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A Few Words on Nashville

A Few Words on Nashville

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I generally avoid writing about political topics here, thinking that we get enough of those from other sources. But it’s hard stay quiet about the latest school shooting. Three nine-year-olds! A principal, custodian and substitute teacher! People who love children doing their best to keep them safe. 

If we take a long view of history, the 2020s are not an especially violent time. But if we start with the world in which most of us grew up, then the fact that three months into 2023 we’ve already had 130 mass shootings (defined as four or more people killed), or the fact that one in 20 Americans owns at least one AR-15 rifle, a gun designed for military use, it’s hard to argue that our society isn’t violent. 

As it happens, the Washington Post began a series on the AR-15 on Monday. It was the lead story on the Post website … until the Nashville school shooting took that prime position. 

Undoubtedly, many factors are producing these mass shootings: mental illness, social media, a culture of celebrity, a lack of belonging. The people who are perpetrating these acts, often little more than children themselves (though not in this case), are usually loners, people who in their final acts seek the notoriety they hope will make up for the anonymity in which they’ve lived. Banning assault weapons would not solve all of our problems. But it would be a huge start. 

I keep thinking about the Covenant parents sending their children off to school in their plaid uniforms, backpacks and lunchboxes in tow. Those parents were expecting to see their kids back home Monday afternoon. They would have offered them a snack, nagged them about homework, given them a hug. Instead, they had to identify their bodies. 

We are the adults. We’re supposed to keep our children safe. And we’re not doing our job. It’s as simple — and as horrifying — as that. 

Nine Years

Nine Years

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I’d gotten so used to its timekeeping that when it finally stopped I thought at first that it was my watch that was off. But no, it was Dad’s. Almost nine years to the day that he left this world (which is today), his watch stopped ticking. 

I felt bereft, as I knew I would. That watch says Dad to me now. I have so few things that were his. I can still remember how it looked on his wrist, peeking out from beneath one of the long-sleeved knit shirts he liked to wear. 

Of course, the watch will keep its prominent position on my dressing table. But its beating heart is gone. 

I tell myself I had it nine years — just like we had Dad for ninety — but it’s never enough, is it? 

The Tableau

The Tableau

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When my children were young, I would often end the long days by trying to clear a path to the couch to read or relax for a few minutes before sleep. Often, though, the couch would be occupied.

It might be a stuffed bear, rabbit and dog having tea. Or a bevy of Barbies strutting their stuff. Whatever it was, I hated to dismantle it. I’d been so busy all day doing my job that I hadn’t had time to appreciate the work my girls were doing, play being the work of childhood. But the little scenes were so dear that I knew I would never forget them. 

Now we’ve come full circle. It’s my girls who are coming upon these sweet reminders of their children’s play. Except when the toddlers are over here, which they were yesterday. When I went down to the basement after the flurry of departures, I found a little something the kiddos left behind. 

I’m not sure what’s going on in this tableau, other than knowing it includes a block, a plastic rabbit, Playmobil girl, tiny doll wardrobe on its side covered with a piece of lavender fabric, and red plastic monkey from a game we once had called Barrel of Monkeys. Needless to say, I couldn’t dismantle this right away —and I took a picture before I did.

Megalopolis!

Megalopolis!

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Over the weekend, a family birthday party took me to Towson, Maryland. It dawned on me as I was driving that my niece, her husband and their now one-year-old daughter live in the same metropolitan area that I do. I can get in my little gray car and drive for an hour and a half and never leave home.

It sure feels like leaving home, though. Four expressways are involved: the Dulles Toll Road, the Capital Beltway, I-95 and I-695 (the Baltimore Beltway). And the two places have quite a different look and feel. 

The megalopolis is a strange creature, a many-bellied beast of a term. Coined in the middle of the last century, it means two or more adjacent metropolitan areas that share enough transport, economy, resources and ecologies to blur their boundaries and complete a continuous urban area. I see that megalopolis is an outdated term. It’s now megaregion, according to the America 2050 Initiative. 

Given that most humans identify with a house, a block, a town at most, I think we’re in dangerous territory here. Let the geographers have their fun, but as far as I’m concerned I definitely left home on Saturday.

(The Northeast Megaregion at night. Courtesy Wikipedia, which also served as source for some of the information in this post.)

Visits to Grandmother

Visits to Grandmother

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I awoke to a snow-globe world, a yard transformed by frozen precipitation that, at least as far as I knew, wasn’t predicted. It’s a perverse way to celebrate what would have been Mom’s 97th birthday. She would have hated the snow, as she did all winter weather. Another, better way to celebrate Mom’s birthday is with this guest post by her, a tradition I established after she died. In this except from a story Mom wrote years ago she talks about visits to her grandmother Concannon. Mom is pictured above, second from right, with her sisters and brother. 

I can still remember our silent rides to see Grandma every Sunday afternoon. Daddy drove us to her house on High Street in his big brown Pontiac with the yellow wire wheels. My sisters and brother and I would have rather been anywhere else in the world. The dread we felt mounted as we got ever closer to her home. 

Her door was usually unlocked (most doors were in those days), but my dad always knocked gently before he opened it and led us inside. Sometimes our grandmother stood to greet us, but often she didn’t get up from her high-back chair at the far end of the room, which to an impressionable child like me looked for all the world like a throne. We each said hello to this tiny woman my dad called Mama and she always answered with a similar hello followed by each of our names. I always wondered if she did that just to prove that she knew the three of us girls apart. 

After we spoke to her, we took our place in one of the small hard chairs along the walls and waited to be called on to speak. Once we were of school age we were always asked what we were studying and what we were reading on our own. I often rehearsed my answers silently on the way over, then gave them quickly and breathed a sigh of relief that it was over until the next Sunday.

Through all those years I watched Grandma and my dad together, mother and son, with so little to say to one another. Each bit of conversation between them was followed by a long period of silence. Although I did learn from listening that they both liked Franklin Roosevelt, were sure no other Irish tenor would ever replace John McCormick and didn’t believe in buying anything you couldn’t pay cash for, I was never able to figure out if they really loved each other. 

Grandma died when I was a senior in high school so she didn’t get to see me graduate from college, the first in our family to do so. I wish she had known. I think she would have been pleased.

Familiarity

Familiarity

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Some light rain, the sky a washed-out gray, tree limbs a study in contrast. I look outside as if at another world. The days have turned inward for me, as our dear dog Copper is ailing. 

It’s a comfort to glimpse the sparse azaleas, the ragged hollies. Even the open space where the tall oak stood is familiar now.

I know these places, these absences. My eyes rest easily on them, until I look inside again. 

Grandparents Rock!

Grandparents Rock!

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New research finds that grandmothers may be one reason for the dominance of homo sapiens. Humans have alleles (alternative versions of a gene) that protect against late-onset Alzheimer’s Disease and otherwise safeguard the functioning of  grandmothers and “other human elders who are involved in caregiving of the young.” 

This study helps explain why women live on past menopause and bolsters the “grandmother hypothesis,” which posits that it’s in grandmothers’ evolutionary interest to ensure that grandchildren survive to reproductive age.  

Scientists who study the evolutionary effect of various genetic mutations have noticed that these mutations were not present in Neanderthals and other early human lineages. 

All of which says, to me at least, that grandparents rock!

(My parents, who lived to see almost all their grandchildren graduate from high school.)

Trick-or-Treat!

Trick-or-Treat!

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Ghosts and goblins haunted the streets of my ordinary suburban neighborhood yesterday during our third annual Halloween parade. 

Two costumes in particular caught my eye, worn by two adorable toddlers who are so hard to capture standing still that this (admittedly very amateur) photographer had no time to consider background.

But the bee and the dog did pose momentarily before joining the parade and grabbing treats. And later, they enjoyed the moon bounce, which sent them scurrying and tumbling down the slide. 

And this all happened the day before All Hallows’ Eve. Tonight: more of the same…

Royal Lake

Royal Lake

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This week, the fall colors lured us out, and Claire and Rory and I (well, Rory was being worn by her mama) hiked around Royal Lake, only 30 minutes from here but a place I’d never seen. 

What a discovery! The two-mile trail winds through woods and open meadow and skirts a small dam. We saw ducks and geese in the lake and turtles sunning themselves on a log. 

And then there were the breathtaking colors: The brilliant scarlet of the maples, the glow-from-within orange of the American beech and the sunny yellows of the tulip tree. 

We had a flurry of excitement at the end of our walk, including a car that wouldn’t start. But what lingers in my mind now is the beauty of the stroll … and of the company. 

Taps

Taps

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Over the weekend I had a chance to do something I’ve meant to do for years, to be part of an 8th Air Force Historical Society event, thanks to a friend who’s a member. My dad flew in the 95th bomb group of the 8th Air Force and was active in both the 95th Bomb Group and 8th Air Force organizations. I cheered him on through the years but never had time to join him.

Now, of course, I wish I had. Because as much as I enjoyed meeting a couple of the WWII veterans present, all up in their 90s, of course, I only missed Dad more.

There was the familiar 8th Air Force insignia, the talk of where stationed, at some village or another in Britain’s East Anglia. There were the facts and figures, amazing to recount. In 1942 the 8th Air Force had a dozen members. Two years later, there were 300,000. 

And now they’re contracting again, have been for some time, at least when it comes to those who served in WWII. In a crowd of 400-plus … only seven were veterans of the Second World War.