… that the cardboard box was inducted last year into the Toy Hall of Fame*:
* If any of you have the opportunity to visit the Strong Museum of Play in my hometown of Rochester, NY, do it. If you don’t love it, you have no inner child, and there is no hope left for you.
In the last two days, two icons of my youth passed away - James Brown and Gerald Ford.
My childhood spanned the early years of Soul and the entirety of the Vietnam war. My earliest political memories were of the Nixon-McGovern campaign and I vividly remember watching the newscasts of Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s public announcement of his pardon. The music of James Brown, and the other superstars of Soul music, were the backdrop for the turbulent social changes that marked my years growing up and my budding political awareness. I credit this with the wide political differences between my Reagan-era brothers and myself.
I am among the last of the Baby Boomers, the last to enter middle age and see the living memories of my youth pass away. It’s as if I am watching the passage of a whole generation, a whole chapter of shared history. The world I live in now is at once far better, and worse, than the one I grew up in. But it is increasingly a world of younger faces, different values, different memories.
Middle age is a strange place. You find yourself reaching tenuously backward to hold on to the things that root you, that shaped the person you have become. At the same time, you try to keep up with the world’s relentless march into a place more technologically wonderful, but less socially familiar.
I feel the passage of time less in my body than I do in my morning news.
After getting Sarah’s Missing-Blogger-Milk-Carton email (not about me), I realized that I hadn’t really touched the old blog in five days. Not exactly a millennium, I realize, but unusual for me. I don’t know why this assuages my guilt, but by the looks of the traffic on my regular reads, I am not alone in my unearthly orbit.
Greeeaaatt. Another instrument for self-induced performance guilt. Just what I needed for Christmas this year.
I will have to say that the VERY best gift that I got (in fact, one of the ONLY, but that’s another blog for another day), was from Charlotte. 5 yards of highly coveted wool in a fabulous gray-black weave that is authentic for medieval Europe. From the lady who hates to shop. Let me emphasize this: Highly. Coveted. I looked at this stuff at least twice a day online and drooled. And it’s MINE, ALL MINE. Thank YOU, Charlotte. Next to the Christmas morning smiles of my son, it was the highlight of my holiday.
As for Christmas itself? Let’s just say it was a bittersweet year, far more sweet than bitter. And really, in the face of this:
How can it NOT be a great Christmas?
Today at 1pm officially begins Christmas. At least for me.
It’s been a rough week. I don’t often talk about my work much because it’s either 1.) confidential, 2.) obscure, or 3.) gruesome. This week it was all three. It wasn’t an aspect of my job I enjoy, but it IS an aspect of my job, and I have a lot of integrity about that.
I am glad to be home.
I am glad for the barista at the Atlanta airport who said - “Merry Christmas, glad to have you here!” as she handed me my coffee yesterday as I passed through, bleary eyed. I told her I was grateful she was there providing me with toasty beverage, and I was grateful I wasn’t staying long. More grateful than she may ever know. I was going home.
I was glad to see my son, who started with his “Momma-sucks-for-leaving-me” scowl, only to be thwarted when I pulled a candy cane out of my leather satchel and popped it in his mouth, leaving him all smiles and sticky pink hands. I was grateful to the hotel receptionist who handed me that candy cane with a smile as I left, never knowing how much it made my day - and my son’s.
I was happy to see my Christmas lights on my house as I pulled in the driveway. I could overlook the unseasonably warm weather and the lack of snow and still smell Christmas in the air.
We are leaving today to visit Kris’s family with a load of presents for our ever-burgeoning numbers of nieces and nephews, whom we will attempt to keep from burning down the house (or each other) for two days. Then, on Christmas Eve, we will head back home.
Home.
Home, where we will put our son to bed and I will play the role of Santa for the first time, sharing with my son that magical moment of waking to a tree ablaze in lights and tinsel, rising over the secret joys of childhood, wrapped in gleaming color. We will breakfast on Christmas cookies and cocoa, and we will arrange his Nativity - the Mommy and the Daddy and the Baby Jesus - while the warm smells of roasting turkey and cider fill the house.
We will finally have that “First Christmas” together as a family, one year delayed from the day when we walked into this empty house, five days before Christmas, trumping four months of itinerant uncertainty. I felt like I had been holding my breath until that moment. No other Christmas present could match the key to that door.
Home.
We have come in a full cycle of the seasons, back to where we stepped in from a life interrupted. This year we will christen our little house in the woods with the twinkling of lights, the crinkle of paper and the smell of cinnamon and sage. The walls that surround us will grow beyond the wood frame and drywall into the fabric of our life. Home is the place where you grow your soul into the rich soil of memory. Home is where your heart rests in those quiet moments when a smell or a sound brings you back to the places of childhood joy.
May we all go home for Christmas.
Top reasons I am not a pathologist:
Bodily fluids.
Yep. That pretty much covers it.
Excuse me. I have to go burn my clothes.
it’s off to work we go!
I will be traveling for the next three days for work, staying in lovely Harriman, TN. I will try to blog from the road, but it’s a study wrap-up, so no promises are implied.
Happy Holidays everyone!
Something I think should be on many of our Christmas lists:
Get yours at Fussy.
So, what do you think? Black or Red?
Lest you fall into the trap of believing I am anything remotely resembling a profound thinker, I have to let you in on the secret of what I have been grateful for lately.
After years of getting whatever baseline cell phone that came for free when I renewed my contract, I dipped one tenative toe into the digital revolution. My husband’s phone chose exactly two days before our contract was up for renewal to die irrevocably (and here is where I interject “LG, piece of shite”), and we found ourselves unexpectedly buying ourselves new phones for Christmas. Merry Christmas to us.
Two things happened that made me realize that I really, really do have to access my email from my phone:
1. My new job requires long periods of time when I am “on-call.” While I rarely (in fact, almost NEVER) have to come into work off-hours, I must be accessible (by federal regulation, no less), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
2. I travel for work.
The combination of the “and” and the “or” of the two above circumstances forced my hand.
I really, really wanted a Samsung Blackjack. I can’t believe I am truly enough of a geekette to deem any piece of electronic equipment “sexy”, but, damn. Blackjacks are sexy. But I just couldn’t justify it. The upfront cost wasn’t really much more than I ended up paying, but the monthly data service forced me to do a reality check. There’s need, there’s convenience, and there’s just plain luxury. We were tipping into the luxury with the Blackjack, no matter how bad I wanted a QWERTY keyboard. Folks, I have an unbelievable typing speed. Me and QWERTY, we relate.
But, considering the state of our budget, and my serious aversion to being in debt, I ended up with this:
A Cingular 3125 Smartphone (otherwise known as QTEK 8500).
And, well, I couldn’t be happier with it. Even sans QWERTY.
It runs Windows Mobile, so the navigational interface is familiar, and it has the added bonus that when my project manager emails me an appointment, it automatically integrates into the Calendar on my phone, because it is all, essentially, Outlook. Email setup, even to my corporate server, was quick and painless. Multimedia messaging, either phone-to-phone, or phone-to-email, is integrated. And it synchs with the Outlook on my laptop, which means I don’t have to enter all my contact information tediously on the phone’s number pad. I can enter it in Outlook on my computer, and send it to the phone via USB.
It does everything I need, and a couple things I don’t. It has a built-in MP3 player, which I am too addicted to my iPOD to use. Right now, it will only hold 20 songs, but a quick memory card upgrade will change that. If my audiobooks were compatible with it, it would be more useful, but they aren’t right now. The cameraphone has been fun to play with, but, frankly, it’s not exactly a career necessity. It will also do video, which makes my mother happy, because I can email her videos of cute Harry tricks, but, again, it’s a perk I could have lived without.
But, I can blog and check MySpace straight from my phone, anywhere. How cool is that?
(Geek.)
Amy-Renee posted yesterday on how much she loved Christmas.
Of the multitude of differences between my best friend and I (and “opposites attract” is about the only way to explain our close relationship), that is one of the things upon which we are in complete harmony.
I love Christmas.
I will start playing Christmas music as soon as it is seasonally decent to do so. I lean toward traditional arrangments - most of the pop-Christmas stuff (with a few notable exceptions) makes my ears bleed. Give me Nat King Cole singing “Adeste Fideles”, though, and I am in heaven. And I will have to say, I miss snow. When you grow up in the land of “Over the river and through the woods” where the “horse knows the way, to carry the sleigh”, you have to reach down deep for those jingle bells when you are running around in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt at Thanksgiving dinner. The Louisiana years were tough in that respect.
Mostly, I have loved Christmas for the story. THAT story. The Nativity.
All my life the story of the babe in the manger has moved me.
As a parent, it takes my breath away.
Children are born of faith and hope. We bring them into a world that is deeply flawed. A world of hardship and violence. A world of hatred and division. But we also bring them into a humanity capable of amazing acts of love and kindness. They are the manifestation of our faith that the world will continue and somehow we will leave a legacy worth handing to them. They are our shot at immortality, and in them we wrap our hopes for a future that will somehow, against all odds, be better than the one we live in. We protect them, we nurture them, and we sacrifice for them. But most of all, we love them with a love so boundless and fierce that it can manifest as a physical ache. We look into the face of our infants and we project the world upon them. Could there be no sacrifice greater than your child? It is what makes the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis so horrifying a test of faith.
“And He so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son…”
That God so loved humanity that he would send his own son, in full knowledge of the suffering he would have to endure, is a symbol of unconditional love that could not be expressed as fully in any other way. Whether you believe in the Christian canon or not, the power of the story is undeniable. Could I look into the face of my innocent son and send him off to certain death and agony for the sins of another?
Forgiveness is divine.
I have been moved by Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Ghita and the lesson of devotion and sacrifice to purpose. I have been moved by Taoist teachings on the beauty of the transitory. There is a message in the stories of great religions that transcend the dogma of faith.
Forgiveness is divine.
Whatever religion you practice, or if you practice none at all, there is something we can all hold in our heart about Christmas. If we forgive one person for their sins against us, we have held it in our heart. When we comfort one person in need this season, when we give of ourselves, our time, our hope, our love, we have lived in the spirit of the Nativity. We have taken one step toward being a humanity that is worth so profound a sacrifice.
Peace on Earth.
Good Will to All Men.
Merry Christmas.
I am usually do not like to talk about, or even write about, political topics. Too many of the people I hang around are entrenched “facts be damned” kind of political thinkers, and discussion in that kind of atmosphere is worse than pointless. It’s poisonous.
This does not mean that I cannot be passionately political. If it really matters to anyone out there, I consider myself, politically, to be a liberal-leaning moderate. I subscribe to neither party. I tend to vote Democratic, given few other viable alternatives, but I have voted the range from Libertarian to Green depending on the election and the issues at stake. I tend to support causes, not candidates.
But right now I am disgusted across party lines, so you all are going to hear about it.
The Department of Labor is requesting input on the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and has considered rolling back several of its provisions. This is the act that most people associate with maternity or paternity leave, but it goes a whole lot further than that. This does not affect some small special interest group. It touches every single one of us.
Have cancer or a chronic illness? This affects you.
Have a child in the home? This affects you.
Have a special-needs family member? This affects you.
Caring for elderly parents or grandparents? This affects you.
Our government has been giving lip service to supporting families for years. Candidates will gather their wives and children around them in front of an American flag, but the dismal truth is that we have a piss-poor track record in the United States when it comes to developing policies to make family units stronger and better able to care for their own. Politicians to the far right whine about entitlements, but will not support legislation that allows us to care for our families without having to use entitlements. Politicians to the left focus on what to do once the family unit has broken down, but not as much about policies that keep it together.
In an ideal world, the interests of good business and the interests of employees should coincide. Strong industry comes from a strong workforce. In reality, our shortsightedness when it comes to our management practices and our failure to plan long-term strategies in the marketplace violate this ideal. In an ideal world, there would be no need for the FMLA.
We are far from an ideal world. Human resource is just another resource to be cut to pad the bottom line in the upward flow of capital. Even under the current provisions of FMLA (which only requires unpaid leave and only in companies over 50 employees) those whose incomes place them on the edge of the poverty line cannot afford to take family leave to care for a newborn child, a sick or elderly parent, or for long-term medical therapies. They will continue to rely on substandard care, or will end up relying on public assistance to meet those needs. And who pays? We do.
If I cannot stay home to take care of an elderly parent in end-stage sickness, I will have to seek hospice care. If I cannot afford it, that elderly parent will end up in a charity hospital - at the expense of the public. Or at home, alone and uncared for. Who ultimately pays? We do.
If my mother cannot use FMLA to take unpaid leave for her chemotherapy, she loses her job, and ends up on the rolls of the unemployed, and on Medicaid. Who pays? We do.
Proposed changes will force people to take FMLA in no less than four-hour increments and is considering limitations on intermittent leave. That means, even if only two hours is needed to attend a prenatal checkup, four hours must be claimed. This may mean that pregnant women who must use FMLA leave to obtain prenatal care may burn over half their FMLA before the baby is even born. Net result? They take MORE time than they need off, not less, or the child does not receive proper prenatal care. The latter increases the risk of needing increased neonatal care, and the former shortens the time a new mother can spend at home, recovering and learning to care for her newborn child. Who pays? We do.
With increased insurance costs to cover the burden on the system of preventable neonatal care.
With increased taxes to cover daycare assistance.
With increased numbers of people turning to public assistance when their jobs are lost as they are forced to make decisions between caring for their families, and putting a food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Our government already sends us the message that family care is only for those who can afford to leave their jobs without pay. All we are asking is that we have jobs to come back to. And somehow, even that is too much?
More information can be found at the links below:
http://www.nationalpartnership.org/Default.aspx?tabid=140
http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/12/fmla_input_need.html
To prevent this to become a political slug-fest, I am turning off the comments on this post.
If you care about this passionately, either way, email me.
Or even better, email your Congressman.
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