Archive for ‘Parents & Children’

September 25th, 2016

Temps Perdu

I have this lovely set of rose-colored glasseware that I inherited from my grandparents. Twelve glasses in each of three sizes–for water, wine, and cordials–plus a similar number of small dessert bowls. They’re likely Bohemian and could be late-19th century in origin. All I know is: they were always there.

As with many people’s inherited objects, these glasses have a totemic power for me. They remind of special family events, Seder foremost among them, when I would help my grandmother set the table. Even as a young kid, she trusted me to carefully extract each glass from the cabinet, a responsibility I cherished.

rose-colored-glassesBut these glasses also remind me of something more basic and differently nostalgic: of a lifestyle that I can remember, and one that also feels long gone.

My grandparents used these glasses on other occasions, such as dinner parties with good friends or out-of-town guests. They were one set among a range of such objects, like the hand-etched pint glasses from Abercrombie & Fitch (yes, that A&F, in its original incarnation) from which my grandfather would drink his Tuborg at lunch. Or the white, porcelain, claw-footed “chocolate cups”: delicate little items that the average person might mistake for demitasse instead.

I suppose these are “housewares,” a word that feels so average in comparison to the objects themselves. As does “china,” or “stemware”: all things one can purchase at many retailers, or add to your wedding registry, etc.

But what I miss is making the time to use these objects, rather than leaving them sitting on a shelf. I miss the sense of style my grandparents had, in which as much care was taken with the table as the food that went on it. The sense of investment in these objects, which had to be treated delicately, but also used. And the making of time, perhaps the most important thing of all: the time to cook three course meals, to sit and leisurely eat and enjoy company, and the time to clean-up, too.

My parents cling to this, and I appreciate it. I aspire to it: to finding making the time, to taking things out of cabinets and off of shelves, to setting them gently on the table, to appreciating their beauty and fragility, and to enjoying their functionality surrounded by people whose lives enrich mine, and with whom I can make new memories with objects from a time that otherwise feels lost.

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April 5th, 2016

The Power of the Puppy

Last week, walking home with Riley after dropping the kids at school, a taxi pulled to a stop 15 feet in front of us. The door slid open and Riley looked intently. Then she decided that she wanted to say hello to this woman, whom I did not know.

I tugged Riley along. It was 8am, and this well-dressed woman looked to be heading into the television office building in front of which we happened to be standing. But Riley insisted–and the woman, now out of her taxi, asked if she could pet Riley. I said yes.

We stood there for a minute, as the woman scratched Riley behind the ears. Riley pulled one of her signature moves and wrapped her paws and front legs around this lady’s wrist, holding her firmly in place. The woman smiled.

“Thank you for this,” she said to me. “I’ve had a rough morning, and this really cheered me up.

I guess Riley knew what she was doing.

Now Riley is spending the night at the vet, getting spayed. I can’t wait for her to be out, so she can wrap her paws around my wrist again–and so I can know she’s ok.

Sleepius Schmoopius

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January 24th, 2013

Not So Hungry Games

Last May, I bought a copy of the book The Hunger Games at Costco. The movie had been released and the frenzy had mostly passed, but seeing the book on sale I decided to investigate–and I was especially intrigued by the blurb on the inside back cover:

Suzanne Collins is the author of the bestselling Underland Chronicle, which started with George the Overlander. In The Hunger Games, she continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age.

The book sat until recently, and then I finally got around to reading it–having forgotten all about that dust jacket description, and most of the hype about the movie, too.

If you’re looking for an extended summary of the plot, go check out the book’s Wikipedia entry. Here’s a short version: a boy and a girl from each of 12 districts of the country of Panem are chosen at random to compete against each other–to the death–in a fantasy land arena that in some ways resembles the Holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The losers die and their districts get nothing; the winner gets fame, some fortune, and good things for his/her district. The entire proceedings are broadcast on television to the nation.

Collins borrows from all sorts of sources: We and 1984 created the framework for the kind of controlling, monolithic police state in the book; there’s a slightly post-apocalyptic feel that has resonances of A Canticle for Leibowitz, with its knowledge lost and re-gained; and the themes of violent children come from sources as varied as the Grimm Brothers and Shakespeare to Lord of the Flies. Not to mention the many stories of star-crossed (young) lovers have we all read, including those with twists that give the girls a more tomboyish demeanor and the boys a quieter, SNAG-like feel, as well as those (such as in 1984) who find ways to try to subvert the oppressive regime under which they live. Katniss (the girl) and Peeta (the boy) are composites, and don’t add much new by way of character development.

And this is where I disagree with the blurb. Perhaps what Collins intended to do was explore how young people relate to and respond to violence, but this is not what emerges. If anything, while there is some rejection of and sadness about all the violence and death in evidence from Katniss and Peeta, they seem to adjust to it–to its necessity, to the feeling of needing to inflict it–with the ease that comes from a will to survive. The reader roots for them because, well, of course we do: isn’t that the point?

The radical part of what Collins does is mix all these things together into a new stew with a distinctly 21st century twist: the reality show. This is also the part that gets the least exploration in the book, and deserves the most examination from the perspective of its social impact. Katniss, Peeta, and the other forced “contestants” are aware of being watched by their families and districts. They can play to the cameras for support–often literally, in the form of supplies that get dropped into the game for them–and they wonder occasionally about the reactions of those at home.  Yet we get virtually nothing from the audience’s side of the story except the imaginings of those in the game, who presume there to be shouts of glee or signs of sadness when players die or survive. (The one exception is a gift to Katniss that she thinks comes from the members of another district, in recognition of something nice she has done, some subversion of the power of the state.)

It is frighteningly easy to see how we, as a society, could make the transition from the current entertainments of Survivor and The Biggest Loser to the genuine violence and death of The Hunger Games. We accept the former already, not just as entertainment but as a social structure: people are inherently in competition; their achievements in a (probably rigged) game constitute an acceptable judgment of their value; and teamwork is itself a fleeting concept, with alliances formed and reformed until ultimately abandoned in favor of a single victor. (If this sounds both vaguely Darwinian and vaguely like the Republican party platform for the 2012 presidential election, I will let you sort out for yourselves the irony of a party pursuing a Darwinian strategy while denying Darwin’s most important evolutionary insight.) This separation, this distinction between an audience and its entertainment, is dehumanizing, tapping into our basest instincts–to see harm done to those we think we don’t like–while further inoculating us from taking too seriously the reactions of those who are physically or psychically wounded. Collins’ book is no great piece of literature, but in revealing this point so clearly she may have done something good for her “young adult” readers, if only they step back long enough to see it.

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October 16th, 2011

Reading IS Fundamental

Last night, I sat next to my daughter in her room, she reading a Muppet book, and me reading Ashenden. Truth be told, I wasn’t getting a lot of reading done: every other minute, she asked me to help her make sense of a new word, so we would sound it out together, and then she would move on, and I would read another sentence until her next question. But at some point in this episode, much like Trixie, I realized something.

This was an extremely unusual scene.

The reading itself is not unusual. My daughter loves books and has from an early age; she’s the kind of kid who is quite likely to grow up to be a voracious reader. She has two shelves of books in her room, and another shelf of her own in the living room, and while she’s too young to articulate it this way, I think she takes pride in the books’ presence and what they offer: the opportunity to grab one and read it, no matter how familiar, and enjoy it all the same. I love books too, both the reading of them and the collecting of them, and have for as long as I can remember. I grew up surrounded by books, inherited libraries from people, and knew they were the one thing my father would always buy upon request. Books were and are essential to me. (The shift to the ebook is vexing, and very much a separate subject. But beyond the philosophical issues they raise is a simple, practical one: it feels not quite as authentic to catalog them when their very presence is so ethereal.)

So what was unusual about this scene? I realized that while I read constantly, I couldn’t remember the last time my daughter actually saw me reading a book, an actual book–and that saddened me quite a bit.

I am fairly sure she knows that I read books; our house is filled with them, and there’s a whole shelf and stack next to my side of the bed. She’s a smart girl, and my guess is that without ever thinking about it, she assumes I read those books just as she reads hers.

Yet that assumption isn’t the same thing is the literal, in-front-of-your-eyes knowledge of seeing your parents reading. It just can’t be. In an all-digital, iEverything age, the shared experiences of families takes a different form, and this whole thing gave me one more reason to feel slightly sad about its seeming inescapability. When I was young, I saw my parents reading all the time. Sure, they did other things too, but on a summer weekend afternoon, my dad was often inseparable from a book, or from one issue out of a stack of New Yorkers or New York Review of Books that he was trying to catch up on. I understood implicitly that this was an activity central to his life. I want my daughter to be able to say the same about me. Likewise, I want her to know the shared joy that comes from reading together–reading separate things, together, in the same place, whether it’s on a beach in summer or around a fireplace in winter, or just on a random evening at home.

With all these digital devices, her experience is different–as is mine, of course. I read, often, but holding my phone or my iPad I could just as easily be playing a game; there’s no book spine to give it away. Likewise, I spend time with these devices writing (as I am now, drafting on my iPad, editing on my laptop), and while she can discover these blogs when she’s older and look back with some understanding of what I might have been doing while typing away … I could just as easily have been sending a text message or an email or something else equally fleeting.

In theory, the fix for this should be easy: read more–more books, especially–around my daughter. This will likely be just as important for my younger son, who likes books but who could probably do with more evident modeling of the Life of a Reader. Talking more about books would help, too, to make evident the connection between their physical presence and our digestion of them. I love being a writer, and that’s an identity I would be happy to have my daughter understand–but as a writer, few things are as important as good readers. And as a reader, I want her to have the best shot I can provide at staying engaged with books for the rest of her life.

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