Out of the Frying Pan

The Atlanta Public Schools -- still trying recover from the nation's worst public school cheating scandal -- are now facing redistricting. Redistricting is one of those tasks that no matter what you do, you make lots of people (and sometimes almost everyone) really angry. School closures tear the heart out of neighborhoods, new schools sometimes can't be built where they are most needed because land acquisition is too expensive or impossible, and reassigning a neighborhood to a different school is almost always traumatic if not riot-inducing. APS is now undertaking citywide redistricting. (Disclosure: all three of my children attended Morningside Elementary through 5th grade, and then went to the Atlanta International School. I have not had children in public school since Iain completed 5th grade.  If I had wanted them to go to Inman, they could have.)

There have been major demographic changes in the city. I don't know if south Atlanta has really has fewer school-aged children than they used to, or if APS is playing catch-up with school closures that should have happened long ago, but the options developed by the consulting group that did the demographic study include closure of a large number of elementary schools in south Atlanta. Those neighborhoods I am sure are mobilizing to try to keep their neighborhood schools, but without students to fill them up, I don't think they are likely to prevail, since schools in other neighborhoods are bursting at the seams.

Along the fault line between the underutilized schools of south Atlanta and the crowded ones to the north, they are proposing to pair up elementary schools to increase utilization at an underused school and relieve some pressure on an over-full one by having one school offer kindergarten through 2nd grade and another one 3rd through 5th grade. Parents with more than one child in elementary school totally hate this idea on logistical grounds. In two of the proposed options, Springdale Park Elementary has been paired with Hope Elementary on Boulevard, and not surprisingly, there has been lots of pushback from Springdale Park families.

 

There's a plan for a new middle school (crosshatched area in the map above - in both of these maps, Morningside Elementary is the green square in the lower righthand corner) and a new high school in north Atlanta (see below), and that's where kids from Morningside would go, after elementary school, instead of Inman Middle School and (under two of the drat proposals) Grady High School; Springdale Park would stay in the Inman/Grady cluster of schools. Morningside families aren't happy about this, given how close we are to Inman and Grady (kids can walk to Inman from here) and how far we would be from the new schools that aren't built yet but would probably be a long way away. Two scenarios also have a new elementary school, just to the north of the Morningside district; a small part of the Morningside district ends up assigned to the new elementary school.

On the maps, it looks like the new middle school is near E. Rivers Elementary School in Buckhead -- not so far, but admittedly much farther than Inman -- and the new high school along Northside Parkway in the far north of the city, near Mt. Paran Church. It's a really long way away. Are there concrete plans to build schools in these locations, or are these projections for planning purposes? It's not clear from the materials I've seen that APS has provided, but I would be surprised that they would put a location on a map if they didn't already own the land.

APS has been doing lots of outreach, and neighborhood groups (largely opposed to almost everything that is being proposed, at least if it affects their schools) have been getting organized. APS says they are still in fact-finding mode and nothing has been decided. That's good, because the response I've heard to the options that have been presented has been largely "try again."

It's a tough job they have and I'm glad I don't have to make the decisions. Schools will be closed, new ones built, boundaries changed -- it's almost certainly going to happen. They've posted the maps and the presentations they've given at some of the community meetings on their website -- and there will be more meetings in early 2012.

Stay tuned. More to follow.

Running with Santa

A week ago Saturday, Iain ran the Virginia Highland Christmas 5K. This year they registered 1200 runners. At least based on the number of people we saw walking away from Fire Station No. 19 that morning with their T-shirts and Santa hats, lots of those 1200 race numbers went to people who for whatever reason ended up not running the race. Too much eggnog the night before, perhaps? But of the ones who did run, many were dressed as elves or Santa or in one case a giant rabbit.





There was the woman in black runner's spandex wearing a red satin bra and thong over her the black spandex. There was the couple in footed fleece pajamas, and the middle-aged woman wearing the Christmas tree skirt as a cape. We saw our neighbor Aaron, unobtrusively dressed in normal running attire. And there were the dogs wearing sweaters or tinsel or antlers or Santa hats. It was a marvelous, quirky neighborhood event.



Finally, it was time for the runners to go to the starting line, which was on Los Angeles, not far from the fire station. It was a great scene of Santa-hatted runners filling the street curb to curb for just about as far as one could see. I walked back up Highland toward Morningside Presbyterian, where the race ended, to wait for Iain. On my way I saw an Atlanta police officer, manning the orange cones at an intersection. I said good morning, and thanked him for keeping the runners safe. He broke into a wide smile.

There was a woman sitting on the hood of a car with Cherokee County plates, parked on North Highland near the finish line, waiting for a runner to finish the race. I don't quite understand driving to our neighborhood, early on a Saturday morning, from Cherokee County to run this event. But there weren't many cars parked on Wessyngton that morning, so I don't think there were many people who came from outside the neighborhood. There probably were some serious runners participating (the best time overall was 17 minutes, 11 seconds), but Iain said he saw one person checking his Blackberry while running. And in the Morningside Presbyterian parking lot, along with the cases of plastic bottles of water and bananas and oranges, there were plenty of small groups in costume happy to pose for pictures.



A history of the Virginia Highland neighborhood was recently published. When streetcars ruled in Atlanta, before the cars took over, the subdivisions in Virginia Highland were suburbs. Virginia Highland -- as a defined neighborhood -- didn't exist until the Georgia highway department announced a plan to build an interstate highway through the neighborhood. An organization that had not been active, the Highland-Virginia Neighborhood Association, was claiming to represent the neighborhood, and was stating at public meetings (erroneously) that the neighborhood supported construction of the highway. From that was born the Virginia-Highland Civic Association, to distinguish it from the other group, and the VHCA became part of active neighborhood opposition to the state highway department's plans.

In 1974, the Federal government rejected the state's Environmental Impact Statement, and plans for the road were dropped. Many residents had fled to the suburbs during the years of legal battles over I-485, but the ones who stayed and the ones who replaced the ones who left rebuilt a wonderful community in Virginia Highland and Morningside, where we live. Christopher Leinburger mentioned Virginia Highland in a recent NY Times op-ed piece, "The Death of the Fringe Suburb." Neighborhoods like Virginia Highland and Morningside are good places to live. You can walk to a coffee shop or a restaurant or to Alon's, and you can run a 5K in a Santa suit. What could be better?

On Christmas eve, Iain walked to Fire Station 19 with a tin of Christmas cookies. My family made these, he told them, and we just wanted to say thank you, and Merry Christmas.

The Cookie Index

Week before last, I ran into a co-worker at Kroger. As I said hello, she was scanning some foil-wrapped chocolates at self-checkout. She started to explain that German tradition requires a celebration of St. Nicholas Day on December 6. I told her my kids' school was hosting a German Christmas market on Saturday, and that she should come. She knew about it already and said she would be there.

The Christmas market is hosted by the parent organization representing the families of the kids in the German track at the school; some of the families are German, and others, like us, just have children who study German at the school. Over the years, we've done different things to help out. One year we did crafts with the kids of the volunteers working at the market, and a few years ago I made an angel costume that was worn by a student who posed with small children for Christmas photos (like having pictures taken with Santa, in the United States). Last year I made cookies for sale by the parents' group at the market.

When I signed up to make cookies last year, I think I expected that I would - I don't know - make one batch of chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, and that would be it. So I was somewhat surprised to be assigned one of 7 traditional German Christmas cookie recipes and to be told I needed to make three batches of them. The kids helped and we rolled and cut and baked cookies one evening, packed them into the required cookie tins (the detailed instructions specified storage and transport in cookie tins, not in plastic containers), and turned them in a day or two before the Christmas market. There they were combined with cookies made by other families and packaged on a small paper plate, wrapped with cellophane and tied with ribbon, and sold at the market for $5. I bought two or three packages of them last year; I think we gave one package away and ate the rest of them. They were very good, and a nice variety, even if there weren't any chocolate chip cookies.

But last year, as I recall there were a lot of cookies that went unsold - I think they might have ended up in the teachers' lounge at the school. So I thought that this massive cookie-making effort might be scaled back a little this year, to try to come closer to matching supply and demand. But I was wrong - when the instructions came, they were planning an even larger cookie-making effort, and had plans to package some of the cookies in tins that would sell for more than the small packages that had been sold before. This seemed highly optimistic to me, but I just did as I was instructed.

So I was up til 1 a.m. one night the week before last, making cookies. They got combined with all the other cookies and packaged up at a massive cookie-packaging-event the morning before the market, and were for sale at the event last Saturday afternoon. It was a beautiful afternoon. There was the photo station, with a girl in the angel costume and this year with Santa too, and little kids posing for photos. There was grilled bratwurst and potato salad, and the German church had desserts of various sorts. A German bakery had stollen, and there were lots of stalls with other things for sale, too.

We ate bratwurst off styrofoam plates and Iain stood in line with other kids at the table where the desserts were for sale. I saw my co-worker who I'd run into a Kroger. Tom and I looked at the used books (in German) and browsed the crafts for sale. By the time I made it back to the table where our cookies were for sale, the small packages were all gone. I bought a tin for $15, and I'm glad a didn't wait any longer, because it wasn't much later that the cookies had been sold.

I don't know who made the decision to make more cookies this year, but they were right and I was wrong. Of course, I haven't seen any foreclosure signs in the neighborhood for a while and there's a new restaurant about to open in Caramba's old location on North Highland (okay, it's yet another burger place, but still...).

Finally, things may be getting better. It's about time.

The Dead Bird

When my children were younger, I read to them, a lot. Since I was doing the reading as well as most of the book purchasing, I tried to find books that I liked. It's nice of course if the children liked them, too, but if I had to sit there and read it out loud, it might as well be something that appealed to me. So when I found a children's author that I liked, I bought all of their books that I could find. I might have said it was for my children, but that wasn't completely true; it was mostly for me.

One author that I liked a lot was Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote many wonderful books for children before her death in 1952 at age 42. I hadn't realized - until I read the Wikipedia article to find out when she died - that in addition to writing children's books she led a pretty interesting life. She is probably best known for Goodnight Moon, but she wrote many others, and at her death left behind a large number of manuscripts, at least some of which were published posthumously. One of her books - originally published in 1938 - tells the story of a group of children who find a dead bird.

The children were very sorry the bird was dead and could never fly again. But they were glad they had found it, because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it. They could have a funeral and sing to it the way grown-up people did when someone died.

So they take the bird into the woods and bury it, and sing a song to it, and they cry. They mark the bird's grave with a stone.

And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.




Recently, walking down the hallway to my office, I have often thought of this story. My office building has outer walls that are mostly windows. At the bottom of the windows on my floor is a narrow metal ledge, only 5 inches or so wide. One day a month or two ago I noticed on the ledge outside my office door the body of a small yellow-green bird, lying on its side; it was clearly dead. It was sad, seeing the body of this little female goldfinch right outside our window. I tried not to look, as I went in and out of my office.

Someone propped a book up against the window, so we wouldn't see it, every time we walked by.

Sometime after that, the dead bird was gone. I don't know what happened to it, but it was gone.

And now the book is now back on the shelf.

The Morning After

On Friday morning, the dishwasher - the one we bought the day after Thanksgiving two years ago - was open and full of clean glassware; I had washed the first load of dishes soon after we had finished eating, but there were still people at the table, and we had left the glasses in place. So sometime during the evening Tom did a second load. There were still some dishes left to wash, and of course there were leftovers. Empty bottles to put in recycling, and lots of wine left; it was only Tom and Mark who lingered at the dining room table into the night, this year, and we had been prepared for more, just in case.

It was a couple of weeks ago I asked Tom how many people we were expecting for Thanksgiving, and he said he didn't know. This was a little alarming, but when I asked if he remembered who all he had invited, he said he did. Sunday night we were at Little Szechuan for dinner and it seemed like a good time to ask him for the guest list; I wrote down the names on a receipt in my wallet and then counted them up. It was eleven, if Angela came, and ten, if she didn't. Ten or eleven is a good number; we can seat ten people at the dining room table pretty comfortably, which meant we could squeeze another in if we needed to. Iain really doesn't like being relegated to the kids' table so I was glad we all would fit.

An unexpectedly anxiety-inducing road trip last Saturday to pick up the turkey. I had forgotten that we'd ordered a heritage turkey again this year, until I got the email from the farm that pick-up day for turkeys was November 19, from noon to 3 p.m. So we could pick up Caroline on the same trip, since Athens is on the way. Let's hope there's not a football game.

But there was a football game. Tom talked to both the Athens police and the university police, and they told him we should be able to drive around Athens during the game, there just wouldn't be anywhere to park. The game was, roughly, noon to 3 p.m. But it should work if we picked up Caroline at noon and then went to Elberton to get the turkey, or got the turkey at noon and then went to pick up Caroline.

Elberton was farther from Athens than we remembered, and the GPS plowed us into game traffic, and of course we didn't have a map to figure out an alternative route. But it all worked out. At the farm, there were very cute piglets in a pen and a flock of guinea fowl wandering around. Tom measured the turkey with a tape measure to make sure it would fit in the smoker (it would), and then our turkey went into the cooler and we headed for Athens.

Most of the campus had sort of a neutron-bomb-had-hit-it feel - tents and folding chairs but no people, and many of the students already gone for Thanksgiving break - but there were a few groups that had stayed in place and were watching the game on television. (I wondered later if they also had generators there, to run their televisions.) We got out of town before the game ended, although on the way back to Atlanta it feel a little like we were trying to outrun a tsunami that we thought might be behind us. But it all worked.

When the job is complex, timing is critical, and the consequences are high, one can minimize the chance of failure by establishing standardized procedures and making checklists. And that's how I do Thanksgiving dinner. We have roughly the same menu every year, and I have in my Thanksgiving binder a master ingredient-and-shopping list, and I make notes on things that need to be done differently next year. But the bread machine's broken (it makes noise but no longer moves the bread around - I think we probably wore it out) and since we weren't expecting Fred after all, I really needed to make bread. I had tried to get the things ahead of time that my neighborhood Kroger stores had sold out of in Thanksgivings past, and shopped for the rest of it on my way home from work on Wednesday. We had yeast and whole-wheat flour, but I forgot that we needed powdered milk for the bread so Tom stopped for it on the way back from the gym Wednesday night.

Wednesday night, I made the cranberry sauce and cooked the squash. Thursday morning, I started the bread as soon as I was up, but it wasn't in time to avoid conflict with the pies for cooking temperatures. Kroger had changed the recipe on the back of the pumpkin can - it now called for heavy whipping cream instead of one of the cans of sweetened condensed milk - and we didn't have whipping cream, but we did have another recipe in the notebook with my lists. After Sarah had the pumpkin pies in the oven, Caroline made a blueberry pie using a new recipe. I tried to bake the bread with the blueberry pie but the oven was too hot and I thought I'd ruined it. So Tom went to the store for bread and I called him while he was there and asked him to get aluminum foil. Maybe the bread would be okay if I covered it with foil while it finished baking. It was sometime after my near-meltdown over the failed bread that Sarah said, "I love Thanksgiving. We all get mad at each other in the morning but then when we sit down to eat it's all okay."

Fred came by after all, before we ate, and he and Keith traded notes about serving on aircraft carriers during the Vietnam war. The food was great. Mark came and Angela did not. Keith and the girls left after dessert but Mark stayed into the evening and he and Tom talked about music and played guitars.

The dishwasher worked just fine. Fred brought us a loaf of sourdough bread, and after baking a while longer with aluminum foil on top, my whole-wheat bread was fine, too.

It was a good Thanksgiving.

The Last Chapter

Years ago - before Caroline was born - I was an officer in a local organization for women physicians. I don't quite remember how I got involved in this, but both the president and vice-president were spouses of people I knew from work, so that probably had something to do with it. I remember there were some meetings at people's houses, and that we sponsored a reception for a distinguished Emory faculty member who had just gotten a lifetime achievement award from a national organization. I spent an enormous amount of time putting together several issues of a newsletter for the group. I used WordPerfect, which at least at the time wasn't optimal software for newsletter publishing, and it was a lot of trouble, just to get it to look right. And I spent a lot of time working on content. This was before Google, so I was on the lookout in the newspaper for news about women physicians in the community that might be of interest. Once it was all done, I'd take it to Kinko's and get it copied on ledger-sized paper and folded for mailing, then print out mailing labels on my 9-pin printer and put it in the mail. I think the three of us did a pretty good job, but then I had my first child and I had no more time to spend on putting together a newsletter or for that matter much of anything else. I don't remember what happened after that, and I had forgotten about it.

A year or two ago I heard from Rachel, who had been president when I was the secretary, with the news that somehow there never was a successful handoff to the next set of officers. This wouldn't have mattered so much, but there was still quite a bit of money in the organization's bank account, and we had to do our due diligence to either try to find some new officers or officially put the group out of business. Carol, the former vice-president, no longer lived in Atlanta, so it was just Rachel and I. Rachel hired someone to send out a letter to our distribution list and there was a meeting at a restaurant, somewhere, to see if anyone was interested in taking the chapter over. No one was. There was one more outreach and then - absent any alternative - the decision was to close the bank account and send the money to the national organization.

So Rachel tried to do that, but it turned out that only Carol and I were signatories on the account. Rachel sent me the paperwork to get her added to the account but I never got it done. I would periodically get an email from her, asking when I could go to the bank with her to close out the account. The times that worked for her were always bad for me. There were a few final checks a couple of months ago, covering the costs of mailing and a deposit Rachel had made just to keep the account active. But the days I took off from work and had time to go to the bank were not days that worked for her.

Then, on Monday I had to go to the Bank of America to deposit some money for the Girl Scout's fall product sale. Girl Scout product sales - including the cookies that will be on sale in a few months - are set up as cash sales. The directions say don't keep more cash than you can afford to replace if it's lost or stolen, but you have to go to the bank in person to deposit it, which suggests to me that they think all their volunteers work for Bank of America (and can easily do this, during the hours the bank is open). But I digress. So I emailed Rachel and told her I would try to close the account while I was there, and if she would tell me what to do with the check, I would mail it.

At the bank that afternoon, I deposited my $57 for the Girl Scouts, and then told the teller I needed to close an account. Personal? A business? An organization, I told him; I showed him the checkbook. It would be a few minutes; have a seat.

Just a couple of minutes later I was invited into an office, and the banker pulled up the account. Carol and I were signatories on it; did I have ID? I gave him my driver's license. I told him I wanted to purchase a cashier's check for the balance of the account; he said they'd give me the cashier's check, that I didn't have to buy it. So I wrote a last check for the account balance - $19,720.24 - to the American Medical Women's Association, and he asked a little apologetically for a second ID ("because of the size of the check.") I gave him my passport. He disappeared with the check, my driver's license, and my passport and came back a few minutes later with my documents and a cashier's check, made out to AMWA. It was done.

That evening Rachel emailed me a cover letter to send with the check, and asked what the final amount was. I told her, and that the banker had told me that the account had been opened sixty years ago. She responded back that it said a lot about how things had changed for women physicians that there apparently was no longer a recognized need for a local organization like this one (although she thought there was still a need at the national level). I thought this was an interesting observation, and she may be right - on the other hand, organizations generally are not fairing so well in modern life. I asked her if she'd read Bowling Alone. No, she replied, should she? Yes, I told her, it's one of my favorite books.

In his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam makes the case that both formal and informal social ties have massively frayed in the modern United States, and that this actually matters - that social ties contribute in important ways both to our personal well-being and the strength of our nation. Thinking back to all that time I spent putting together that newsletter, years ago, and putting a first class stamp on each one and dropping the bundles in the mail - it was an effort to tie together somehow a group of busy professional women who were too busy in the end to keep the organization going.

Sixty years ago, there were many fewer women in the medical profession, and they were of a generation that were more organizationally-inclined than their daughters and granddaughters. Now, of course, if we did want to network with other women physicians in the community we would do it differently. If we had a newsletter at all, it would go out by email, but we probably wouldn't have a newsletter; we'd have a website or a Facebook group or a blog. (This is one of the reasons that the Postal Service is in trouble.) But we're busy - we have jobs and kids and causes we're passionate about - and maybe this category doesn't resonate any more.

On Tuesday morning on my way to work I dropped the letter into the mailbox.

Autumn Again

I was only gone five and a half days, but when I came back, the lemon tree had been moved to Kathy and Steve's porch, and yesterday morning there was frost on the windshield.  The ginkgoes in the neighborhood are now mostly yellow, but ours - always the last one in the neighborhood to change color - was yellow-green yesterday; today, it's more yellow that yellow-green.  There's a Japanese maple on Cumberland that is red on the top, orange in the middle, and green on the bottom.  It's cold enough that the dog doesn't mind being outside.  An email from the farm in Elberton that we need to come next Saturday to pick up our turkey.  First quarter report cards and midterm exams.  Who's in town who can work the Friday after Thanksgiving?

The house on Cumberland that was empty and unfinished for so long has been finished up, modern (from looking at it from the outside) and ecofriendly (according the the sign in the front yard).  It's not stylistically a match for the 1920s bungalows on the street, but there are no Design Police in our neighborhood, telling you what's acceptable and what's not as far as the appearance of your house is concerned.  (If there were, probably someone would have words with me, as we are still flying the flag of the Kingdom of Libya at our house.)  It looks like they did a wonderful job of transforming the empty white box into a beautiful home.  Last night, as we drove to the symphony, we saw people in the dining room, a bottle of wine on the table.  There never was a "For Sale" sign in front of the house, after the work started; whoever was responsible for the completed renovation apparently planned to live there, and now I think they do.

Up the street, Millie and Jon are putting a second story on their house.  Although there is still a construction dumpster in the front yard, the exterior work seems mostly to be done.  Friends have been coming to help them with interior painting.  They have a compelling deadline for completing the work, with a baby on the way.  Their architect did a good job, with a design that fits the street.  The only "For Sale" signs on the street are at the apartments at Wessyngton and Highland, which still are on the market as a site for Three Luxury Homes.  They have been on the market for a long time.

The analysis of the ten sickest housing markets in the United States in August listed Atlanta as number 4; I suspect our friends in the apartments are not going to have to move just yet.  Yesterday I mentioned to Tom that it's been a long time since I've seen shattered car parts on the sidewalk on North Highland; we've assumed that this is an economic indicator, of sort, that the Drinking and Driving Set are spending less at bars south of us before driving home.  So I knew what he was talking about when he said, "We should have known it wasn't real."  A fake affluence, driving by an artificial rise in the price of housing, ultimately did in the U.S. economy in 2008, and even though the numbers say that things are getting better, it doesn't feel that way.

A chickadee grabs a sunflower seed from the feeder on my dining room window.  Leaves on the ground in the back yard.  I need to do something with those lemons, and clear out a space in the freezer for the turkey.  It's that time of year.

Mass Transit

I was in Geneva this week attending a meeting. In the baggage claim area at the Geneva airport, there is a machine that - when you press the button - will give you a free ticket for public transportation into the city. You can use it on the train - the train station is next door - or the bus. There are many trains an hour. They all stop at the Geneva station so you just get on one with your free ticket and go. Usually no one asks to see your ticket during the ten minute ride into the city.

When you check into your hotel, the hotel will give you a transit pass good for the duration of your stay. There are buses and trolleys that go throughout the Geneva area. There may be somewhere you can't get via the public transit system but there's never been anywhere I needed to go that I could figure out how to get to. The buses run frequently and although a valid ticket is required to ride the bus, I've never seen tickets checked. You just get on, your ticket in your pocket. Not having to check tickets makes boarding the bus much faster; you can board through any door, rather than having to file past the driver and present your ticket. But you are required to have a valid ticket, and if asked you have to produce it; if you don't have it, there is a stiff fine. I've never seen anyone be asked to show their ticket on a bus, but people buy tickets at the automated ticket machine at the stop, and I assume that the ones who don't have weekly or monthly transit passes. (I assume also that this is why they make such an effort to provide transit passes to visitors, who could just assume they don't need tickets and get themselves in trouble.) And I've never seen any kind of of disorderly conduct or bad behavior on public transit there. Everyone is quiet and polite.

With the parking problems at my workplace, there's been a big push for us to consider mass transit, and I have thought about riding the bus to work. But I haven't quite figured out how to do it. And how do you buy a transit card on the bus? There aren't vending machines at every bus stop like there are in Geneva. But I did ride MARTA to the airport on Sunday. Tom dropped me off at Lindburgh and I successfully put $20 on a transit card (so maybe I can ride the bus sometime). I had to carry my suitcase down the stairs - there was no "down" escalator that I saw - and I waited on the platform for the train.

A train came quickly but it was being taken out of service, so they made everyone who was on it get off. MARTA employees walked the length of the train to make sure everyone was off. Then the train left the station, empty of passengers, and we waited.

I don't know if he got off the train that was taken out of service, or if he was there when I arrived, or if he came later, but sometime after the train left, I heard him, talking loudly not clearly to anyone in particular (not that I could tell for sure, and I didn't want to look). It seemed threatening enough, this string of random obscenities, that we moved away from him. No one talked. No one wanted to make eye contact. The unstated fear of a deranged person picking someone at random off the platform and tossing them on the tracks. And the MARTA employees, who had so diligently made sure that no one stayed on the train being taken out of service, were no where to be seen.

It seemed like it took a long time for the next train to come. We breathed easier when the doors closed and the man with the loud voice wasn't in our car. There were several of us with suitcases. At some point a guy with a bicycle got on. Then - I think it was at North Avenue - two young women and a young man with numbers like they give you when you participate in a race pinned to their shirts got on the train. I figured they'd been in a 5K earlier in the day, or had walked to support finding a cure for some terrible disease. One had a clipboard, which is unusual for a 5K, and they didn't seem to be dressed for running. I thought one of them was carrying a GPS. Maybe they were geocaching? But with race numbers on their shirts?

Then one of the young women knelt down next to me and said, "I don't want to scare you, but we're on a scavenger hunt, and we need to find someone with an out-of-state driver's license." (Why she thought I would be so easily frightened I don't know, but then I *had* been frightened at the station; maybe that still showed.) I told her I couldn't help, but other passengers with suitcases spoke up, and a young man volunteered that he was from Virginia. Did he have a driver's license? They needed a photo of themselves with him, and they needed a close up of him with his Virginia driver's license. The woman sitting next to me obligingly took the group photo ("get closer together, okay, that's it"). They also needed someone wearing clothing for for a non-Atlanta professional sports team. The request got passed halfway up our car, but no one could help with that. The three of them got off somewhere downtown, but the idea of teams of people wandering around Atlanta on a scavenger hunt left me with a smile.

Monday afternoon after the long plane ride and the short train ride, I got to my hotel and I found the event on line - they were participating in the Atlanta Challenge, part of a national series of events sponsored by Challenge Nation. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounded like fun.

As the week went on, I rode the bus uneventfully to and from my meeting every day, and back to the airport early yesterday morning. On none of those rides did anything interesting happen. Nothing at all.

Harvest

My father was a wonderful gardener. When we lived in Kansas, we had a large garden and he grew corn, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, boysenberries, cucumbers, and lettuce. There was rich soil, and full sun, and a well my father dug. When we moved to Woodward, we joked about the small back yard that was almost completely covered with a concrete patio; he said he didn't want a big garden anymore, that it was too much work. But he couldn't stand it; he ended up taking out part of the driveway with a sledge hammer and planting tomatoes.

I, on the other hand, am not much of a gardener, although I keep making these ineffectual attempts. At the beginning of the summer, I bought some lettuce plants at the farmers' market. I set them in the bed in the front yard and forgot about them; by the time I remembered, they were dried up and dead. The strawberries in the front bed - descendants of plants placed there a few years ago - did produce some wonderfully sweet strawberries early in the summer but as soon as the squirrels found them, they disappeared as soon as they started to ripen. The blueberries disappeared and so did the few blackberries on our new blackberry bush. I planted some heirloom tomatoes but got not a single tomato off of them. If we were responsible for producing our own food, we'd have to live on squirrel and mulberry jam.

There's one exception, though, to my amazing failure to grow anything edible. A couple of years ago, Iain and I were at Pike's and we bought a small lemon tree. The tree was in a pot, small enough it could be easily moved; it reminded me of the orange tree my dad used to have in my parents' kitchen. So we set it out in the front yard, in front of our house, and there it  bloomed, and made some small green fruit, but the small lemons it made ended up all falling off. The tree ended up spending the first winter on Kathy and Steve's porch and when I got it back in the spring it had lost all its leaves. The leaves grew back, and it bloomed several more times, with wonderfully fragrant blossoms, but it didn't make any lemons. It spent last winter in our foyer.

But this year after it bloomed the little lemons didn't fall off, and they grew to be lemon-sized.  They stayed green for month after month, and I didn't think they were ever going to ripen (maybe they had heard what happens to ripening fruit in our yard).  But then they turned yellow, and suddenly we had real lemons.



Last night, right after I look this picture, we picked them. They are beautiful.



I told Iain I think we need to make something special with them.  Maybe we'll make a lemon tart and some marmalade.  But definitely something special, with these glorious bright yellow lemons.

Welcome to the 21st Century

Years ago I read a book by Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View, about scenario planning. The section that made the biggest impression on me was that planners at Royal Dutch Shell - using publicly available information - identified the possibility that the U.S.S.R. would collapse long before it did. Sometimes, we can identify a range of scenarios and come up with decent estimates of probability. But sometimes we can't, or at least we don't.

I don't know if any of the people whose job it is to think about these things really saw the Arab Spring coming. Gregory Gause wrote about this in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in an article with the self-explanatory title, "Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring." He says that they missed it because no one had been paying attention to the military. "Most scholars assumed that no daylight existed between the ruling regimes and their military and security services." International donors have pressured the non-oil-producing states to modernize their economies. "Some Middle East specialists thought that economic liberalization could establish new bases of support for Arab authoritarians and encourage the economic growth necessary to grapple with the challenges of growing populations...Meanwhile, Western governments pushed the idea that economic reform represented a step toward political reform." Of course, saying so does not make it true.

Looking for this issue yesterday afternoon, I found the January/February issue, with the cover story, "The Political Power of Social Media," by Clay Shirky. He makes the case that one of the most important roles that social media play in promoting democracy ultimately will be in facilitating the development of civil society. "Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss the issues presented to the public." In the long run, it's more important that a country's citizens can talk to each other than that they have access to Google and The New York Times. "Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation."

Last week I went to a very interesting presentation on Cuba. While I've been following events in the Middle East and North Africa, I didn't know much about Cuba, so I learned a lot. There is a little progress on the civil society front, and the Ladies in White have continued to march each Sunday since the arrests of dissidents in 2003 (although I've read since that their founder, Laura Pollan, recently died, so the future of that group may be uncertain). And there are now lots of cell phones in Cuba, and some freedom of communication even if the government doesn't like it. The speaker talked about the blogger, Yoani Sanchez, who has bravely written about life and politics in Cuba.  But the most interesting thing to me in his presentation was the observation that everyone in charge in Cuba is old - they are all in their 70s and 80s. Every time someone younger starts to become prominent, they get removed from their position - there's a phrase for it in Cuba, which means staying home in your pajamas. So, one way or another, change will come to Cuba.   The speaker would not let himself be drawn into speculation about what that future might be like. In the meantime, if you want to know about Cuba present, read Yoani Sanchez's blog. Her most recent post is about unmasking the people who monitor telecommunications in Cuba.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. Internet security company made the devices that the government of Syria is using to block access to the Internet. In the meantime, the government crackdown against the demonstrators continues. The U.N. estimates that more than 3,000 people - most of them civilians - have died since the uprising began in March.

On Delta 1138 to DCA

I saw them, first, at the gate while the plane was boarding. They stood out in the mass of business-suited men and women on the early morning flight, a family of four, standing together at the edge of the swarm of frequent flyers filing on to the plane. Someone ahead of spoke to them - probably asking is this was their assigned boarding zone - and the man, wearing a straw cowboy hat trimmed in leather, shook his head "no." The line moved passed them.

Later they boarded and stopped at the row ahead of me. It rapidly became clear (even though only the father appeared to speak English - his wife seemed to only speak Spanish) that they had the two seats on one side of the aisle on the row in front of me, and two seats on the row behind me, but they didn't want to sit in their assigned seats. So they just stopped in the aisle, preventing anyone from getting past them. One of the flight attendants tried to get them to sit in their assigned seats until everyone boarded, and then swap people around, but the father wouldn't sit down with his younger daughter in the row behind me. So the flight attendant moved two people from the row in front of me to the row behind me, and the father and the younger child moved to the same row, but across the aisle, from the other two family members.

Then, the younger child began to wail. Children do sometimes cry on planes, and their parents do their best to settle them down so they don't disturb other passengers. Parents travel with backpacks of small toys and coloring books and special treats to distract their young children, at least in part to prevent the evil stares from fellow passengers. I remember once, travelling to Oklahoma with Iain when he was around three, when he began to cry when we had to put the tray table up for takeoff. He didn't cry for very long but I remember the exaggerated sighs from the woman across the aisle, who apparently not only did not have children but had never been one herself, and the less-than-helpful flight attendant who could have shown up with a plastic cup of apple juice, but instead told me I should get my son to stop crying. So I try to avoid staring disapprovingly at parents of crying children - I'm just happy that it's not my child that's crying - but we all couldn't help but notice that the father, sitting in the aisle seat with his young daughter next to him in the window seat, did nothing to try to comfort the child. Not a thing. No arm around her, no whispered words of comfort and reassurance, no reaching for the backpack with the Gummy Bears, nothing. It's like she was someone else's child, and he was in the awkward position of having to sit next to her on the plane. I heard someone say, "It's going to be a long flight."

The flight attendant in the red dress who had previously seen to seating the family in a single row reappeared. She said to the father, very graciously, maybe your daughter is crying because she wants to sit with her mother. She offered to move the remaining person in the row, a woman trapped at the window seat in the row in front of me, who jumped at the offer (I think they put her in an empty seat in first class). Now they had the whole row. The mother moved to the middle seat, with a daughter on each side of her. The younger girl stopped crying and the father settled into the window seat across the aisle, his hat on the empty aisle seat. We were all hoping now that we would be able to sleep, or work, or whatever it was we were planning on doing on the short flight. The plane took off.

As soon as things quieted down, I heard the exclamations from the row in front of me; every few seconds, someone would repeat a two syllable word, with the accent on the second syllable. It was the older child, and I think the word she said over and over during the hour and forty-four minute flight was "Mama." Later, after the seatbelt sign was turned off, I got up to get something out of my backpack and I stole a glance at the older child. She looked happy, but she didn't look like a developmentally normal child. Down syndrome, I guessed. And the younger child wasn't a toddler - I would guess she was five or so.

Before the plane landed, the flight attendant who had gotten them all seated made a final pitch for contributions to breast cancer research, and made another trip down the aisle with a small pink paper bag, wearing a pink feather boa over her red uniform. I don't know what made other people reach for their wallets - maybe memories of their own medical histories, or those of friends or family members - but I did by way of saying thank you for how well she handled us all during boarding.

The plane landed. The younger daughter and the mother got up out their seats; the father took the older girl by the arm and pulled her up out of her seat. I saw the mother wrestle two roll-aboard bags down from the overhead compartment. Then they all walked up the jet way, the mother holding on tightly to her older daughter.

Fall Break

Sarah and Iain didn't have school last week, so Wednesday afternoon the dog went to the dog hotel and that evening we drove to Cloudland Canyon. We had expected to have to pick up the keys from the after hours key box, but someone was in the office, and while we were there we were able to buy some firewood. After we got to the cabin, a quick supper of grilled cheese sandwiches. Sarah and Iain and I played Apples to Apples, and Tom cut some kindling from our newly-purchased firewood. He said the wood wasn't dry enough to burn and proposed putting the kindling in the microwave. Sarah and I didn't think this was a good idea but he did it anyway. Although it may have been damp, it did catch fire in the microwave, suggesting that this is not an optimal way to dry kindling. (Continuing our series of Problems with Appliances: see here and here and here.) So he put it in the oven instead, along with a couple of the logs, and baked it for a while, uneventfully.

Thursday we went to the Tennessee Aquarium. We looked for the leafy seadragons but couldn't find them. Tom asked someone and was told that they had all died of old age and they don't have any anymore; they do still have weedy seadragons, but they are not as unbelievably outrageous as the leafy ones. We reminisced about the time - when Caroline was young - that she was splashed by a duck in the Delta Country exhibit; a new, higher barrier now prevents drenched children, unless parents with good upper body strength and poor judgment lift them up and drop them into the fake bayou. We saw Oscar, the sea turtle that survived an encounter with a power boat that damaged his shell and amputated his back legs, but is doing fine in the all-you-can-eat environment at the aquarium. We spent a long time watching the river otters, who exited the pond at exactly the same time onto opposite ends of the ledge, no doubt a provision in the otters' contract, that they did not have to swim around constantly for the entertainment of visitors. I didn't remember seeing mossy frogs before this visit, but maybe they were there and I just missed them in the display; another example of either the effectiveness of natural selection or the Creator's sense of humor.

We had lunch at Big River Grille. As we were being shown to our table, there was a glimpse of CNN on the TV over the bar, with the report that Qaddafi was dead. Our order was slow coming, so every few minutes I would head back to the bar to try to find out what had happened, but on CNN they didn't seem to know, only that Al Arabiya had reported that Qaddafi was dead. Someone being interviewed who was saying that this was 2011 was the Arab world's 1989.

Later that afternoon we walked up the street to a used bookstore and on the way I asked Sarah if she remembered the time we took the ride in the horse-drawn carriage; she didn't remember the carriage ride, but she remembered the Dalmatian that was sleeping on the seat next to the carriage driver. We got back to our cabin and Iain and I played frisbee outside. That night we tried to build a fire, but in spite of having been baked in the oven, the wood still wouldn't burn. Friday, we walked around on the east rim of Cloudland Canyon, and down to the first waterfall, but got home in time for Iain to drop by Morningside and visit with some of his former teachers. It was followed by a busy weekend - Iain started confirmation, Sarah and I made a dress for her to wear in the Little 5 Points Halloween parade, and Caroline came home for her improv class.

We had a good time, in spite of the fire in the microwave oven but no fire in the fireplace, but probably the memory that will stick with me of this trip is hearing Tom say, as we were being shown to our table on Thursday at lunch, "Qaddafi is dead."

Yesterday, in the New York Times, there was a story about the leader of the transitional government in Libya announcing that the revolution is over, and it's time to build the new Libya. The story ends with a quote from a woman in Benghazi, celebrating with a crowd in the recently renamed Victory Square, telling the reporter, "This is the greatest day of our lives."

Revolutions don't come with guarantees, and no one knows what the future will hold for Libya, but a future without a mad dictator must be preferable even with all its uncertainties to a past where that's all there was.

More Family History: The People Not Found

Sarah is named after an ancestor on the Ward side of the family, Sarah Berryhill. My mother was a little ambiguous about where exactly Sarah Berryhill was in the family tree - maybe a great-great-grandmother, or a great-great-great-grandmother - but she was said to have been Cherokee (or maybe half-Cherokee).  (In retrospect, we should have realized it was significant that my mother was unclear about the relationship; up until the time she had a stroke, my mother never forgot anything.)  When I was a child, I went to a Ward family reunion in Winfield, Alabama - my parents drove my grandfather there, so he could go - but I don't remember anything much about it. Then there were all those years we drove to Oklahoma for 2 weeks in the summer and again over Christmas, to see my parents; we would go through Winfield, and I always assumed that when I got ready to learn about the Wards it would be straightforward because so many of them were still there.

Willis Monroe Ward was my great-great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1802, possibly on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina, or maybe in Spartanburg, South Carolina, or maybe somewhere else. His father, Solomon Ward, was said to be from Spartanburg. Willis married Mary Ann Berryhill in the 1820s in Franklin County, Tennessee, and by 1830 they were in Jackson County, Alabama, just across the border; by 1840 they had moved westward to Marion County, Alabama. They had nine children (at least I think they had nine children - these things sometimes are not so clear).

The oldest son, born in 1831, was named Solomon; presumably he was named after his grandfather. In the early 1850s or maybe a little earlier he married Lucy Ann Northcutt. By 1860 they had established their own residence and had three children. By 1870, Solomon, Lucy, and the youngest child no longer showed up in the Marion County census, and the older two children were living with Willis and Mary Ann.

There were at least three Solomon Wards from Alabama who served in different units of the Confederate Army, and I don't know which if any of them was Willis's son. One, who served in the 11th Regiment, was killed in 1862 at Fraziers Farm in Virginia. Another one, who served in the 58th Alabama Regiment, was wounded severely with both legs broken at the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863 and died the following month. Another one served in the 9th Alabama Battalion and was hospitalized in Selma for "vulnus sclopeticus" in September 1863. I didn't know what vulnus sclopeticus was (not a term I learned in medical school) - it's a wound inflicted by gunshot.

In the 1866 census of Marion County, households were asked about deaths among soldiers, and Willis reported that one was killed, and one died of sickness. One of Willis's sons-in-law died of disease in 1862, so I think that Solomon was killed in battle or died of injuries from battle.

But I don't know what happened to Lucy, or to the youngest child. I'd like to think she remarried, and I can't find her because she had a different name, by 1870, but I don't know.

And to circle back to the beginning of the story, another person I haven't found is Sarah Berryhill, who Sarah was named after, and who was supposed to be Cherokee. Willis's wife was Mary Ann, and went by Polly, not Sarah, although her last name was Berryhill. But Willis may have been born on the Cherokee Reservation, so maybe Sarah was his mother (and maybe her last name wasn't Berryhill).

Since I don't think my daughter wants to change her name, I guess I need to keep looking.

Insert Coins Here

At work, we moved into a new office building during the summer. On our floor there's a break room with a wall of windows and a nice view of the campus. It's a very pleasant room. Up until a couple of weeks ago, there were empty spots along one wall -- room for two more refrigerators, I thought. Then vending machines appeared. There's a soft drink machine, that isn't quite right yet (a co-worker told me if I wanted water to select ginger ale, and if I wanted ginger ale to select Sprite), and another machine that at least when I last saw it on Friday was still empty. Presumably it will eventually be filled with snacks -- potato chips and Hershey bars and trail mix and salted peanuts -- but at the moment it is empty. But it's been turned on, and the inside is illuminated, the chrome racks inside gleaming, and blue lights on the control panel sequentially turning on and off, over and over, urging you to insert your money and make your selection. It's hypnotic, really, those lights. But there isn't anything in the machine, so it doesn't seem right that it keeps demanding that we insert money. (Although a co-worker suggested that perhaps it wasn't empty, but that the snacks were just really small; perhaps our employer has insisted on extreme portion control from the vendor.)

This Vending Machine Encounter got me thinking about other Notable Vending Machines I Have Known. Last summer when we were in Chicago, Caroline and Sarah and I went to the Chicago Cultural Center to see an exhibit; while we were there, we wandered through the first floor reading room and got something to drink at the snack bar. Somewhere on the first floor there was a vending machine that caught our eye. It had previously vended cigarette packs, in another life, but now it dispensed small Works of Art (or at least Crafts) in cigarette-pack-sized boxes. The machine took tokens that you had to purchase at the shop; I think they were $5. It was tough for the girls to make their selection; you didn't get to see what was in your box, only select a category. Sarah got an ornament on a string (was it a harlequin? I don't remember for sure) and Caroline a necklace, a polished stone on a string.

The first time I saw a vending machine that sold small Works of Art was in Durham, North Carolina, when I lived there in the mid-1980s. At the Carolina Theater downtown there was a vending machine that sold bits of art for a dollar (the price of everything has gone up since the 1980s). This was more like a machine that might have sold sandwiches in a previous life, so you did get to sort of see what you were getting before you purchased it. I was the proud owner of two color photocopies of pictures of Snap-on tool trucks. I assume there were more in the series, but I only had two of them. For a long time, they were framed and up on my wall, but I don't know what ended up happening to them.

Back to the vending machine in the break room. I find it unnerving, this gleaming illuminated machine with the insistent sequentially illuminating blue lights, demanding that I put in money, even though there's nothing in it. Hopefully, when I go back to work tomorrow, it will be full of granola bars and packets of M&Ms, and I won't have these feelings of existential dread any more, when all I wanted was to get myself a cup of coffee.

But if you want ginger ale, be sure to select the Sprite.

CSI: Wessyngton Road

I think Iain was the first one who noticed them. In the afternoon, we'd see them under the birdfeeders in the back yard - they weren't full grown, and Sarah thought they were cute, but they were absolutely and definitely rats. Fortunately when startled they ran away from the house, toward the wooded area behind the fence, so we didn't think they were actually living in our house. Still, it's not exactly the kind of wildlife you like to see in your backyard, snacking the sunflower seeds that fall from your birdfeeders. The squirrels are bad enough.

But that was a few weeks ago. I haven't seen them for a while. Maybe I just haven't looked at the right time of day.

Then, yesterday afternoon, Iain and I found some clues in the back yard:



Exhibit A.



Exhibit B.

This afternoon we found gray feathers scattered over a large area in the back yard - clumps of feathers (Exhibit A) or individual feathers, of all kinds (Exhibit B). The bird to whom these feathers had been attached had almost certainly been eaten by something - but what? My first thought was a cat. Cats are very effective predators, and a cat certainly could have staked out the bird feeder; Dan used to complain to us when our cat, Rocky, used to stake out their bird feeder. But I don't think I've seen a cat in our back yard since before Rocky died; the very large Labrador retriever who usually is asleep somewhere in the yard may have something to do with the absence of cats in our yard (it certainly kept Rocky away, and he nominally lived here). So, we didn't think it was a cat.

The fact that the feathers were scattered over such a large area suggested at least to me that it was a hawk. A week or two ago Iain and I were walking back from the farmer's market and he spotted one, soaring over the back yards on our side of Wessyngton Road. I've looked, since, and I haven't seen one, but I think at least yesterday it was dining high above my back yard. (I hope that the meal wasn't the catbird I saw at the bird bath the other day.)

In May and June, I watched the red-tailed hawk family in the nest outside the NYU president's office. I started watching soon after the unexpected hatching of Pip (it had been too long, the experts said, none of the eggs are going to hatch), and got anxious when she started wandering around the nest, especially when her mother was out hunting (the experts said she wouldn't fall out, but they were the same ones who said none of the eggs were going to hatch), and then when she finally flew away. But while she was there, we would see her parents would return from hunting with tasty rats, squirrels, and the occasional bird.

I don't know much about hawks - I know that many of the hawks in this area are red-tailed hawks, but I don't know if there are other species too. But I love the idea of a hawk patrolling the neighborhood and dining on rats. For what it's worth, I haven't seen the rats at the bird feeder in a while. I really hope they were lunch. Or maybe dinner, or breakfast.

And I'll keep looking up, to see what I can see.

The Girl Effect

Today lots of bloggers are writing about The Girl Effect, and even though I don't usually blog during the week, I didn't want to miss the chance to write about this. I believe in this one, and if we really want to Make the World a Better Place, and get an optimal return on our development investment, this is something we should support.

Here's the idea. If we invest in keeping girls in school, they will have a chance for a better life, not only for themselves, but for their families and for their communities - and if we keep enough girls in school, it will change things for the better for whole countries and eventually for the world. A few years ago, the Nike Foundation funded the creation of the first of the Girl Effect videos, and even though there have been several others since, this one is still my favorite. If we really want to do something to improve life for people in poor countries, one of the most effective strategies - with the best return on investment - is educating girls.

For years - I don't actually remember how many - the Girl Scout troops in our neighborhood have donated money to help keep a girl in school in Cambodia. The concept is a simple one: every month the girl stays in school, her family gets $10. This small amount of money reduces some of the financial pressure on poor families and help keeps the girls in school. The first year we did it, it was the girls who decided to support this particular cause, and the girls have continued it, every year since.

It was in the New York Times today, that because of the pressure on the Federal budget, foreign aid is taking a big hit. Times are tough, and we do need to focus our investments in the areas where they are most effective.

One of those areas is supporting the education of girls.

And the Girl Scouts can't do it alone.

High Stakes Testing

I remember taking those tests in high school. They weren't given at my high school, so my mother and I would leave early in the morning and drive to the testing site at Alva or Weatherford, with my sharpened number 2 pencils. This was before there were calculators of course; perhaps I took a slide rule, I don't remember. I took both the ACT and SAT just once, and I didn't take a prep course, and I didn't even have one of the phone book-sized preparation books with sample tests that now are piled up around our house. And - as far as I recall - no one asked me for any evidence that I was who I said I was.

Now there's a whole industry around these tests that didn't exist when I was in high school in the early 1970s. There are practice books and preparation courses, and kids take them over and over, trying for better scores. There are subject matter tests and an essay section, with peculiar grading rules that do not actually include getting a lower score for writing things that are factually incorrect. You get graded down for errors of "grammar, usage, and mechanics," but not of fact. (One can imagine why. "Grammar, usage, and mechanics" are not open to debate, really, or litigation. Facts are, so why deal with them?)

Taking it a step further, there is also the commercial enterprise of hiring someone else to take the test for you. It was in the New York Times yesterday, that an Emory sophomore was arrested for taking the SAT in exchange for payment for six Long Island high school students. According to the story, there are - as far as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is concerned - no consequences for cheating. "When the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test, detects irregularities, it simply notifies the affected students that their scores are being withdrawn. Neither colleges nor high schools are ever alerted that cheating was suspected." According to the Nassau County District Attorney, four of the students who have admitted that Samuel Eshaghoff took the test for them are now in college, presumably based on Mr. Eshaghoff's test scores; "the colleges have not been notified by the testing service of their statements." ETS has said that confidentiality laws prevent disclosure.

So let's get this straight. We have a system that doesn't do much to assure that the people taking these high stakes tests are who they say they are, and yet we base college admissions on them, and no one tells the colleges if kids get caught, hiring someone to take the test for them. What kind of a testing system would work this way? One more concerned about not getting sued than doing the right thing. The same kind of system that grades you down on grammatical mistakes, but not on errors of fact.

Facts don't matter, and neither do rules.  Whatever it takes. 

Intersecting Histories, or Travel Notes for the Next Trip to Chicago

I recently finished reading Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. The book, published in 2003, is an account - basically nonfiction, with a little novelistic speculation included - of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, intertwined with the story of America's first known serial killer, Dr. H.H. Holmes. It's a very compelling piece of storytelling. The Chicago World's Fair brought us electric street lighting, the Ferris Wheel, and a certain vision of urban design. The fair itself was called the White City, because the huge, neoclassical buildings that filled Jackson Park were covered with a sort of white stucco. It was a monumental accomplishment to build, and must have been amazing to see.

Most of the buildings built for the fair were designed to be only temporary structures, but two were permanent - the Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry, and the World's Congress Building near Grant Park, which is now the Art Institute of Chicago. We visited both of them when we were in Chicago this summer - I had no idea that they were built for the World's Fair.

While we were there, I did read a book of Chicago ghost stories, which had a chapter about the murderous Dr. Holmes. Holmes (whose real name was Herman W. Mudgett) built a three story, block-long building at 63rd and Wallace, not far from Jackson Park. There he rented out rooms to an unknown number of people and many of them disappeared. His hotel had rooms that appeared designed for asphixiation, and a crematory and quicklime pits that could destroy bodies were in the basement. Holmes killed many people in Chicago, but didn't come to the attention of law enforcement while he lived there. He was finally arrested in Boston and jailed in Philadelphia for insurance fraud in 1894, and a relentless detective named Geyer found evidence, in a cross-country investigation that extended into Canada, that Holmes had murdered three children. That led to the grisley discoveries in Holmes' vacant hotel in Chicago. Not long after the police found evidence of the crimes committed there, the building burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances. The site was vacant until a Post Office was built there in 1938.

The weekend before last I had a bad cold and didn't feel like doing much so I spent more time that I would have otherwise working on Tom's family history. Both sides of his father's family emigrated from Germany and ended up in the Chicago area during the 19th century. I had been unable until a couple of months ago to find any records from his father's mother's family - we couldn't find anyone named Buesdorf anywhere - but I went back and reviewed the earliest census record that listed his grandparents as a married couple and they were living at 14 Kroll Street with the Bewersdorfs. Once I had the name spelled correctly, I could find records. The earliest record I could find for Tom's great-grandfather Charles Bewersdorf was in an 1894 Chicago city directory that listed him as a carpenter, living at the Kroll Street address. We used Google Maps to look for Kroll Street in modern day Chicago and couldn't find it. We figured it didn't exist any more, that it must have been destroyed in some round of urban renewal.

So last weekend I found a list of street name changes for Chicago, and found that Kroll Street had become Seeley. Because the 1900 Census went from 23rd Street to Kroll, I think Kroll Street is now the 2300 block of South Seeley, in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago. It was settled by German and Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century, who were replaced by Czech immigrants, who were replaced by Mexican-Americans. This block of South Seeley contains a mixture of multifamily and single family homes, all built in the late 19th century; I don't know which one is the one where the Bewersdorfs lived, but I've seen pictures of the street from Google Maps. One of those houses is - I think - where Charles Bewersdorf, the carpenter, lived in 1894, with his family.

It was interesting thinking, as I read the book, that some of Tom's ancestors were in Chicago while these events were taking place. Charles was a carpenter - was he one of the thousands of workmen who helped build the White City? Did they attend the fair on Chicago Day? Thankfully, they probably never stayed at Holmes' World's Fair Hotel.

In 1907 Charles bought property in Melrose Park, and by the 1910 Census, that's where he lived, along with his wife Wilhelmina. But I still wonder about 14 Kroll Street. Maybe the next time we are in Chicago we can try to find it. And I might just have to go visit that Post Office, too.

Signs and Omens

It's not that I'm superstitious - I'm not, except in the hard-wired, limbic system-kind of way that almost all of us are - but the economy's still bad, the Government may shut down on September 30, and a satellite is going to hit the earth sometime today, so it's hard not to assign meaning to what may be chance observations.

Of course, sometimes when something usual happens, it does mean something. Last weekend I was running an errand and noticed that the "check engine" light was on. We took it in to the shop Monday morning and I asked while they were at it that they check the brakes. The "check engine" light was on because the gas cap was loose, as it turned out, but the brakes needed major work. So, at least if the satellite crashes into the road ahead of me, I might be able to stop.

Sometime in the last week or two I saw a bluebird in the backyard. I've been a backyard birdwatcher for a couple of years now and I've never seen a bluebird in the yard before. In fact, I've never seen a bluebird at all. I've been watching, but I haven't seen it back.

Tuesday night I was heading out to pick up Iain from Boy Scouts and heard fireworks. Driving down Cumberland, I saw them - explosions of red and gold, unexpectedly in the sky, visible between the trees. Later that night, a really loud party, somewhere nearby, followed by the flashing blue lights of a police car; after that it was quiet.

It's raining this morning, the sort of slow steady rain that soaks into the ground. It rained on Tuesday, and yesterday afternoon was raining when I came home from work and has been raining since then, I think. But on Wednesday, September 21 - the International Day of Peace - the paper pinwheels the Girl Scouts made at their last meeting were out on the lawn at Haygood, as a tangible expression of hope for something better.



They are made from plastic drinking straws, paper, beads, and a bit of pipe cleaner, and are not very substantial. I had assumed that they wouldn't really work as pinwheels, and the best we could hope for was a day that didn't rain, so I would not be retrieving bits of soggy paper from the Haygood lawn Wednesday night. But yesterday I got an email from one of the parents of a girl in the troop who said they had looked great, spinning in the breeze that day.

When we picked them up Wednesday night, Iain left one of them - the one I had made as a sample to show the girls - on the dashboard of the car. It had "International Peace Day" written in blue and green crayon in concentric squares on both sides of the paper wings. Yesterday when I got to work I decided to bring it into my office. If I held it just right, there was enough air movement just from walking for it to turn, and when there was a breeze, it spun.

I don't know that it means anything, but it did make me smile.

Friday Night at the Movies

So this week at work all the movie buzz has been about Contagion, the movie that just came out about a killer virus that threatens Life on Earth as We Know It (I haven't seen the movie yet so I'm not completely sure about that part, but I do know that Kate Winslett, playing a CDC doctor, dies heroically, so it must be really bad, if they kill off one of the stars.) I'm looking forward to seeing it - I've heard it's compelling and scary and good story-telling as well as the subject of some extremely cool but creepy marketing.

But that's not actually what kept me awake last night, even though I was really tired when I finally got to bed. Last night Tom and I watched a movie that we'd had for a while from Netflix, "The Lives of Others." I don't remember why I ordered it - we are always looking for German movies for our German-speaking family members (that would be everyone but me) - but I'm glad I did, and that we watched it before mailing it back.

This 2006 film is about life under surveillance in the former East Germany. I don't want to give away the ending, but it's a compelling story of life under pressure in a country that tried to control what people could read and write. The fonts of every known typewriter in East Germany were identifiable by State Security, and if documents were found with content that wasn't to their liking, there were people whose job it was to identify the typewriter that was used to type it. A untraceable typewriter smuggled from the West plays an important part in the story.

In 1984, when the movie takes place, writing was done on paper with typewriters, making writing an act of great risk in countries totalitarian societies. Of course writing is still risky - journalists and novelists and playwrights and poets and scholars and bloggers still risk imprisonment or worse in many countries around the world. But it's harder and harder to control words - they control the newspapers, you post to the web. They control state television, you post to YouTube. They control the internet, you use a cell phone. Probably the role of social media in the uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa has been overblown, but I am sure that the nearly unrestrained flow of information across borders has contributed to the astonishing events that have taken place this year.

I hope it is not to long before I see a wonderfully compelling movie about how things used to be under an oppressive regime in Yemen or Syria, and I'll look back and say I remember that, I remember when it was like that. Until then, there are still brave people who are putting their lives at risk for a better future for themselves, their children, their country by marching, by writing, by uploading cell phone videos, by fighting well-equipped armies with almost nothing. The best hope for a peaceful future for the region and the world is a rapid transition to democracy. We have a chance, this time, to be on the right side of history.

Off to College

Caroline left for college on Wednesday.  There was lots of last minute stuff left to do, those last couple of days, but Tom and Sarah drove her to Athens on Wednesday and got her moved into the dorm.  A big step for her, and for us.

During the last few days before she left, I was thinking about when I went off to college.  The first roommate who only lasted a few days before she decided she wanted to go back home (I don't think it was anything I did).  The freedom from attending class, all day long every day, yet the classes were so much better and covered so much more, compared with my high school classes.  New friends, almost all from the honors dorm or my honors classes, some of whom I've kept in touch with and I still consider myself close to, even if we aren't as good about keeping in touch as we intend to be.  Some classes I still remember (admittedly, not that many) and a professor and his wife who are still friends.

In those days - in a different era - you had to pay for out-of-town phone calls and my raised-during-the-Depression-era parents didn't make long distance calls unless there was some news to convey that wouldn't wait for a letter.  So we didn't talk much on the phone, but they wrote me letters, and I wrote them back.  Presumably I exercised some sort of judgment and didn't tell them the stuff they really didn't need to know.  But that was it - that's how we kept in touch.

Since Caroline left, we haven't heard much from her, but Sarah gets text messages (they are sisters, and that's how sisters now talk, apparently) and I see the updates to her Facebook friends.  The only communication I've gotten that was more than a brief answer to a question by Facebook message was when she wanted me to order a couple of items from Amazon.

And that's okay.  She's gone away to college and her parents are no longer supposed to be deeply entangled in the everyday minutiae of her life.  We could be in touch almost all the time, but we shouldn't; still, I can see totally how new technology has totally enabled helicopter parenting at a whole new level.

I'm trying hard to not be that parent.

Family Reunion

Last weekend, Tom and Iain and I went to Dallas, North Carolina, for the Rhyne Family Reunion.  It was interesting and I'm glad I went - a room full of people at a Lutheran church in Dallas, most of whom I am very distantly related to, but none of whom I've ever met before.  There has been an enormous amount of work done over the years by a lot of different people, so it's not so hard for most Rhyne descendants to figure out where they fit into the family tree (although there are way too many Jacob Rhynes, and there is some confusion about which one's which, for a few of them).  We put colored dots on our name tags on Saturday, to indicate which branch of the Rhyne family we are from - Iain and I had an orange dots, as a descendants of Johan Philip Rhyne, my great-great-great-great-grandfather.  (Some people had multiple dots, since there was lots of intertwining of branches of family trees in the past.)  There were photos taken for each group of descendants; Johan Philip had a medium-sized group, but I think for some of them there was no one there at all.  There were photos of the oldest person there (age 99) and of the kids who were there.

I lived in North Carolina for three years, during the 1980s.  I had no idea, at the time, that if I were to look far enough back, I had ancestors who came there when it was still a British colony.  (There are other North Carolina connections too - the Smiths weren't far from Gaston/Lincoln County, and I have wondered if there might be some intertwining in my own family tree.)

I remember, years ago, having breakfast in a hotel dining room with a coworker who told me about her family's reunions.  Every year there was a big event attended by the entire extended family.  It sounded like fun to me, although I feel like I'm doing well to keep in touch with my cousins by email.  My children have said - incorrectly - that "they have no relatives" since their grandparents have all died and neither Tom nor I have surviving siblings, or any nieces or nephews.  Before the Rhyne reunion, Sarah asked if we would come home with T-shirts.  I said I didn't think so.  (For the record, we didn't; it was a no-T-shirt reunion, although I suppose it's not too late to make one if we want one.)

The part that interests me about all this is less how far I can trace things back (the farther back you get, the less you know about the people), but the stories.   My grandmother, born in Indian Territory, was the oldest of 6 children; at age 14, she drove the family's second covered wagon into Greer County (now Oklahoma, but I think it was part of Texas then).  Her father Joel is said to have been a handsome man with curly black hair and a mustache; he lived with his family in many different places and moved around a lot.  Was he always looking for opportunities or getting away from something?  A child is buried in Arkansas; the family briefly moved to Oregon, but then they returned to Oklahoma; he died in Texas.  He's named after his father's nephew who died at the siege of Port Hudson during the Civil War.   There are towns that flourished and then faded away, as agriculture and transportation changed.

When Gaston County was split off from Lincoln County, Dallas became the county seat, and was a thriving town in the mid-nineteenth century.  But the railroad didn't go through Dallas (at least according to Wikipedia, the county commissioners refused to appropriate funds to build bridges across the creeks because they thought the trains would awaken people at night and frighten the livestock) and in 1911 the county seat was moved to Gastonia.  We visited Moses Rhyne's store, built in 1850, and the old Hoffman hotel, that is now the Gaston County Museum.

The former Hoffman hotel, now the Gaston County Museum

The Moses Rhyne store, now an antique shop

  
There was a guest speaker at the reunion, who talked about her grandmother making quilts, and all the memories that were in those quilts - bits of cloth from clothing she remembered - and how she now makes quilts for her own family, sewing into them names and dates.  I wish I had done a better job of capturing somehow the stories my parents told me, and that I had asked more questions, and that I had written down the answers.  But absent that, there are still stories to learn.  This time, I do need to write them down.