Framing It

Framing It

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In today’s Washington Post, a column by Margaret Sullivan called “Old Rules of Journalism Don’t Apply” covers the firing of a Marketplace columnist, a transgender man who posted on Medium that journalists, especially minority journalists, must rethink objectivity in the Trump era.

I think the firing was legitimate because the post clearly violated one of Marketplace’s written guidelines, but the columnist raises an important point. We have our jobs and we have our morals. What happens if the two are on a collision course?

This blog is hardly Marketplace or the Washington Post, and it’s almost always apolitical. But I’ve been wrestling with how much to talk about What’s Going On. These are unusual times, so political posts may creep in a little more than they used to.

But I hope not too much. Because as frightening and upending as things have become (at least in the politically super-charged air of the nation’s capital), I still believe that perspective and empathy are our greatest weapons (along with family, friends, humor and chocolate). And perspective and empathy are what I’m after here.

To the Dreamers

To the Dreamers

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On a day that would have been Mom’s 91st birthday, I wear her earrings and a pair of socks with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Mom loved that painting, and she loved the name Vincent, even gave it to her parakeet.  She was a creative person, Mom was. A lover of words and ideas. A dreamer. She would bet the house on a dream — and  did several times.

In that way she inoculated her children against risky ventures. None of us will ever start a magazine or a museum. And yet … Mom left her mark. Which is why I found a scene from the new musical La La Land so touching. It was an audition scene, when the character Mia is asked to tell the casting director a story.

Mia sings about her aunt, who lived in Paris and once jumped barefoot into the Seine. “She captured a feeling, the sky with no ceiling, sunset inside a frame.”

… So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles
The painters and poets and plays.
And here’s to the ones who dream …

Here’s to you, Mom.

Letter from Sumba

Letter from Sumba

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A few months ago I traveled around the world — a trip that came together so quickly and with so many appointments and interviews packed in that I have to pinch myself now to believe that it really happened.

I have the photos to prove it, though, and, as of late last week, I also have a story about it on the Winrock website: Letter from Sumba. 

It’s the first of several stories based on reporting from that trip, I hope. And it’s gratifying because it translates the long flights and disorientation into words and photos.

It doesn’t capture everything, of course: how muggy it was that day, how storm clouds rolled in but the rain held off, how the ocean looked on the night drive back to our hotel. But it chronicles some of it. Enough, I hope.

Snow in Place

Snow in Place

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A white world this morning. The snow behaved itself, stuck to grass and trees and lampposts — and left the streets alone. So I could drive along wintry ways with scenery softened by the snow and made beautiful by it.

It didn’t take much to transform: less than an inch. But what a difference it made. How calm and lovely the passage from place to place.

Here we are at the end of January. We could (fingers crossed) escape without a blizzard. I’ll be content if a few small pretty snows are all we have. Just a soupçon of winter this year, thank you very much.

Keep Climbing

Keep Climbing

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What I continue to think of as my new job (though I’ve been here for nine months) has put me in touch with a fine set of stairs, so when I have a few minutes I trudge from the fifth to the 11th floor and back down again.

It amazes me that no matter how often I do this it still winds me. I think sometimes about what’s going on in my body, how the muscles are moving, using oxygen, how my breath comes faster the higher I climb, trying to stoke the furnace, that marvelous furnace that fuels us all.

Yes, mine are old (older!) bones and muscles, but I expect them to keep up. I want at least a couple more decades of walking in the suburbs.

So to forget about the pain, I ponder as I clamber.  How can I make this easier? How can I stay in shape? Only one answer: Keep climbing.

(These are not the stairs I climb, but they are very special stairs.)

Hats Off!

Hats Off!

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Reading today’s obituary of Mary Tyler Moore (the only front-page story I could stomach in today’s Washington Post), I thought about what set this actress apart.

She called herself a “funny straight woman,” and that was part of it. There was her spunkiness, her niceness, her grace under pressure. But there was more.

A decade younger than my parents she was still part of that generation, a generation that’s vanishing and that I miss more every day. And one of the things I miss most about them is their self-deprecation. They just didn’t take themselves as seriously as we do.

Moore said she was reluctant to be a symbol of women’s liberation, and tried not to think about the 50 million people watching her on TV. A photo that accompanied the obit showed her mimicking a statue of herself, hand upraised, right before she doffed her hat and threw it into the air.  

(Photo: People.com)

The Nominations

The Nominations

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The nominations are in and movie-goers have their marching orders. The Academy nominated nine films for best picture this year, and, in a departure, I’m going to try and not compulsively see every one!

But a few, like LaLa Land, Moonlight and Arrival, are on the list. And last weekend I caught Fantastic Beasts and Hidden Figures.

It had been a while (maybe since last Oscar season) since I’d been in a theater, and I’d forgotten how expansive it feels to slump down into a comfy seat, train my eyes on the big screen and lose myself in a film.

It’s about the best thing you can do this time of year.

Pre-Dawn Haul

Pre-Dawn Haul

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Today I woke up early. Was it the rain? Was it a dream? Does it matter?

So I came downstairs and started looking through old file folders. This was not a completely random exercise. I needed notes I’d kept in one of them.

I found much more. There were two pieces I’d forgotten I’d written, a letter from a former student telling me that one of her essays was about to be published, and a solicitation for an author to write a book on creative praise programs across the top of which I’d scribbled, “For the ‘Can you believe it?’ file. “

The solicitation went something like this: Smart managers are learning that to keep Gen X and Gen Y workers happy requires celebration mailboxes, applause notes, prize packages, even balloons and confetti. A potential author would be familiar with these kind of programs and able to write a book about them. My question: Would a person familiar with such programs have not already slit his or her wrist?

Still, not a bad pre-dawn haul for a unrepentant packrat. How glad I am that I looked through those files and found what I did. I start the day a little more cheerfully now. Not praised but amused, which is much better.

Living With Place

Living With Place

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I’m finishing up a book I bought a few weeks ago at the Reston Used Bookstore. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self (NeWest Press) is a collection of essays on place. The editors, Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson, have included everything from a powerful story of a drowning that forever changed the way one author came to see wild rivers to a piece about how changes to laws and landscape have robbed native Arctic peoples of community and self-sufficiency.

This morning I read an essay by M. Michael M’Gonigle in which he describes a book that he and his wife, Wendy Wickwire, wrote called Stein: The Way of the River. It describes their time of living  in a wild place, living lightly on the land, learning its rhythms and the rhythms of the people who lived on it for generations.

“The Stein may never be logged,” M’Gonigle  wrote of the book, “but now, fifteen years later, the elders that we spent time with are all dead. Here, as elsewhere in the world, with their deaths, the language of local peoples is being silenced to a whisper, and is about to disappear entirely. Here, as elsewhere, the experiences of local places, when there is yet wild spaces and spirits in those spaces, is eroding away. Here, as elsewhere, the strength and diversity and skills of a community living long with its place, and functioning together, is becoming a romantic memory. … Thus does the BIG consume the PLACE.”

“Living long with its place” — not “on,” not “beside,” not “in spite of.” But with.

The Fine Print

The Fine Print

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The Catholics are at it again. I love them, of course. I’m one of them. But their pronouncements can make me cringe. One of the latest is about cremation.

It used to be verboten. The resurrection of the body and all of that. But now, for reasons I don’t completely understand but which may have to do with the number of people on this earth and the popularity of the practice, it’s allowed as long as the cremains are buried respectfully. No scattering the ashes about in woods and fields and mountain tops. No keeping them in jars on mantels.

I read a letter in our diocesan newspaper last night. Can I be buried at sea? was the question. And the answer: Yes, if your ashes are in a special container.

For some reason this morning all of this makes me smile. I mean, if the good Lord is capable of raising us on the Last Day, is it really going to matter if we’re in a jar or the ground or scattered across the Appalachian Trail?

I have to hand it to Catholics, though, because we care about these things. And that’s the point, isn’t it?