Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Here are my parents in 1943, just before my dad headed back to sea. He came home with a Purple Heart, after mortar fire killed men standing on either side of him. My dad never, never talked about the war.

I honor people who risk their lives in war–and I grieve for the people who lose their lives in war. But I don’t like the way war’s risk has been changed for our leaders by high-tech weapons and our “volunteer” army of working-class kids whose only hope for a decent job or college tuition was military service.

The day after Pearl Harbor, my father dropped out of law school and joined the Navy. He wanted to defend his country–that goal was worth risking his life for. That’s still my idea of what a “just war” means–a war where you try to kill somebody else in defense of a cause that you would willingly die for. A harder test of justice is whether you would send your children to fight for the cause.

Can you picture Bush sending his twins to risk their lives because Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction? Would you send your kids to battle in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil guy whose minions tortured people? If so, your opportunity may still come–many other nations around the globe meet both criteria.

While wandering happily map-less around the Web, I suddenly found myself enjoying Hoom! Maps.
For map images and more, head over there now–but don’t forget to heed this final warning:

“When using any walking directions or map, it is a good idea to stop at an inn or hostelry and inquire about news from abroad. Find out whether any wars are brewing, and if so, whether agents of the enemy are pursuing you. This is only an aid in planning. Your eventual route and mileage may vary.”

(Thanks to NH blogger RefugeIsland for the link.)

My dear daughter Mickey, aka Amity of “NatureIsProlific,” gave me this wonderful Edward Gorey drawing.

I think Mickey is right that it somehow speaks to the joy of blogging–and I hope she won’t mind if I dedicate this image to my much-more-glamorous friend Halley.

My friend Elaine of Kalilily lays claim to crone-dom, but never seems to grow old. Everytime I turn around she’s up to some new adventure–planting a garden, joining the Dean team (yay!)–now she’s taking a poetry course. I like this one so much I want to share it, but do yourself a favor, go over and check out the other good stuff in her blog!

The fabric of our lives.

Yesterday
I sent a package
to my second cousin,
stationed in Iraq –

six pairs of
white cotton underpants
and a package of
vitamin C lozenges,

because even though
I protest this vile war,
urge presidential impeachment,
and grieve for those collaterally damaged,

I remember her
before the wars — that
feisty tow-headed toddler,
mindful motherless girl,

adventuresome young woman,
who took a calculated risk
that tossed her into desert dirt,
and a longing for
fresh, clean underwear.

(copyright EF 2003)

Footnote: Have you heard about the peaceniks who hate our soldiers? I sure have–Right-wingers claim they’re lurking on every corner! Really? Gosh! When one guy at Columbia announced he hoped for US defeat, he made world headlines because it was so unusual….

I went to BlogLunch with Halley Suitt and Scott Johnson, and both sides of my brain now feel so good:

Thursday was a three-ring circus of good things–
but today, Friday, has been a two-ring anti-circus–
my dog, with a bladder infection, is puddling everywhere, and
the right side of my face is still sulking from an hour of dentist drilling.
And for a third bad thing, one of my favorite bloggers Dave Winer is driving through the wild, wild, wireless-less west and hardly posting anything these days.
Hmmmmph.
But Thursday was great.

First, I had a chance to meet the actual Elaine of Kalilily, who was visiting her grandson. For me, one of the newest bloggers on the block, it was an incredible learning experience–and yet so much more fun than most real-life learning experiences. (Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”) Hope you had a safe and peaceful trip home, Elaine, and come back to Boston soon.

Second, I raced from my lunch with Elaine to see two old friends (compared to me, two very young friends) bringing home their first baby. In NH, where I come from, people show up with soup or a cake or a casserole wrapped in tinfoil if neighbors have babies or broken toes or whatever. But I’m not in NH any more–I’m in thrilling Cambridge, the first big city I ever have lived in. So instead of slaving over a kettle, I had lots of fun options to find good things for a care package, including a tiny $4 bottle of champagne and a lemon meringue pie just big enough for two people.

The baby is named Jonas, and he is very beautiful and tiny, swaddled in pale soft blankets much more expertly than my babies ever were. (At dinner last night, another young husband told me the secret–husbands now learn how to swaddle babies in childbirth classes–he practiced on a doll to refine his technique. Wow.)

And the third cool thing yesterday was the lecture on Escher I blogged about Feb. 20–wonderful, you really should check out the incredible animations online of Escher’s tricks.

I miss my mother.

I miss her wit, her taste for small pleasures and homely achievements, her devotion to family, her complex memories and the use she made of them for explaining a complex world she didn’t always approve of.

I don’t mean to make my mother sound like a sweet mellow grandma. In her old age that was how she structured her life–but the mother I knew growing up was formidable, even fierce. She came from a houseful of liberated ladies and got through an MA at Smith before World War II turned everyone’s lives upside down. She was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, widely read, piercingly quick to see through pretense. But she narrowed her circle after my father died, narrowed it down to a tiny, tiny round by the end of her life. I don’t want to do that with my life, at least not until I get very old and even more feeble. One of the many things I learned from my mother is that the price of staying away from the parts of the world you don’t like is to have your circle diminish to almost nothing.

I loved the way that she re-read all the books she loved, again and again, not too often because she didn’t want them to lose their magical other-ness. When she felt death was getting close, and her eyes were failing, she abandoned restraint and went through every single one of her favorites in sequence. She felt deliciously wicked for breaking her own longheld rules. Here’s a short list: Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, J.R.R. Tolkein, and perhaps surprisingly, the naughty Colette.

Her last year I sometimes chafed, and Frank did too, at the amount of time I spent driving up to NH to be with her. It took time away from work, from family, from getting our new house organized to live in. And yet, demanding and grueling as it sometimes was–you’d get up there, she was out of medicine, she was out of groceries, there was a sudden emergency, you would be running around doing housework and errands and then drive back. And the worst of it was that you still would not have made her really comfortable, or put her life in an organizational state you would like to see. You would just have fought off the wolves that one more time.

After Marie and Kim got the visiting nurses set up to help out (around New Year, when I was in Chile) the chaos improved. But all year, it was hard to see her losing ground, especially toward the end, and often in pain. She never complained, or almost never, and then only about the little things. Not the pain, not the cancer. When she told me that she had probably baked her last batch of cupcakes…I’m glad she was able to tell me that, but it hurt so much to hear it. Instead, she made a point of saying brave things. That she wasn’t afraid of death, that it would be an adventure, because she’d never died before.

I kept on reminding myself that, every visit, I had brought her some happiness and some peace and some pleasure, some relaxation, some civilized peaceful enjoyment, some feeling the world could be a kindly place. That was what we both needed to believe. My life is now empty of all that good stuff as well as the bad stuff. And I miss her very much. I miss the time we spent together. I miss having her to talk to about so many things. I enjoyed listening to her stories of her childhood. It’s almost as real to me now as my own childhood. And now she’s gone.

And I miss her.

Google search result

I remember the women’s movement, way back when. No, I don’t go back to the days before women could vote, though my mother did– and don’t you also know people born before 1925?

One of the heroes of “my” women’s movement was Gloria Steinem, who toured the US from 1969 to 1974. Somewhere within that range, she came to NH and I heard her speak. From all she said, I remember one thing: that she had spent her youth making friends only with men–until she realized how many other women felt as she did. That is, she was scorning women who scorned her back–all of them fixated on impressing men, all of them convinced that other women weren’t worth making friends with.

I quickly joined a consciousness-raising group. Our hottest topic: were labor pains were as bad as fiction suggested? The answer: no. Many years and two kids later, I agree. Labor pains feel like diarrhea. On the bad side, they last longer. On the good side, you don’t feel embarrassed. Even better, a spinal anaesthetic makes them vanish.

Despite Gloria’s inspiration, and the experience of “consciousness raising”, I didn’t get bona-fide women friends for years–until I was pregnant. During my grad student years, almost all the people who shared my work interests were male. As a mom, my “work interests” shifted to child-rearing. My point–Gloria, are you listening? Friendship rarely arises from idealistic “what a good person” motives. Friendship more often arises from “that person is doing stuff I want to do” motives.

OTOH–I still think Gloria Steinem is a genius.
One of the funniest and most famous things she wrote is an essay, often reprinted (and multiply online): “If Men Could Menstruate.”

In conclusion, I would like to quote this Mother Jones interview with Steinem at 61:

“Old is not a thing. We’re the same people, going through a different stage….
Remember when you were 9 or 10 or 11, and maybe you were this tree-climbing, shit-free little girl who said, “It’s not fair,” and then at 12 or 13 you suddenly turned into a female impersonator who said, “How clever of you to know what time it is!” and all that stuff? Well, what happens is that when you get to be 60, and the role is over, you go back to that clear-eyed, shit-free, I-know-what-I-want, I-know-what-I-think, 9- or 10-year-old girl. Only now–you have your own apartment.”

Woo hoo! If this is indeed so, I can hardly wait!

Mister Rogers has left our neighborhood. I haven’t thought about Fred Rogers in years, but now that he’s dead I feel as though one of my friends is gone.
His gentle voice, slow pacing, and dorky cardigan begged for parody. I liked Eddy Murphy’s–Rogers liked it too.

I loved the way he treated us all with respect. I loved his complete lack of irony. I was moved by this heartfelt, person-by-person eulogy written by my cynical pals at Plastic. It reminded me how many good neighbors we have online.

The AP eulogy has a quote I want to share:

During the Persian Gulf War, Rogers told youngsters that “all children shall be well taken care of in this neighborhood and beyond — in times of war and in times of peace,” and he asked parents to promise their children they would always be safe.

“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility,” he said in 1994. “It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’

“Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”

Dear neighbor, if you read this far, you must be missing Mister Rogers too. I’m finding some comfort in what he used to say:

“You always make each day a special day for me. You know how? By just you being you. I like you just the way you are. Bye, neighbor.”