My little sister barely 20 years old and looking much younger, proud of her beautiful giant baby, seen here with her then-habitual cigarette.
She beat her smoking habit, brought up her baby, made it back to college and through law school, made a busy courageous life for herself, made the lives of so many others so much better, and in a twist on the old-style fairy story, found and loved and married her Prince Charming sometime in her late forties.
She died this morning after a long long battle with ovarian cancer. I haven’t felt like blogging about her, and I haven’t been feeling like blogging not about her. We are going to miss her so very much.
How times change! When I was little, NH houses all had an outdoor thermometer, much like the one in this Flickr photo by Églantine.
Neither the many hotels where we’ve stayed this month, nor the charming apartment in North Oxford that we are housesitting now has any such thing as an outdoor thermometer that you can check from inside before dressing to go outside. But that’s ok, because if I want to know the current outdoor temperature in Oxford, it’s on my Google homepage.
Our outdoor thermometer was a source of great joy when winter started ending. The very first morning that the mercury (remember mercury?) climbed above 32, my mother would let us four kids run outside in our woolly bathrobes and long flannel pjs! We had to wear boots but we did not have to wear our coats as we celebrated the family’s springtime ritual, jumping up and down on all the soon to be melted snow.
Talk about adventure! And Kon-Tiki was an adventure my father talked about, with enormous enthusiasm.
And, from all the books my father urged me to read in my pre-teen years, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl wrote two of the ones I loved best.
So visiting Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum with Frank was both sweet and sad. It was sweet when I thought how my father would have loved to be there with us. It was sad when I added this to oh-so-many adventures I’d love to have shared with him, in all the years since he died.
Here’s what I still share with him–sailing the paths of the universe with every one of your friends, every one of the people who have shaped your life. Some of them, when you are lucky, will be by your side. All of them, always, will shape your future adventures.
Not even Kon-Tiki’s sun god could be more powerful.
As Akma says, love the standing ovation at the end. But who could have resisted? Snip:
Chew slowly
But hurry
The bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside, don’t play rough, will you just play fair?
Be polite, make a friend, don’t forget to share
Work it out, wait your turn, never take a dare
Get along! Don’t make me come down there
Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid.
And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors.
Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?
“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.
Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…
Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.
Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”
Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?
“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.
It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.
Right up against the edge of this plowed field, one small daisy plant celebrates its so-improbable survival with a few flowers.
I’m guessing that late September may be too late for these flowers to set seeds–but what do I know? I’m not a botanist and, for that matter, I am not a little Swedish daisy.
Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.
What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.
I grew up in a (New England) world with no air conditioning. I’m not sure how grownups who spent days in offices managed on really hot days–but little kids with backyard sprinklers did just fine.
Keeping our house cool inside needed different tactics.
First, our windows were opened up wide every bedtime, on the theory outdoors would get cooler before we woke up.
Second, once sunrise arrived, grownups stayed alert for the absolute instant when air outside the house got hotter than the air inside. Bang, bang, bang, those windows got shut again!
This morning in Cambridge, MA, I’m sorry to say, that slam-windows moment came at 8:30 a.m. But at least so far I don’t need the whir of my room air-conditioner, thanks to old New England tactics from long ago.
By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that’s a different story)…
Another great Weinbergerism on John Lennon there: “What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.”
