On Independence Day, I took my son to the first fireworks display he was old enough to appreciate. Our little town has a typical small town Fourth of July celebration. We have a stage with local dance troupes doing little recitals, and local country music bands (because I live in rural Arkansas, and ALL local bands are country bands), and the obligatory political stumping by local officials (always entertaining in a surreal kind of way). Because we are also a small town, we have free hot dogs, popcorn, sodas and ice cream, and we sit on the lawn of one of the local Baptist churches (separation of church and state is a bit blurry in these parts), and watch the fireworks to a selection of patriotic staples, Sousa marches and horrible country anthems (I say horrible, because I can never decide whether to cry or giggle).

It’s satisfying in a claustrophobic way that only small-town America can offer and I love it.

I found it is difficult to explain to a three-year-old what the fuss is all about, other than being for his own personal amusement. Everything, to his self-centered world, is for his entertainment. Wider awareness is something that is taught and developed. It’s hard to explain that it’s the birthday of the country, when his grasp of nationhood is a bit shaky and his own birthday so proximate.

So I started teaching him about his nation the same way I started learning about mine. I bought him a placemat.

For years as a child I ate my breakfast cereal on a laminated map of the United States. I learned the outline of each state, the state capitol and little trivia like the state motto and state bird. We sat over Harry’s breakfast of muffins and juice and I showed him where he lived, where he was born, where Mommy was born and where Daddy was born. We pointed to the states he visited “when he was little”, and we started those tiny little baby steps toward learning what it was to be an American.

It is a journey that will never be finished. With all the recent talk of what defines patriotism in our time, it’s hard to know what that means, but I know what being an American means to me.

It means that I love my country. And it means I have a duty to be difficult.

I have had the advantage to have traveled extensively across the US, and more importantly, outside of it. I went to school for a time in Europe, and I think it was during that time that I learned two things. First – that we do not have the corner on quality of life. Second, I learned how much I love America in spite of it.

I have also worked for and with the vast bureaucracy that is our federal government. I have an enormous amount of respect for the people that serve for the common good – both military and civilian. These are people who make a myriad of sacrifices for the American people, from the very small to that last full measure.

That high regard and respect is independent of whether or not I agree with the policies of any current administration.

Make no mistake. You CAN support our military without agreeing with the decisions that require their service.

Because sometimes that disagreement the essence of patriotism. Sometimes the deep love of country requires public dissent with your government. I do not want my elected officials to sleep well at night. I want them to ponder. I want them to debate. I want them to hear every bit of dialogue, internal or external, before the decisions they make waste one tax dollar or one human life. I do not want them to rest easy with their consciences. Like Shakespeare’s Henry V, I want them to pace the night, consider the power in their hands to consign their countrymen to war and destruction. I want them to remember:

“But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it—who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.”

I thank God I live in a place where I have a voice in the selection of leaders who make these decisions.

I want them to hear me.

I want them to hear you.

Whether we agree or not.

This country was founded, not by people who walked lockstep behind public policy, but who entered into open debate and dissent with their rightful government. These are men (in the gender-neutral usage, with nods to Abigail Adams), who refused to believe that those who ruled were naturally imbued with higher wisdom or higher moral ground than the common man in the street. They were men that believed in the right to self-rule by the people, with all the messiness and argument and compromise that belief entailed.

These were men who believed that their duty to their country was to be difficult and inconvenient, and were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that all of their descendants had that right as well. I am a firm believer in the necessity for a Loyal Opposition as a crucial component of a free society and of right governance.

This I have learned from the history of my nation. For this, I love America.

I will teach my son to love his country.

And I will teach him to be difficult.

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.” ~Thomas Jefferson

Thanks to Bambi, who pointed me here, this is My Level of Awareness, visualized.

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

You know how sometimes you have all these words and ideas and phrases all knocking around in your brain at once and you just can’t sit down and put them all together into cogent paragraphs?

Yeah.

Welcome to my world.

More to come when me and my ideas can sit down together over a tall drink and sort things out.

I have a client in my office.

More blogging later.

The party was a smashing success.  And when I have cleared the aftermath, I will post more on this later.

But for now, happy hats!

My best friend came down, and there were mojitos, shopping, waaaaaayyyy too much bad-for-us-food, and  have I mentioned that my nails are frosty pink?  Specifically they are “Desert Nomad” pink, whatever-the-hell-that-is.

And HATS!

I’m glad she liked it!

(I am such a geek.)

… why hair stylists hate hair?  At least long hair.

And why they seem inherently unable to tell the difference between three inches and six?

My waist-length hair?

Is now down to the bottom of my shoulders.

Again.

Okay, here’s a newsflash for the hair stylists out there:

Some of us? Like. Our. Hair. Long.

Really.  We are not fashion idiots.  We secretly won’t be happier or look better with some short style de jour.  So let me repeat for emphasis.  WE LIKE our hair LONG.

My hair is not scraggly long.  Or unkempt.  It is thick, it is wavy, it looks like SHIT short BECAUSE it IS thick and wavy, and I WANT IT LONG.  I want it to look even and healthy long, so I DO want a TRIM.  But a TRIM, is NOT SIX INCHES.

I.  Am.  Not.  Happy.

That is all.

(and PS – if you persist in making unrequested major style changes of your clients the day before they have an important social event, you not only WILL NOT get repeat clients or referrals, you will get stalked and hounded to the ends of the earth and will have all past tips beaten out of your body.)

My son turns three this weekend. THREE! When I look at his face, there is almost no baby left. If I look close at the roundedness of his cheeks and squint juuuuuussst the right way, I can see the infant that I could cuddle at will. But one glance at his thin angular muscled little-boy frame, and all illusions are dispelled. Although he is in the technically correct age frame for it, I don’t even feel justified in calling him a toddler. He does not “toddle” in any sense of the term. He is a scant thirty pounds of rocket-powered running, jumping, independence-declaring preschool little boy. And, by-the-way? Terrible twos? Notsomuch. Three is shaping up to be the year of frustration. I stopped the car TWICE this morning. TWICE I gave the “if I have to stop this car ONE MORE TIME, you are in BIG TROUBLE, little man”. TWICE he got a stern talking to.

The great horribleness of it all is I realized that I had become a wimpier version of my mother. My mother, now THAT’S a woman that could unleash a world of horror on a miscreant. I am purely a poseur of a disciplinarian.

So my son turns three. Which means birthday party – the first “real” birthday party that includes actual guests that are my son’s peers, as opposed to family and parental friends looking for an excuse to hang out and grill and drink margaritas. Of course there will be some of that, or I will not make it through the party. My son’s best friend Keegan, who he no longer sees every day at school, is coming to Harry’s party, and it will be the highlight of the event. Of course, this means Keegan’s mommy is coming, who I know only from Harry’s attendance at Keegan’s party. It’s that whole mommy-playdate-world to which I am completely and totally dense.

In Robbin-speak this translates to real “guests” at the house. This is not something that happens often. Most of my guests are friends, who by inclination or long association, know where I keep all the glassware, the spare toilet paper and feel perfectly free in raiding my refrigerator. These are guests I don’t clean house for. I live in a very casual world.

So, I will sum up:

A real party with real guests.

Which means cakes to be baked.

Groceries to be purchased.

A house to clean.

Activities to plan.

Yard to mow.

Decorations to be fussed over, placed, replaced and abandoned.

All by Saturday afternoon. Oh, and I have to work somewhere in there, because I have a major, major client coming to visit early next week.

And in-laws coming for the weekend.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

If I were my mother, I would drop a sheetcake on the table, have a few paper crowns and candles and turn the kids out into the back yard to play. I didn’t really have birthday parties as a child.

I am not my mother. I am the domesticated, wimpified version.

So I have taken tomorrow off.

And what’s the first thing I will do?

Go to the spa.

Seriously.

Totally me, don’t you think?

Spittin’ image.

God I love the internet.

Christian living books are really not material that makes its way onto my bookshelves very often. Although I have been attending my local United Methodist Church regularly (a late development), and I do enjoy it a lot, I would describe myself as more spiritual than religious. My relationship with my Supreme Being is very direct and personal, and neither of us seem to stand a lot on dogma.

But my middle brother has become very involved in the youth ministry at his church back in New York, and as a Christmas gift, he sent me this:

You could have no children, completely skim the references to Christianity and read only the chapter on the differences between scarcity and abundance thinking and you will have gotten your money’s worth from the book.

The premise is this – our society is based on the idea that our measures of success are based on scarcity thinking, that things worth having derive their value from the fact that they are limited. Exclusivity increases value. From the standpoint of personal and society development, this is a recipe for disaster. It is a concept that places us in constant competition with each other, a system with a few “winners” and a losing majority. And the idea is that the constant competition will ultimate lead to innovation which ideally benefits all by trickle-down.

But it is a system that by its nature, by its very design breeds discontent. Progress is defined and driven by the feeling that happiness is brought by things that not everyone has. We are an economy and a society that is motivated by unhappiness.

How completely messed up is that?

I am an acknowledged gadget girl, and you are going to laugh when I tell you this, but if I think of all those moments where I am the most supremely contented, there isn’t a single material possession involved.

What brings me happiness?

Family.

Friends.

A job well done.

All these things are things that are available to us in abundance for the making. If we teach our children (and ourselves) that THESE are the things that bring us happiness, that these are the measurements of a good life, well lived, they will have the formula to live contented, fulfilling lives. If we convey to them somehow that we measure our worth by the car we drive of the size of our house, we are setting them up to compare their lives to the inevitable person with the larger house and the more expensive car, instead of teaching them that we “win” when we reach out and share what we have to create the circumstances for true happiness – companionship and cooperation.

We are setting them up to be unhappy. We are teaching discontentedness

And yet, avoiding that exact situation is damnably difficult. We are constantly bombarded by messages that tell us that the quality of life is in a bottle or can be placed on a credit card. Homes are not places to live and to love and to make memories in – they are investments to be traded upward in a race to make the most money and have the most house. We mortgage our happiness in an incremental race without asking ourselves that in the penultimate moment if this will be the way we will measure our existance. Will we leave this world at peace because of what we own? Or will that peace be brought by the happiness and love we gave away and were given?

Stop and think about the messages we send our children. Are their parties about the gifts or the companionship? What do we celebrate when we celebrate? What do we discard? What do we keep? Are our hands and our hearts open or closed?

What do we tell them about the value of life?

Knock on wood, because a lot can happen between now and December, but our current plan is to spend the Christmas holidays in my hometown.

Kris’ current job basically demands that he take two weeks of forced vacation between the Fall and Spring semesters. I was banking my leave time in order to be able to spend that time with him and Harry anyway, and it seems to be a good time to allow Harry to get reacquainted with his cousins, now that he is of an adequate age to be a proper playtoy to my herd of nieces and nephews (have I mentioned that I am the oldest of six children?).

I joke that I only remember my hometown of Rochester, NY in shades of cloudy gray. It is only nominally a city of Upstate New York; the green rolling hills of the Catskills and the Adirondacks are not really a defining feature here. It is more a city of the Great Lakes, sharing its climate and its culture with the likes of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. We have more in common with our Canadian cousins to the north than the City-that-Never-Sleeps.

Rochester is a working class town, a town of flannel and jeans, pub games and barfood cuisine (can you say “garbage plate” anyone?). It is a city that was once owned, lock stock and barrel, by Kodak. Almost every member of the generation before me worked for them for at least one time in their lives, banked with them, had their leisure time sponsored by them, and their homes mortgaged with them. These were company people, bought and sold, until the endless cycle of layoffs and hire-backs took their toll.

But for all this, there is a tremendous amount of culture in Rochester. At one time, it was the smallest city in the country to boast it’s own Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Eastman Conservatory was the first professional school formed at the University of Rochester. The Strasenburgh Planetarium has been awing children since before I entered Kindergarten, and it has expanded into a Museum of Science . In a nod to our cultural inheritance, the George Eastman House and Museum of Photography maintains an amazing chronicle of the art and science of photography. The last time I was there, the exhibition of mourning portraits made me weep.

Of my six siblings I am the only one to escape Rochester, and the only to leave New York. My youngest brother got as far as Staten Island for a time, but even he is returning to the fold. He is moving back this month. This is typical of Rochesterians. As a child, four generations of my family lived within a five square mile boundary. It is insular and conservative. Even chain stores took years to penetrate the Rochester clannishness, our local Sibley’s and McCurdy’s falling only in my adult years to the large retail chains, and even now, the family-owned Wegman’s is still the dominant grocery store. We are creatures of habit and strong familial ties, preferring our large networks of Irish and Italian family connections over convenience and, above all, over trendiness. The American fascination with novelty does not penetrate here.

It was never a place I fit. Dreamy and prone to wander, caught between two worlds, my face was always turned outward in family photos. At the same time that I miss the warmth of the family fold, I chafe under the myriad of little invasions privacy demanded in the close-knit pressure cooker of extended relationships. I love and miss my family dearly, but I have always instinctively guarded the peace of my life from the messiness of the ties that bind. I am, by heart and nature, solitary, and this is difficult to be in Rochester.

And yet, it is equally difficult to leave. A city on a lake big enough to have tides can also pull on the heartstrings in its rhythmic pulses. It calls me home like a Siren to its shores, and I will walk along the lakeshore in the windy gusts of winter, the remnants of the autumn leaves clinging to the black and silver skeletons of the maple and birch trees and the icy, pine-scented prickles of New England winter in my nose. I will share the joys of warm cider and the novelty of snowmen with my Southern son. I will remember how much I miss Rochester, and in two weeks of snow and ice and damp lake air, I will remember why I wandered away.

Always to return.