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A Birthright of Stories
The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative. – Bruce Feiler, The New York Times Like many, I grew up with stories. A collection of bedtime fairy tales, Nancy Drew, the Choose Your Own Adventure series, as well as The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series because my oldest brother was in to Tolkien and I read whatever I could get my hands on. I inhaled stories. I also had scores of family stories. I learned about how, when Dad and his brother were little, they got hauled down to the local police station…
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The Sun is Gonna Shine Again
Steve Martin has a bluegrass band. Yes, that Steve Martin. He plays the banjo and sings, and if you dig bluegrass, I think you’ll dig Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. Martin and his colleague, Edie Brickell, wrote a beautiful musical titled “Bright Star.” Set in the 1920s and 1940s Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s a poignant story of love and loss. Some friends and I saw it this week, and the music has been echoing in my mind ever since. As I wrote that sentence, my brain had a hard time wrapping itself around the fact that, yes, I was at that show on Monday. It’s Saturday, and things…
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Be the Change You Seek
I’m fatigued. I’m tired of the societal junk I’m witnessing. Back-biting, in-fighting, political maneuvering, argument for the sake of argument. Seriously, I’m done. Not today, Satan. (Side note: I introduced this phrase to a friend who struggles with self-criticism, and told her she should use it as a mantra. She though I was telling her ‘not to date Satan.’ I mean, you know, both. Don’t allow Satan to trick you AND don’t date him or anyone resembling him.) Okay, back to it…Not today, Satan! I am actively working to reject the bad and embrace the good. And not in a head-in-the-sand Pollyannaish sort of way. I work to be educated…
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So Much Depends
There were too many perplexing questions needing answers in my day and I was overdone. Attempting sleep, I took deep breaths and quieted my mind. As I cleared out space, into the vacuum came William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In my sleepy state, it wasn’t words that came; it was a scene. A red wheelbarrow in green grass, dew sparkling, sun streaming. A slight breeze, sounds of grasses humming, birds calling drowsily. And I, drowsy too, drifted off. The next day I read the poem. so much dependsupon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the whitechickens Ah, so sparse, so unfettered by capitalization and punctuation. Clean. Crisp. Only…
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Fortune Cookie #1
Finally, I’ve found a purpose for all the fortune cookie messages I’ve been saving for years. This is the first in a series of fortune cookie posts. I’ll pick a message, see how it plays out in my week, and write about it. Let’s begin. “Keep it simple. The more you say, the less people remember.” I am my family’s historian. I scan pictures, convert old Super 8 and Camcorder tapes to digital movies, and change cassette tape recordings to digital audio files. This has yielded such amazing moments for us as we’ve been drawn back into time, hearing and seeing earlier versions of ourselves. What has really been the…
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Books Are People Too
I am inordinately happy about this librarian’s use of the pronoun ‘who’ in reference to books. Almost as happy as I am that the books will be saved.
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Ciao and Chow
Last year, I was lucky enough to become acquainted with a delightful professor of Italian. I helped Marie with revisions to Italian department curriculum, and she in turn gifted me friendship and food. The woman is a wizard in the kitchen. She cooks, bakes, and is the only person I know who makes gelato. Saying she makes gelato is hugely understating what she does. She has studied, invested, and practiced to the point that she’s a true gelato artist. Marie called my office one afternoon, “I have the gelato. I’ll bring it over just before five so you can get it home and in the freezer.” She breezed in with…
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Granola Bars and Humility
“The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.” – Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life Years ago I had the privilege of attending an event in which Clayton Christensen was the featured speaker. I was aware of him being a thought leader in management, and had learned something about his principles from stories told about him. I have since come to respect him greatly and was saddened to learn of his death last month. While Christensen’s brilliance in innovation and business is laudable, one of the greatest lessons he…
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Creating a High Light World
On my ‘to read’ list is a book titled The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. I recently listened to a podcast in which Tierney stated that we currently live in a “high bad” world, where “merchants of bad” in the media work to make us think the world is worse than it really is. This checks out, right? A preponderance of media today focuses us on the depressing and depraved when what we deeply crave is the enlightening and excellent. I want to be a purveyor of light. By that I mean one…