Are You My Mother?

Yesterday, April 24, 2006, a woman named Gertrude Johnston Day died in Lafayette, Louisiana. Two months shy of her 97th birthday, she had spent the past 15 years in an assisted living facility. She was physically healthy, but Alzheimer's disease made it impossible for her to take care of herself.

This woman gave birth to my brother and me, but there were only rare occasions that I remember when I could call her my "mother." She was a Jehovah's Witness and for my entire life I never knew what she - that woman named Gertrude - thought about anything. What I had instead of a parent was the Watchtower society. We never discussed politics in my house. We never discussed science, we never talked about society and culture, we never talked about current events. I entered my adult years crippled by the lack of knowledge about how the world works and how to navigate my way to happiness. It's no wonder that I am so omnivorous about knowledge still. To read about someone else's similar experience go to this link: http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/04_13_2005.html To further complicate matters, my brother and I are adult children of an alcoholic father. So between them I never had any fun growing up. Not like Heather http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_08_2005.html and Heather grew up MORMON!

I can name the things I remember that were things a mother would do. I wanted to go to school so badly, but my birthday was in late December, so I had missed the deadline. My mother enrolled me in "dancing school" so that I could still say I was in school. Ballet has been a passion since I was 5. She also was the person that I saw reading Pearl Buck, Jane Austen, Dostoyevski; all the classics. She was the one who took me to the library to get my cherished library card. She enrolled me in a program offered by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and they sent a little booklet every month with stickers that I had to place in the right spots. I learned about the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David, the Winged Victory of Samrothrace, Picasso, Monet, so many wonderful works of art. My favorite was the now-famous-for-the-Bud-Lite-commercial Winged Victory and many, many years later when I stood in the Louvre and saw her, I cried. And when I moved with my husband to Montana to the sheep ranch, for a while she wrote to me every single day. Not much, just something, so that I would get mail - like you would for a child at summer camp.

She always loved my brother best and made no bones about it. He was the good son, I was the stubborn, recalcitrant, wicked daughter. Even though she had to grant that I was smart, she made sure that I knew that I was not good at math and I didn't know that she was wrong until I took a math class in Billings when I was 30-something and got an A. Somehow, my parents helped my brother graduate from medical school. They provided me with one year of college with the stipulation that I take shorthand and typing. Apparently they believed that only boys could make a living being doctors.

They say that parents love their children unconditionally. Not my mother.

What Marriage is About

This morning my husband was flipping through the pages of a little book a friend gave me, "The Quotable Woman." Many of you have probably seen it in your local bookstore. He read one quote to me and we laughed together. Then he said, "Funny, there aren't any quotes from that one woman . . ." and paused, not able to come up with her name right then. I looked up and said, "Dorothy Parker?" "Yes!" he said.

Now, how did my brain suddenly just know, out of all the millions of women alive, the one his brain was thinking of? In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, he discusses how the brain processes information, sifts through all sorts of facts you've come across in your life, and somehow picks out the exact thing it needs. If you haven't read it, you should.

Then I asked my husband, "Do you love that, or hate that? I mean that I knew exactly what you were thinking?"

"I love that - I love that!"
And, that, my dears, is one of the things marriage is about.

Golda's Balcony

Never Again
Those are the words inscribed on the nuclear warheads in Israel. I didn't know that until yesterday when I went to see Golda's Balcony, a one-woman play starring Valerie Harper. This is the story of a woman who grew up in Milwaukee, only finished the 8th grade, left home when she was only two years older than my grandson to go to Denver and live with her sister, and eventually came close to ending life on this planet. Hearing about her decision to go to Palestine in 1921 and work for a state for the Jews, I could not imagine myself doing such a thing. But maybe for her it was the same as when I threw as much as I could into 3 hefty bags and loaded my kids in the car and left home and eventually made a life unlike the one I thought I would have.

It was amazing to realize that when Golda was agonizing over whether to strike first at the countries aligned against Israel during the Yom Kippur War in October of 1973, I was agonizing over whether or not I had cancer, not knowing that this growing tumor in my belly would turn out to be my darling daughter, Nancy. I had no idea that across the world, a fearless and tough woman was the one who truly held my fate in her hands.

This play revealed a truth that I had not seen quite so clearly before: that history is made by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

We're planning a trip in May with our best friends. They're flying here to Phoenix and we'll drive to Gallup, New Mexico, then head north into Colorado. We'll go first to Durango and meet another couple there whom we haven't seen for many years. Together we'll ride the Silverton Railroad which is a 9-hour round trip. We'll stay another night in Durango before heading east to Alamosa. On the way, we hope to sample the hot springs at Pagosa Springs. Maybe even a bit of white-water rafting if that's available. We'll stay in Alamosa so that we can visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park, something I've wanted to do for a long time. Visit their web site for some spectacular photographs of the dunes. I might have to even get up early to get some good shots. After we explore the park, we'll return west to Mesa Verde and enjoy the magnificent views and architecture of the pueblos. Then back home to Phoenix. It should be a very enjoyable and informative trip.

Boot Camp

Yeah, baby! Now there is no reason for you not to buy a Mac. For all of you out there who thought that you'd like to have a Mac because, after all, they are so cool, so reliable, so upscale, but all you've ever worked on is Windows and you think you'd have to learn a whole new operating system (which you wouldn't) - run, run, run to your closest Apple store and hand over your credit card. Because now you can own a beautiful computer and still run your old clunky Windows program that you're used to. With Boot Camp, you have the choice of running Windows XP or Mac OS X. Is it a perfect world now, or what?

Big News out of the ACC!

No credit is given in this short blurb, but I think this breakthrough is probably the work of the scientists at Wake Forest. Anthony Atala left Harvard's ivy halls to come to a new institute of regenerative medicine at Wake Forest. The word is that he's been able to make cell suspensions that form uteruses, vaginas, and large blood vessels. Atala's group has even constructed a fully functioning rabbit penis! Now they're working on solid organs.

URINE LUCK
We can grow you a new bladder. Can we conquer death?
By William SaletanUpdated Tuesday, April 4, 2006, at 9:15 AM ET
(For the latest Human Nature columns on birth control, polygamy, and old people, click here.)

Scientists have grown and implanted the first custom-made human organs. They made bladders and put them in patients who donated the source tissue. Recipe: Take a tiny tissue sample from each patient, grow it in a dish, wrap it around a scaffold to shape it, grow it for seven weeks in an incubator, then put it in the patient, where the new bladder keeps growing. The bladders have been functioning in seven patients for about four years. Next, scientists plan to grow kidneys, livers, and hearts. Interpretations: 1) Tissue engineering has arrived. 2) We did it without embryonic stem cells. 3) Death, RIP. (For Human Nature's take on growing organs from embryos, click here.)

My Final Final Four!

That was the worst Final Four I've ever seen! The first rounds were so very, very exciting. Many games went into OT and even double OT. We were all talking about those great games. Then by the round of 8, I didn't even care who won anymore. I could have cheered for "Big Baby" but LSU was playing so badly, that it was painful to watch.

I hate Duke, and I'm not crazy about Jim Calhoun's UConn team, either, but that would surely have been a much better game. I feel sorry for those players who had NBA scouts watching them and then, as time went on, their stock fell lower and lower. Let's see how it plays out when draft time comes.

Whew! I'm glad baseball season is here!

Stomp!

Just got home from seeing a performance of Stomp! at ASU's Gammage Auditorium. It was wonderful! The creativity is just mind boggling, and kids could actually learn from the performers how to make music out of almost anything. This performance included brooms, dustpans and dust sweepers, long sticks, short sticks, flexible pieces of rubber hose cut to various lengths, matchboxes, zippo lighters, 55-gallon drums, plastic garbage cans, metal garbage cans, garbage can lids, and a large assortment of pots and pans, dishpans, plastic water cooler bottles, and anything else that makes a sound. The timing and syncopation was impeccable, and the performers were funny, energetic, athletic, and, of course, fine musicians.

If you ever get a chance to see this marvelous show, don't miss it!