Joel graduated!

May 28

What a week-end-- actually, what a month. We are exhausted from moving Joel's stuff back from Providence in a U-Haul truck! That is, Andy and I drove (me too!) with Joel's worldly goods in the truck. Joel and Sarah are still driving back in the Subaru. It was a great week-end: dinner Friday with Ellen and Jon and Greg and Bethany and us and Joel and Sarah; then the big dance where we saw Ethan Schreiber and Vanessa; Ken and Linda the next day too along with Harvey and Adrianne. The Phi Beta Kappa presentation; the Baccalaureate speech; receptions, dinner cooked by Joel, Seb, Melanie and Sarah for the families, Joel baking pies with his own crust! Sunday all graduation all day with Chiaki and Tak and the thrill of Joel surprising us by geting to walk up on the stage! They had one student representing each group (1200 students, so thousands of family members and well-wishers)--one Bachelor of Arts, one Bachelor of Science, etc., and Joel got to "walk" representing people who got both a Bachelor of Science AND a Masters! He also got interviewed in the Providence newspaper.

Beautiful day-- B.B. King got an honorary and sang a cappella-- how delightful and touching. Dinner that night with Ken, Linda, and Ethan and Vanessa and us (us being Andy, me, Joel, and Sarah). Lots of photos (see a samply at graduation pictures). Very exciting and exhausting.And today-- up early renting truck, hours of packing and carrying things downstairs, then driving, and now waiting for Joel and Sarah to get here--and they are off tomorrow, she to D.C., he to a conference in CA!

I'm a Humanitarian of the Year!

May 21

They honored me Saturday night at Ethical Culture (Actually, at Cryan's Irish pub's party room in South Orange). It was pretty terrific, to have people stand up one after the other and say nice things. See some pictures here. There was some stress, of course, with all the people who mean something to you there to talk with, but over all, what a high!

May 19 Continued

I just booked a flight for my mother from Newark to Cleveland. It cost @$200 and I booked it using orbitz, and that's all fine, but now it gets weird. This flight is a round trip! It cost over $400, twice as much, to go one way.

Is Capitalism crazy or what?

I booked the required return flight from Cleveland to Newark in late July in case she happens to be back in Cleveland (my cousin takes her by car sometimes). Then, if she happens to be there, she can fly to Newark and I'll take her back to WV on my way to the Appalachian Writers Workshop. Otherwise, we'll just forget the second half of the round trip. Andy's brother David, who flies all the time, says this is very typical.

1984

May 19

I started reading back in 1984 diaries looking for the beginning of Joel, as he is graduating college next week, and came across early thoughts about writing on the computer. We’d already had one for close to a year, the famous Zorba. I wrote on July 25, 1984, and I was all into “the agony of writing.”

I was at that time doing galleys on Only Great Changes and also working on the novel that became Trespassers, the final Blair Morgan, and not published for more than ten years. This was at the very beginning of the publisher shake up, Scribner's would be dropping me in about a year. It was the heart of Reagonomics.

We were at the lake and I was deep into trying to get pregnant and also Being a Writer. “Do I have too many threads here?” I wrote, with an eye no doubt to the imaginary graduate student someday studying my journals for clues to the source of my brilliance, “Too much to handle at once? Maybe I have to leave out the hospital, but I really do want to finish with Blair in this book. None of this speculation, though, is the agony of writing. This is all just chewing it over: it will take care of itself later. I might, for example, separate out the Porter Otis stuff altogether, let it stand as a novella. Or turn it into a many-viewpointed piece like ‘The Birds That Stay.’”
This surprised me, that I had already at least drafted “The Birds That Stay.” Also that Porter Otis (which became the story “Evenings with Dotson”) was apparently part of what became Trespassers. Boy, you forget the details.

I go on, rather dramatically: “There is some discomfort in speculation–the pain of uncertainty. But the real agony is the blank page syndrome. Dark screen now. How to fill it with light, the page with words.” And then I went off on writing on the computer, how it seemed to encourage less linearity, and this is still true, for drafting. I think in fact the digital age encourages a lot of linear maundering in bloggers.

I commented that “there is much more freedom to stop in the middle and go in different directions. The several dimensioned flowering seems paramount instead of the linear narration. A problem of computer writing I have solved is how to make changes in hard copy. I turn to the place in the hard copy, located in on disk, wrote and rewrote the new part, then printed up (via a file called ‘Type’) and inserted it into the manuscript. The problem had been keeping hard copy and disk material equally updated. Little changes will still have to be done twice, I guess, but this larger changing will work well. The most practical effect of Zorba on my writing (and teaching and business letter writing and resume updating) is of course the ease of using drafts again. Another practical effect related, is the relatively late state of drafts that are finally printed out."

This was printed out and pasted into the journal book. The next entries were handwritten in ink, with little sketches I really like, dreams, all my agonizing over getting pregnant. As time goes on, there are increasing numbers of pasted in typed passages. I seemed to have started doing journals on the computer and saving them around the summer of 1986. Gain and loss, of course, the loss is off the flow of ink and the sketches of my dreams.

All that speculation about writing is so interesting to me to read now. I had no idea of what was ahead-- the world wide web, the incredible amount of information in each computer. David Weinberger as philosopher of the Internet, my son who I had not even met yet majoring in computer science in college. Only 22 or 23 years.

Atlantic City

May 17, 2007

Last night Carol and Mila and I went down to Atlantic City to receive an award for the Coalition. It was a real adventure getting down there--an hour to go ten miles because of a downed wire on the Garden State Parkway, and then through the recently reopened section of the Parkway where the sky was still full of yellow smoke and your eyes smarted, and you could see the backfires still burning from the big forest fire in the Pine Barrens, started by National Guard flares dropped from a plane. Very spooky, smoke, blackened grass.

I enjoyed the ride down and the dinner, but especially the ride back, late, Mila driving, Carol riding shotgun, me napping in the back seat with their voices going on, two hours of a golden nostalgic glow in the dark for me, Carol’s familiar deep chuckle, Mila’s lighter voice. Telling stories, talking about how to help kids who need scholarships. I felt relaxed and safe as I used to on the ten hour drives to my grandmother's while my dad and mother talked endlessly in the front seat.

Mother's Day

Chiaki Achiwa at Ethical Culture on
May 13, 2007, Mother's Day

May 13, 2007

Another beautiful performance by our friend Chiaki Achiwa at Ethical Culture today, accompanied by our neighbor Jim Harrington. Chiaki and Takeshi came in from New York last evening with a Junior's cheesecake, and Chiaki went across the street to rehearse with Jim, and then the Harringtons came over for dinner-- Lienne after softball tryouts. Cara-An did some amazing knife work making tiny slices of some grapes, and we all enjoyed being together. Then today, Mother's Day, Chiaki sang two songs, including a lovely Japanese piece called "The Red Dragonfly." There was group sharing of music, poems, and thoughts about mothers and nurturing. Andy took along to share the photo of his father and mother in a restraurant in New Orleans. Beautiful weather.

Taps!

More pix at pictures

May 7

We're back from a whirlwind visit to Brown where Joel had his final dance performance, and Andy decided we should buy flowers for Joel-- all the nineteen years of him dancing, and all the little girls in tutus who got flowers-- and we never gave any to him till last night! Sarah gave some to him a year ago, and the dance team gave some to the seniors, but these were Joel's first. He danced very well, and the show was extremely well choreographed and organized this year with funny bits of patter between routines while they changed clothes, and once Joel changed behind a sheet on stage! Some of the girls were really super, Camel on the front row left above and Meg on the top far right plus Sarah F. on her right in a blue tee. ALl of them really, but it was the wholeness of the show that stood out for me. A really nice turn out too, lots of Joel's CS friends, including an important professor in his life, Shriram, who (they tell us) shouted Take it Off or something like that from the back row when Joel was changing clothes! Oh, and Joel shaved off his moustache in the middle of the show-- offstage that. And one number was called "Billy Joel Weinberger!" And Meg and Sarah F. did "Moses Supposes" again with Meg's dad onstage as the benighted elocution professor.

We had a nice time with Sarah, too, riding up, riding back. She just left to drive to D.C. today, straight to work. Joel has projects, one final, has finished classes. "It kind of sneaked up on me," he said.

Well, lots to say good-bye to, but this was a lot of fun and I'm working on my upper lip stiffness quotient.

Demos & Haiku

I went to two demonstrations last evening– the usual one with the Military Families in South Orange, and then I went to Maplewood and caught the tail end of the South Mountain Peace Action/ MoveOn rally against Bush’s veto of the spending bill with the deadline for beginning to leave Iraq

I was struck by how I don’t appreciate the fine points of ideology– ideology interests me and informs me, but doesn't grip me the way art grips me. Yes Bush is a disaster, and yes I love to wave a sign that says “Bush lied they died,” but it’s the lies and the deaths that move me, not whether the Democrats should be castigated or praised for their efforts at a deadline rather than an immediate pullout.

I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I were Emperor of the World or the Demiurge (if the Demiurge gets to change what already happened). I’d certainly stop the invasion of Iraq. Or maybe I’d make sure the winner of the majority of presidential votes in 2000 actually became the president. Or I’d go back to the end of WW I and make better arrangements in the Middle East. Or...

But I guess that’s the point. What I see is what has happened and what might happen, all extremely complicated, and I don’t think in terms of policy, or rather, I see clearly certain general directions, and I have a few clear policy preferences: elect someone who will make better choices for the Supreme Court. Find a way to extend Medicare to everyone. Get rid of the Death Penalty. Get the heck out of Iraq. I react with a strong sense of what is right and wrong, which is admittedly often simplistic, but isn’t right and wrong always?

One reason I stand with the Military Families Against is that I am glad when someone takes the farther left position, which ultimately, I believe, moves things that way. I also vote for the Democrat for president because I believe that small practical improvements count. I'd rather vote for a Socialist, of course.

One great success of the Reaganites was the creation of a culture of greediness. The even greater success of the Right has been to move the discourse so far in their preferred direction that people laugh nervously if you say you’re a democratic socialist.

May 1

Dogwood pink and white,
Maroon tulips, cherry blooms,
Fragrance? Wild onion!

Spring Sonnet

Spring Sonnet, already a little out-of-date, as today we are greener than yesterday and white and pink blossoms all over the place. So this was last week, just before it all busted out:

Come puffs of wind from all sides & above
Come sun on eyelids breathing glowing green
Come buds not yet burst out in summer love
And father-robin breasts all orange sheen.

I’m lying on our lichen covered bench
Tickled by air and life on exposed skin,
Yearning to stay out here, not have to wrench
Myself away to busy tasks within.

So rarely do I pause and steep in sun–
My days bereft of time to see and hear
Like this, to let the to-do list be done:
My life my body centered fully here,

While Chaucer’s little fowls make melody
In April, I, aware awake, in stillness free.

Crum on Tape

I took my long drive today, listening to Ross Ballard's MountainWhispers.com CD version of Lee Maynard's Crum, one of my all time favorite books. Ross Ballard, is the voice actor and producer with a mastery of regional dialect and the age-old art of fine storytellng. Crum makes a terrific audiobook. Its episodic quality and rambling series of incidents totally engrossed me--You trust the storyteller (that's Lee channelled by Ross) to twist and snake around all those characters and funny and tragic incidents and then return to its stated themes of escape and extremelly reluctant celebration of a time and place. If you haven't read Crum, do, but even if you have, enjoy it again this way. No one ever forgets forget Ruby's apple slice or the Great Meat Robbery. And a lot of other things.

In Shinnston

I drove over the mountains today-- leaves coming out in Maryland around Hagerstown, and then up on Big Savage Mountain-- snow-- not groundcover, but strips and patches and a few piles. And over here, in Shinnston, it looks about like New Jersey: very green on the hillsides but trees a passage of gray, barely pink at the tips, so close to bursting out!

Aside from visiting and checking on my mother, my big job here is to get her computing, and I'm writing this on her Lenovo, which is a nice little machine, square faces, which I probably like better than my laptop, which is just back from the shop.

Things are good here now, although I’ve been totally embarrassed by not being able to get the dial-up to work, and finally discovering, after calling AOL, that I had the phone wire plugged into the wrong place–the ethernet, I guess, instead of the lineout. I have worked so hard to get this up for my mother–the computer functioning in a way she can learn. So far, she has actually done better than I expected. I think she wants to learn. At 88. Very exciting, really. Also, a diversion when she’s alone.

Our Relationship to Books

Alice Robinson-Gilman and I did one of our interactive member platforms at Ethical Culture this morning. It was raining hard already, but we had an intrepid twenty people or so, mostly circled, and Alice did a great job of speaking about her personal deep relationship with reading. I had some amusing quotes from people like Ambrose Bierce (“The covers of this book are too far apart.”) and Frank Zappa (“I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy”) and Dorothy Parker (“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force”) as well as the famous Groucho Marx one (“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”)

So Alice provided the passion and I provided some amusement and serious comments as well– I got to read a page from Higher Ground where Blair Ellen reads Crime and Punishment and walks around through the Christmas holidays feeling like Raskolnikov. Then we had a good twenty or twenty-five minutes of discussion about all kinds of good stuff– Jill didn’t become a reader till adulthood; Terri sent Essex County Community College students off to read the Great Books, etc. etc. Very satisfying.

I finished my anti-deer garden web!

You can't tell too well, because it was getting late when I took the photo on this cold Easter, spitting snow, but the view is to the northwest, the corner of the carriage house plus the home of the Misses Magliaro. If you look closely you can see the shadows of the netting, a fine net that even heavy wind goes right through. It totally tents the garden. My objective this year was to make it so I could actually stand everywhere in the garden--last year I was always stooping and lurching, but this time, with two more of the posts from the swing set planted in the ground, and with sunbrellas (like the ones over wintered over vegetables on the ground in the picture)-- but old ones with the plastic torn off, dropped into the posts and used for slinging the net-- well, all I can say is, I really hope that *&@@!! Darling Bambi gets the message and doesn't eat my vegetables.

About Easter

It's Easter, which was never my favoritechildhood holiday. The chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeprs were nice, but my mother had extremely mixed feelings about the candy and new clothing being in conflict with the Easter message. Should we really be trading jelly beans when the day commemorates the triumph over Death? A very heavy holiday in a lot of ways, scary too: the crucifixion, the betrayal with a kiss, the rock rolled away and the creepy empty tomb. There is so much more theology attached to Easter than to, say, Christmas, where the myths and traditions are all somehow lower key: it's a celebration, not the feverish praise of Death Having No Sting No More Hallelujah!

My favorite holiday in childhood was Halloween, which for low church protestants had no religious significance left at all. Halloween was dressing up and walking around after dark in crisp October air knocking on the neighbors' doors; Christmas had some pressure involved, but was mostly magical. But Easter was all about Don't eat the whole two pound chocolate bunny, you'll get sick and besides, you're supposed to be thinking about how Jesus died for your many, many sins and is now arisen and watching you!

Easter is about a theological conumdrum: that Jesus the teacher and man became or always was Christ who is also God.

What I like about Easter a lot is some rousing songs ("Up from the Grave He Arose! With a Mighty Triumph O'er His Foes!"-- on Friday, Lennie Lopate played terrific Easter gospel numbers on his radio show). I also am moved by the various versions of the story itself, the narrative of the popular new leader being arrested and deserted by the people as well as by his closest friends, then executed brutally and in a way reserved for the lowest of society. One of the great strengths of the Jesus story has always been the uplifting of the poor and humble and normally sinful. And then, whether you take it literally or not, there are the women discovering the empty tomb and the subsequent rise of an enormous religious and social movement. Fascinating stuff, however you slice it.

Today's New Jersey Star-Ledger has an interesting oipinion piece about the meaning of Easter for non-believers. The writer John Farmer emphasizes the message of love that Jesus said trumped everything else. I've always seen the drama of the Easter story as a story about Hope in the face of despair.

Hope and charity, then, even for those who aren't literal-minded Christians. Which leaves Faith, and I guess that anyone who can love and have hope without explicit guarantees of a prize at the end probably has to have more faith than the ones who believe Death will be followed immediately by a big reunion with family and friends and pets with no dog hair on the couch and no arguments with the family.

Happy Easter to All of Us!

Lots of Living Things

Geraniums eager to move outside...

I get so much pleasure out of this silly little fleck of yellow-green life with the blue cere and blue patches on his jowls. He is all about musicality, listening intently to jazz on the radio, to my whistling. He makes love to anything that is shiny or clicks, including dishes in the drainer, the radio, the hanging lamp, the plug on the toaster over, my fingernails, the zipper on Andy's jacket. He just chortles and sings and, like the guy who drank Love Potion Number Nine, kisses everything in sight. What is not to like? Well, I wish he would pose a little better for his pictures, as he insists on coming closer and closer to the camera, sitting on it if he can. Thus, always in-your-face-and-out-of-focus.

Spring Stuff

Farewell, bare branches.
Now, the moment before green--
Look!-- touches of red!

We had a very nice Seder Monday night, even without Andy’s family. The Graveses came, and Boe Meyerson and Betty Levin and Mary Sciaino! It has become fairly routine for me, the preparations, especially when we have eight or less people. There are matching napkins and plates, etc., and I don’t have to clear out the dining room plants. In spite of all the shabbiness here at the manor, the chandelier in the dining room glitters, and there's Andy's mother's Acapulco pattern plates and her cobalt blue Mexican glasses (and of course it’s her brisket recipe). But my own homegrown parsnips were in the vegetable roast, and my salad from the garden–the entire salad this time, as the lettuce has begun to make its rosettes after shivering under the plastic for the winter. It is an endless delight to me to know that the mâche and the Winter Marvel lettuce and the radicchio and some bok choi and red giant mustard and a little kale have wintered over and are beginning to grow– even faster than the weeds around them!

Andy’s Seders are always short, without the half after the Festive Meal. He emphasizes the fact that it’s about ending slavery, and that he likes to know we’re doing part of a world wide tradition: David and Ann have Jennie home, and they’re at the Gellers; Joel and Sarah are at her aunt’s house.

Our quirk is that we often have more gentiles than Jews: last night we actually had more Jews! Although Lorraine Graves, who is a Jewish-humanist, had to leave for a while to go over to Our Lady of Sorrows (Mary Sciaino’s church) for choir practice, as she sings in the choir and last night was a big rehearsal for Sunday’s Easter singing! It’s all good.

It Really Is Spring

Crocus Early Spring 2007

This has been a wild week, how everything comes in clumps for me. A presentation and a training session with the Coalition on our new Speaker’s Bureau, NYU, a day with fourth graders at Butler and yesterday was another wild one, Park Ridge High School, then home long enough to pack up my laptop to go to New York for repair as our local CompUSAs are closing. Off to NYC, tired and back hurting by the time I got the thing into the remaining CompUSA on Fifth Avenue and 37th Street. Then off looking for a bottle of wine, no liquor stores on Sixth Avenue or 23rd Street, finally down Seventh avenue to that one I’ve been to before, just west of 7th on 21st, I believe. Another Australian brand with a different kangaroo. Then to Suzanne’s for writing group where Carol E. read the latest version of a nicely revised story about the old lady whose feet tingle predicting (she believes) a disaster and walks west with her cat. I read the galleys of my piece for Maggie A’s anthology of prose writings about schools and schooling, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Last night started reading around on the web about another Blog tempest, this time about bullying and general nastiness (See Kathy Sierra's blog).

Anyhow, I’m home today, to write for maybe ten minutes, then shop for the small Seder we’re doing on Monday and do Coalition work and probably even some housework, which is almost always a-way down on my list of priorities.

And here come the daffodils!

Crocus time

We have snow melting fast, crocuses and snow drops both out in force (the snow drops have been around for weeks, under snow, out from under snow). I saw a few daffodils when I was out doing my Nordic walking, and a two week cold seems on the run. The other sign of spring is that Andy took a bike ride, all dolled up in red and blue high tech socks and shirt. Well, fairly high tech. I've ordered a computer for my mother, which I intend to set up here and have ready to run, complete with a dial-up connection and a word processor. I'm going to go down and visit her for a day sometime in the next two months and try to ease her into using the thing. She says she doesn't want it, but knows she needs it...

Commemoration of This War

It's four years of this war now. More than 3000 American soldiers dead, and we don't seem to keep count of the tens of thousands of others. I'm sure you can find people in Iraq, perhaps especially some of those in Kurdistan or the relatively peaceful southern Shiite regions where some are glad the Americans blasted their way in.

But if you ask the rest-- the ones who have lost family members and friends, who have had to desert their homes, who have no jobs, no functioning infrastructure, not even a modicum of a sense of safety in their daily lives-- let alone if you could ask the ones dead from American bombs and bullets, from insurgent and terrorist bombs and bullets-- if it was worth it, do you really think they would say yes? Does anyone really think those people are glad about this war our leaders chose to force us into?

There are many events around the country today and tomorrow and all week commemorating the U.S.'s foolish, brutal war. Where I live, there is a walk at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow from South Orange Town Hall to Maplewood town hall.

The Power of Blogs??

Wow! I got some angry comments on my March 11 post that talked about The Spencers, the illustionists who performed at SOPAC on Saturday night. I also got a comment on the Spencer blog itself (Spencer March 14), and Mr. Spencer was a lot nicer than his fans.

I'm having a lot of reactions to this micro-mini tempest-in-a-teapot. First there is my ambivalence about blogs: I have been journalling for years, often writing pretty intense things, and my blogs are far more gregarious affairs. They are unlike my journals, and also unlike the blogs that Brother-in-law Internet Guru David Weinberger interacts with-- his blogs are mostly deep into things like internet neutrality and the meaning of blogging or straightup political stuff, with an occasional bit about the family, which is what I mostly read for.

So I began blogging experimentally, something along the lines of the journals I wrote when Joel was a baby that were aimed at public consumption, namely my mother. The only people I'm aware of who regularly read my blogs now are family and friends, and I'm certainly aware that I have readers, and to some small degree write accordingly. My friend Phyllis Moore actually turned a paragraph of one of my blogs into a poem! And Mary Sciaino sometimes sends me emails in reponse to things I blog (most recently our feelings about our kids flying in planes!). Recently, when I mentioned I went to an anti-war vigil, the excellent blogger Sherry Chandler wrote a supportive note.

What I haven't experienced is this business of offending people I never even thought would notice. I admit I wasn't thinking about the feelings of The Spencers when I wrote that blog! I was mostly just musing over my reactions to a performance in an area that is a favorite of my husband Andy's, not mine. When I comment on illusions, it's like a reader who only reads thrillers reading one of my books and asking why I don't have more action in them.

That's more or less the kind of audience I am for an illusionist.

I focused on what I enjoyed: friends in the audience, little kids' responses, trying to figure out an illusion, the performance style of Mr. Spencer. Which I praised, although I did use the phrase "full of himself." That was imprecise, a falling back into personal shorthand, the sort of thing I write in my personal journals but try to keep out of the blog. I was thinking about how you can't be a performer without a fullness of self. I know when I give talks, or even teach creative writing classes to fourth graders as I did yesterday, I am full of a kind of spirit, an energy that is like I am taking in the appreciation of the audience and somehow magnifying it.

Performing-- the relationship between a performer and audience-- interests me a lot. We went to see a performance of Shakespeare's King John the afternoon after the Spencers, and I felt it there too, me as audience member being part of the event, that wonderful magic (real magic to me) of a performance where audience and performers do it together, make it happen. And I really do think Mr. Spencer has a lot of that kind of magic.

He also seems to have some really protective fans!

Coughing and Teaching

I've got a really bad cough now--I'm into my second week of this, and now it's the coughing getting me down--I don't feel particularly bad except my forehead is just short of aching from the cough and my throat likewise. Still, I got through the morning with the fourth graders at the Aaron Decker School, in Butler, New Jersey. I had to apologize to each class and tell them that they were going to hear some ugly coughing, but I was really okay. And, indeed, I'm pretty sure I AM okay. They had fifty kids absent yesterday in a relatively small school. I always enjoy so much being up there. The teachers seem glad to have me some and do workshops and, in fact, the lead fourth grade teacher has made the arrangements herself for several years running. Most of my best relationships with schools are in the ones where the teachers truly buy in-- I've been in a fair number of schools where it's the PTA's who bring in another perk for the kids (along with performers and trips and riding lessons) and the teachers can feel it's just a waste of their time to have in one more special. The school in Mendham where I was earlier this year could have fallen into that category-- it was certainly a wealthy enough district-- but in that case, the language arts supervisor knew me and brought me in for a specific project with her teachers. She had begun a new writing program, and the teachers, very professional, viewed me as a good supplement to their work. So lots of things are good, as long as the teachers want the program.