Welcome to the Third World

A couple of weeks ago our dishwasher broke. It is a GE Profile, with an illuminated shiny stainless steel interior and a brushed stainless steel exterior. Great design, from the aesthetic point of view, but it doesn’t work. A couple of months ago it was leaking and the repair guy came and replaced a gasket. That seemed to stop the leaking but then two or three weeks ago it stopped working altogether. The repair guy came back and said he would have to order the parts, but they are on backorder. He was back last week, with the parts, and worked on it some more, but it still doesn’t work. He is supposed to be back tomorrow – but of course gasoline is in short supply in the Atlanta metro area, so who knows if he’ll make it?

On Wednesday, our internet connection stopped working. (I am writing this off line, and will upload it when I get access to the internet.) Since then Tom has spent several hours on hold or talking with various Earthlink support people. Finally one of them called back Friday night and told him that the problem was that Earthlink had switched our DSL from one station to another and now we were too far from the station, so unless they can switch us back, well, we just can’t get DSL any more. It will take them 5 days to figure out whether or not they can do that - or maybe 10.

Of course, the U.S. economy stopped working a week or so ago too. I’m not trying to get a loan, but from what I’ve heard and read, the credit markets are frozen up because The Smartest Guys in the Room dreamed up devilishly complex financial instruments that were too complicated for anyone to understand, and no one said “no” – not the executives of the companies, who were making a bundle off this, or their Boards of Directors, or their auditors, or the regulators. No one said “no” and it doesn’t look like they even asked any questions. And now, Congress is talking about a $700 billion dollar clean up. That’s on top of Bear Stearns and A.I.G. Put it all together, and pretty soon, well, you’re talking real money.

Here in Atlanta, there is hardly any gasoline. Tom and I have been talking about what we’ll do if we have to get by on the ½ tank in the minivan and the ¼ tank in my car for, well, who knows long. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and shopped for the week. There are doctors’ appointments on Wednesday. Iain can walk to school, but what about the girls? Can they take the MARTA bus? Caroline went to a movie last night at Phipps Plaza – she walked to the MARTA station with two friends. We asked if the attendance was down at the movie for a Saturday night. Maybe a little, she said, but there were a lot of people on MARTA. I could work from home some of the time, if we had an internet connection, but we don’t (see above).

We are not big television watchers in my house, but we’ve been watching the local news the last day or so, trying to find out about the gasoline shortage. What’s going to happen on Monday morning, when people from this whole metropolitan area, including the MARTA-free suburbs, need to get to work but can’t because the tank is empty, or are afraid to, because what if they can’t get home? Who is going to go anywhere that they don’t have to go? Our state leaders have been notably absent from the airwaves, although I did hear Governor Perdue Friday evening asking people to not make trips that aren’t essential. Thanks, Governor Perdue, we already figured that part out.

None of this of course is anyone’s fault. It all just happened.

While Tom was out looking for gasoline, I was washing the dishes. Standing at the sink, thinking about the dropping reservoirs (it just happened that Atlanta has not made plans to assure a longterm water supply, while the metro area grew unfettered, without any plans on how to deal with a sustained drought) I was imagining the tap running dry.

But forget investment in new technology to get us out of our dependence on oil from countries that hate us, or investment in our young people, or investment in research – no, Congress is going to spend $700 billion in a hope of cleaning up after a bunch of guys with six and seven and eight figure salaries who have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

It just happened.

More about Head Lice

We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.

I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.

The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.

A Place of Safety

What a week. Houston - America's 4th largest city - still has large areas without power, much of Galveston was seriously damaged, the Bolivar Peninsula was pretty much wiped off the map, and it doesn't even make the news.

On Sunday, before the week's market convulsions, we sang a song* that included the line:

Lead us to a place, guide us with Your grace to a place where we'll be safe.

The images that that line evoked at the time were of weather - wind and rain and rising water - and in the shadow of September 11, of opportunities lost, and what would really make us safe. I started a posting about that, but I didn't get very far.

Then on Monday the market dived, and with every passing day the scale and scope of what was happening became clearer and more frightening. At this point, only six days later, "a safe place" means a place where you can invest your money without exposure to mortgage-derived securities.

What we heard this week is that credit is suddenly tight in a way that threatens normal functioning of our economy. Businesses that are sound are having trouble borrowing, and things are much tighter for mortgages and car loans. Walking around the neighborhood, I see the houses under construction (almost all of them Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses) and wonder what all this means for the people who are building them.

Tom had a conversation with a builder who lived across the street until recently. He had been to his bank and had been told that he was the only builder that the bank did business with who had not defaulted on something. That was before the market dived, before the credit markets dried up.

So - here we are. A place where we'll be safe sounds really good. Leaders who could help us get there would be even better. And a strategy other than (or in addition to) prayer - well, that would be priceless.

*The Prayer, with Lead Us, Lord by Carole Sager and David Foster

Fired Up! at Fire Station No. 19

This morning Iain ran the 4th Annual Fired Up 5K race. Registration was set up inside Fire Station No. 19, and the fire truck was outside. I think a few of the fire fighters ran in the race, but most of them were standing around outside. There were also several volunteers from the Greenbriar Lions Club there, middle-aged African-American men and women, wearing yellow vests covered with pins and patches, helping people get in the right line during registration, staffing the finish line, helping with different tasks. I asked them where they met, and they said they met on Thursdays at Greenbriar. I told them that my father had been a Lion for many many years, and they asked if I'd ever been to a Lions Club meeting. I said I had and they smiled and invited me to visit their club. They make the rounds of community events, it sounded like - they told me what event they were working at next weekend, but I don't remember. This event supports scholarships for kids attending Atlanta Public Schools. Fire fighters - community volunteers - scholarships for kids to go to college - seems like a winner for the neighborhood.

This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)

Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.

I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.

Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.

Remembering September 11

Seven years ago today, Tom was with the kids at the dentist. He called me and told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I assumed an accident, and a little plane; he called back not long afterwards to say that a second plane had struck the other tower. It wasn't long afterwards that I remember seeing the first tower collapse, on the television screen in a conference room in my office building. I remember later hearing that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and someone in the office trying to call family in the state, and her fear, when her call did not go through. That night emailing an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon (she was all right) and another whose office I thought was in lower Manhattan (he was all right too, although the offices were not).

I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.

Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.

Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.

One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."

Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.

It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:

Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771

Primary prevention is almost always best.

Easy Ways to Save the Earth

Last night Tom and I heard Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who wrote The World is Flat, at the Atlanta International School. Mr. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, was just published. We bought the book and stood in line after the talk to get it signed, but I haven't started reading it yet. (This was the first book signing that I have ever attended where there were police officers there - we weren't that rowdy a crowd. Were they that concerned that people were going to cut in line?)

He gave a great talk. He talked about the big global trends - rapidly growing demand for energy around the world, climate change, oil-enriched dictatorships - that were shaping the future of our country and the rest of the world. It is very clear, he said, that we cannot drill our way out of this, nor can we conserve our way out - it will take radical change in policy to support a radical change in the economics of energy that could ultimately drive the innovation that could develop the new technology that is needed to solve the problem and lead the way to a future that is not dependent on us sending all our money to countries that hate us so we can burn their oil to power our country and destroy the planet.

He listed the book titles you can find on Google under "Easy Ways to Save the Earth" - there are a lot of them, and they are all wrong, because the things that need to be done are not going to be easy. They will be disruptive, painful, and scary. They will require focus and longterm vision and investment in the future that has been in short supply among the leadership of our country. What's needed is revolutionary change, not evolutionary change, and in revolutions, someone always gets hurt. Right now, all this talk about "green" is just rebranding; it's something the marketing people dreamed up. It's a party.

Which leads one to the obvious question, what can we do. The answer seemed to be get involved, demand that our country's leaders do a better job and actually address the real threats to our country. Of course, we have been replacing our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got those cloth bags in the back of my car that I take with me to Kroger. I'll keep doing those things not because they are going to be the solution but because they will keep reminding me that we need a solution.

Neighborhood Basics

I moved to Wessyngton Road in 1989, and the only neighbors I knew at first were Kathy and Steve. Sometime after that - I don't know when - we started having neighborhood parties. I had nothing to do with organizing this; this was probably during the years when I had young children, and the ones doing the organizing did not. But I went, and I got to know them and the other women they invited. For years it was a women's thing - the guys never did anything (although there was one evening when Tom, Fernando, and Dan stood out in the street in front of our house drinking beer for several hours).

The women of Wessyngton Road still get together on a more or less regular basis. The ones who started it have moved away (Lindsey got married and now lives on some other street, and Todd and Charlotte sold their house to travel around the world, took the long way to Colorado and never made back to the eastern U.S.) but Lynsley, Kathy, Amy and I (+/-, depending on the occasion) have continued the tradition. A few years ago we started having block parties, inviting everyone on the street (flyers to every house, emails to everyone we have email addresses for) and the last couple of times I think we've had at least 30 people there. Every time I've met people I didn't know, and we've added a few new names to the neighborhood directory.

Last year Tom invited Mark, a fine guitarist who lives at the other end of the street, to bring his guitar, and the result was a nearly spontaneous emergence of guitars in the hands of guys from all up and down the street, and music that went on into the night (I know they were still there, that night, when I went to bed). This year there were fewer guys with guitars but it was still great. I love living in a neighborhood where guys will sit on lawnchairs and play guitars in a church parking lot. What could be better than that?

There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last summer about a guy who decided, after seemingly out of nowhere a neighbor murdered his wife and then himself, that he really wanted to know the people who lived in his neighborhood. He started asking his neighbors - people he barely knew - if he could come spend a night at their house. Many of the people he asked said "yes" and that was the beginning, it seems, of many friendships. (He's now writing a book about neighborhorhoods.) His column is still on the NY Times website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23lovenheim.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

That strikes me as a little drastic; we're more a potluck/block party/baby shower/winter solstice-celebrating group on Wessyngton Road. There's lots of pet-sitting that goes on on the street, though. And the guys in the parking lot, playing guitar.

Mothers' March, 2008

A couple months ago I got a call from the March of Dimes, asking me if I would be a Mothers' March coordinator, sending their fundraising letters to some of my neighbors. I did this for the March of Dimes a couple of years ago, and was supposed to last year (but I will confess I think I never got my letters sent). So I said yes. I support the March of Dimes for several reasons, most importantly because of the critical role they played decades ago when they were still the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in supporting development of polio vaccine. That was a different era, when people were terrified of the annual summer epidemics of polio; when ambulances came to summer camps at night to take away the children who were striken during the daytime; when fearful parents would not let their children go to swimming pools. On April 12, 1955, when the results of the Frances Field Trial were released, demonstrating that the Salk vaccine was effective, the bells rang on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Since then, they've gotten more involved in prenatal and infant health issues, with campaigns to prevent prematurity and birth defects. These are really important issues and the March of Dimes continues to support important work; I suppose they are having the same challenges that all nonprofit organizations have, to stay fresh and compelling in the cacophony of competing priorities that we all face every day, to stay relevant, to stay current with how people see themselves and their world.

Which brings me to the Mothers' March. In the early days of the March of Dimes mothers really did walk the neighborhood, collecting spare change. David Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history "Polio: An American Story" spoke at Emory last year and talked about how his mother was a Mothers' March block captain. Since no one wanted to knock on doors and ask people for donations who didn't want to donate, the custom was to leave your porch light on if you were willing to have the Mothers' March volunteer come by. But the Oshinskys lived in an apartment building, and the apartments didn't have porch lights, so people would leave their shoes outside their door if they were willing to have someone come by.

Now, you don't have go door to door, you can do it all by snail mail. The March of Dimes sent me a list of names and addresses (many of which are out of date), preprinted cards, two sets of envelopes (one to mail the card, one for my neighbor to mail their check back), and some larger envelopes to mail everything back to the March of Dimes. When I did this two years ago, I wrote a letter which I mailed to my neighbors, and yesterday morning I went to the Post Office and bought stamps. But it doesn't feel right.

I know almost all the people on this list. They may or may not be readers of this blog. They are all invited to our neighborhood block parties, and most of them come. And the only time I have ever sent anything to most of them in the mail was two years ago, when I did the Mothers' March before.

So here's what I think I'll do. I'll email them the URL for this entry, and I'll take the envelopes door to door. I'll write something for the few people for whom I don't have email addresses, and I'll deliver them in person. If people what to donate something, I'll tell them to bring it to my house, or let me know and I'll send one of my kids to pick it up.

It's the Mothers' March. No need to turn on the porch light or leave your shoes out - I'll be by. See you soon.

New School Zones Released by APS

I couldn't find the new school zones last night, possibly because I was looking in the wrong place; I was checking the rezoning page, but this morning there's a link on the home page:

http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/Morningside-lin.pdf

with questions and answers here:

http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/FAQMorningside-lin.pdf

Because my youngest child is in 5th grade this year, and we live so close to Morningside Elementary, I have not been as anxious as others have been, but the new school zones are astonishing - the entire Virginia-Highlands neighborhood, south of Amsterdam Avenue, is going to the new school. I probably should have seen this coming, but I didn't. Morningside Elementary School, without our neighbors from Virginia Highlands? The new school will initially open with kindergarten through grade 4, so the kids who will be in 5th grade next year will not have to change to the new school.

There will be a Community meeting at Grady High School at 6 p.m. on September 18, and then it goes to the school board for a decision on October 6.

According to the materials APS has posted, if we were using these zones now, Morningside Elementary would be smaller by about 1/3, down to just over 600 students. (I started to say something about head lice but thought better of it.)

Stay tuned. I think things are about to get lively.

The Road to Freedom

I took the day off today and Tom and I went to the High Museum; the Louvre exhibit is about to close, and it was nice, but I wanted to see the exhibit about the Civil Rights movement, "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968," on display through October 5.

Some of the photographers are famous, some are anonymous. But the events they captured - and shaped - are seered into the history of America in the 20th century like a scar. I didn't know the stories about the Freedom Riders, brave groups who rode buses into the South, to unmask the segregation that still existed in interstate travel, and how the first group was nearly killed by a mob outside Anniston, Alabama. There were other stories I did know - the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, in 1957; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; the murders of the civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; the brutal attack of the demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965; the murder of Martin Luther King and the violence that followed, in 1968. Some of the pictures portrayed an Atlanta that Tom remembered from his childhood, and one portrayed an incident for which he was a near witness.

The photographers who captured these images - images of bravery, of dignity, and of struggle - were (intentionally or not) part of the history they were documenting. The images were so powerful that Kennedy and later Johnson could not ignore what was happening, nor could the rest of America. Two of the photographers are interviewed in a video that is on display as part of the exhibition; one of them explains that what was happening was just so wrong based everything he had learned from his father, growing up, that he just had to do something. Photographs are powerful. And some of the photographs in this exhibit changed history.

There is a picture of a young black girl who was part of the group that desegregated Central High School. A mob of young people - her peers, kids her age - screams at her. The faces of two white girls with their perfect upward flipped hair were contorted with what I can only describe as hatred. I pointed them out to Tom. Do they know that people like me look at these pictures? How do they remember what they did back then? Are they ashamed? Have they grown up into people who recognize that they were on the wrong side? How do they describe it to their children and grandchildren?  Tom (who is both more cynical and more Southern than I am) said he thought they were probably proud of what they did.

I don't think so. As humans, we have a nearly overwhelming need to think well of ourselves, and the things we remember and forget determine that internal image of ourselves. These girls are now women in their 60s, and I bet they don't remember being in that mob that day. For when memories are too painful, the road to freedom is forgetting.

This is a time in our history that we should not forget. The exhibit is there through October 5. Go see it.

Speeding through Morningside

We have a problem with cars speeding through our neighborhood. Some of it is drivers trying to shave a few seconds off a trip by avoiding the light at Morningside and Highland; sometimes they are avoiding utility work on Morningside (when they were working on Highland, the Coldwell-Banker outdoor sign said "Whatever they are digging for, we hope they find it soon"); sometimes it's just our neighbors driving too fast. Wessyngton Road is wider than some of the older streets in the neighborhood and even when there are cars parked on both sides of the street it still feels like the wide open spaces, at least compared to other streets in Morningside.

Our neighbor Tim requested a traffic study, to see if we would qualify for speed bumps. They did the study and we failed - no speed bumps for us. In the absence of help from the city, we are on our own. I personally have been known to relocate fallen tree branches to make them easier for the city to find when they come round to pick them up. For a while we had natural inverted speed bumps (also known as potholes), which did tend to slow down the traffic, but with the regular digging up of the street and frequent repaving, the street is now smooth enough for roller skating. Tom and Dan had discussed in the past creating some potholes, when it seemed like there weren't enough to be effective, but as far as I know they never did it. As far as I know.

PEDS (http://www.peds.org/) is a local advocacy group that works on pedestrian safety and accessibility issues. I don't know if they get the credit for it or not, but those "State Law Requires Drivers to Stop for Pedestrians in Crosswalks" signs that are at many of the crosswalks in the neighborhood now at least are a visible reminder to drivers to stop for pedestrians.

And of course, enforcement would be nice. Lack of enforcement tempts otherwise Law-Abiding Citizens to Take the Law into Their Own Hands. There are stories of flung objects - coffee-cups, usually, but also those ubiquitous blue plastic bags (you know the ones). If the car gets close enough to you that you can touch it, it seems like you should be able to defend yourself. We were walking to the Virginia-Highlands SummerFest last year, and a car didn't stop for us in the crosswalk. Tom felt the need to get the driver's attention and kicked the car. This was witnessed by an Atlanta police officer who seemed more concerned about the state-law-violating car (not damaged) than the narrowly averted pedestrian casualties (us). This was last year; maybe it's better now.

PEDS has a nice flyer on their website about how to take action against neighborhood speeding (http://www.peds.org/pdf/Slow_Down_Flyer.pdf). According to them, if hit by a vehicle travelling 20 miles per hour, 9 out of 10 pedestrians will survive. It goes down to 5 out of 10 at 30 miles per hour and 1 out of 10 at 40 miles per hour. The speed limit in our neighborhood is 25 miles per hour. The flyer lists 9 things we can all do slow down the cars in our neighborhoods; tearing up the street is not among the recommended solutions, but one thing they suggest is using a radar gun to monitor speed. They have one that can be borrowed, or they say that one can be purchased for less than $100. I told Tom I wanted one for Christmas. (He said I could probably just point a hairdryer at the cars and it would have the same effect. Sounds like a good experiment.)

When Caroline was born, there were no other kids on our street; now, there are lots of them, including several that are still in diapers and more on the way. The demographic shifts in the neighborhood are dramatic, and of course that's why they are building a new elementary school nearby (the new school zone for which is not yet on the APS website - at least not at the URL that was sent out last week). There are skateboarders and bicycles and rollerbladers in our street. There are runners and joggers and walkers. There are people with dogs and people with strollers. And every car that comes down our street too fast potentially puts people that I love in danger.

Any ideas?

Urban Wildlife (Part 1)

Yesterday Tom and I went to the Target on North Druid Hills. We were surprised to see on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the parking lots for Arby's and Target about 20 Canadian geese. They were walking around and pecking at the ground. I parked about 30 feet from one of the clusters of geese, and Tom said, "Do you think you should park here?" Some of the geese were walking toward us (looking for a handout? they should know that aggressive panhandling is illegal in Atlanta - but maybe that's just downtown) but then they kept their distance. Were they park geese that went on a Labor Day flight and couldn't find their way back to the park? On their way south, but stuck in Atlanta due travel delays from Hurricane Gustav? I told Tom I was afraid someone would snatch one of them and have goose for dinner. He said that's illegal. Well, so's panhandling - or at least "aggressive panhandling."

Last year I saw baby geese along the edge of Peachtree Creek near Buford Highway. I was simultaneously delighted (it's fun to see baby geese) and alarmed (neither Peachtree Creek nor Buford Highway would seem to be a safe neighborhood for geese). But they have to live somewhere, and after all, around here we have covered most of the landscape with asphalt.

So I hope they made their way to wherever they were going, and that none of them ended up on someone's dinner table.

Man on Wire

We went to Boston the week before school started - Freedom Trail, Museum of Science, New England Aquarium, whale watching, Harvard tour - the whole deal. The last night we were there we went to see "Man on Wire," which had just opened in theaters. This is a wonderful film about Philippe Petit's daring bid to string a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center. With a motley crew of accomplices, he succeeded in getting the cable across the sky and early in the morning on August 7, 1994, spent almost an hour suspended over lower Manhattan, in turn walking, dancing, and reclining, up so high he could barely be seen from street level.

Petit recounted how at age 17 he had read an article in a magazine about the World Trade Center, not yet built, and how from that moment he was obsessed with walking between the two towers. It took years of planning, but he finally did do it; had we not known how the story ended (the still-living Petit tells the story in the movie) it would have been a very frightening story. His friends talked about how they feared for Petit's life, how they were afraid he would not survive - and how they helped him do it anyway.

It is a wonderful film, in part because it doesn't end quite the way one expects - Petit does succeed in walking the wire between the towers, but in the aftermath loses friends and a lover. We expected a happy ending, but it didn't really have one.

During the movie, Tom's cell phone rang. He didn't take the call, but as we were leaving the theater, walking back to the T station, he returned the call; it was Amy's brother-in-law, with the news that our friend Dan had died that day in a motorcycle accident in Montana. Tom and Iain had visited him in Florida just before he left.

Dan was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and then was an engineer with AT&T for more than 30 years. He was an accomplished athlete - he ran marathons, and had competed in whitewater events at the national level. He flew airplanes and he had jumped out of them (including on his first date with Amy). He raced cars and had a livelong love for motorcycles. After he retired, he had a second career as a motorsports writer and photographer.

Sarah picked up a "Man on Wire" postcard at Movies Worth Seeing after we got back home; it's now on the refrigerator. Seeing it there, the other morning Tom said that he couldn't think about the movie without thinking about Dan, and getting the sad news of his death. I told him I felt the same way, but that it seemed somehow fitting - Dan lived his life fully and he too was in his own way a man on wire.

And the endings? Well, they aren't always happy.