Merry Christmas 2013

“Then one foggy, Florida morn…”
it ‘came so crystal clear,
Christmas is not about the snow,
or Santa being near,
It’s you, our loved ones old and new,
we cherish as we change
traditions made to celebrate
the night the Baby came...


In 1947 my parents moved their family of 3.5 children twelve miles from Mom’s parents. She was sad that because of the new baby (me) and the distance (FAR if you’re driving a model “T” Ford) Christmas morning would not be spent with her folks. “Make your own traditions, Helen.” her father said, and this year, while emails between our family flew in and out om my inbox from before Thanksgiving to one entitled “Christmas: Final Plans” last week, I imagined my Grandpa’s gentle encouragement as his great grandchildren, figured out how they’ll celebrate the season together in spirit if not actually at “Tom’s House (which was “Grammy’s House when they were children, because Helen DID make rich traditions”).


Christmas 2013 started with a visit from SandyandGeoff (all one word because they’ve been married over 40 years. Geoff is baby #5 of 8, for those who didn’t know us a long time ago.) We brought them to Christmas concerts and toured holiday lights until we all blinked white, red and green. As we sang along at one concert, Sandy hit the first soprano’s high note effortlessly and we chuckled under our breath (it was a solemn song) and remembered high school Christmas concerts and the alum leaving their seats in the crowded auditorium to sing the Halleluiah chorus until it was replaced by “The Little Drummer Boy”, a song that Grandpa died too soon to love, but that has become a Christmas classic.


I wonder in this season of wonder if my children’s children’s children will consider Mary J. Blige’s version of “Mary Don’t You Know,” new this year, a Christmas classic. I wonder how the warp and woof of their experiences will create a fabric for their lives that contains mystery and magic even into their wisdom years …


Last week Art and I “worked” the Disney World premiere of Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the negotiations between Walt Disney and P.L.Travers for the rights to Mary Poppins. As reading her books in second grade convinced me I wanted to teach, and as Walt’s standard of excellence set Art’s career goals in 1973, we felt an extraordinary amount of pixie dust counting guests entering the theater, and then watching the film. At one point Disney invites Mrs. Travers to Disneyland to experience its magic. She never really got it. Thank G_d, I did. This is our tenth Christmas working for” The Mouse”, and I marvel every time I begin a shift, knowing that I will smile for four hours, and that one smile may make a difference in some one person’s day…or life.


As we continue our now traditional Florida Christmas, dinner with Jen and Chad, a Disney night before New Year’s Eve Celebration with friends, and a January visit from Merri and her boys that will bring us to Candlemas (on February 2nd, which I just learned ends the Christmas season in Mexico), we’ll leave you with a little ditty to sing with us as you celebrate however it is you do…

“Then one foggy, Florida morn…”
it ‘came so crystal clear,
Christmas is not about the snow,
or Santa being near,
It’s you, our loved ones,old and new,
we cherish as we change
traditions made to celebrate
the night the Baby came


Peace and good___________, Beth and Art

It's the second day of Christmas...

Dear all,
It’s the Second Day of Christmas – we’ve opened our gifts and your cards, but we’ll savor your letters when we return from Ft. DeSoto where we’re camping John and Janie Sloane, whose condo we watch when they’re in Hyannis, whose driveway we could call “home” when in Plymouth if Merri and Geoff still lived on a busy street instead of a cul- de - sac. (To everyone who invited us to “live” in their driveway, please forgive us for not stopping by in July when Max was born, and for not calling you the couple of times I’ve visited since. The energy spent keeping up with 2 year-old Sam is only restored by rocking his baby to sleep.)
On Christmas day, Jen and Chad served Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding and regaled us with Ringling /Disney on Ice stories. I delight in their lives and am in awe of God’s work, for when Jen was five she said “He” wanted her to be a vet. She majored in French and International Relations in college and in her junior year declared she would spend her life making people happy. Only the Creator could have merged it all into a career that has her responsible for managing the logistics of transporting and caring for hundreds of performers (four legged ones, too) from and to arenas all over the world entertaining families.
Meredith is beginning to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming grandmother to a small town. Her boys will have some say in that reality, but she does live in the place that claims to be the great-great grandmother of most small towns in America, although I would argue St. Augustine has the right to that title even though it was a military colony first Spanish, then English, until after the War of 1812. And the Seminoles still living in the Everglades would challenge us both.
Speaking of challenges ... My mother taught me to play bridge when I was ten, and when my Dad was housebound, I’d visit every Monday so she could play with her “club.” Sure that playing games kept her mind sharp almost ‘til the day she died, and because Bridge is the one game I always thought I could win if I learned to pay attention, I’m working hard to become an “A” player. It may take a few years, but my 81 year old partner is both a mentor and a role model. Art is role model and mentor to the cast members in his bi-monthly classes on their first day “of work” at Walt Disney World having been chosen to be one of 53 “proud members of the WDW 2012 Traditions Team”, a once in a lifetime opportunity.
We turned our guest room into a space where he could prepare for his classes, (Mickey Mouse is everywhere), made room for my writing by putting a desk in the den, put the TV into the living room and suddenly our condo feels like home. Maybe because we’re living in every inch of it, maybe because like Walt and Lillian Disney, and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, we thrive in this pattern of living – our interests differ, but our trust in and awe for each other is cherished in the times we are together - watching Leverage and Burn Notice… walking the parks…camping…
To celebrate the feeling of home, I invited friends who ground me to meet each other on my birthday: my oldest friend (we met in junior high), my oldest daughter, pool buddies, writers and readers of all ages, and, as in every circle of friends I’ve ever had, they needed no prompts to keep the evening lively (although they humored me by playing one involving 5 decades of pop culture that I’ll send to you if you ask).
The deepest sense of rootedness came early this month when two of the first people to welcome us to Celebration were eulogized at the same time in the two churches where we’ve worshipped. Dave Thompson was our buyers’ agent and because of his regular check-ins with the builders, we’re convinced we’ve the best built unit in our neighborhood. We did not know Lois Loons well, but an ornament her little boy made as a Christmas welcome to our first faith community is cherished.
A place becomes home when one buries a friend – more an Easter thought than a Christmas one, perhaps, but as I meet guests in Disney World who have come to jump start their lives after a loss, as we pray about joys and concerns with friends old and new , near and far, the promise of Christmas becomes tangible. Like the shepherds, we will abandon our work to care for a child, like the Magi, we will give our all for a vision. Like Mary and Joseph, we nurture the Light.
The day after our dear dog, Zak crossed the Rainbow Bridge, we began a cruise through Alaska’s inner passage. In the glacier calves that floated past the ship we saw shapes of animals and flowers, peoples and places, almost as if the Creator placed them in the ice to be discovered as Michelangelo found the Pieta. May the New Year bring us all discoveries, vision, comfort, hope, energy, and laughter as we continue to light each others paths.
Peace and Good__________ ,
Beth and Art.

Our Children's Expectations

“I know what makes evil in the world,” my five year old announced for no reason apparent to me.


“Really what?”


“One day somebody made a mistake and didn’t tell.”


Our goal was to raise our children “Catholic without the guilt” and she had not yet heard the word sin from us, but her imagination often took her to places of wisdom, and on this day she defined “Original Sin” for me.


In the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, the media has been attempting to find reasons that will stop our grieving. I’ve listened to pundits both left and right analyze political conversations as far back as the death of Alexander Hamilton at the hand of Aaron Burr to explain and/or justify the collective/individual American psyche which celebrates free speech that may or may not lead to violence because while one may not "falsely shout Fire in a crowded theater", one may carry a handgun into it.


I’ve listened to conversations about mental illness that attempt to explain the complexity of our brains but still leave people believing that “if only someone had done something” maybe the tragedy would not have happened.

"We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations," the president said at the memorial service for the Tucson victims.

Thirty years ago my daughter set the bar very high.

“Try to do right.” ‘Fess up when you’re wrong.”

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

While visiting, we picked up

Kearns on the Double by Eamon McCarthy Earls

Kearns is Bill Kearns, a postman turned detective turned journalist who lives and works in a quiet town in Central MA in 1920. I am privileged to own a signed copy because the author is my sixteen year old cousin. Eamon used family legends and traditions to build his characters, but this is not a family memoir. Eamon clearly did his research and captures the era for his readers (intermediate school) as well as Richard Russo did for adults in Empire Falls. Read together, one journeys through time from a hope filled immigrant mill town just before the Depression to the despair of post-industrial America. I like Eamon’s perspective better.

As we traveled we listened to

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston – Buried beneath land rented from Native Americans, scientists are prepared to go to the center of the atom, but as they get closer, a voice they believe to be God’s begin to speak to them. At the same time, a fundamentalist preacher is manipulated into calling the experiment the beginning of Armageddon, and the Native Americans realize their land will no longer be theirs if the experiment succeeds. The triangle of conflicts led to conversations on the relationship between faith and science, and lots of guesses, whenever we stopped, which wasn’t often, as we were held spell bound by Scott Sowers reading of this novel.

Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card read by a full cast.
Ender is Ender Wiggin of Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel found on high school reading lists as a complement to Pride and Prejudice. We know from the beginning of Ender’s Game that he is being trained to save the world at Battle School. Ender’s Shadow is the story of Bean, a street child, who talked before he was one, and solved moral dilemmas by age four, who discovers when he is sent to Battle School that if Ender cannot accomplish the task, the responsibility will fall to him. Ender’s Game is a story of a child sorting out internal conflicts through action. Ender’s Shadow is a story of self-discovery through logic and analysis. As we listened, I imagined which book would be the better introduction to the series for my 12 year old relatives. Each stands alone, and together they challenge adults to appreciate the whole of a child, and encourage young people to question, question, question, and to trust their own answers - Maybe the families will get the whole set.

Library books read in the comfort of the RV
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fjorde
Chromatica is a world where the strata of society is defined by color and one must do as commanded by anyone above your color in the spectrum. Defy the authorities and you are punished … or worse. One can move up, of course – Red marries Blue and voila, Violet. The Greys are everyone’s servants/slaves. Our protagonist is Eddie Russett (a red of course) who, in an attempt find out how Jane (a grey) moves in and out of places she doesn’t’ belong, discovers the rigidity in the rainbow and the colors of his heart. Fjorde’s fantasy world is populated by the absurd, and at first feels too contrived, but when one trusts his imagination, one’s own is opened to the possibilities in our world, which is why one reads, is it not?

Day After Night by Anita Diamant – Set in the Atlit Internment camp , a “holding place” run by the British in Haifa for Jews entering Palestine after WWII, we learn of the Holocaust and the dream of Israel through the eyes of four young Jewish women imprisoned there. Diamant does not preach nor embellish the day to day lives of the women. She just imagines four of six million points of view and through their memories, or denial of them, we learn what it means to find hope grounded in a reality most of us will never experience, and we begin to understand what it means to begin again.

And “Beach Books” found at campground book exchanges
Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon (suspense) Minor in Possession by J.A. Jance (murder mystery)

Sabbath for the Gulf Coast

“It is the end of the world as we know it.” With this statement, made on Day 31, my daughter, a resident of the Gulf Coast, brought the oil spill up close and personal to her New England family. Her ability to approach and resolve challenges with humor and vision is legendary, but her words were void of both. Her cousins were silent. Their children looked to their mothers for comfort. To ward off nightmares, theirs and mine, I asked “Given that what you said may well be true, what is the world we want to know?” We talked of “Green Energy” and “Organic Living”, but on day 70+ of the disaster, I have yet to find comforting answers to my question.
The President quoted a priest who participated in the blessing of the fleet in LA a few weeks ago. “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that’s granted “even in the midst of the storm.” In that spirit, I've made a commitment to celebrate our Sabbaths with a sense of gratitude for the gifts of creation, and to abstain as much as possible from the use of petroleum product on Sundays. Art’s response? “That means no TV or Computers, but I’ll do it if you will.”
Check out this site to see what else we’ll try not to use on Sundays - http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
And please let us know if you’ll join us.
Peace and good_________,
Beth

The Kumquat Festival: Or how another industrial town maintains its identity despite a half century of economic challenges.

Dade City FL

January 30, 2010

A Florida Project Adventure

The Kumquat, a native of China and not quite a citrus fruit*, is about the size of a grape and packs a tart or sweet punch depending on your choice.(Nagami = tart, Marumi= sweet). After a not so long drive through Florida’s Green Swamp, we ate at the Kiwanis booth - hotdog or hamburger with all the fixings plus fries and a drink for 6 dollars. We were served by H.S. athletes, working under the Chief Cook/ Athletic Director, helping out their little brothers and sisters (all the money raised at the festival would go to the elementary school for playground equipment).
The streets were crowded with vendors – arts and crafts mostly - but we’d come for the kumquat jam so we headed straight to the Kumquat Growers Association Booth. Good thing too, as a downpour sent us to the car and, as it was early in the day, a trip to the Pioneer Florida Museum & Village, a mile away.
We expected to see history from the 1800’s when the Homestead Act gave land to pioneers (We thought they all went West, too!) instead, we found what is left of a train station and the memory of a bustling company town of the 1950’s. While Art played engineer on the 1913 Porter-Steam Engine, we chatted with Tom, the volunteer Stationmaster and discovered the history of an area that centered on cattle and citrus. Trains that once ran 24/7 as 6 lines from Sanford to Tampa to Lakeland to Miami, criss-crossed an area as big as New England, mostly stopped In 1989 when a deep freeze sent the citrus industry south and the many packing plants in the area closed. In our two hour visit, two coal trains, one empty, one full, heading to and from the Tampa Power Plant, reminded us once again that the United States is not just the name of our country, but the reality of our lives. We also again realized how large the state is (The Green Swamp Preserve is 173,000 acres in only 5 of Florida’s 67 counties) and how rich its history. Hence – our Florida Project. Our goal – to visit at least one festival or state park monthly so that we will learn and love Florida’s history as much as we do our home here. We invite you to share our journey on Roots and Routes.
(Words don’t do the museum justice. Check out our pictures on http://therami.shutterfly.com/)

*The Kumquat was re-classified as a member of the fortunella genus – cousin to citrus – in 1915.

La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver - a Review

Violet Brown, the narrator of La Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, is the kind of faithful person I wonder if I am. She is loyal to her employer who becomes her friend and defends him beyond death as he is caught in the tide of anti-communism that flowed from the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950’s. Her employer is Harrison William Shepherd, whom we meet as quite a child of the streets in Mexico in the 1930’s, naive to the political intrigue that surrounds his life, cook to Lev ("Leon" Trotsky) friend of Frieda Kahlo, son of an American Government worker and Mexican beauty. He begins his adult life in the United States when he accompanies art work from Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, to the United States. After working as a protector of American Art during WWII and a short stint as a Spanish teacher, the success of his first novel, set in long ago Mexico, gives him the freedom to stay at home and write. The irony of the freedom to stay confined is subtly reflected in Shepherd’s dry, voice, a voice the reader clearly hears because the author is so, so, good at her craft, but that draws no empathy from the reader. He has become after all, an adult who has chosen to shut himself away, never discussing the only freedom he ever allowed himself - that of swimming in La Lacuna, an underwater tunnel when he was a child in Mexico. In the end, we remember that time. We remember that there is always hope if one waits for the tide to change, but not until we fully empathize with Violet Brown’s dilemma – whether to let written accounts of Shepherd’s life define him or let the world know the soul of the man by publishing through the journals he’d kept since childhood that she had not destroyed when he’d asked.
In Violet Brown, Ms. Kingsolver has given us an honest, hard-working, woman whose passion for the good comes through her conversations with Shepherd. Her idealism doesn’t blind her to the darkness Shepherd faces as the insidiousness of the politics of the early 1950’s overtakes their lives (and the novel.) “You are a poet, Mrs. Brown,” he says as he acknowledges the truth in her advice while choosing not to heed it.
My advice to you, dear reader, is to stick with this novel as it slogs through a very difficult time in American History. While Ms. Kingsolver comes close to proselytizing, the lesson to be learned is deeper than how fear controls politics. It is one that speaks to the power of fidelity and it is not learned until the book is closed and we say, “Wise choice, Mrs. Brown.”