Archive for August, 2010

Like a lot of people, I was wary about wading into the waters of social media. What would I find? Who would find me? But after a few weeks, it had been a wholly positive experience of reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Then one night my cousin Karla posted a note to me on Facebook that made me realize reconnecting can come at a price.

She’d just heard from someone she hadn’t seen in years. Naturally, her old friend had asked about her children, specifically her eldest son. “You think everyone knows, then you realize they don’t,” Karla wrote. Her 22-year-old son was killed on New Year’s Eve 2001.

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Sometimes it feels like I was born in the wrong era. I’d love to have marched with suffragists at the turn of the last century, campaigned for better labor conditions in 1930s factories, or helped stage sit-ins on college campuses in the 1960s. Oh, I’ve participated in my share of marches and worked for many causes. But I always yearned to do something more dramatic … until an unlikely hero reminded me you don’t have to start a revolution to make a difference.

“Johnny” was exceptional … but not in a way that usually suggests leadership qualities. He had Down Syndrome, and working as a grocery bagger for a Midwestern supermarket chain was likely as far as his skills would take him.   Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one thing all children in the American South have in common, it’s the joy of running barefoot. I was 10 before we moved to a paved street. Until then, I ran free on dirt roads, prickly yards, and sandy lakefronts. In summers, we visited my grandparents in Alabama, and each year I’d wander into a clover patch, step on a bee, and suffer terribly until Daddy pulled out the stinger. But not even my annual bee encounters could persuade me to put on a pair of shoes.

Somehow Southern kids manage to walk, run, tumble, skip, jump rope, ride bikes, and even play baseball and football in our bare feet. But then we grow up, put on a few pounds, decide to get in shape, and suddenly it’s all about THE SHOE.

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Recently my brother and I were swapping stories about our childhood peccadilloes and the punishments that usually followed. One thing was certain: When Mom and Daddy caught us in our misadventures and promised to tend to us later, they kept their word. We not only learned that actions have consequences, we learned our parents meant what they said.

Most people seem to take a more ambiguous approach to life than our parents. They’ve discovered the easiest way to avoid conflict is to avoid making firm commitments or saying anything meaningful. Instead they waffle and warble, acting out the advice Rolling Stones’ front man Mick Jagger once said he picked up from singer Fats Domino: Never sing the lyrics very clearly.

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My niece is about to enter the second grade, but as Robert Fulghum famously noted, she learned everything she needs to know in kindergarten. She learned to share and to play fair. And she expects the universe to support her idea of fairness. So when she lost her plastic duck-topped coffee-stirrer—a souvenir from the previous day’s parade of ducks at the Peabody Hotel—she declared: “That’s not fair!” as though the universe would magically make it reappear.

“What’s not fair?” I asked.

“They took it!” she said of the restaurant staff that had thrown away her prize.

“You left it on the table, and they picked it up with the rest of the trash. Why isn’t that fair?”

Because!

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Britain’s official royal poet was in a bit of a snit. Sir John Betjeman had been asked to pen a verse for Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Silver Jubilee. And the usually good-humored 70-year-old Poet Laureate was not pleased with the response. Among other criticism, Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn had called Betjeman’s patriotic work “banal.”

After the poet left in a huff, his agent explained to reporters, “He is very upset that it is being treated as a poem when in fact it was never intended to be. It is a hymn.”

Whatever literary critics and politicians thought, when Betjeman’s “hymn”—sung to a composition by Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music—premiered later at London’s Royal Albert Hall, it was greeted by long and thunderous applause. Clearly the public overruled the critics.

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As a small child, I was so afraid of heights I was scared to go up on a teeter-totter. So I only got on with children much smaller than I was. That way I could control the experience, keeping myself in the middle and bottom ranges and sending the other kids soaring to the top. Naturally, they were thrilled with the view from on high. The view from the bottom wasn’t so great, but at least it didn’t come with a panic attack.

The other day, I realized I’m back on the teeter-totter, sitting at the bottom and hating the sucky view. Only this time, I don’t have the same level of control. That’s because the teeter-totter is my life, and I’ve somehow seesawed out of balance, becoming focused on work to the exclusion of almost everything else—including my health and well-being.

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Children are much more influenced by what their parents do than what they say. Sherry Lansing is a perfect example.

When Sherry chattered about becoming an actress, like other stereotypical moms in the 1950s, Margot Heimann Duhl told her daughter to focus on becoming a housewife. But necessity had forced Margot off traditional paths. When she’d fled Nazi Germany for America at 17, she’d had to be self-reliant, learning to speak English and working as a dressmaker. And when Sherry’s father, real-estate investor David Duhl, died of a sudden heart attack when she was nine, Margot stepped up again. The grieving widow went to his office and announced she was taking over the family business. On being informed by a male office manager that she couldn’t possibly do that because she didn’t know anything about real estate, she replied, “Teach me. I can do it.”

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July 18, 1984. People walking along the street that Wednesday in Detroit were probably a little startled when it suddenly began raining … clothes … books … small kitchen appliances … furniture … a bicycle … a stove … a refrigerator.

For three hours, unemployed auto worker Nelson Jones dumped the contents of his 16th-floor apartment onto the street as crowds watched and a television crew captured the drama for the evening news. When it ended, police charged Jones with littering. As his niece later noted, “Everyone has their off days.”

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We all have hidden talents. Mine is mind-reading. Somehow I can discern—without any meaningful evidence—when people disapprove of, or disagree with, something I’m saying or doing. It’s an amazing skill. And what’s truly amazing is how many of my friends share this wonderful gift. In fact, the world seems to be a thriving hive of mind-readers.

We mind-readers could be a useful or dangerous bunch … if we were any good at our hidden talent. But usually when we decide what other people are thinking, we couldn’t be further from the truth. And if we act on our fanciful imaginings, we only wind up hurting ourselves … as blues legend B.B. King once discovered. In a 1997 interview with writer Kira Albin for Grand Times magazine, King shared how his mind-reading skill combined with his love for potato pies to create a painful childhood moment.

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