A Globalization Moment

Several years ago, I was in New York City for a board meeting of the International Council for Distance Education.  After the session, several of us decided to have dinner together.  We were four—from Germany, India, Norway, and myself from the U.S.

            We set out to find a good restaurant, deciding that we could easily find good food within walking distance of our Manhattan hotel.  We came to the door of a well-known Italian restaurant and were about to enter when our Indian colleague stopped.  “I’ve never understood Italian food,” he told us.  “I don’t think I am ready for this.”

            We stood on the sidewalk and discussed where to eat.  Eventually, we all agreed on Chinese food.  We had passed a Chinese restaurant on the way and so backtracked to it.  It was late, and the restaurant had on a few tables with customers.  Our waiter, apparently, was born in China and, if his grasp of English was any indication, had arrived fairly recently.   We struggled to identify what was in the different menu items.  Finally, my Norwegian colleague found something he liked.

            “Bueno!” 

            He had a habit of exclaiming in Spanish like that. 

            Our waiter’s eyes lit up.  “Quiere esto?”  he asked.  It turned out that, in the New York neighborhood where he lived, Spanish was more common than English.  It was his American language.

            After that, we had no problem.  We ordered the rest of our Chinese dinner in English, confirming the details in Spanish.  It was a great evening.  Smiles all around, including the waiter, who was much relieved.

            It was a globalization moment—a little example of how our new world works.  We are all in this together.  All of us equals in a world, all of us trying to find a language that will help us become part of the new community in which we find ourselves.  There is no room for xenophobia in this world:  we are all strangers here.

Reading Memoirs

I have become a big fan of memoirs.  Not biographies, but books where interesting individuals explore major events in their own lives.

            It began with One Hundred Names for Love, Diane Ackerman’s memoir of life with her husband, novelist Paul West, after he suffered a stroke that affected his ability to communicate.   This was a very personal memoir for me.  I took several courses from Paul when he taught at Penn State.  More than that, I thought of him as a mentor and role model at a time when I hoped to become a writer myself.  I don’t know Diane, but we very likely were both students at Penn State during the late sixties and early seventies.   She is a wonderful writer in her own right, the author of The Natural History of the Senses,among other books.  She had been researching a book about the brain when Paul suffered his stroke.  As a result, her memoir starts with the science of what he suffered and expands to explore how their relationship evolved as he recovered and, ultimately, how he himself experienced the stroke and its aftermath.   The powerful aspect of this memoir, though, is her description of their daily life together, both before and after the stroke. 

            I then read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which starts with the sudden death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, and her life over the next twelve months.   I knew little about Didion at the time.  I discovered that she was an inspiration for a generation of women and that she and her husband had been an important screenwriting team.  From her narrative, I learned that she was also a “tough customer.”  As she describes it, when her husband died, she went to the hospital, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.  When the attending physician came in, she overheard the EMT tell him, “It’s okay.  She’s a tough customer.”   For a while, she takes that as an ironic nickname.   Reading Magical Thinking was a bit like moving into a new neighborhood and getting to know a wonderful, but complex neighbor. 

            I had just finished Magical Thinkingwhen Karen and I took a vacation to Maine.  We stopped by the public library in Kennebunkport, where I was delighted to find a copy of John Gregory Dunne’s last novel.   Interesting how reading can become a family affair.  Didion completed a second memoir—about the death of her daughter—before she died earlier this year.  I have yet to read that one, but I will.

            I knew almost nothing about Patti Smith, the punk rock poet, until I picked up Just Kids, her memoir about her early days in New York and her relationship with the photographer Robert Maplethorpe.   She is just about my age.   She ran away to New York from New Jersey in the 1960s and recounts her life there during the flowering of the American counter culture.  I was amazed to read about a peer’s experiences, so different from my own, but with many of the same cultural contexts as background.  I immediately went out and bought Horses, her breakthrough album.

            This week, I started another memoir—Along the Way, a father-son memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez.  Again, I was confronted by two people who experienced some of the same events that I did—the death of Robert Kennedy, for instance—but from two very different perspectives:  one, a man a few years older than me; the other, his son, much younger than me.   I could identify with both as they talked about their experiences in the 1960s—Martin getting starting his career and his family in a time of cultural revolution, Emilio experiencing a nomadic childhood in a strong family.  I am still reading this one, but it promises to be very revealing of the dynamics between two creative people in a demanding profession.

            What I like about all of these books is the way these first-person accounts are like sitting down and catching up with an old friend.  In the end, I feel a personal connection with the authors.  It is a fantastic literary experience.

Planting Roses

This morning, I planted three rose bushes--three double knockout reds--behind our new house in State College.  I've been looking forward to this for some time, but was excited to actually get planting, even if it was the hottest day of the summer (so far).  I always like to have roses in my yard.  When I was a boy, growing up in my grandparents home, I was surrounded by roses.  My grandmother's mother's name was Rose.  My mother's name was Rose, and Grandma and Grandpa had huge rose bushes lining the long drive up to the house--red, pink and white roses with huge blooms.  Two other bushes, at right angles to the others, defined our front lawn.  At the corners were lilacs (my aunt's name was Lillian).

Roses remind me of what was good about my childhood.  They help me stay in contact with Grandma (whose love of these particular flowers extended even to her talcum powder, which was named "Lilacs and Roses") and Grandpa (who did the hard work of planting and very occasional trimming) and, of course, my mother and aunt (whose names always conjure up the image of "the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley"). 

They help make our house home.

Deadly black lung surges back in coal country - Open Channel

The article contained in the link below is a truly sad reminder of why we need regulation--and enforcement--to protect workers.  Coal companies are not going to protect their workers unless they are regulated.  In this case, regulations were made to control the cause of black lung disease in mines, but the regulations have not been adequately enforced.  Coal companies care only about money.  Government needs to care about people.  That means not only putting regulations on the books, but enforcing them.  We've seen enough examples recently in the financial area to demonstrate that enforcement cannot be limited to fines--corporations have come to see federal fines as simply a  cost of doing business, no different than the bribes they pay overseas.  Enforcement must require that the individuals who break the law pay personally, in some cases by doing time.  Creating environments that harm workers--and even kill them eventually--should be seen as a serious crime.  Shame on these companies, and shame on the individual investors who profit from their awful treatment of workers.

Deadly black lung surges back in coal country - Open Channel

Ben Franklin's Lesson

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.  In it, there is this paragraph that I find to be very important for Americans today:

Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building.  Franklin would have disagreed.  A fundamental aspect of Franklin’s life, and of the American society he helped to create, was that individualism and communitarianism, so seemingly contradictory, were interwoven.  The frontier attracted barn-raising pioneers who were ruggedly individualistic as well as fiercely supportive of their community.  Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character (p. 103).

            It strikes me that what Tocqueville called “inherent struggle” is the yin and yang of American society.   The opposites are, in fact, just as Franklin saw them:  two aspects that, taken singly, are in opposition but that, taken together, define the American character.  Throughout our history, it has been this kind of civic individualism that has allowed Americans to solve problems and to innovate to create a better society.  It is what allowed us to be not just a nation of immigrants, but a nation of immigrants who created a unique culture.

            Today, in our politics and in our culture more generally, we are ignoring the unity that these apparent opposites allow us.  We are focused on the yin and the yang—the sun and the shadow—rather than on the mountain they define.  We need a Franklin to remind us that, as he wrote, “The good men may do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively.”

Reference:  Isaacson, Walter.  Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.