"take care of one another"

No matter where I go around the world, the issue of Native Americans comes up. We white European-Americans have no moral credibility around the globe with respect to our relationship to the First Peoples to inhabit this land. It is a matter I do not think of often. I don't dare. It is too painful. It is too humiliating, too terrible to remember. We, who dress up so nicely, who turn out so elegantly, who speak with grace and eloquence, we, who can be immensely gracious and generous, kind and compassionate, we, we. We are the perpetrators of horrible crimes against the native peoples. In a torn and depleted world, amazing things happen sometimes. I was part of a moment, a relationship, an event in time, on Friday that stirred me deeply and is worthy of consideration. "Warriors take care of one another. This is our common pledge. We are here to honor you, Warriors, as you carry on the name and the hallmarks of the Arapaho people," says Tribal Elder Leonard Moss to the 2100 cheering Arapahoe High School students. Tribal Elder Moss, wearing the dignified face paint and ceremonial headdress of the Arapahoe nation, his wizened face conveying kindness and conviction to the students, reminded the Arapahoe Warriors that "the Arapahoe and the Arapaho are two communities with one heart." The Arapaho came to Arapahoe today. And oh,what a day! A reverent and joyful celebration of the uncommon relationship between a high school community and the Native community whose name and heritage they bear. Gifts, dancing, lots and lots of dancing, drumming, singing, affection and respect exchanged between us all. Dozens of Arapaho traveled in white vans and Suburbans from the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming to Littleton, Colorado, to a suburban high school where more than two thousand students are reminded every day of their identity and heritage as Arapahoe Warriors, part of the Arapaho community. "Warriors take care of one another." Words posted all around the school, recited daily in the student announcements, and reinforced in countless ways to the point that it is a message internalized by these students, as a part of their identity and commitment. "Arapaho are known as a 'people who teach,' and it is our privilege to be here to teach you something about the culture of the people whose name you carry," the Tribal Elder told them. You might think this is a schmaltzy, schwarmy, hokey and tokenistic, feel good experience. But, au contraire! Everyone about this relationship is profoundly serious. honest, and gracious. There is no artifice. It is remarkable to see a gym filled with 2100 teenagesr who are wildly proud to be Warriors, and when I say Warriors I mean Arapaho Warriors as much as Arapahoe Warriors. It is "Warrior pride" that these students learn to feel about themselves, and now, by Warrior I mean, strong, tenacious, pride for yourself (self-esteem)and your tribe, and respect for yourself and for your Elders. Your actions, your life reflects upon your people, and by their actions, your people are expected to honor you. And, as the motto for both nation and high school reminds them, "Warriors take care of one another." I have seen these words every day for the four years my daughter attended Arapahoe. Nice, thoughtful. I had no idea the freight they carried. And even though I knew from the start about this uncommon relationship between the Arapahoe and the Arapaho, I didn't understand the extent to which each community identifies with the other, the sense of solidarity and unity. How remarkable is this! In this country, on this land, given this history, our children acknowledge the forfeit that has given them privilege. Our children, through this relationship, accept the responsibility of caring for one another. Our children, because of this unparalleled relationship with the Arapaho nation, are graciously blessed and given the opportunity for learning and living. Indeed, the words that touched me most deeply, from Tribal Elder Leonard Moss, were as gracious as I could imagine, anywhere, anytime. "We are glad you can use this land that once was ours to learn, to grow," to become more human. Can you imagine such a blessing? If every people in America was as humble, grateful and respectful, and overcome with affection for the Native community on whose land we now learn and live and make our livings as the community of Arapahoe High School, and if every Native community was, by some miracle of forgiveness and acceptance, as gracious and kind and giving as the Arapaho community of the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming, this country would be very different. Think, if you will, about what the world would look like, if other conflicts were so resolved, if other vanquished peoples were given the grace to embrace the children of those who stole their land, their livelihoods, their world. And what if we, the children of those who violated and stole and ruined, desecrated the world of others had the grace to embrace with gratitude the legacy that has been ravaged but not finally obliterated. What if we shared a common conviction, "Warriors take care of one another." So far as I can tell, the House of Representatives in their vote tonight, affirmed this vision, that "we take care of one another." How ironic, that these words first found me in the voice of the First Peoples who have changed my daughter's life over these past four years as an Arapahoe Warrior. I never imagined how proud I would be, never imagined, not at all, how happy and proud I would be to hear my daughter tell a family friend again today, "I'm an Arapahoe Warrior." Let's be like them, and take care of one another!

Wherever you go

...there you are. Even when it is not where you planned. My cousin Bev and I were pregnant at the same time and due in March, 1992. I had a miscarriage but she continued a healthy pregnancy and gave birth to a sweet little boy, Mark. I remember every year when Mark's birthday comes around, with a pinch of pain, remembering the baby I did not have then. I saw Bev shortly before Mark was born and shared joyfully in her expectations, honestly, and did not make mention of my pregnancy that had ended too early. As it turned out, I was pregnant already again when I saw Bev that day and was thrilled beyond imagining when Annika was born in August and even more thrilled that she turned out to be Annika. What a kid! That is always the thing about a miscarriage; the grief for what wasn't is almost completely swallowed up in gladness and delight about the child who was born, the daughter who, along with her sister, has grown up to completely own my heart. Back to Bev. And Mark. In the days after his birth, Bev and her husband, Tim, sent out a birth announcement that said something like this...... Imagine for a moment that you have planned a trip to France. You have made careful preparations, learned everything there is to know about France, even some of the language. You have drooled over photographs of the French countryside and the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. You have picked out a spot on the Riviera for a few days of rich living and chosen a lovely chic hotel for your days in Paris. You dream about the fields of lavender and the rich food and fine wines. Oh, yes, you have it all set up, you are going to France. You have your tickets and a little bit of French currency and the perfect itinerary. You find it hard to concentrate on anything else, as the days count down... You pack your clothes, the special dress you got for an elegant evening, the chic touring outfit, and, of course, the shoes. The day arrives. You get to the airport early, in your excitement, find the proper queue, have your passport stamped as you leave the country, board the big Air France jet, settle in for a first glass of cabernet, some crusty bread, even, believe it or not, a little escargot. You squeeze your spouse's hand, lean your head on his shoulder, smile at each other like you've got a secret, and you've won the lottery. "Here we go!" You settle back, your dream is coming true. In a few short hours, you will land in France. Only you don't. You land in Bruges. Belgium. And there seems to be no question but this is where you get off, this is where you are going, where you will stay. This, not France, is your destination. Bruges is a lovely city too. Not Paris, mind you, but interesting, You don't know Flemish and you have no idea what to look for and you don't have any hotel reservations and no map and, really, you're completely flustered. "What do we do in Belgium?" This was the gist of Bev's letter, Bev's and Tim's, as they wrote to announce the birth of their son, Mark. Who was born with Down's Syndrome. Not what they were expecting. And, as they explained from the start, "this is not a bad place we've landed, just not the one we planned for." Not, quite frankly, what we envisioned, not what we imagined parenting would be like. Mark had a number of urgent health issues, as Downs' babies often do. He had several surgeries in his first years of life. His heart. A colostomy, a reversal of the colostomy. Some of his health issues were critical. It was an all-consuming process, to care for Mark. And so it has been now these 18 years. Mark is also graduating from high school in May. It is a season of "lasts" for Bev and Tim too. His last high school football season: Mark was a manager for the Grandview High School Varsity football team all four years at Grandview. That includes the year they won the state championship and Mark was down on the field at Invesco Field at Mile High, where the Broncos play, sharing in the excitement of that big day. He has a letter jacket and wears it with obvious pride. Individuals with Downs Syndrome generally live somewhere along a continuum of capabilities, capacities. Mark is a fine swimmer, and bowler, and does well in the Special Olympics where his parents so faithfully support and cheer him on. He doesn't do as well on cognitive skills. Bev told me last fall that their goal for him before graduation was that he be able to use a cell phone, even to text, so he might have a feeling of a bit of independence. He works at a Chik-Filet as the person who cleans up after you, if you left junk on your table, spilled sauce, forgot to throw out your napkins. Wouldn't it be cool if he could call when he was ready to come home? Bev wrote to me after my post last week about "lasts," about how different it is for her, for Tim, for Mark. Because in some ways, life will go on very much as it has. Mark cannot be left alone. He will be living at home. Despite catastrophic cuts in funding for 'special education,' they are hopeful Mark will be able to go on to a post-high school program that teaches more life skills and perhaps even simple job skills. Bev wrote, "We're having a last school year with Mark but we're on a different journey from your family. The positive is that we don't plan to send him off anytime soon and we have more time to enjoy him at home." It seems to me there were words to read between the lines. Poignant ones. I cried. It's been 18 years in "Belgium" for Bev and I'll be honest. It's not been easy. It is a very different way to be a parent. It is exhausting. The rewards look very different for them than for us. She and Tim have always been on a different journey from our family. It is with enormous feelings of admiration and respect that I write, as I often think, of my cousin Bev, her husband Tim, and their son, Mark. I can tell you that they are the most incredible parents I've ever encountered, much less known. Their patience, lovingkindness, their clever and effective way of giving Mark the boundaries he needs, the affirmation and opportunity he thrives on, the playfulness he delights in ---- well, I can't imagine anyone coming close. Mark's job for the football team was to run out on the field and collect the kicking 'tee' after kickoff's and he has done his job with careful dedication. But there was not a Friday night or Saturday afternoon that Tim wasn't with him on the sideline, helping him zone in on his moment, and sometimes reminding him to come back off the field. You wouldn't believe the gracious manner in which Tim interacts with his son. Well, I hope you do. And Bev, too. Sundays and Saturdays at the pool, at other special activities, at home. Their last's are quite the same only different from ours. Their future looks very different from ours. They will be staying on in 'Belgium,' a place they've found their way around, skillfully. They've found all the hot spots, the groovy, funky places, and the boring but necessary ones too. We sat together, Bev and I, in the bleachers when Grandview played Annika's school, Arapahoe, last fall. Tim was on the field with Mark, of course. I thought it was pretty cool that Mark was out there being a manager for his school's team while our daughter, Annika, was on the opposite side, being a manager for her's. The same only different. After the game ended (Grandview beat Arapahoe, badly), Mark and Annika came up to see us and to horse around like kids do. Annika had her letter jacket on. Mark had his letter jacket on, too.

There will be no carnations today

Not a one. There will be no carnations today, not in Poland, not given to women, not if you want to save your skin. Happy International Women's Day! May 8. I didn't pay much attention to the news today so I can't say if the occasion got much play in the States. Some years it does, others it goes by without a peep. In years past I was involved in special events designed to teach women's history, or call attention to continuing issues of sexism, whether that be pay inequity, or glass ceilings, or sexual harassment and abuse. But, to be honest, International Women's Day has never had a big following here in the States. We take for granted all that we have and we are in denial about the problems that live on, and on, and on. So our attitude is pretty much just "never mind." Not so in Poland. Oh no, not so at all. International Women's Day is a big deal there. It is all about patronizing women, being extra chivalrous, even more condescending in the attention paid to "our women who work so hard for us." It is still a sore point. A major demonstration was planned this year, to call attention to specific injustices, a demonstration that most Poles managed to ignore. A recent magazine article reported the hardships women faced during the Communist period. But Polish women will tell you that the challenges are not gone. However, there are flowers. Never mind the issues of pay and power and housework, the women all get flowers. We get flowers from husbands and sons and brothers and fathers and friends and bosses. The corner kiosks selling flowers prepare for a brisk business and sell out before mid-afternoon. Women walk up Nowy Swiat carrying small bouquets, sometimes more than one. They have received flowers at work, at lunch, from sweethearts and co-workers. One would feel neglected,and embarrassed, to be seen outside today without flowers, evidence of someone's respect and affection. Men rush to deliver their flowers during lunch hours, on quick breaks, and it is a bit of an odd thing to see them out carrying bouguets of flowers too. If all else fails, there's always the supermarket. Yes, the market has a supply of roses to hand out to its women customers today. Touching. But heaven forbid you hand out carnations. Carnations are absolutely not allowed. Not one. Back again during the Communist period, every woman was given a red carnation at work on International Women's Day. These flower hand-outs generally took up work time, which had to be made up, as the "top dogs" (Poles love this term) would call a general assembly of the entire staff, spend an hour or two extolling the virtues of women, then send them back to finish their day's work, which often kept the women there longer than usual. How thoughtful. Charming, really. Needless to say, the carnations weren't particularly popular at the time. Tokenism. Boring, empty rhetoric. A longer day than usual. And a wimpy little carnation. Resentment, sarcastic wit, disgust were the order of the day. Symbolized by a red carnation. You'd have to look extra hard to find a red carnation anywhere in Poland today. If only the culture had made so much progress.

The Farewell Tour

Tonight we made the farewell tour at Arapahoe. This is a season filled with "lasts." The last choir concert. The last musical (Cinderella), the last basketball championship run, the last winter dance, and tonight it was the last Parent-Teacher Conferences. Mrs. Gerlich, the girls' AP US History teacher suggested we go out and drink a champagne toast. It was a lovely idea, but it doesn't mix well with the percocet. So we pretended. "Drink a toast to yourselves," she said, "you've done a great job, raising two exceptional young women." See, this is why we go to Parent-Teacher Conferences. Whenever we need a little boost, whenever our self-esteem is flagging, we talk to the girls' teachers. It gets a little bit embarrassing, but not so much that I'd turn it down. I used to joke that if I needed a hug, I'd just go find one of the teachers who would be so happy to tell me how great my kids are, and how much she appreciates having them in class, she's jump up from her desk and give me a big squeeze. I don't joke about it anymore, I just go. We are so lucky. With one or two exceptions, our girls have had terrific teachers. Many of them have been over-the-top excellent. We've seen the development of maturity in personality as well as intellectual growth. I love going over to Arapahoe and, meeting someone new, saying, "I'm Annika's mom." In a school of almost 2400 students, that's all it takes. "Annika's mom." I could not ask for a more honorable title, for a surer guarantee of respect by association. So tonight we went to make the rounds, our farewell tour of the teaching staff. And it was nice to hear one correct me and say, "no, it's a victory lap. Congratulations!" Somewhere in the mix of our encouragement and support and the girls' own maturity, talents, and commitments, the alchemy of this parent-child collaboration has created a couple of very cool kids. Together with their teachers and other mentors, we've done what we hoped to do: bring to life the best of their passions and quirks, their intelligence and good sense, their talents and openness, and their engagement with life at a level of thoughtful, careful, and joyful enthusiasm. And the girls, to their credit, have given it their best, their highest, and their mostest. And here they go. Again. There will be several more lasts this Spring, and not only for Annika here at home but also for Kaia at Macalester. The last prom, the last exams, the last research project, the last meals and times with friends. And for us, parents, who feel it all very differently, these are poignant last times. I have already cried, more than once. This is what we do. We go and go and go, and teach and teach and teach, and love and love and love, and listen and listen and listen. We comfort and harass, encourage and put on brakes, we nudge and throw up our hands. We laugh, we cry, we sing, we speak and we keep our silence. We say yes and we say no. We point things out, we keep things in. We hope, we cringe, we celebrate, we fill up with gratitude. We take a farewell tour, or maybe even a victory lap. We soak in the goodness. And then, they go. As we planned. As we prepared. They go. They go. They go.

Now that I'm not dying....

I started making plans. It's the not knowing. Only two weeks of uncertainty. Not bad by any standards. Except mine. Not knowing is better than knowing something terrible. I'll take not knowing for two weeks anyday over knowing, having lethal, devastating information, information that I feared but did not receive. Time falls into a different rhythm. One feels suspended. In fact, it feels a lot like the experience of being more literally 'dissociated,' as I was in the months after the attack in 2002. Dissociation is that eerie and awful experience of feeling outside yourself, outside your mind, outside your life. It is the sensation of watching your life go on, and you with it, but without being on the inside of it. During the months after the attack, the experience of dissociation was a safety mechanism, a gift from my mind to myself, a protective layer between my reality and the reality of what had occurred. It was hard enough to go on, being conscious as I was, of what had happened, what had been done, what other humans were capable of doing to one of their own, the evil that was perpetrated in a sacred space. It was a shock. But there was still this lovely layer, like gauze, a sheath, protection. Because there are times when life is too much to take in. We cannot stand too much reality, as the playwright has said (Bertold Brecht). Sophie's Choice is a devastating portrait of a life severed from reality, a reality that is too diabolical, that feels overwhelming, beyond redemption. I just read the book again in the company of some very talented writers, and we were really struck by the way the author wove together life and death so close, so interwoven that the lines became blurred. Like too many of her peers, Sophie was dying from the moment the Nazi's crossed the border. Reality was far too much. She never found her way back. Some of us split away from our personalities, our selves, forever in the wake of extreme shock, trauma, violence. And some of us just take a break, a time-out from the reality of what is in the world, what the world can do, of how harsh and stupid and destructive the world can be. And then we come back for more. Daring to step back in, to take steps in the direction of living, of life, of trusting and loving and playing around with life again. These last two weeks of not knowing what was going on inside my lungs was scary like that, the temptation to step outside for just a little while. To wait and watch. And not make any big plans. Not like before, not like I felt for the years it took before I dared to move outside a very small circle of trust, after being attacked a few years ago. And not quite like it still feels today when I come too close to what my animal brain perceives is danger. Not that bad, but weird all the same. No cancer, no embolisms, no creepy stuff. Just this one stinkin' rib that broke. I can live through that. In fact, now that I'm not dying, there's a list I've got to get back to. Poland is on it, of course, and Sweden. And, by gum, there's a novel..... It's good to be back! And thanks again for all your notes and concern! This is reality that is easily better than bearable. You make it good. Thanks!

It IS a broken rib!

No goat. This disappoints some of you who were eagerly awaiting the freaky outcomes and tabloid coverage of your friend with a goat in her chest. But, no, no goat. It is a broken rib. You'd think they could have just told me. But this is what happened -- because it is all so fascinating. I had a bad cold, a bit of a pneumonia even, terrible coughing. Difficulty breathing because of the respiratory infection. This went on for awhile. I sounded scary. The dog still hides. But that isn't the meat of the matter. Two weeks ago I felt something break or crack or crunch or tear or rip or something. And that hurt like labor. Which is to say, a lot. I went to the doctor. She ordered xrays. They took xrays. But not of the area where the rib was. Oops. So I went back later that day for a CT scan and they did their thing. But missed the rib. Oops again. But for some reason --- one can't account for what one can't account for --- nobody followed up on the broken rib angle. I was sent to a pulmonologist. He ordered a bunch of tests to check on the lung inflammation, pneumonias, cough, lung issues. Swell. But meanwhile, the rib the rib. However, the docs started talking like maybe the pain wasn't a broken rib. Maybe it was something really creepy like an embolism, cancer, that that sort of thing. Well, that was scary. And meanwhile, the pulmonologist's office lost my paperwork so the tests weren't in fact ordered, as he ordered. Big mess. It got really confusing. But this is it, the bottom line, what is actually happening. I have a broken rib. Pretty badly broken. So it's gonna hurt a lot. But that's all. The other, respiratory stuff is over. Or almost. But at least I know, we know. It's just a rib, a lousy broken rib. Thanks for being concerned. I really appreciate your care and your patience, as the confusion reigned. Knowing isn't everything. But knowing is good. Let's talk about epistomology now. Or after the percocet wears off.

It is a goat!

The CD from the CT scan of my thorax (yes, Kaia, it is a word!) is in this laptop. It is surely a good thing that a radiologist or two will take a look at it because this is all I can tell from my analysis. I have a heart. And lungs, two of them. The heart is on the right side, except when looked at from the back view, which worried me for a moment. There are ribs, well defined, but none of them look broken or cracked. There is a spine, always a relief. And fat. Yeah, fat. And there, tucked in behind a little pillow of fat is the goat. I knew it; it was either a broken rib or a goat. And it looks like a goat to us. It also looked like a little fetal head in the middle of a lung but we decided that is a physiological impossibility, for several reasons. So. There is not a black hole in my heart, also a relief. But not a golden glow around it either. Pretty normal looking to me. But something weird is going on in there. And tomorrow perhaps the veterinarian -- or my doctor -- will give the word. Stopping the percocet will be welcome. Feel free to keep me in your thoughts and join me in giving thanks to Dave for the amazing tender loving care he offers effortlessly and without ever any reservation.

Chopin's Heart, the Heart of Poland

Happy birthday to Fred! Bless his heart! Speaking of which, I sat next to it. Chopin died in his adopted France but his heart was lovingly returned -- and rather creepily returned -- to rest in repose in an urn in the church of the Holy Cross, built into a pillar in the nave of the sanctuary. I dashed in late for worship and looked up after a few moments and found, at my left hand, Chopin's heart. You can't see it -- thank the lord, but the urn is there with a red satin bow of honor. Now if I were to tell you that the heart was still beating, "The Telltale Heart," -- all I could think of the first time I saw it -- that would be really creepy. But it's not. Thank goodness. This is the 200th Anniversary Year of Chopin's birth. And today, this very one, 22 February, is the day. There is a lot to say about Chopin that I don't have time to tell today but, please, take some time yourself to listen to some etudes, a concerto, a polannaise. Perhaps the soundtrack of The Pianist is the most accessible popular source of Chopin's music. And you hear, you sense the romantic wistfulness of the Polish heart in every note. Poland was not a hospitable home for its 18th and 19th century geniuses. Chopin, Marie Curie are but two Poles who had to leave in order to find freedom for their creative forces to flourish. But Chopin remained a Pole through to the end. His soul is reflected in the plaintive, poignant passages and the brave chords of a concerto. Go to Poland today, find its heart, listen to Chopin! (from the Sunday, February 21, 2010 Washington Post) After 200 years, classical composer Chopin's music still holds mysteries Elliptical style: Polish-born Frédéric Chopin's music can appear simple, but his work is intricate and challenging. By Anne Midgette Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 21, 2010 Monday, Feb. 22, is Frédéric Chopin's 200th birthday. That is, it's Fryderyk Chopin's birthday; the Polish-born, Paris-dwelling composer's name is more commonly spelled these days with Ys. And that's his birth date according to a baptismal certificate; the composer said he was born on March 1. Even 200 years after his birth, things that appear simple about Chopin are actually more complicated than they seem. Including, and above all, his music. Chopin's piano pieces -- all of his pieces involve the piano: no symphonies or operas here -- are lyrical and lovely, poetic and, therefore, seen as accessible. Yet they can also be harmonically intricate, technically challenging. His 24 Op. 10 and Op. 25 Etudes, far from being simple "studies" for students, are so difficult that the great pianist and Chopin specialist Artur Rubinstein avoided playing some of them. And they can be elliptical to the point of impenetrability (take the final movement of the Second Sonata: a whirling cloud of sound less than two minutes long). Taken together, Chopin's pieces represent a towering hurdle, the benchmark against which a classical pianist is measured -- in part because of the difficulty of finding a way to plumb the music's depths while sounding simple. * * * "Proper" Chopin style is at once a seal of approval and the subject of endless debate. It involves lightness and clarity of touch, something evinced by one of the latest crop of Chopinistes, Rafal Blechacz, in his new CD of two rather conventional piano concertos. It requires a singing legato: the illusion that the pianist is creating an unbroken line of sound, like a human voice. This is particularly true in the Nocturnes, which are incessantly compared to the operas of Chopin's friend Vincenzo Bellini. But Chopin style can also evoke the kind of stormy outbursts the young Martha Argerich gives in her just-released CD, a collection of previously unreleased radio recordings from 1959 and 1967. Most important, and most elusive, Chopin style involves rubato -- changing tempo or rhythm for expressive purposes. The question of rubato dogs Chopin performance. The composer was said to be quite free as a pianist, but it's not clear what this meant: There are indications that he kept a fairly steady left-hand beat at all times. Still, generations of performers, following the misguided notion that a piece of music is a canvas upon which they are to express themselves, take Chopin's advocacy of rubato as license to slow down and speed up almost at will. Hearing a lot of Chopin -- even in some cases very good Chopin -- can leave me seasick from listening to too many phrases being stretched out as if going slowly uphill, then tumbling helter-skelter down again. Chopin's music has sometimes been branded effeminate, or "salon music": not quite serious, not quite healthy, not quite German, since it departs from the structural conventions of the great Viennese classical school. Even the two powerful sonatas are unconventional, playing fast and loose with the structural conventions upheld by Mozart and Beethoven. Indeed, some of Chopin's ardent defenders have implicitly bought into the idea that the music is weak and needs defending, trying to emphasize its seriousness (and manliness) by playing the works in sets -- all 24 preludes, or the 24 etudes of Op. 10 and 25 -- and thus casting them as long, weighty pieces rather than salon entertainments measuring three or four minutes long. * * * The view of the work as fragile and sickly is also linked to the pervasive idea of Chopin as a prototypical Romantic genius: pale and dapper, doomed to a tragically short life (he had tuberculosis), needing the care of a strong mother figure (his lover, best known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand), receiving the divine flash of inspiration at the keyboard (though a brilliant improviser, he labored over his compositions). After 200 years, classical composer Chopin's music still holds mysteries The work isn't fragile, though. Although Chopin himself was said to shrink away from too-loud playing, there's plenty in it that thunders and plenty that's assertive. It's also strikingly original. Chopin, unlike many composers of his day, wasn't under the sway of Beethoven. He abhorred, for instance, the start of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony; his primary influences were earlier, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach. Like Bach, he wrote music in sets: for instance, the 24 Preludes, a set of short pieces in every key like "The Well-Tempered Clavier." And pre-Classical keyboard music was an influence in some of the forms he particularly developed -- even the Nocturnes, that quintessentially Romantic expression. Chopin pioneered other forms, as well, like the Four Ballades: long dramatic monologues without words, at the intersection of tone poems and sonatas. Particularly his own were the polonaises and mazurkas, based on the idea of Polish folk dances, that are perennially held up as an example of the expatriate composer's patriotism. Chopin took his Polish nationalism seriously, but he was also capitalizing on a perennial interest in local folk color that turns up in Mozart's "Turkish" concerto or Brahms's Hungarian dances. There's certainly nothing sissy about the A-flat Polonaise. * * * There's a hint of the pragmatic in Chopin's 19 waltzes, as well. When Chopin went to Vienna as a young man, before settling in Paris, he disdained waltzes as the epitome of popular bad taste and complained that it was impossible for a composer to publish anything that wasn't a waltz. He may have looked down on them, but he was practical enough to start writing waltzes -- not, certainly, waltzes that one could actually dance to, but pieces that evoked the ballroom atmosphere, the whirl of gowns. The waltzes seem to be getting particular attention this anniversary year. New recordings have recently come out by Alice Sara Ott and Ingrid Fliter, two pianists worth knowing about, and Dinu Lipatti's classic set from 1950 is going to be rereleased yet again at the end of March. Listening to all the waltzes at one go is like eating a box of chocolates, leaving you feeling ever so slightly bilious; yet each of these recordings has its strengths. Fliter has a gorgeous, light, easy touch that appeals to me instinctively, but she gets a little carried away with the rubato, tugging at and prodding every phrase. Ott, too, sometimes sounds willful, but she has a wholesome directness. With a big sound that feels reined in, she embodies, in the Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat, the slightly coltish exuberance of a young girl at her first dance. In comparison, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who recorded the waltzes a few years ago, offers a drier, cooler approach: The playing is admirably clean and slightly distant, and very much a tonic after too much emoting. The waltzes epitomize one of the hardest things about playing Chopin: walking the fine line between emotion and sentiment, between feeling something and looking back, fondly, on the way it felt. Chopin presages Ravel's "La Valse" in his expression of slightly ironic nostalgia. The dance forms Chopin used had particular connotations; his works were a kind of social commentary. Today, the nostalgia threatens to trump everything. One big secret of playing Chopin may simply be to remember that it's not as pretty as it sounds.

"The Pants Heard 'Round the World"

"Look at your pants!" says the Queen to the King in Cinderella, begging him to schedule a festive ball to introduce their Prince to the eligible young women of the kingdom. Annika was rehearsing this dialogue yesterday when the Norwegian Olympic curling team appeared on the television screen. Meredith Viera called them "the pants heard 'round the world," and all we could say was, "Look at your pants!" I have the typical Swede's issues with Norwegians to begin with and this just doesn't make it easier. On the other hand, one of the issues Swedes have with Norwegians is that they are just too damn serious, and take themselves way too seriously. These pants definitely go the distance in rebutting that stereotype. So go Norwegians, wear those pants. Just don't expect us to ever take you seriously again. But this is not really about pants. That was just a teaser. This is about falling. And getting up. As much as I love Canada, I have to agree with the Salon writer yesterday who was inclined to tell Canada, "you're fired." The downhill ski course was a disaster. I keep envisioning these women whoooshing through the powder at Steamboat, snow worthy of an Olympics competition. But no, instead, they are sliding down a frozen concrete slippery slope that took six of the women out. Downhill skiing is an edgy, dangerous sport. That's a given. But taking out six of the best skiers in the world? One wonders. This is the thing, though. They got up. All but one who required an airlift off the course, the women got up, released their bindings, gathered the broken pieces of their skiis, and walked off the course. They're younger than me. Younger than most of you, too. That counts for something. But it is this getting up business that impresses the heck out of me. Getting up is good. Getting up is amazing. Getting up is normal -- much of the time. But it's not always possible. At least not right away. And it is certainly not always easy. One of my theme songs in the months after I was attacked and quit working was, "I get knocked down, and I get up again, I get knocked down, and I get up again..." Sometimes you can sing at the top of your lungs and push as hard as you can and grit your teeth and push and resolve, be determined, and still, it doesn't always happen right away. Resiliency is about bouncing back. I used to be so resilient I was a damn trampoline. Bounce, bounce, bounce. But then came a time when bouncing was no more possible than flying off into space. It's frustrating to be in a different time and space, to have to deal with an experience that is profoundly, intrinsically different from the challenges I'd faced before. But I learn new ways to be resilient, to grow those resiliency muscles. I keep saying that one of the big draws for me to Poland is the resiliency I've seen, as they bounce back, or build back, recover, return, heal after outrageous devastation: the destruction of World War II, the imposition of a communist regime for forty years post WWII, and earlier, after the Partitions of the 19th century. But it's not an even process. Some are more resilient than others. Some are more resilient in some ways, less in others. And some are more resilient now, others later. I thought I knew all about resiliency. But I was humbled. Broken beyond the point where bouncing back was easy, quick, straightforward. Sometimes it feels like I'm still just reverberating, absorbing the shock. That is the way it is. For all of us, in various ways. It varies. The least helpful thing we do when others fall is judge their response to it. We don't know what else they have endured, encountered in life. We don't get to tell others how long it will take, what exactly they must do, how much it will hurt. We see this as military veterans return home from war and respond differently to their experiences. The best thing we can do when others fall is attend to them. Listen. Honor and respect their interpretation of what happened. Then encourage and support them as they begin a healing process. I see this in Poland too. I have friends and acquaintances there who are still stuck, have not been able to move into this new era and embrace all that it offers. And others who jumped up and seized the new opportunities even as they were just beginning to emerge. Some are frozen. While others have been flying. And so it is with those of us who have faced violence and danger, hostility and harassment. We respond in various ways. I'm not a trampoline anymore but I got one. And I guess if it makes them feel better about not being Swedish, those crazy Norwegians can go ahead and wear those bizarro pants. Whatever it takes. Just so long as they don't mind hearing Annika shout, "Look at your pants!" What works for you, what have you learned about strengthening your resiliency muscles?

Lost in Bubbles

Maybe it was the narcotic haze. (Just a little bit of codeine overload as I continue to battle pneumonia.) Or perhaps it was the conversations I've had with my daughters lately. They are both up to their eyeballs in community organizing, activity, and what Macalester College refers to as Civic Engagement. Or else it was just historical amnesia. But I wrote yesterday that I don't feel apologetic about being an American. Let me clarify that. For the record, an important record. And thanks to old friend, Mike Voigt, for catching me up short. To be honest, it is such a relief to feel good about being an American again, in many ways (not all!, that I got carried away. But just a few reminders of who else we are. El Salvador. Chile. Nicaragua. Mexico. Panama. And, god bless us all, Granada! And that's before we move on to the present moment. Irag. Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia. Shall I go on? Yes. Slavery. I can apologize as long as the day lasts. Blood on our hands. Sleazy, greedy, creepy foreign policies and domestic failures. Cynical urban policies. Corruption. Petty politics. And that's before we come to the hedge funds and disastrous behaviors of the financial sector that, as it turns out, reading today's NYT's, has screwed Greece too. (With ample participation of the Greeks.) So yes, you get lots of hand-wringing, regret, embarrassment, and anger from me. Cynicism, frustration, disgust. But. As noted above, I've been paying a lot of attention to my kids. And to the communities around me. And I'm impressed. Caveat: it seems I spend a lot of my time in Poland being reminded of all that is wrong with America. We're big. We're imperious. We're cocky. We've screwed up the world's financial sector. We're racist. And that has got my back up. So I like to remember, as well, the ways our parents take an active role in their kids' education, the remarkable quality of arts and music programs, the teen-agers who spend hours sitting on town Planning and Zoning Commissions (ask Annika) representing the wisdom of a new generation. The levels of civic engagement in everything from education and health care and sports programs. Volunteer hours. I venture to assert that we probably spend more volunteer hours per capita than almost any other nation on earth. We do share our wealth, if not in the ways I'd like, in terms of economic adjustments, at least in donating and giving. So. Not to be too defensive here. But that's what I was thinking last night as I watched our delegation come in, and reflected on who we are. We are a really mixed bag. Really mixed bag. And the same ones of us who do great things also do terrible things. We are, at the same time, saints -- so to speak -- and sinners. Good and bad. I was lost in bubbles last night, grateful for all that is right. But we dare not forget the rest. And learn. And repent. And change. Yeah, change.

Here Comes Everybody!

Ghana is represented in the Winter Olympics. And Ethiopia. Cyprus. I love this! I love the world. The whole world, everybody from Andorra to Iran to Israel to Tadzikistan. Tell me it's all schmaltz. I won't believe you. On nights like this the idealist in me is alive, flaming in fact. We are everybody and yes, we are the world. All of it. Playing together on this pale blue dot. Sadly, the Jamaican Bobsled Team didn't qualify. But Moldova is represented. Here comes everybody! My daughter watched the Torun Olympics from either Italy or Estonia, I don't remember which. But I do remember her jubilation at being in the Town Square in Tallinn Estonia when their first gold medalist, a cross-country skier, returned home to an enormous crowd as the conquering Queen. I love this parade, this Opening Ceremony, the time we take to honor each participating country, the reminders of who we all are and the faces given to strangers, neighbors, ancient enemies. The ironies are striking. Turkey and Armenia. Bosnia and Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro. Macedonia and Greece. Iran and Israel. I'm sentimentally attached, of course, to Estonia and Sweden and Poland, and I will be cheering every chance I get for a Swede to beat a Norwegian. The huge Chinese delegation walked in and every single one of them held up a camera to capture their experience. The Georgians were somber and clearly affected by the tragedy form earlier today. The lone Mexican competitor looked lost. The Poles brought their best hopes, cross-country skiers, and got through without being the object of any tacky jokes. But it came close. And then the United States comes in, all boisterous and overwhelming and confident. It's a herd of Americans! This is always a striking moment for me. There is pride, of course, but also a sober sense of awareness of scale. We're big. We're really huge. And to see our relative strength in numbers out there on the field, well, what can I say? What needs to be said? Having sat in living rooms across the world and watched the United States show up in force, I always feel the embarrassment of riches. Seeing us as others see us. Dominant and dominating. Overwhelming. It's a poignant moment, always. I'm never moved to apologize for who I am, who we are. But I always do feel a sense of responsibility and humility. With great wealth comes great requirements. And I wonder, are we worthy? Are we good stewards of all we are, all we have? Sport, war, humanitarian aid, relief, music, art, literature, science, medicine, economics. Oh yeah, we compete, we share, we each bring our best, and, idealist that I am, flaming idealist that I am a night like tonight makes me wonder, even hope. Human frigging beings that we are, could we try a little harder to pull this off, more often? All the time? Okay, I'm not crazy. Not all the time. But, nevertheless, ready or not, here comes everybody!

"Over my dead body!"

Oh, this is flattering! In his column last Sunday in the New York Times, Nobel Prize winner (Economics), Paul Krugman compared the current level of functioning in the United States Congress to that of the Polish Sejm two centuries ago. It's a disturbing picture. And too true to be good. This gives me the excuse to offer a little history lesson and another insight into the Polish psyche. And perhaps, while we're at it, a glimpse into our own. It's all about the "No." As the Polish nation began to come together, as early as the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1264, a basic Jewish Charter was established to promote Jewish trade within Polish lands and by 1515, King Sigismund I extended the policy to promote Jewish settlements and a policy of tolerance toward Jews throughout the realm. This was at a time when Jews where being pushed out and persecuted throughout western Europe and squeezed into a vise that narrowed their options for freedom, promoting Jewish culture and religion, and for making their livelihood. The Jewish communities within Poland were gathered under an elected tribunal of rabbis that administered their own affairs as an almost semi-autonomous state within the state. (This is not particularly relevant to the argument at hand, I just wanted to throw it in because it is a little known part of history, which does cast a certain, different light on the history of Poland and Jewry. But anyway, I digress.) This came at a time when Poland was already on the path to a Constitutional Monarchy, one of the first in the world. Poland had a bicameral parliament, sejm, by 1497, comprised of nobility. The Catholic bishops and the Papal authorities wielded considerable power as well. Skip twenty chapters of dense Polish history, names, dates, wars, schemes, intrigues.... Oh, my goodness, this is all so complicated. There will not be a test later. Poland was one of the first nations to see the emergence of a powerful parliamentary system. The members of this parliament were the Polish nobility. A very powerful class. They pushed, they pulled, they took land back from the burghers, they cut deals with the Jewish merchant and guild classes. They adopted an attitude and a lifestyle of entitlement, and, of course, privilege. The Polish nobility was numerous by European standards. 25,000 noble families, altogether about 500,000 persons, represented as much as 6.6 per cent of Poland's total population. At the same time, for example, France's nobility comprised only one per cent of its population, and England's nobility was only two per cent. [Clearly, the Poles were more noble than anyone else!] They were a closed estate, their privileges protected by a labyrinth of detailed laws. They controlled their own destiny and that of everyone else in the Polish republic of roughly 7.5 million. They governed according to "their private inclinations." Nice gig if you can manage it. Well, these nobles felt so entitled and empowered that they were at pains to preserve the power of every single one of their caste. Which is to say, nobody wanted to allow anything to happen that they themselves would not benefit from. "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Or, at the very least, it's not going to happen. Poles may be the world's most notable idealists. By 1652, they enacted procedures that assured the Sejm would act always in unanimity. That's right. Can you imagine? They proceeded from the notion that no law could be enforced if it had not been made by unanimous consent. They wanted to avoid the chaos that comes from conflict. They strove to create harmony in their civic life. And, anyway, if a policy did not have universal consent, if it could not be convincing to everyone eligible to decide, then it must not be worthy of adoption. Yes, idealism. Indeed. My mind, which ranges toward cynicism on occasion (okay, often, when it comes to matters of the administration and distribution of power), wonders if there wasn't also an element of "over my dead body" that prompted the Sejm to give veto power to all of its members. "If I don't want it, it ain't happening." "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Kind of the reverse of the old adage, "what's good for GM is good for America." What isn't in my best interest isn't going to happen. The motivations for this policy, such as we are privvy to them, seem high-minded, if naive. But it created chaos. Eventually. Nothing got done because, surprise! the nobles did not all agree. They used the "Liberum Veto" for matters large and small. Petty and churlish. And the country stalled out. Okay, that's simplistic. But you didn't sign on for Polish History 440, the graduate seminar, after all. The point is that a lovely concept degenerated into misuse and selfish, mean-spirited, vindictive obstructionism. That pesky human nature at work once again. Now, read Paul Krugman. Sound familiar? It happens everywhere. In families, school boards, sewage oversight committees, country clubs and quilting groups. And even in churches. Striving for consensus is one thing, a noble thing. But giving veto power to the churlish, ignorant or paranoid is always a bad idea. As Krugman points out, Poland disintegrated and disappeared, degenerated into chaos, became ungovernable and vulnerable to the predatory intentions of its neighbors. Respect for bound conscience is one thing. "Liberum veto" is another. Concern for consensus is great. But the petty don't deserve to win.

I scared the dog

It is not pretty. The mucky non-productive cough of pneumonia. The Daisy dog is permanently scarred, and scared to come near me. I hope we can patch this up one day. I hope I stop coughing one day. It's been a week now. And I, for one, am not enjoying it. But at least one thing is better than the last time I had pneumonia. You. Christmas Eve 2000. I shook several hundred hands as the congregations left worship services. Somebody had Influenza B. The bad one going around that year. Christmas morning 2000. I woke up feeling like I'd been trashed by a team of roller derby queens. Which is to say, not good. But there was a worship service and it was my turn to do Christmas Day duty. The next day was a funeral and burial. The day after that was the church staff Christmas party. At my house. A kitchen full of guests, last minute preparations, gravy, mixing a salad. I could hardly stand up. So when they all went in to the dining room to sit down for the meal, I went upstairs "for a few minutes" to rest. I woke up ten hours later. I had this wicked Influenza bacteria and I got pneumonia. And, as some of you have been relating similar stories, pneumonia is nasty. And it lasts a long time. One friend wrote tonight of being sick for a month and a half. As it was, I was down, ennervated, totally wiped out for three weeks. It was six weeks before I really felt back to almost normal. I saw the doctor weekly and was on mega-doses of antibiotics. You can check my insurance records. It's true. As you have been following this blog you know that I am recovering from an attack at work. That happened in October of 2002, so about a year and a half later than this bout of illness. After I returned to work at the parish, I learned (not right away) that the "word on the street" --- which is to say gossipy emails, parking lot conversations, coffee klatches and telephone calls --- was that I didn't have the flu or pneumonia at all. In some versions, alternately, I was not sick at all and just faking it. Or, this was the most popular, I had a mental breakdown. The irony of that story was that 18 months later, in fact, their incessant and devilish harassment, sabotage, and abuse did result in my having a severe mental injury. I guess they were just planning ahead. The congregation was behaving according to a long pattern. And when I say congregation I should clarify that a core group of perhaps as many as fifty persons were gung ho on Operation Kill Jan, and others got dragged in or caught up in some of the gossip. And of those fifty, perhaps only as many as twenty or so were the most vigilant and diabolical in their behavior. The pattern that had worked for them before worked for them again. Pimp up the young assistant, undermine the senior pastor (me) and split the staff apart. It only works when the young assistants are guillible and needy. It hadn't worked with the previous team but oh, did it ever work this time. Moral of long story made short, my getting pneumonia and Influenza B became the first opening, the big opening, for mischief. (Mischief is as appropriate a descriptor here as bombing is for describing what happened at Hiroshima.) It was the opening campaign of the war they won on October 22, 2002, in the parking lot of the church. The next eighteen months were pretty much unmitigated hell. If you can imagine it, they did it. I've been reading all this week, Sophie's Choice about the holocaust, The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam war, All the King's Men about corruption in the early 20th century south, Willa Cather about the hardships of life and the moral breakdowns that were part of early life on the Nebraska prairie. The things we are capable of. Doing. To. One. Another. I realized how naive I still am. How genuinely hopeful I am about the human race. But mostly naive. Even though I know it happened, these and other terrible things, I have to confess, I have a very hard time wrapping my head around them. Really? People do these things to one another? There is still a big part of me that is in denial. Sometimes I have to watch the reality crime shows on TV just to convince myself that people, "normal" people really do terrible things. I will confess one thing more. I'm not sure if the denial isn't a perverse flip side of cynicism. Maybe I'm not so hopeful as I want to believe. Something changed inside of me as a result of that experience. Not unlike veterans who come home and talk about having become numb, even cold. I get it. Whether or not that's healthy, I'm not sure. Thanks for all your good wishes, suggestions and encouragement. I really DO have pneumonia and I'm not especially worried this time about a raging gossip campaign asserting otherwise. Thanks for being trustworthy. And kind.

Choose Life

Before I went there for the first time in 1980, this is what I knew and thought about Poland, when, rarely, I thought about Poland at all: Auschwitz. The Holocaust. And I knew it was part of the Warsaw Pact. Communist. That’s it. Period. Poland? When you live on the north side of Chicago you learn this about Poland: it is where your Jewish neighbors were sent like cordwood in box cars to death camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka and Majdanek, from which these remnant few had somehow survived, traumatized ghosts without family or home or faith. I watched Hasidic neighbors from my window go to the Yeshiva every morning. I saw the wives with their wigs play with children on the front stoops. I walked past three synagogues on the way to the grocery store. How could I go to Poland? I struggled for a time with a feeling that I would somehow betray my Jewish friends and neighbors by going to Poland. It was for them a symbol now of death, of trauma. I would be treading on their ghosts, their haunted memories of loss and torture. Having Jewish neighbors, whole communities of Holocaust survivors, the Hasidic Yeshiva across Argyle Street, an Orthodox seminary a few blocks west on Foster Avenue, thriving congregations just up Kimball and scattered all through the neighborhood, and observant religious Jews living next door, all meant learning firsthand about the Nazi horrors, the desperate struggles to live, the terror of being torn from mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and, worse, one’s children. I read their histories, their theologies, their narratives. I read Elie Wiesel, read Night, and carried, as part of me now, the haunting picture he described, of a child hanged on the gallows at Auschwitz, and the angry cry of a fellow prisoner, “Where is God? Where is He?” As Wiesel was forced to march past the boy, hanging between life and death for over half an hour, the man behind him asked again, “Where is God now?” Wiesel writes, “ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows.....’” (Night, page 62) In Poland. Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Viktor Frankl, Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Chaim Potok — I inhaled their writings. They were foundational to the theology, still Christian, that was constantly forming and reforming within me. I would go to Poland with the witness of these Jews in my heart and mind. “Religionless Christianity,” “the cost of discipleship,” “the way of freedom,” the penetrating insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were the dominant influence on my Christian views. Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and scholar, became a leader in the resistance movement in the run-up to World War II and throughout the war, sharply critical of the German church that allowed itself to be coopted by the Nazi’s and was silent in the face of anti-Semitism and other atrocities. DB (as we groupies affectionately call him) ultimately gave up his life trying to save the world from Hitler; as part of a plot to assassinate Hitler on July 21, 1943, he was arrested, sent to Buchenwald, and was hanged in the last days of Nazi power, May 7, 1945. While his own experience was dramatic, heroic, and profoundly sacrificial, worthy of the deepest respect and a challenge to any Christian who hears the words of Jesus, “take up your cross,” and “whoever would save his life must give it up, for my sake and the Gospel,” it was his writings, especially the Letters and Papers From Prison, that gave voice to my own deepest convictions about God and the world. I would go to Poland with Bonhoeffer in hand. Poland. Poland. Poland? I would go to Poland and ask questions. I would go to Poland and wonder about evil. I would go to Poland and try to understand something more about faith. About living. I would go to Poland, defiantly, choosing life in the face of death. So I did. So I do. Humbly, gently, carefully. And I chose. Life.

Round Trip to Auschwitz

The train to Auschwitz left from Platform 4.

Peron 4. A sign pointed the way.


It had been a leisurely morning. A cheerful voice greeted me with a seven o'clock wake up call. I hit the snooze button twice, finally shambling off to a warm shower at seven thirty. The small hotel in the Kazimierz district of Krakow served a marvelous breakfast -- scrambled eggs, perfectly prepared, with chives and bacon, a warm croissant with sweet Danish butter, crisp fresh pineapple, orange and grapefruit, salad (Europeans always need some sort of salad for breakfast), a bit of brie, a chilled glass of freshly squeezed pulpy orange juice exactly as I like it, and perfectly brewed rich black coffee.

I took a direct route to the train station, stopping only at a Bank-o-Mat -- in this case a German bank -- for yet more zloty, and dodged the occasional car heading up onto the sidewalk, where parking is customary. The street was torn up as new tram lines are being laid down but that has nothing to do with why cars are on the sidewalk. Cars are always on the sidewalk in Poland. The narrow streets leave no other choice for parking.

I strolled on, happening upon shop owners cranking out their awnings and sweeping the stoop, readying to open for the day. I passed students hurrying back from a quick trip home to the villages, barely in time for a new week of classes at Jagellonian University, one of the very first chartered universities in Europe. These students dragged suitcases, lugged awkwardly heavy backpacks. I followed a smartly dressed businesswoman of my own age, who knew exactly the most efficient way to navigate the maze of paths and obstacles through construction zones, one way streets, and tunnels. We bridged a ten-foot-deep trench on a sturdy plank and stepped around the worker in his royal blue and, so far, neatly pressed overalls. He was laboring to level ground for new paving stones.

The sky was clear blue with only a faint hint of the early morning haze, dew rising from the rolling fields just beyond the city. The sooty dank coal smell that I remembered from visits in the 1980's was conspicuously absent. It felt fresh and new and good to be about.

I arrived at the railway station with twenty minutes to spare. I bought a round trip ticket to Auschwitz/Oswiecim for 22 zloty. Coke Zero cost 3.5.

The train left precisely on time, at nine fifteen, as Polish trains do. We stopped at the Krakow Business Park, a skyline of red and yellow cranes putting up a score of modern office buildings to join the gleaming multi-storied corporate offices already there.

I believed I'd found a forward facing seat in the front car of the train, my choice. But when the train began moving, my mistake was obvious. I was in the last car. Looking back.

Did my unconscious will out after all?

No matter, I moved forward at the first stop and found a comfortable place across the aisle from two young women speaking in their animated, cheery French about friends, travel and ordinary things, about life. (I love eavesdropping.) The older man facing me read a succession of periodicals, a daily tabloid newspaper, a more serious newspaper, a magazine about Formula One car racing, and finally another lightweight weekly. His briefcase sat on the vinyl seat next to him. He got up, then checked the time on his cell phone several times, apparently anxious to get to an appointment on time. His grey tweed sport coat, stylish striped shirt and smart tie put me in mind of an architect. His glasses were new and of the very latest and highest fashion and his serious mien seem ill-suited to his choice of reading material. Of course, I never did figure him out. A journalist, maybe? Nah. Who knows.

Another, younger man in the last row of our car looked like one of Sarah Palin's 'Joe Six Pack' fixtures. He spent his time with a book of crossword puzzles, or else staring out the window, his arm resting on a small, brown canvas duffle bag.

The countryside from Krakow to Auschwitz ranges from gently to bigger, then big rolling hills, from woods and forest to patches of farmland, some villages and small towns. We passed through Dulowa, a sprawling village of two-story stucco houses, set at the base of a small hill surrounded by woods. A modern church, built to resemble the prow of a ship rose from the midde of nowhere, between this village and the next one.

Homemakers were out, taking advantage of a warm dry spell, hanging laundry to dry, digging around in gardens. It was wash day in Galicia: brightly colored blouses and skirts hung like flags and waved freely in the pleasant breeze.

We passed through Trzebinia, the biggest town on the route. A power plant with a tall red and white tower rose like a lighthouse. A railworker stood in the weeds of the trainyard, curly blond hair tossing rings around her face, talking on a cellphone. Several people got off in Trzebinia. A few others got on. The railworker was still on the phone.

Autumn was in its waning moments. Leaves turning from gold to brown, falling, drifting, like lilting notes of a completed season, or sonata. The trees looked bleached out and tired. The willows drooping, pulled down by the weight of life. Beech trees, cottonwood, all spent.

The man across from me checks the time evermore frequently. Pulls out a presentation folder. A printed document. Is it a lecture? A business proposal? His phone rings. He seems relieved to have made contact.

Ten eighteen. We stop in Chrznew.

The man is restless. He pulls out a well-worn gold appointment notebook, very old-fashioned. Then his wallet. Then he reviews all the documents contained therein.

Getting close.

We are now surrounded by woods. A few fir or pine, I can't quite tell which. We go under a bridge being constructed as an overpass for local cars. Life must be picking up around here. The train bed becomes rockier, then so much so I have to stop writing. The train bed is sitting up fifty feet above the forest floor. I'm a little freaked out.

Did everyone brought to KL Auschwitz arrive by train? On these tracks? Didn't I read that the first, Polish political prisoners arrived by truck transport?

There are freshly painted gray coal cars sitting, empty, on a siding.

The French girls who were laughing earlier have become more serious. The man combs his hair. Again. A few minutes later he does the spit and polish on his hair, using the cell phone's face as a mirror. Now he's checking the packages in the big Bass (brand) bag he has alongside.

Clutching both bags. We're not late. Why the restlessness? Is he coming to be interrogated? Tested?

Or is he on a pilgrimage too?

We pass a lovely large yard with rich green grass, an ornamental windmill, trees heavy with fruit, a small orchard of trees well-pruned. A big house is nearby, still under construction, the roof beams exposed.

The man across from me finds and checks another wallet but he doesn't seem frantic, searching for some lost item, just perusing. He checks a credit card or two, then reviews some business cards.

He reminds me of myself on some of the business trips I used to take, fumbling out of nervousness, low-level anxiety, boredom, eagerness to get on with it. I think ADD or something like it.

Now I see that all of the trees are completely washed out. Nature is past its peak. Even the pines look faded, bleached, tired of holding on.

But here and there, a brilliant red or gold band of trees stand out among the barren. Occasionally, the silvery trunks of birch gleam in the sun, which has been playing hide and seek all morning. We move along very slowly, bumping over the rocky train bed.

A French girl yawns. The other one, with darker hair, is quite quiet, pensive.

The man checks his watch again. And fidgets with his pockets, pulls out a slim red lighter. And a cigarette.

Forest on either side of us now. I think, it would be easy to hide in that forest, even now, with all its dense undergrowth.

We approach another tall smoke stack, painted red and white, another lighthouse. Full coal cars sit on the siding.

It is ten forty. We have stopped just short of, in sight of the Oswiecim/Auschwitz station.

We will arrive on time.

The girls take out packets of candy and each have one, their talk now strangled in the chocolate. They chew heavily, their jaws working like presses on the sticky candy.

We speed the last few kilometers, rocking rather wildly from side to side. A fringe of red oak lines the edge of a clearing. A large corn field extends beyond the woods into the distance.

More houses, small plots, typical edge of town. A big yellow Caterpillar sits on the next track, obviously rebuilding it, laying down steel rails. Whose equipment was it that helped the Nazis build the extra rail lines they required to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Now we are wobbling across a bridge that spans what reminds me of a northern Colorado irrigation ditch, like the one where my father learned to swim and carouse with his cousins. We pass old, faded red brick, two-story square houses. They all have satellite dishes installed on their sides. There are newer stucco houses too, even a lime green one. They have satellite dishes too.

And we're here. Auschwitz/Oswiecim.

We're late.

I wonder, did that happen a lot?




My trip by train to Auschwitz.

Does anyone do this and not think. Not think about what was. About what was then. Was horrific. Terrifying. Brutal. Inhuman, inhumane.

How did a simple banal train trip become, in time, at one time, evil?




The last train back to Krakow today leaves at 19:17. I don't want to miss it. I take a photo of the schedule so I don't get mixed up. I get to go home. Today.

Blue Numbers and White Lace

The tablecloth was lace. The candles were lit.

Sunday dinners at this family’s table were times for playful political bantering, and for poignant history lessons. Parents, children, different views, differing priorities, common values. I was glad to share dinner with my friend and his family.

I struggled to understand the meaning of swishing Polish consonants sweeping past, all sz's and cz's and dz's --- chshjenchtz (not a real word but a lovely sound that whooshed by time and again). Much of the conversation was lost in translation but I got the message.

One a bright,warm Sunday in June, we shared soup -- borscht -- and pork with apples, fresh bread and butter, a variety of garnishes and specialities, and a green vegetable that I assure you was not cabbage.

I don't remember all of that, I know it only because I wrote it down. But this I do remember. Can see even now.

The deep indigo numbers imprinted on his father’s forearm. A strong arm resting on white lace. He had passed me a bowl of salad, this middle-aged Polish man, and set his arm on the table between us. Numbers. What I remember now is how the typeface was so dark, distinct, easy to read. Tattooed, burned into his skin. His identification mark. From Auschwitz.

I never had the nerve to ask him directly but I did ask his son, “does he still think about it? Talk about it? Often?” “Sometimes, not very often. And not very much,” Christopher said quietly. “There are some things he cannot talk about.”

I had no idea that ethnic Poles had been sent to Auschwitz, for the crime of being Polish. This man had fought the Nazis in the forests of Poland, from encampments that were crude and barely fortified. His father had been shot in front of his eyes; as a 14-year-old boy, he witnessed the murder of his father by Nazi soldiers. As a teen-ager he fought to sabotage and undermine the crushing Nazi occupation of his country.

And he was caught. "He didn't have a gun in his possession at that moment, else he would have been shot on the spot." But he was sent to Auschwitz.

65 years ago today, Soviet soldiers liberated the biggest concentration camp in the entire Nazi system. They arrived early on a bitter, snowy morning and found dozens dead, but, miraculously, dozens alive, huddled together, hidden under haybeds, hidden even amongst corpses. 1.1 million humans were murdered on those grounds alone -- Auschwitz-Birkenau, most but not all of them Jews. But some had survived.

Including the man who passed me the salad.

Thousands of Auschwitz survivors had been force-marched in the previous weeks westward to Buchenwald and other Nazi camps. Of that number hundreds died along the way. Jews, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and others.

The Holocaust stands as a singular event in human history. We have done dastardly, terrible things through the centuries. Even in that same last one. But, the systemmatic, scientifically organized murder, the intent to exterminate an entire race of people, the dehumanization of millions, the efficiency of the killing -- unimaginable horror -- of the Holocaust haunts us all and reminds us of the slim cord between control and tyranny. We are vulnerable to our own worst inclinations, our own worst instincts. The Holocaust reminds us of the requirements of vigiliance, and generosity, of the dangers of arrogance and, at the other end of the spectrum, and often at the same time, of fear and paranoia.

On this day, sixty-five years ago, the biggest death camp was torn open. The children who survived as skeletal heirs of an entire culture walked, or were carried out of the barracks and given over to the gracious care of the soldiers who liberated them, entrusted to the care of local Polish families, and nursed back to life. Young men like my friend's father, staggered through the snow to begin their journeys home. And the world was forced to stop ignoring the Nazi killing machines.


I've been to Auschwitz-Birkenau on two occasions. Both of them, life-changing experiences. It is eerie. It is harrowing. It is a moral "in your face" to all of us, all of us.

I've included some photos from a recent visit, photos that I could not bear to view myself for some months afterward. Yet these photos do nothing to truly convey the gravitas of the horror.

The true witness to the Holocaust, to the death camps, is best found in the stutter of the survivors, the haunted look in their eyes, the nerve damage that was permanent. The empty shtetls, the stolen art and stolen homes, and stolen lives. The cost of the Holocaust, among Jews and other victims, including ethnic Poles, is all too apparent in the next generation, as the children of survivors have paid a price for their parents' trauma.

But there is another witness that has come from this grim moment in history. The witness of human resiliency, of grace, generosity, work, dignity, and love.

At that dinner table, the strong arm that still bore a tattoo was also the strong arm that raised up a new generation, rebuilt and built new, carried and created a new society, albeit derailed for forty years by the lie of the imposed workers' paradise.

Strong arms. Blue numbers or not. Strong arms on white lace.

I figured it out!

I did.

I figured it out. What Poland really needs is my dad's cousin Bill.

Or The Judge. Justice Erickson.

Poland needs Judge Erickson, Bill, in its back pocket.

My father's cousin, Justice William H. Erickson, died last week and I've been reflecting long and gratefully about his life, his firecracker personality, his deep and abiding commitment to justice, and his faithful loyalty to what is right.

And I've been gratefully thinking about his kindnesses to his family.

At the Memorial Service today there was some conversation about nomenclature. Some of his former law clerks can't think of calling him anything but Judge Erickson, or even The Judge. He was on the Colorado Supreme Court for 25 years and was the Chief Justice for part of that period. So some colleagues can't but call him Justice Erickson.

To me, he was Bill.

In the past few years we had been working together on some family history (see above, Sex With Kings) and he told me stories that had as much to do with the practice of law and his own father's stealing apples from William Jennings Bryan's apple tree and the great legal cases of the century as with our own Erickson clan. It was a lot of fun. And we even managed to get a product completed!

But my most grateful memory of Bill was the morning he sat in my living room and respectfully invited me to rehearse the sordid, disgusting history of my experiences at the church here in Littleton, the experiences that resulted in my becoming badly injured and leaving, experiences that are simply evil. There's no other word for it.

I was still at the point of not quite being able to believe it myself. "Things like this don't really happen, do they? People don't do these things, do they? Am I making it all up?"

He listened patiently. And he nodded and validated every single experience I described. He'd heard it all before. He knew it was possible. I didn't say anything that shocked him -- except insofar as it happened to me. He was disgusted and angry.

And that meant the world to me.

When outrageous things happen to us, especially when they seem to come right out of left field, unexpectedly, from sources we didn't think could be capable of such hideous crap, we don't believe it. We doubt ourselves.

When injustice occurs, when we are trampled, when we're blindsided by hatred and fear and incompetence, we often feel that we're misreading the situation. But we know we didn't. We have transcripts. We have data. We have witnesses. But still, we don't quite believe it.

It is so urgently important in such a case to have a person of credibility and authority who can sit and say, "Yes, this happened. You're not crazy. You read it correctly. You did everything you could. You don't deserve this, you are better than this."

Bill wasn't quite as vigorous as my friend, Christopher, whose reaction was, "Where do they live? Where can I find them? I'm gonna beat the hell out of that man." I loved it.

Bill was an expert on the law and the law doesn't smile on taking matters into one's own hands.

But he respected me. Given the complex law governing Church/State issues, we decided not to launch a civil suit. He would have been there for me had it been appropriate. Had it been any other profession I was in, it would have been a slam dunk. Knowing that was empowering. Knowing he knew that, believed it, was empowering and terribly heart-warming.

Being validated, respected, believed, affirmed is a critical part of the healing process. Justice Erickson, Bill, did that for me.


As Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, he wrote the opinion in 1993 that found the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado liable with respect to a civil suit filed by a victim of clergy sexual abuse and awarded a few million dollars to her in damages. That opinion shocked and scared the shit out of church officials who realized for the first time that they would be held accountable for passing along to other parishes the clergy they knew to have been sexually involved with parishioners.

I loved it! And it was the landmark case that caught the attention of church leaders overall and helped to change the dynamics so that most Protestant churches now have policies that are respectful of victims and have a bias toward preventing abuse rather than covering it up. Sadly, that message didn't get through to all leaders --- ask me! --- but, hey, we're working at it.

How odd, from very different professional positions and responsibililties, Judge Erickson and his cousin's daughter collaborated on moving this along. How cool is that! At the time I was the ELCA's churchwide point person for responding, and teaching bishops, to respond to clergy sexual abuse. Chief Justice Erickson and the Colorado Supreme Court did part of my work for me.

So, Bill, thank you. For the character and inspiration you've provided over the years, to me, to hundreds of others, for the kind and generous spirit you shared, for being an advocate of justice. And thank you for that morning when you asked and I answered and you listened and I finally began to take it in.


Poland -- back to Poland -- is still waiting for the world to validate their WWII experience, all they suffered, how valiantly they resisted and fought, and for someone with the same relative authority and credibility in that arena that Bill offered to me in mine.

Poland still needs to be loved, respected, believed and acknowledged for what happened to them. Maybe in my own modest way, I'm using this blog to do for the Polish people what Bill did for me.

Listen up!

It's a wonder

It is a wonder she hasn't done this before.

Kaia is doing the major clean. As in clean out her room in preparation of giving it up rather sooner than later.

The books will stay, of course, and the trophies and the goofy little troll with purple hair and a jewel in its belly that Annika "gave" her on the day Annika was born, a Happy Big Sister present.

Her very first beanie baby, Rover, and her favorite one, Bones, the dog with floppy ears, and a bear with a knitted sweater with a red heart on its chest, and the eagle she got to go with her high school basketball team, and the Mickey Mouse she got at Disneyland are staying, along with other favorite stuffed animals, on top of the bookcases, along with the silver Peter Rabbit bank and the wooden race car she made in Shop class in 8th grade. Her guitar and hockey stick are staying, and some basketball and soccer jerseys and a few favorite tee shirts from 3rd grade basketball. She has decided to keep her shin guards, but in a cabinet, not on display. I convinced her to keep her Junior High Yearbooks. And we just looked at the packets of photos she took on her 5th grade outdoor education trip, her 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C., and her summers at camp. Those go in the scrapbook box.

It will be her room, still, when she comes home but it is going to be less her room when she's gone.

When will she be home? We've been so lucky. She's spent all three summers of college living here and teaching nearby. And she's been home for a good five or six weeks every winter. And at Thanksgiving, Easter, Spring vacations.

This feels big. She's not exactly moving out but it feels for sure like she is moving on. She may or, more likely, may not move back here after she graduates from Macalester in May. It feels like the end of something important.

So, like a mush, I sit here -- as she organizes and puts folders in boxes and folds clothes to give to Goodwill -- and cry.

I am not at home with this. It went too fast. Did I miss something? Could we have a few do-overs? Not because they were wrong but because they were so right, so very right.

None of the rest of you ever felt this way, I'm sure. I'm the only one. Harhar.

We let go in stages, in inches. Since the day she was born, I've been holding on and letting go. And, as I wrote the other day, even saying, "GO!" I raised her for this. I raised her to pack up and move on. To find her place in a wider world. And she is succeeding, wildly, at that. She's ready!

But maybe we could get out the Beanie Babies and play one more time before she goes.

Don't hold your breath

Be careful what you teach your children. When we parents offer our children up to the world, to serve, to give, to go, to heal and teach and dig wells and make justice, we'd damn well be clear about what we are doing. We are giving them up. A "brilliant light" and vibrant life has been taken away from this life. He died along with the poorest of the poor, the desparate, precious people of Haiti. A young man whose mother and father taught him to love and risk and sacrifice has paid the ultimate price for his commitment. Ben Larson is lost within the rubble of a building in PAP where he had gone to teach. His life is lost to us, to his wife, to his friends and family, including his siblings and his parents, April Ulring Larson and Judd Larson. I know his mother. And I confess, it's April for whom my heart is breaking most of all. She is a great mom. She brought up her kids to love God, to give and give and give. And so they did. Be careful what you do, moms. Be careful what you do, dads. You give your children to the world and it doesn't always spare them. My daughter spent several weeks in L'Aquila, Italy a few years before the earthquake there. She was there to serve. When the earthquake struck, she was in an unreachable village in rural South Africa. She was there to learn, to serve. It was an unnerving reminder that we send our kids out into the world, honoring their commitments to justice and healing, and we are not in control. Of course, of course, we're not in control anyway, anywhere. And who expects an earthquake in Haiti, of all places? A big one? I'm probably too rattled and too overcome with sadness tonight to make this make sense. But really, I think, the point is this. We share our children, we share one another with the whole world. They do not belong to us. We nurture and guide them along, we encourage and succor them. And, if we're like the parents who are grieving tonight in Duluth, we enourage these risky behaviors, for the sake of the world. It's a good thing. Yes, it is. It is a good thing. To share our lives, our children, our gifts with the world. It can be dangerous. It can be deadly. But it is right. I never knew how much my mom worried about my bouncing off to the Soviet Union all the time when I was a young adult, until the last year of her life when she gave me her journal to read. She was a nervous wreck. But she never told me not to go. I'm grateful for being given up, to the world, to serve a larger purpose, a larger community, a higher good. And I do the same with my own two girls. Send them off, send them out. To change the world, to take risks and perhaps live dangerously. For the sake of love. It's not something to be taken lightly. And now, as the scenes of wrecked and ruined buildings and broken bodies fill the screens, stories of devastation and loss, of grief and unspeakable horror, we are overcome with sadness for every human life that has been lost and torn apart. And I am especially holding April in my heart, another mother who told her kid, "Go!" and he did. Peace to her, to Judd, to the rest of their family, and to all who mourn. Life comes from death. Every time. One way or another. Every time. Life comes from death. And it will now, too. It will.

First we admire them, then we eat them

Denver has an extra season. It's called Stock Show weather. From the beginning of time the frigid icy weeks in January when the National Western Stock Show is going on have been designated as wweather weeks from hell. There are nights when the Nine News forecasters simply tell us, "well, it's Stock Show weather." And we know what they mean. Dreary gray overcast, bitter winds and zero temperatures. Enough said. It is Stock Show time and I am all about cows. Or, rather, cattle. And horses. You will not believe how many breeds of cattle are out in the fields, and pens, these days. Limousin and Red Angus, Simmental, and the up and coming Gelbiveh. And Lowline and Maine-Anjou and South Devon and Tarentaise. Our Estonian Intourist guide told us years ago that, "here in Estonia we have two breeds of cows: the black ones and the brown and white ones." I remember those days two: Herefords and Angus. And, for exotica, Charolais. There are a few magical memories mixed in with the mundane from childhood and many of mine involve trips to the Stock Show with my dad. I miss him. I miss him telling me for the umpteenth time about how to 'get ahead' of the steer and get it roped and penned. I miss his funny story about his "Catch It Calf" contest win when he was 16. My kids have now heard them umpteen times from me but I tell them anyway. The idea is, you're a kid in a big arena with a bunch of other kids, and they open the chutes and turn loose a herd of cattle. With their bare hands, the kids struggle to catch and wrestle a calf to submission. There is an art to this. And a science. And grit, strength, and a bit of luck. In my dad's case, grit played a larger part. He caught a calf. Quickly. He turned its head to the side and wrestled it to the ground. He held it for 18 of the requisite seconds required. But it fought him like a mad cow. And wriggled and twisted and almost got away. My dad caught it again --- by the tail. And my dad held on, please do picture this! for three rounds around the dusty arena, the calf running, straining, pulling my dad on his butt, cowboy boots dug into the dirt, being dragged around in circles again and again and again by this recalcitrant beast. And on each pass, dad pulled himself up a little more, edging over the hind end of the calf until, finally, he got his arms wrapped around it again, wrestled it down, and held it for all 20 seconds this time. The crowd whooped and hollered, cheering for him -- not the animal -- and when he finally had it, they went nuts! His picture made the bigtime newspaper with a quirky headline that I've forgot, like "Lucerne 4-H'er hangs on for the ride of his life." His jeans were worn clear through the bottom. And he was sore. But he'd won his calf. And raised it for the next year, tending it every single day, feeding, brushing, training it for the show ring. He loved that calf. And then it was Stock Show time again. He brought a half-ton steer back to show, won a prize, sold it, and gave it up. Somebody had some mighty fine pot roasts and brisket that year. We admire them, then we eat them. Being at the Stock Show does a number on your omnivorous inclinations. I sat in the arena watching gorgeous Angus yearlings being admired and judged from quite literally every angle. Enjoyed seeing the boys I'd met earlier in the morning, as they scrubbed and vacuumed and brushed and shaved their animals and got them all ready to show, using a special prodding stick to hold their legs just so, take the blue ribbons in their class. Their steers were damn weird looking. A newer breed called Gelbiveh. See photos. I read later that one of its best features is "biggest scrotal circumference." I don't think I've ever been to an event before where that came up. Besides these cattle, the arena was crowded with black angus and red angus and cows that, I must say, were really beautiful. You get up close, you look in their big black cow eyes, and you feel their sweet soft fur (hides, okay). And then you head into the Cattlemen's Grill and eat them. Or not them, but their daughters and sons. I had brisket. Where else but the Stock Show would you count on getting the best prime beef you've ever eaten. Amazing. Lean, and very tasty. What a weird world. The Omnivore's Dilemma, indeed. This is not exactly my daddy's Stock Show anymore. "World's Best Semen" signs fought for my attention as I walked through the cattle barns. The emphasis is on breeding. The cattle are shown for the sake of establishing breeding lines, of selling 'product.' Most of these cattle will not be sold for food, not yet, but for stud, or breeding. It doesn't feel quite so warm and cuddly as it did when I was a child. But I will walk up and down every aisle, ponder every bovine beast, marvel at the variety and the abundance of creatures that share the planet. Then, it's time for horses, ranch horse riding, steer roping, cattle cutting and penning, range riding. I could watch horses gallop all day. Um, come to think of it, I did. And go back for more.

iGap

My daughter spoke to a friend on the phone. This, please be clear, is news. Had it been the 22-year-old talking on the phone, I'd be surprised but not shocked. But this was the 17-year-old. Talking on the phone. To only one person. At a time. Granted, now, it was simply to clarify directions that had become too complex to explain via text messaging or Googlemap. But still. She talked. On the phone. To a friend. I noticed the emerging iGap three years ago. Older daughter chatted on the phone with friends, deciding on plans, arranging a meeting place, the usual back and forth: where do you want to go? what time? but maybe we'd prefer to.... At the same time, her younger sister, by only four years and a few months, not even a meaningful fraction of a generation gap in years past, had stopped talking on the phone altogether. Gone were the delightful specialized ring-tones that each of her favorite friends had created, "Pick up the phone, pick up the phone! Annika, this is Hanna, pick up the phone, pick up the phone!" I even got one, "This is your mother. You need to talk to me. Now." It was great fun! We haven't heard one of those ring tones in years. When Annika and I made our first trip together to NYC in 2008, she spent more time texting her friends than interacting with me. "I'm on 5th Avenue," "I'm at Michael Kors," "I'm on the Staten Island Ferry." And she was kept up on all the local gossip; she had might as well have been right there at the pool herself every afternoon. She was absolutely, entirely, virtually in two places at one time. When Kaia and I made our first trip together to NYC in 2005, the only time her phone came out of her pocket was once or twice -- to call me to check on a meeting time and place. When Kaia was admitted to college, in the spring of 2006, Facebook was a brand new phenomenon. To think, kids going to the same college could begin to connect before they got there. How cute. How clever. Sometime during that summer, she and her classmates began finding Facebook -- and what a different Facebook it was then. It felt exclusive, you could join your university's network and that seemed just about all there was. When Annika received her Early Decision admittance to NYU a few weeks ago, the first thing she did -- after hugging us and screaming for a full five minutes -- was text all her friends. It was viral within half an hour. At one point she had 28 new text messages. The second thing she did was look online and sure enough, there were already two new Facebook groups for early admits to NYU Class of 2014. Thanks to technology, she now 'knows' future classmates from around the globe, including two she's met, from Vail and the Ranch, just down the road. They are 'talking' constantly about the relative merit of various dorms, scanning virtual floorplans, and choosing roommates. They text constantly. And it is simply a part of their social arrangement that it's okay to be texting others while with some. They multi-task, she does, anyway, perhaps 16 things at a time. I'm doing good if I can listen to classical music and concentrate on writing this. The NYTimes comments on this change, this quickening in the technological gap, today, citing a forthcoming book by Larry Rosen, calling children born in the 80's, now in their 20's, the Net Generation, and those born in the 90's, still teens, the iGeneration. I confess, I sure like these monikers better than the Gen X and Gen Y that has been used in the past. So, the NetGen and the iGen. I buy it. But that gap is closing fast. As older young-adults get hold of iPhones and other new generation technology, sometimes out of fairness, before their younger siblings, they are quickly changing from tone to text. I see Kaia texting far more now than she used to. And with an iPhone, her adaptability to new applications is remarkable. I have 12 extra apps on my iPhone. She has about 30. She too is multi-tasking, maybe eight things, at a time. The other night at dinner, she whipped out her iPhone seven times to collect info from the 'net about matters ranging from sheep (!) to geophysics, to NY style pizza. I smugly proved that Hayden Colorado was where I thought it was, way out northwest, by googling it and pulling up the map. And history. I have to say, it does tend to keep us from running out of things to talk about. Remember when complaining about the remote -- and surfing channels was new. So last century. We want information, and we want it now. And we get it. Now. No waiting. Dr. Rosen wonders what impact this will have. I think I have some idea. Already, we are more and more impatient, expecting data, contact, change to occur immediately. Think about -- whatever you think politically -- the evaluation of Obama's first year in office. The 'war on terror' is not won: Fail. The economic catastrophe he inherited is not fixed: Fail. A new health care plan is not in effect: Fail. Are we serious? Do we really expect that much that fast? We do if we are living according to the iWorld, where everybody is instantly accessible, I read the NYTimes this morning in bed from my iPhone (not even my laptop), and send out an instant commentary before I'm done with my second cup of coffee (still in bed). We expect instant change when we live in a world where we can touch Yemen and Tadzhikistan and the latest images from the Hubble all in three minutes. I remember taking a business class about 15 years ago -- geez, where did that time go? -- where it was news -- new news -- that technology was turning over so quickly that generations of technology were new every few months. That trend is unending. My exercise routine is now an iApp, my weight loss program is LoseIt, I read the latest Sara Paretsky on my iKindle and before today is up, I will have read at least four newspapers from around the world, including my beloved NYTimes Weddings stories (thank you, Calvin Trillin) on my iPhone. I'll take a photo or two, record a few notes for the novel on the voice memo and do the "old fashioned" thing, write a few memos on the iPhone's legal pad. I can check the scores -- like I care! -- of playoff games, and listen to an NPR podcast. I'll check Facebook, update my status via Twitter, and send a few text messages. It is not likely that I'll talk on the phone. I too now prefer texting to talking. In the past week, I've sent 62 text messages, including some to my family in other rooms of the house, and have spoken on my phone five times. I've sent and received hundreds of emails and well, I wonder if, for some of us geezers, the iGap is closing. I'm in the process of buying a car and plan to do it -- all except the test drives --online. Even the financing. It is unlikely I'm telling you anything you don't already know, and do. But the point that strikes me this morning is that we're going to have to keep our expectations out of line with our capacities for communications. There is this uncontrolled variable. I think it's called human nature. And as long as that is in play, it will take longer than a year to enact comprehensive health care reform, win the war against terrorism, convince Wall Street banks to end the practice of usury, and put an end to stupidity on television. In the meantime, I've got to go. Annika is awake and I need to text her to find out what her plans are for the day.