weekend roundup

saturday's child
can't see the forest
from the trees

After several days of gray rain, the sun emerged this afternoon, and I was able to snap this photo of our pin oak, sans leaves. The stubborn brown, crunchy, and curled leaves finally blew off this past week. These naked branches will soon be speckled with spring buds. As I attempt to photograph our friend Pinocchio at this time of year, I find that this phase is most fleeting, because the tree will be like this for no more than one week of the year. I was so happy to see that the sky and the light gave me one brief and beautiful image. The rainy day images of the past few days were too gloomy to include in my collection of "phases of the tree."

So what else is new? We got through our busy week only to have Matt get sick on Friday with what may be strep throat, but is at the very least an unpleasant ear infection with need for antibiotics. There is nothing sadder than seeing your vibrant, active child reduced to a puddle of sweat and discomfort as we experienced on Friday evening. Thank God for Augmentin, as within 24 hours we have seen a dramatic improvement. He was back to being himself today, and I snapped this photo of him cuddling with Mars the cat.

Daniel and Matt Mendelsohn's visit on Wednesday and Thursday was great. Daniel is an eloquent speaker, and anyone in attendance who hadn't already read The Lost certainly bought a copy on the spot to read after hearing him read the first couple pages and talk about the experience of writing the book. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk, and it was great to spend a little time with Matt again after many years. They are two special people, and we were delighted to have them come to Cortland to speak at our campus Holocaust Remembrance event. Of course, there is much more to The Lost than meets the eye. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you will soon.

I am happy to report that my group project presentation on Wednesday went very well, and I am nearly done with my final paper and self-assessment due this coming week. My trip to Albany was quick and full, although I had the unfortunate experience of rooming next to a noisy and late party in the hotel where I stayed on Thursday evening. I think I am still tired, in part, because of the lack of sleep Thursday night.

Onto another week. The last few weeks of the semester are always "full." I will now have three weeks off before starting my summer session course, and I am looking forward to a little break on the grad school front anyway. Have a good week.

the other side of mid-April

A quick hello here. We are all doing well and keeping busy. The spring weather has had a positive effect on everyone, it seems, and spirits are definitely lifted.

Matt is doing great with his oboe! Today his music teacher gave him three songs to learn for the year-end concert . . . we weren't expecting that he would be invited to play with the band this year since he just got started. So that seems promising. I'll have to snap a photo of him practicing. I wish I could attach a sound file. He really has a strong, loud tone!

[Photo of Old Main at SUNY Cortland - lifted from the Internet.]

Work is busy, and my course is winding up, so that has taken any free time I might have. I will be handing in a big project and doing a group presentation tomorrow and then will rush back to hear the end of Daniel Mendelsohn's talk on campus. We are thrilled that Tom was able to arrange to have Matt and Daniel to come to Cortland. As you may know, Matt, a talented photographer and good friend of Tom's (and mine) from SUNY-B days did the photographs for the award-winning The Lost, written by his brother. Daniel will be the speaker to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day on our campus tomorrow. Matt sent a stunning photo exhibit that was installed for show this entire week in Old Main. Tom is very excited, as am I.

On Thursday I travel to Albany for a meeting, and on Friday afternoon I have to do a presentation for our College Council. Suffice it to say, I am looking forward to the weekend, when I will write one last paper of the semester to hand in by next Wed., and then I am done with my course for the semester. I purposely try to not talk much about work or grad school on this blog, because part of the reason I write this blog is to remember balance, have a creative outlet, and remember that there is much more to life than work and school. That being said, every once in awhile, I may have to mention it because it will explain why I may not be blogging much during certain time periods.

Of course, you never know. Be well.

the ordinary and the extraordinary

It was pointed out to me that I have been slacking off on my blog posting. (True enough, Jean ;-) My best laid plans to post 4x a week seem to have fallen by the wayside. I had a lot more posts in January because of the Belize journal. Now that we are into March, I am trying to get in at least two entries per week.

Perhaps it is the time of year -- with the persistent snow and damp and cold -- but on a day to day basis, I feel like not much is happening. When I sat down to think about what was new, I realized that there are lots of things going on. Here are 11 of them:

• Matt is doing well at school, is reading a great book, and is enjoying snowboarding on Wednesdays, basketball on Saturdays, and baseball clinics on Sunday afternoons.
• Matt got his first choice of an instrument as he begins instrumental music lessons at the end of March. We went to Syracuse yesterday and rented a beautiful oboe, and I can't believe the sound Matt is getting from it already. He really seems to get it! Why oboe you might ask? Well, we have the soundtrack to one of my favorite shows, Six Feet Under, and the theme song features a very interesting oboe melody. Matt has always been attracted to it and asked right away what instrument that was. That is how he decided that is what he wanted to play. My mom tells me that it is exactly how I determined I wanted to play the flute. I heard it as a very young child, asked what it was, and that was it for me.
• Tax stuff is pulled together and delivered to the guy who prepares our taxes.
• Our friend Sue successfully defended her dissertation last month and she has now earned her PhD from Cornell University in biology (please don't ask me to explain her research... she is in a post-doc now, and I try to stay focused, but my eyes glaze over when she talks about her work!)
• Natalie got a clean bill of health from the vet and she and Mars are getting along very well.
• Tom delivered a well-received lecture and photo presentation on the Adirondacks to my mother's ladies group, the Wednesday Morning Club, in Rome, NY this past week. The ladies just love him. This was his second appearance. He did a program two years ago on his travels to Serbia.
• On the beautiful baby front:
  Friends Meg and Kurt adopted a baby girl, Ava Linh, from Vietnam in January
  Friends Janet and Joe had a baby boy, James, at the end of February, who I get to meet later this week, and he joins the lovely little Greta
  Tom's cousin Mary Beth's son and daughter-in-law, Mike and Joi, had twins Ryan and Isabel, on March 2nd, and they join their big brother James
• On the birthday platform, several of Matt's cousins have recently had birthdays. Mia turned 2 and Kristina turned 11 in January; Elena turned 5 in February; and Jeremy turned 7 just yesterday. Tom's sister Sue and our sister-in-law Kim had birthdays (on the same day) in February. Friend Paula celebrates her birthday today. And all three of Tom's brothers. Charles, Paul, and John, have birthdays coming up later this month along with another one of Matt's cousins, Danny, who will turn 11 at the end of the month.
• Our friend Matt's brother Daniel Mendelsohn has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006 for The Lost in the best autobiography category. It is a brilliant book and this is a well-deserved honor. See my post on The Lost for more information. Congratulations Daniel!
• The temperature has reached 40 degrees and the snow seems to be melting. We have three more days of this "heat wave" forecast, and with that we should see some of the snow and ice thaw.
• This week is the spring break at the college (conveniently planned so that students will not be in town for St. Patrick's Day). Tom and I are looking forward to a week to get caught up without students around. I may take a day off to do work for my course. Matt has his spring break in April (you know, when it is actually spring) so that makes it a bit crazy every year to not be able to take time off when he is off. Since we'll work most of the week anyway, it isn't a huge issue. It is still a break just not having the students around to add to the volume and it let's us catch our breath a bit.

I have some laundry and cooking to do, and about 6 chapters to read... so off I go.

As for the song of the day, to go along with the theme of "ordinary/extraordinary," check out Maia Sharp's Regular Jane. It is one of my favorites. Have a great rest of the weekend.

[Image is from myprimetime.com]

The Lost

Daniel Mendelsohn has written a very important book. It is beautiful and heart-wrenching, and I hope that many people will read it. The Lost -- a search for six of six million -- chronicles Daniel's search for the stories of the lost members of a branch of his family (his grandfather's brother Shmiel Jager and his family -- wife and four daughters) who perished during the Holocaust.

One of the things I love most about this book is its ability to bring to life the relationships Daniel had with his mother's father, Abraham Jager (and his mother's mother, his Nana Gerty) and the friendship he developed with Mrs. Frances Begley, a woman and Holocaust survivor he met through a friend. Woven through this masterful story are segments that reflect on interpretations of the Torah from Bereishit (Beginnings) to the story of Cain and Abel through parashat Noah (the story of Noah's Ark) to parashat Lech Lecha (Going Forth) to the full circle of coming home. The Lost takes us on travels all over the world -- to Australia, to Bolechow (what is now Bolekhiv, Ukraine but used to be Poland) to Israel and Prague and Sweden. It is both the unraveling of a mystery and fine literature at the same time.

I found I had to read this book slowly, over the course of about six weeks, and I wasn't sure I could get through it at times. As I was reading the ending pages at the airport on Sunday, tears were streaming down my face, and a few times I looked around me and realized that I must have looked like I was in great pain. No doubt, I was. But there is something about the pain that dissipates. I love this quote: "For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of peoples now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and the Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this or that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror and loves and hunger of every one of those millions of Ukrainians, just as the hair of a Jewish girl or boy or man or woman that someone once loved, and the teeth and the brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost or soon will be lost, because no number of books however great, could ever document then all, even if they were to be written, which they won't and can't be; all that will be lost too...." (pp 486-487). This is a book about one last look back, finding what still exists, and finding something important in that last look at what is lost.

A very special theme that emerges through the telling of this quest is the relationship that siblings have and how the estranged, the lost among our own living family members, can bond again. Through the journey outlined in the book, Daniel reconnects with his brother Matt, an incredibly talented photographer who happens to have gone to Binghamton and has been a good friend of Tom's (and mine) for many years. Matt took the photographs for this book, and Daniel credits Matt's perceptions as an artist and his intuition for tapping into the emotion that was so critical to finding the lost.

So many people just do not want to think about the Holocaust. As Kate Winslet quipped during an episode of The Extras (satire), in reference to the number of films on the Holocaust, "We get it. It was grim. Move on." But the truth is, we do need to think about it. We need to read about it and remember that it did happen, and that it was horrific, and in the name of God let it never, never again happen -- and make sure that "never again" does have meaning. We know that history repeats itself. As Daniel points out, the Ukrainians themselves, who were known as "the worst" by survivors, suffered mass starvation and death as a result of Stalin's purposeful decimation of that people in the 1930s. And after the Holocaust we have several million Cambodians wiped out in the 1970s and more than half a million Tutsis and Hutus killed in Rwanda and more than 100,000 Bosnian Muslims wiped out by the Serbians in the 1990s.

The difference The Lost offers when compared to a host of very depressing works on the Holocaust that deal with dates and details is that there is a humanity and a love and an energy in this book -- and it focuses on trying to remember the people who were lost. The author makes us care deeply about the characters and their lives so that we are able to continue reading even when we think we cannot. It is a story of family and of rekindling the familiarity and fondness of the relationships with the people we love.

I hope that you will take a few minutes to read more about Daniel Mendelsohn at http://www.danielmendelsohn.com/.

I have Matt's blog linked under my favorite misc. sites (see bar on right.) Some very good reviews of The Lost can be found at the following sites:

New York Observer Review
http://www.observer.com/20060918/20060918_Rebecca_Goldstein_culture_books.asp

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/living/books/s_468815.html

You can purchase The Lost on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Search-Six-Million/dp/0060542977/sr=8-1/qid=1157483591/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2110716-4277559?ie=UTF8&s=books

*Note that Jager should be spelled with an umlaut over the "a," but I couldn't get this editor to input the character.

Clearwater Beach Hello

I traveled all day yesterday - from sub zero wind chill factors to 30s in Philadelphia to 60s in Tampa... en route to my conference here in Clearwater Beach, FL. I arrived in the dark last evening around 8 p.m. not remembering how beautiful it is here. I was here about 10 years ago and hadn't thought it was all that special at the time. For some unknown reason, I see it differently now.

This morning I woke up early to do one of my favorite things. I took a walk on the beach as the sun was rising. The hotels on this beach are set far enough back that when you are walking you get a sense of isolation - as it should be - and there were very few people out. Just me and a few seagulls. I saw a heron of some type flying over the water about 30 yards off. As you may have figured out, I have this thing for birds. Loons, ducks, seagulls and especially herons. It was about 50 degrees outside with a wonderful ocean breeze blowing.

I snapped a few photos on the digital camera and thought about our human need to try to "keep" things. We are always trying to hold onto images. To own them. To remember them as they are. We do this with stories, journals, videos, and cameras. A digital camera, at least the type I have, is a good teaching tool in the lesson that some experiences can't be captured. I looked at the photos I had snapped and I thought, they are not quite adequate. They don't show what I see. And yet, I didn't delete them - though I thought about doing so - because even just a glimpse is sometimes enough. It is enough to hold on to in trying to re-create an experience or a reality. However, we have to be sure that we don't misrepresent with our medium; to take things too far out of context distorts the reality. This surely can be done too. I have been thinking a lot lately about photographs and their meanings and how we view them as I read a very special book, The Lost, about which I will blog soon. I am still trying to get my arms around it. I am nearly finished with it and am reading it slowly and deliberately to get everything I can from it.

Anyway, one of the things I hoped to find on the beach was one special, perfect shell, to bring home to Matthew. He loves the beach as much as I do - and probably more. Everywhere I looked, I could not find the right shell to "get" for him. I had just decided to give up, and was heading back to the hotel, when I spotted the most brilliant, iridescent, purple, blue, green shell. I picked it up. It was shiny and lovely, and yet imperfect and broken. I thought of putting it down in search of a more perfect shell - just as I had entertained deleting several of that morning's photos. And then I decided that it was "enough" - it was beautiful as it was. It was incomplete and yet gave a gift of the beach that was "enough." It was the Japanese concept of "wabi sabi" - perfection in imperfection. The broken shell was wabi sabi - and a perfect metaphor for what I was trying to do. Bring a bit of the beach home to Matthew.

So here are a few imperfect photos from this morning. The conference has been great so far. The sessions have all been good and it is nice to see colleagues from colleges and universities all over the country who do what I do. I will enjoy some seafood down here and will head home to the snow and cold on Sunday when I fly into Ithaca. I know Matthew will love the shell. He will say it is "awesome." And I don't even think he'll notice or care that the shell is not whole.

Belize Journal Day 3

Trip to Belize

Day 3 of 8 - Monday - 1/8/07

[View from hammock on casita porch - entitled "stained glass window."]

We slept fairly well. Around midnight (I'd guess) it down poured rain *hard* and you could really hear it with just screens for windows and a canvas canopy. In between what would be 3 distinct downpour periods the rain would steadily sprinkle (perhaps it was dripping from all the trees). At about 5:30 a.m. I woke up needing to head to the bathroom and this is the first time I really missed my little bathroom off my bedroom at home. I waited 10 minutes and then put on my windbreaker and headed down the stairs, through the mud, and down the path to the bathrooms in the dark. Tom woke up shortly after to get ready for the 6:30 bird walk with Hilberto. Matt wasn't up for sitting through a lecture so I stayed back with him (and in the rain, it didn't break my heart as much as I was interested in seeing and learning about more birds). Matt wrote very briefly in his journal. We all have 1 or 2 itchy bug bites - one of mine is under my watch band so I have to switch it to my other wrist.

This morning we will go to the Maya Farm where it is expected to be very muddy. Tonight is the "creatures of the night" walk (which I certainly had on my own last night between the spider eyes, small gray foxes and earlier the tarantula and scorpion.) Off to Day 3 - Breakfast is at 8 a.m.!

Breakfast consisted of 1 fried egg, a warm tomato & cilantro & sweet pepper salsa and three half-slices of sourdough toast and fruit and juice. I forgot to mention that all our meals in our dining hall are served when we are all seated at tables of 4 and 6. There are 20 in our group. The 3 Pasquarellos have been sitting with Joe Agovino (we also have a Joe Agnew, 2 Jasons, and a John - comprising the 5 male student in the class) at each meal and it seems established that everyone is staying with their own meal cohort and sitting at the same table, at least for the beginning now. The chairs are heavy wooden chairs and the tables are solid. Thatched roof. We saw 2 birds at breakfast - a beautiful hummingbird just off the roof canopy and a red throated ant tanager (I am getting these names from Steve Broyles and any misspellings are of course mine.)

The students so far are very good natured and non-complaining. They had a rainy bird walk that we skipped and went off in the rain to hike to the Maya Farm. Per Tom - it would be lecture, buggy and muddier than usual due to the unusual amount of rain that Belize has had lately in what is typically the dry season. Matt opted to skip (yay!) and so did I to stay with him. Instead of reading or doing homework, we worked on the easy-to-make (ha ha) Western Frontier Fort (cutout, score, and glue) that Tom got for Matt for a rainy day.

When the group returned, we all met for lunch at the lodge. We 3 ate with Donna Johnson - the leader of the alumni group and the coordinator for all trip details. She also happens to be the sister of Mrs. Quail, Matt's 3rd grade teacher. We enjoyed a wonderful fresh greens salad with a sweet balsamic vinaigrette and a pasta dish with a light meat/tomato sauce and a wedge of garlic bread. Dessert was a lightly iced cake brownie with a cooked banana with a cinnamon glaze which made a fantastic custardy sauce. Wow.

After lunch, Tom and students and Lily Westbrook attended a talk by the Chaa Creek lead-guide, Mike Green, on the 10 points required for a lodge to be considered an ecotourist lodge while Matt and I went with Joe Westbrook and Matt's new friends Molly and Cody to see their cabin at the lodge. (We have some activities together and some apart, dine apart except for a few lunches at the lodge. They leave for Ambergris Caye a day earlier than we do - Wed. versus our Thurs.) We saw the fancy digs and then they hiked to the camp to see our accommodations and we let the kids play for a couple hours - just free - while we sat and chatted and played some cards. We saw a brown jay (large) hopping in the trees and got a close up photo of another (same?) red throated ant tanager to whom we fed some granola crumbs. Tom and Lily returned and we showed Lily around and then sat some more in the dining hall and chatted until 4:30 when Tom and the others and kids took a walk to the lodge gift shop. I have a few precious minutes to myself and am writing in my journal before settling to read/doze in the hammock. It is buggy today with all of last night's rain but it hasn't rained since the early a.m. It is VERY humid and pretty warm. Looking forward to reading more of The Lost, which I am finding to be an amazing read. Especially I keep reading my favorite section so far - pp 182-183 - on the nature of photographs/memories and what we can "possess" in relation to the Holocaust and compared with Aeneas in the Aeneid (Vergil's poem). Brilliant.

Tonight's agenda - dinner at 6:30 followed the the creatures of the night walk. Things that magically "appear" around here: camp fire built during dinner and lit at the end of dinner around 7 p.m. and it burns for a couple of hours. Fresh towels in the shower room (3 shower stalls with benches and doors and 4 sinks/3 mirrors); lanterns are lit in the casitas and along the path before it gets dark around 5 p.m. - and they stay lit until we blow them out (2 kerosene lanterns on bedside tables); 3 flush toilets/lights on the inside are solar powered electricity - stayed locked from the outside until you use it so that nothing gets in). We don't lock the cabin doors - except a small bolt at night.

Another delicious dinner and Matt helped to make the appetizer course with some of the college students (all women ;-) The appetizer was stretched and fried flour tortillas topped with cabbage, tomato, cilantro salsa and cheese. Dinner consisted of a lightly savory beef stew, rice with tomato slice and optional bean sauce and a wonderful coleslaw with a slight vinegar dressing and cilantro and fresh cucumbers. The vegetables are so fresh and delicious. They served Tom's favorite dessert - pineapple upside-down cake - and it was the best I have ever had. It was a simple-from-scratch yellow cake with fresh pineapple rings with caramelized cane sugar from the baking. After dinner, we dressed in long pants, long sleeves, and good shoes for walking in mud and headed out to see the creatures of the night. Matt and Tom went with David the guide and I went with Ichsta (sp) - 2 different routes. Our guide was from Tanzania and he had an African accent. Very interesting guy. My group was small, 8 of us including the guide. We saw the coolest leaf-cutter ants - trail about 4 inches wide and VERY long - first found the mounds and then traced them back maybe a quarter of a mile or more back to the tree they were leaf cutting! Emerald green shards marching along steadily. We saw several wolf spiders and spider eyes sparkling with our head lamps. 2 kinds of centipedes - a medium red and a small white - and we saw a skinny/small millipede. A baby tarantula and termites. Our guide ate a termite or two and said they taste like carrots. I guess Tom had one this a.m. and found them to taste like radish. Steve thought they were "nutty." I will take all of their words for it because I am NOT trying one - even if it was what people ate way back then.

I liked how our guide loved nature and sweetly said to each creature "are you all right?" "sorry to disturb you" -very respectful and loving. Very muddy trek back. The stars were out and were incredibly bright. The bats were out in the meadow no doubt attracted to bugs attracted to our lights. We all sat around the embers of the fire circle when we got back and set the course for tomorrow. Students who want to help cook report at 6 a.m. and breakfast is at 7:30. At 8:30 we will be off to the Natural History Center and the blue morpho butterfly farm followed by lunch at the lodge. We are to wear our swim suits because we will be canoeing for 2 hours down the Macal to San Ignacio after lunch. We'll be back for an early dinner followed by a 6:30 lecture at the lodge with Sharon Matola, the founding director of the Belize Zoo. But that is tomorrow. For tonight, good night.