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

The decisions we make in our 20s…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Not that I regret this young woman’s decisions, crazy as some of them were–well, maybe I’m blushing a bit at those orange curtains.

You see in this photograph married grad student housing in Princeton, where Frank and I were living when we got the word–we were pregnant! Well, OK, I was.

So this long-haired black turtlenecked soon-to-be-ex-grad-student, wearing a lotus-y necklace, decides …I’m going to be a mom–time to get serious about my life! No more cigarettes–well, that was a good decision.

Get serious, be grown-up–I know! I’ll get Frank’s grandmother to teach me how to crochet so that i can make a blanket for my baby.

Now, there were a ton of things I didn’t think of. Just for example, since Frank stopped being a grad student and started being a post-doc during my pregnancy–neither of his two different medical insurance groups would pay for the delivery.

But, by gosh, my baby had the most beautiful blanket!

Staatsoper PDA

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

As of July 3, it’s 34 years and counting for Frank and Betsy–not to mention (wow!) more than 60 years now for Frank’s mom and dad.

I still don’t understand why the long-term love of any two people is endangered by the thought that two different people (whose lifestyle couple #1 might not approve) want to promise to love one another forever.

It’s easier to imagine that Hollywood “marriages” lasting 55 hours set a bad example to couples from more normal origins–but I hate to think that our US Constitution needs an amendment fo protect us from poor Britney Spears. (And isn’t she heterosexual, IIRC?)

The best marriage advice, according to my little brother, is to keep on caring about each other, respecting each other. For my more long-winded but heartfelt version, here’s some advice I wrote way back in 2003.

Love is a wonderful thing, and good luck to us all!

In honor of Fathers’ Day…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…here’s my dad, Murray Devine, who was far too rarely the subject of photos. Most often, he was the one holding a camera, trying to get all the people and places and things he loved to hold still so that he could preserve us forever.

This early Polaroid shot was so overexposed that my dad’s face is almost eclipsed by a pale, pale blur.

So thank you to Photoshop for bring my dad’s face back to me, many years later. I still miss him so much.


Oh–and here’s a shout-out to so many other dads I love and admire–Frank A and Frank J and Kevin and Bill spring to mind. You are the Babe Ruths and Mickey Mantles of Dad-hood. You stepped up to the plate and took your best swing–not just once but again and again. Sometimes you hit home runs–other times tried just as hard but your luck was against you. Thank you for your love and your courage and your perseverance. Those of us with dads like you are lucky indeed.

Radcliffe Camera with tea drinkers

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Headed for Oxford, beautiful Oxford, tomorrow.

To see, among other glorious sights, the Radcliffe Camera, which Tolkien hated–it was his imaginary basis for the temple of Sauron.

I love JRR Tolkien–but would he like me? He didn’t like modern stuff–Saruman’s dirty orc-factories. He liked hobbit yeoman farmers with loyal servants.

My own French-Canadian great-grandparents poured out of picturesque farmwork into dirty factories. Freedom, they wanted–maybe just one small chance for a better life.

And just a tiny few of them got that chance–my father’s grandfather Hugo Dubuque became a lawyer, called in his obituary “a credit to his race.”

My French-Canadian mother’s aunt Leda Charpentier didn’t go back to school on the day she turned 12 because that was the magical age to start work in “the mill.” Leda’s luck turned later, when the mill owner rented her out to some friends as a temporary maid/helper.

And my own luck began when, many years later, Leda’s orphaned niece Clothilde struck the warm-hearted fancy of maiden ladies for whom Leda was now cook-housekeeper. In time they adopted my mother and sent her to Smith. I remember those lovable maiden ladies, including “ma tante” Leda, from my own early childhood.

But back to Oxford, back to JRR Tolkien. How foolish it would be for me to try to refute Tolkien because my family history doesn’t fit in with his fantasy. I love his fantasy–reading through one page of its watered-down quotes puts tears in my eyes.

Part of growing up is re-finding the missed connections where cranky cynicism cut us loose from stuff we once loved. I’ll be looking for Tolkien’s magic next week in Oxford–even as I (maybe) drink tea next to Sauron’s temple, which Tolkien, on so many levels, would have despised.
***

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

Little Golden Book _The Color Kittens_

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown was one of my favorites and long after I could read it to myself I loved my mother’s dramatic readings of it. Especially that “wonderful kittens” line.

And now it’s been reissued–and I got a new copy as a wonderful Mother’s Day present.

I photographed the “wonderful kittens” page lying on my now-blooming and also wonderful azaleas.

Ah 1999–the summer my husband Frank Wilczek almost blew up the universe, as recently dredged up by the latest New Yorker.

Fans of the universe will be glad to know that you were in no danger, because I was on the job on your behalf.

1999 Betsy: But the universe is not going to blow up, right?
1999 Frank: Of course not.
Betsy: You really thought about it and it’s not.
Frank: Yes, I did. And no, it’s not.
Betsy: Good, because if it blew up I’d be so mad at you…

The New Yorker starts their version of this story when Scientific American decided to publish…

…a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine.

Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. Wilczek labelled his own suggestion “not plausible,” but the damage had been done. “BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH” ran the headline in the London Times. Brookhaven was forced to appoint a committee to look into this and other disaster scenarios. (The committee concluded that “we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.”)

“I know Frank Wilczek,” Engelen told me. “He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve.” Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”

One missing piece of this widely-quoted version–The letter Frank wrote for SA was never published. Frank wrote them a carefully detailed reply to a non-physicist’s black-hole concerns. What SA published, with Frank’s name at the end of it, had been edited down to much more a dramatic nub by somebody somewhere inside SA.

If I’d just had a blog then, we could have talked back to this story in real time.

Marble goddess

Originally uploaded by Trithemius.

Songs that make us cry — one of my favorites, not on the AV club list is “16th Avenue” sung by Lacy J. Dalton.

From the corners of the country

From the cities and the farms

With years and years of living

Tucked up underneath their arms

They walk away from everything

Just to see a dream come true

So God bless the boys who make the noise

On 16th Avenue

I don’t hear Lacy singing only of back-up guitarists. To me this song celebrates geeks of every variety (scientists, poets, programmers…) who woke up one young morning to hear the goddess whisper that–somewhere out there–live people who care about the stuff they do.

An idea that sets your life on a new path was imagined by Homer as a goddess, grabbing the hero’s attention–or, in case of emergency, seizing his hair.

When I hear “16th Avenue,” I re-remember just how grateful I am that the kids who tormented me for being a “brain” no longer inhabit my days or show up in dreams. I’m glad of the friendship of so many folks who, just like me, left home looking for our own 16th Avenue.

(p.s. I found this topic via the always-inspiring and lovable AKMA)

Lake Massabesic, springtime 2007

Originally uploaded by Broompl.

Scrawny NH pine trees and pale springtime sky–Lake Massabesic reflects them.

Tonight I’m missing my beautiful NH, even though I now enjoy similar cold, wet springtime in Massachusetts. (My daffodils are coming up, but no buds yet!)

Lake Massabesic provides drinking water to my hometown of Manchester, NH. My raffish and beloved great-uncle Joseph P Devine and his wife, the former Mae Kelly, lived right on that lakefront, when I was a little girl. Of course, it is forbidden to swim in that water–but not to sail boats on it.

Let me digress to say more about my Uncle Joe, aka within the family as “Darlin’ Joe.” Much more than my grandfather Maurice Francis Devine (his baby brother) Uncle Joe carried on the traditions of his Irish parents–and he was their favorite. He and Aunt Mae took over both the family businesses that had grown out of the very successful carpentry trade built up by Patrick Devine–the Devine Funeral Home (because carpenters build lots of coffins) and the Devine Travel Bureau (because recent immigrants want to take those coffins home to be buried in Ireland.)

But whenever the humor was upon Uncle Joe, he and Aunt Mae would shutter both those businesses (which shared one building) and gather up some of the many children who loved them both for some new adventure. Often they’d take a whole bunch of us to Hampton Beach, bringing us home bright-red with sunburn, full of lobster dinners and saltwater taffy.

Once they completely terrified my poor parents by keeping us out until something like 2 a.m. at a drive-in movie where we saw a wonderful double-feature of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald. My mother assumed that “dinner and a movie” was an event that would get her four children home by maybe, at the latest, 9 p.m.

Now, with that preparation, I hope my dear readers will not be shocked to learn that on one very hot day in one long-ago summer, my Uncle Joe took us four Devine kids on a boatride onto Lake Massabesic, in which, I repeat, you are not allowed to swim. We were all wearing life jackets because you must, on a boatride.

In the middle of Lake Massabesic, Uncle Joe stopped. “Now,” he reminded us, “swimming is forbidden here. But sometimes it just happens … that you fall off a boat!” He then picked me up and threw me far into the water! Yes, remarkably, all four Devine children “fell” into Lake Massabesic on that hot day and had to swim back to the boat.

Not that I’m recommending to anyone else to be as naughty as my Uncle Joe. But now, looking back, I realize just how lucky I was to have known him.

…when it reminds me of California Christmas?