The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
Sometimes the Apple Falls Horizontally
The Tree Grows Close to the Apple
1) should parents have the rights to genetically choose a child with a disability? . . . essentially insure that their child is deaf like them, or a dwarf like them . . . a process which might be regarded as the reverse of having a "designer baby"
2) when should a parent abort a child? . . . is a disability a burden? something to be dreaded? or is it something unique that should be celebrated?
3) what is a disability? should we be able to screen our children for being gay or on the autism spectrum? and then be able to terminate them?
but despite these heavy questions, the final message of the book is a positive one: most parents do not want any other children than their own (though Shakespeare's Henry IV does wonder if some "night tripping fairy" has swapped his ne'er-do-well son with the heroic Hotspur . . . but in the end, he learns that Hal is the son for him) and parents will undergo mental gymnastics and passionate displays of emotion to love and enjoy and connect to whatever offspring they bear . . . Solomon ends saying "sometimes, I had thought the heroic parents in this book were fools, enslaving themselves to a life's journey with their alien children, trying to breed identity out of misery," but then he comes to the conclusion that all parents do this, they all seek some connection with their children, but also celebrate their individuality, and somehow see their children as different from all other children -- and so the tree that the proverbial apple doesn't fall far from is like an Ent, it may move closer to the apple if necessary, as the miraculous parents in this book did -- in figuring out how to care for deaf kids and the schizophrenic kids, kids with autism and severe disabilities, kids that commit crimes or are the product of rape, transgender kids, astounding prodigies, and kids with Down syndrome -- this is an intelligent and inspirational book and it will change the way you view the world, but it's super long, so you may have to read it in sections or choose the chapters that interest you; still, give it a shot, it is ground-breaking and heart-breaking, and it keeps things very real.
Tony Luke's is Better Than Jim's (and Other Notes for Future Trips to Philly)
1) Not only is the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and long hots at Tony Luke's better than the same offering at DiNic's-- but (though it's comparing apples to oranges . . . or pigs to cows) it's also better than a cheesesteak at Jim's-- and as an added bonus, the staff is actually cordial at Tony Luke's-- the woman taking my order didn't seem to mind at all that I had a question-- while Jim's has a "soup Nazi" feel to the ordering process . . . who do I order from? . . . the guy with the metal thingie? . . . did he make eye contact with me? . . . does that mean I need to say something? . . . I'm pretty far along in the line . . . am I too far in line? . . . should I have said something? . . . is it too late? . . . did I miss my chance?. . . do they have provolone? . . . do I have to say "wit wiz"? . . .. how do you spell "whiz"? . . . should I say "wit prov"? and after all the hazing, we were still underwhelmed by the cheesesteaks from Jim's this time around (although I must admit, that past times they were delicious);
2) our next trip to Philadelphia, I am going to get a cheesesteak from Tony Luke's and see if it is as good as the roast pork sandwich (because quite a few people were eating cheesesteaks there);
3) the Good Dog and La Locanda Del Ghiottone are great places to eat;
4) the tour of the Physick House is worth doing: the guy who does the tour is the great-great grandson of Dr. Physick-- "The Father of American Surgery"-- and while he's an eccentric man, who seems to be living his life both in the 18th Century and the present, simultaneously, there is no question that he knows a buttload about the house and the history of the area, which he gets across in passionate anecdotal fashion, with loads of bad puns, and -- odd as he is, and history buffs are usually quite odd-- at least he doesn't dress in period garb, which is a big plus . . . but be warned, the good Doctor's surgical tools are rather primitive and the accompanying diagrams made me light-headed and also, I'm pretty sure he explained to us, while discussing the family tree on the wall in the room with all the surgical tools, that he's seriously inbred;
5) The Hop Sing Laundromat has a lot of rules, so I put the kibosh on going there;
6) listening to the podcast Serial while driving is dangerous stuff . . . Lynn and Connell were so engrossed that they missed the exit . . . by thirty miles (but Lynn did get an A+ on the Episode 10 quiz that Catherine and I created for my class);
7) Connel got the perfect mojito at lunch at Cuba Libre, but then couldn't get the diner bartender to replicate it . . . but he does claim that the best drinks in the world are served at the awkwardly named Franklin Mortgage & Investment Company (but Catherine and I didn't go over there, as you have to mortgage your house to afford the drinks, which run fifteen dollars a piece-- but Lynn and Connel say it was well worth it, so next time I will suck it up and pay);
8) if you want to go to Farmicia, you need a reservation; same with Howl at the Moon, and McGillin's was a madhouse at 10 PM on a Saturday night, far too young a crowd (we walked in while the bouncers were breaking up a fight . . . the place was a giant frat party-- if you want to visit Philly's oldest bar, try the afternoon);
9) it's a long walk from the Old City to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, especially when it's pouring rain and you're only wearing a sweatshirt because your wife didn't emphasize the weather forecast (she told me, but she didn't TELL me);
10) the Thomas Bond House keeps the heat too high, so you have to break the rules and open the windows-- which have no screens because it's a restored historical house.
Like Father, Like Mad Cartographer
Anyway, down at our end of the table, my father was telling Alex and Ian he had an atlas for them-- someone gave it to him-- and Alex made a wisecrack about how many atlases we have around the house (though I've cleaned out my books, I just can't seem to part with the atlases) and then he thought for a moment and asked a serious question. "Could I tear pages out of the atlases and put the maps on my wall? Over the Lego Star Wars?"
If he's ever going to kiss a girl, it's probably time to obscure the mural.
My younger son Ian chose a slightly more classic theme in his room: a jungle tree full of stylized animals.
"Mom, can I cover my Lego Star Wars wall with maps? We have all these atlases . . ."
My wife laughed. The apple does not fall far from the tree. When she first met me, I lived in a disgusting flophouse in East Brunswick, right on Route 18. It was old-- historic-- with lots of little rooms. A bunch of my friends had rented it for cheap, and we were primitive. I slept in a sleeping bag on a camping pad. I shared the room with my buddy Ryan. He agreed to my cartographically themed decorating plan.
I raided the old National Geographic magazines in my basement, and I took all the maps. I covered every surface of our room with them. Walls, doors, closets, and ceiling. And for some reason that I can't recall now, I hung all the maps with toothpaste.
This worked.
Sort of-- until it didn't.
Then the maps hung in assorted ways on the walls and ceiling, corners flopping and flapping. And the room smelled like mint. It's shocking that my wife continued to date me, as a room with no mattress, a sleeping bag, and an array of maps on every surface is a stone's throw away from a serial killer's den (maybe not even a stone's throw, maybe closer than that, maybe a shot-put toss away from a serial killer's den).
So Catherine laughed at Alex's request to cover his walls in maps. She had been there before.
I told him to go for it. In my limited experience, chicks who dig maps are cool.
The Case of The Returned Kite
Put the Secret Token in the Phantom Tollbooth?
1) According to historian Brent Lane, "The Roanoke voyages have nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people-- the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that gothic shit . . . the real story is geopolitics, colonization, the advancement of science, and development of investment"
2) The bickering of historians, professional and amateur, over the fate of the Lost Colony resembles the scene from Life of Brian about the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's front . . . "Willard's dramatic outburst-- 'I will fucking run you over!'-- seemed to sum up the relations among the researchers . . . Lucketti and Horton were quick to criticize each other's research, while Noel Hume and the National park Service had fought to a bitter standstill about the earthwork . . . Evans's First Colony Foundation had refused to participate in a public panel that included Horton and Prentice, and organized their own symposium . . ." etc. etc . . .
3) some folks currently living in this area of North Carolina are consumed by their family trees and genetic history; Lawler describes genealogy obsessed Clyde Miller as a man "engaged in something more than a quixotic effort to trace his relations back to ancient Judea via Tudor England . . . it was as if, using his convoluted and tangled family tree, he were attempting to stitch together the black, red and white parts of his splintered past, the "mongrel" remnants that so many Americans share to some degree, a reality largely lost amid the nation's standing racial divides";
4) most historians now accept the fact that the Lost Colonists, if they survived, simply "melted" into the Native population . . . and this could have been true for the serval hundred abandoned African and Indian slaves abandoned by Sir Francis Drake, the three men abandoned by Lane in his haste to leave the area, and the fifteen men left by Grenville . . . the colonists were only "lost" to the Europeans who searched for them-- the Algonquians absorbed them (and they may not want to have been "found" by the white folks . . . it's embarrassing to be found when you've gone native, taken a native husband or wife, and are living in native ways . . . and this happened quite often in this time period-- white folks went native, but the reverse was very very rare)
5) despite the fact that the folks living in the area are a "mongrel" mix of black, Native American, and European, white supremacists and racists adopted Virginia Dare as a symbol of white unsullied American purity and turned her into a chaste and beautiful huntress who survived on her own and did not mix with the "half-naked Indian savages"
6) Lawler analogously points out that there are people "in eastern Europe who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, spent their teenage years in the Third Reich, lived out middle age in the Soviet Union and died in independent Ukraine-- all without leaving their village" and the people of Roanoke are similar-- they were designated English, white, black, Native America, and they designated themselves whatever was politically or practically expeditious, without worry over the truth of the matter . . . and so no DNA test will ever untangle this knot and no story will ever make everyone happy . . . the truth will never out on this and the legends will be shaped by the context: a great read, especially if you are headed for a vacation on the Outer Banks!
I Taught That Kid Everything He Knows!
So I'm reading Andrew Solomon's tome Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, and I'm plugging my way through the "Autism" chapter when I run across two familiar names in the same sentence: Temple Grandin and Ari Ne'eman; Temple Grandin is a well-known author, professor, and designer of humane cattle-handling equipment . . . and she is also autistic and a major advocate for autism . . . and Ari Ne'eman is described as "the founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network," but that's not how I know the name . . . I remember the name because several years ago I taught a student by that name, a very very smart student with Asperger syndrome, who not only could wax eloquent about politics and the law, but was also very aware of his social difficulties, and knew how to compensate for them with various strategies and techniques . . . and so with the help of the almighty Wikipedia, I now realize that this student is enormously famous in the world of autism advocacy -- and not only did he found the aforementioned autism network (at the ripe age of nineteen) but President Obama also appointed to serve on the National Council on Disability, and so he is the first person on the autism spectrum to ever serve on the council; Ne'eman is mentioned several times in Solomon's book, and I'm glad I serendipitously discovered this, as I may have never known how far he's gone (and no one else in our school knew this either, which is mind-boggling) but it's also a bit daunting when a student I taught several years previous has already done more in his short life than I will probably do in the entirety of mine . . . but I can always resort to the ancient theme prominent in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice . . . the idea of status and contract . . . no matter what Ari Ne-eman accomplishes, no matter how many accolades he accumulates, I will always have the status of being his teacher, and I will always be able to say: "I taught that kid everything he knows."
Hidden Valleys of the Brain
I'm not even going to attempt to summarize Robert Kolker's meticulously reported and compassionately told story of the Galvin family, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family-- it's one of those books you have to read (like Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree) plus, it's a family with twelve children, six of which are diagnosed with schizophrenia, so there's no short version of this disquieting saga-- but I did learn a few things:
1) in 1908, Eugen Bleuler coined the term schizophrenia because the root "schizo" implied a harsh splitting of mental functions but this turned out to be a poor choice-- popular culture has confused schizophrenia with the idea of split personality, but this is a mistake: schizophrenia is "a divide between perception and reality . . . it is about walling oneself off from consciousness . . . until you are no longer accessing anything others accept as real"
2) schizophrenia is a multiplex genetic disorder-- it's caused by a number of genes and they also need to be expressed, often by environmental factors or drug use-- and it might be even less tangible, it might be "a collection of neurodevelopment disorders" and not even one single disease . . . it might be like a fever, a symptom and not a disease at all-- schizophrenia might just be a reaction that happens to consciousness when a brain is broken for any number of reasons;
3) the children in the book were born from 1945 to 1965 . . . so they span a wide variety of treatments and a wide variety of failures in treating the disease, every theory more screwed up than the last: shock therapy, institutionalization, madness as a metaphor, madness caused by over-parenting, madness caused by under-parenting, tranquilizers, induced catatonia, medicines that did as much damage as help, the return of a kinder, gentler shock therapy, possible wonder drugs that couldn't get funded (because schizophrenics don't advocate very well for themselves) and finally the realization that there is no magic bullet yet for this disease-- because it is caused by so many genes and so many factors . . . and while wilderness-based youth therapy and therapeutic boarding schools have been found to curb the disease before it fully sets in, these treatments are extraordinarily expensive and only available to the very wealthy . . . as for the rest of us, we have to cross our fingers, avoid toxic environments, and hope for the best.
Hitchhiker's Guide meets Star Trek Meets a Modern Feminist Perspective . . .
It's a space-opera with a sociological bent-- and while I like it much much more than Star Trek-- there's an archetypal similarity in the mission. The Wayfarer is a tunneling ship that opens up lanes through hyperspace in the Galactic Commons so that there can be communication and commerce between the affiliated species that live throughout the galaxy.
Instead of five years, the diverse crew of The Wayfarer is on a one year trip, but they are definitely going boldly to seek out new life and civilizations and strange new worlds.
The characters are modern and funny and mainly and manifoldly alien . . . humans are on the low end of the totem pole. The new clerk aboard the ship, Rosemarie, is just trying to fit in, knowing full well that the human race-- mainly by pure luck-- has just passed out of this stage:
Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of “intraspecies chaos.” This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided. We have seen this story play out countless times.
I also learned the word "ansible."
Chambers works with the conceit that life abounds in the universe, that it will evolve towards intelligence, and that it is carbon-based. With limitations, is it any wonder that sentient creatures have more similarities than differences. Even so, Captain Ashby is mired in this mess . . .
As open and generous as Aeluons generally were to their galactic neighbors, interspecies coupling remained a mainstream taboo.
Every alien race has to come to grip that there are others out there, with goals and dreams and culture that has evolved on a grand scale, in some ways parallel to all life, and in some way completely different and unexpected.
Sadly, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
In This Instance, Content Defeats Style
the funniest thing happened!
you won't believe how annoying!
as these kinds of statements not only destroy the drama of the narrative, but they also set up the audience to be in a contradictory position-- we'll see just how funny this thing is . . . so when the boys and I walked in yesterday and she said, "I saw the craziest thing!" I was not only skeptical, but also annoyed at her anecdotal style, but for once the story actually lived up to the opening; the rain finally let up and so Catherine took the dog for a walk in the park, along the river, and she saw a giant tree floating downstream-- the Raritan is tidal by our house, so sometimes-- when the tide is coming in-- the current runs upstream towards New Brunswick, but most of the time it runs downstream towards Perth Amboy and the Raritan Bay, which leads into the Atlantic Ocean; when she took a good look at this giant floating tree, she noticed a seal perched upon the trunk, a seal which apparently got swept up in the storm current and ended up far from the ocean and was now wisely hitching a ride on a makeshift deciduous raft back to its home, unfortunately she did not have her phone and so there's no proof of this bizarre happening, but I believe her because it's too weird a thing to invent.
A Movie Review in Honor of Groundhog Day
You may have heard the premise of Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood: he got the same actors together (Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Patricia Arquette) year after year for short shooting stints and then he stitched the scenes together to make a fantastic coming-of-age narrative with the greatest special effect of all-- the actual passage of time; the movie took twelve years to make, and follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from elementary school to his first day of college . . . and the effect is in no way gimmicky, though it's always exciting to see how everyone looks in transition, but the story carries itself . . . it is the opposite of the great Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day-- where time stands still for God-only-knows how long . . . in Boyhood time is an uncontrollable flash-flood that sweeps Mason's family across Texas . . . and I am always impressed by works of art like this, where the investment of massive amounts of time is crucial to the outcome: I couldn't make it through Finnegan's Wake but I love the idea that it took Joyce seventeen years to write the book and it should take you seventeen years to read it; I am also reminded of Columbine and Far From the Tree, both of which took a decade to write . . . and then, of course, there's Noah, who took a picture of himself every day for six years.
The Apple Doesn't Fall Far, But Maybe It Should
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Alex was reading a Fantastic Four comic book when he noticed that a character in the comic book was reading the very same comic book-- he was so excited that he called me over to see it-- and then we talked about the possibility of a guy inside the little drawing of the comic reading a tinier version of the comic book, and the even tinier guy inside the tiny comic book doing the same thing, ad nauseum; maybe this will blossom into a predilection for meta-fiction like Tristram Shandy and if on a winter's night a traveler . . . maybe he will end up just like his dad, nerdy and well versed in novels that no one else has read.
Like Dungeon Master Like Son
I've been really proud of my boys the past week-- it seems they've forsaken the behaviors that dominated this school year: fighting, insubordination, vandalism, candy smuggling, not looking both ways when crossing the street, getting ISS, losing all their shit (Ian lost five lunch coolers!) and forgetting to do homework . . . this week has been different; Alex has managed to organize a large Dungeons and Dragons game with a number of his friends . . . and he included his brother . . . they've been cooperating, planning, setting things up together, and Ian contributed to the game by getting a game mat and some mini-figures for his birthday and while there's been six or seven 6th and 7th grade boys in my house quite a few times lately, they've been really focused and well-behaved and they sound super-smart, they're talking probability (Ian figured out that opposite sides of the twenty sided die all add to twenty-one) and poring over arcane tomes, learning crazy vocabulary (mace, flail, druid, laying hands, melee, etc.) and speculating about very weird stuff-- can a human have sex with a dragon?-- and while there's been the occasional argument, they've been battling each other in the game more than in reality . . . the thing I like the best about the today's session is that my son Alex-- who is the dungeon master-- made a "phone bin" and forced everyone to turn off their phones off and put them in the bin, so they could focus . . . the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Journey to the Center of the Suburbs
Journey to the Center of the Suburbs
Twenty Years!
That's ten years times two, man!
For a marriage to last twenty years, it has to endure the winds of change. It has to survive and thrive.
Twenty Things That Our Marriage Has Survived
Our marriage survived an extremely long courtship (eight years). Yikes.
Our marriage survived a wild wedding (include a wet and muddy ending . . . I got thrown into the Lawrence Brook and was too filthy to ride home in the vicinity of my lovely wife, instead, I got loaded onto a trash bag in the back of an SUV).
Our marriage survived our first years of teaching.
Twenty years ago, in Milan . . . |
Our marriage survived ditching tenure for parts unknown.
Our marriage survived three years living in Damascus and traveling the world.
Our marriage survived intestinal distress and the Second Intifada.
Our marriage survived life before we had money to pay for a cleaning lady (barely).
Our marriage has survived numerous births and deaths.
Our marriage has survived a house purchase and kitchen renovation. Our bank account barely survived.
Our marriage survived a child in a skull shaping helmet.
Our marriage has survived travel soccer.
Our marriage outlasted my 1993 Jeep Cherokee.
Our marriage survived our impetuous son getting hit by a car (he was fine).
Our marriage has survived the acquisition of two dogs.
Our marriage (and out basement) has survived floods and hurricanes (with FEMA assistance!)
Our marriage has survived epic family trips across our vast nation and beyond.
Our marriage has survived raccoons in the attic.
Our marriage has survived my wife teaching fifth-grade math remotely (barely).
And our marriage has survived the Covid-19 quarantine . . . so far.
To celebrate all of this survival, we planted something that could very well survive beyond our marriage . . . a Scarlet Fire dogwood tree.
Apparently, although we stumbled on it serendipitously, it's the perfect tree to commemorate our anniversary. Catherine and I met in New Brunswick, while we were both attending Rutgers, and this tree was bred and developed at Rutgers. Forty-five years of horticulture to produce this tree.
There's a Chinese proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Unfortunately, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree
The Apple Ruins Everything
As a parent, it's wonderful when you see a trait in your child that you possess yourself, especially if it's something you consider essential to your character . . . one of those "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" moments; Wednesday night my son Alex introduced me to a show called Adam Ruins Everything-- and he revealed that he's watched nearly every episode . . . I'm not sure exactly when and where he's done this-- his friend Gary, who is super-smart, recommended it and I think he consumed most of them when he was at my parents' house, but I'm not going to investigate exactly how he binge-watched the program, because if this is the kind of thing he's binge-watching on the sly, then I'm all for it, as this is exactly the kind of thing I'd want him to binge-watch; the show scientifically debunks commonly held misconceptions, and individual episodes have titles like "Why Weddings Are a Total Rip-Off" and "The Awful Truth About Salmon" and the best thing of all is that Adam is essentially a more annoying version of me-- and Alex thinks Adam is really funny and smart, which made me happy-- and I knew my assessment of Adam's character was accurate when my wife said, "It's an interesting show, but I don't like that it's so negative."
Poison Ivy, Jesus, and Leprosy
I'm not a regular church-goer (or even an irregular church-goer) but in preparation for Christmas I do break out our children's Bible and read it to my kids at bed-time, and we were just getting to the verse where Jesus heals the leper when I thought of a way to make this a bit more real for them, so I pointed out that my wife's horrible case of poison ivy was similar to leprosy (perhaps leprosy-lite?) and that it would be nice if Jesus was around to lay hands on mommy and heal her suppurating wounds and then I read them the story and their reactions were ridiculously close to my own thoughts and certainly show that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Ian said, "That's not real, that's fake, that couldn't happen," and I told him that we can't be sure because the story is very old . . . but it does seem rather unlikely, and then Alex-- who has never heard me utter these words-- said, "I don't really like stories about crazy diseases because then when I go to bed I start thinking about them and how I might have them," which is exactly how I feel about such stories and the reason I don't read books about medicine . . . but I told him that he doesn't really have to worry about leprosy these days and that poison ivy is a far more pressing matter.