon, as he picks at the carcass
draped over the branch, a spot of blood on his chest,
yellow talons piercing the ravaged flesh. He stares at me,
I tear my eyes away, and released from bondage, he flies.

Tending the fire

Trying to coax the flames brighter and hotter in the fireplace, reminded me of how hard it is for me to tend the passions in my life. Today was a perfect case of how the minutiae, necessary though it may be, can sap the creative juice/motivation/time right out of me. The vocabulary of today included "Squamous cell," "plastic surgery," "leaky valve stem" and "broken oil gauge," Where was the time or energy to write? If I made the same effort to write that I make to build and tend the fire each night, I would have several novels written by now. Thank goodness for the idea of the small stone of mindful writing. Thank goodness for the fire, which, when tended, brings not only warmth, but also good cheer. May the flames of creativity burn brighter tomorrow than they did today.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

I don't own any diamonds. I did own two and I have given them both away. Today, I was sitting in the kitchen reading through a print-out of my 30 page transcription of my great, great, great Uncle Cyrus Stone's letters, when all of a sudden, the the sun brightened the room and I looked up to see the willow tree festooned with snow crystals. The whole landscape sparkled with millions of diamonds, and they were all mine for a moment.

Mindful Writing Day 2

The snow today came down in flakes the size of a quarter. It didn't take long for all the branches and every available surface to be covered with the large sticky flakes. My "small stone moment" came as I stood looking at the birdfeeder through the curtain of snow and realized that a red-bellied woodpecker was hanging on to a feeder, occasionally opening his beak to catch a snowflake. I grabbed my camera and caught him in all different positions. It was as if we were playing hide and go seek, as he hid behind the snow-covered iron prong of the feeder.