Archive for the category "Family & Marriage"
 Recently I was e-mailed, via Match.com, by an attractive woman (to the extent that profile pictures can be trusted, anyway) named Kathleen. I love that name, and her profile made her sound like someone I’d be interested in talking to a bit more, so I replied. We exchanged a couple of e-mails and I was thinking that maybe I’d like to meet her in person.
Then she asked me if I liked skiing. I answered honestly. I love skiing, although I’m not great at it and I haven’t been on the hill since I annihilated my knees a few years back. I’d love to get back into it, though, but haven’t so far because I hate doing things alone.
I knew as I hit the send button that I’d never hear from her again. Full story »
  #22: The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson; photographs by Nick Kelsh (1996)
It isn’t often that I get to read someone else’s love letters. But read Rachel Carson’s work and you’ll see that’s just what she’s writing. She writes of the sea with a profound, abiding love.
When I spent time with Carson along the edge of the sea a few weeks ago in Maine, I came across references to a Carson book I’d not heard of before. I had already added one extra Carson book to my reading list, and worried about the possible tangent a second might take me on, but in the end, her work resonated with me too strongly to pass it up. The title was too alluring to pass up: The Sense of Wonder. Full story »
 #11: Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams (1991)
“[W]ithout a mother,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in her book Refuge, “one no longer has the luxury of being a child.”
I am at my own mother’s, thinking about Williams’ words, thinking about Williams’ book. I was first introduced to Refuge last year during a Creative Nonfiction class I was taking, but I didn’t have the time then to read it. Months later, at the start of my “25 Books in 30 Days” challenge, it is one of the first books I turn to. I’ve not been able to write about it yet, though. I’ve had to wait until I’ve come here to my mother’s house in Ashtabula, Ohio, before I could fully process the nature of Williams’ loss.
Full story »
 OK, you blew it. You were supposed to load up with whatever this year’s superduper toy was weeks ago, while it was still in stock. But you got distracted, as usually happens this time of year, and now you’re stuck. And your marriage, and your children’s permanent affections, are now at risk.
Fortunately, Wired comes to the rescue. Specifically, good old GeekDad, who reviews toys and all sorts of other stuff for Wired. And he’s got a list of the five best toys of all time. You might have a quibble here and there, but you can’t deny he’s on to something. Your only problem now is gussying them up as Christmas presents for kids who expect something either (a) glowing, (b) electronic, or (C) alive. But that’s what wrapping paper is for, isn’t it?
I had my editorial all planned out in my head. First, Mississippi was going to be the first state to approve the thoroughly idiotic state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg (a zygote) as a person. Second, I… well, I never got past that first step, because Mississippi voters did the smart thing and voted down an amendment that would have made pregnant women second-class citizens at best, and livestock at worst. Full story »
“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.”
- Henry V, Act II, Scene 2
King Henry V was addressing Lord Scroop, a childhood friend who had sold him out to the French just before the English invasion. If the King couldn’t trust Lord Scroop, who could he trust?
These are tough times for a smartass like me. I want to mock the Kardashians and Newt Gingrich and whatever Twilight movie is about to be released (2 parts? Really? Does she need 2 parts to decide on a crib?). But all I can think about is Joe Paterno. Full story »
“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)
“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)
By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”
I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.” Full story »
by Chip Ainsworth
 Shortly after finishing his three-month, 3,312-mile run from the coast of Oregon to the Rhode Island shore, Glenn Caffery visited his physician and complained that his feet were numb.
“What’d you expect?” the doctor replied.
Caffery, a 49-year-old data management teacher at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, lives in Leyden, a small town in the Connecticut River Valley that borders Vermont. His cross-country pilgrimage was to raise awareness about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed his father at age 68.
“He was diagnosed at 55,” said Caffery, “but it was symptomatic at least two years prior to that.”
On May 19, Caffery stuck his foot into the Pacific Ocean and began his long, arduous journey across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota on toward the Northeast and into New England. On Aug. 17, surrounded by friends and family, he splashed into the Atlantic Ocean at Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island.
Full story »
by Andrea Breemer Frantz
A semester isn’t a lifetime.
But it is enough time to change a life.
***
I put my only child on a plane this morning—the first of three flights that will take her to Kigali, Rwanda, where she plans to study community building and social justice issues for a semester.
Hannah is 20, an English major at a small, liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and among the more mature, independent women of her age I’ve known. And yes, I readily admit I’m not objective on that issue.
Nonetheless, my equilibrium felt decidedly off when I watched her disappear into the crowd beyond airport security this morning. Full story »
 My editor does not want me to post this blog. That should tell you something about the sensitivity around the topic I am about to discuss.
First, some background. Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I observed that pudgy Southern teen girls often grow up to be pudgy women. I expected some reaction, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got, which was to get pelted from every angle. The right and the left. Men and women. Old and young. It was as if I spit into the ocean and caused a tsunami.
OK, at the bottom of the page before you post a blog there is a small box that says “Check to allow comments.” If you check that box, as I do, and write about controversial topics in provocative ways, as I do, then you shouldn’t whine (even though I do.) Full story »
by Andrea Breemer Frantz
“It is one thing to adore a painting…but it is quite another thing to learn from a painted narrative what to adore.” - Clifford Geertz, cultural anthropologist, Local Knowledge
For most of my childhood, my mother’s father was primarily two things to me: 1) a magician with uncanny ability to conjure quarters from my ears and candy from nearly anywhere; and 2) a poet whose artful word craftsmanship I did not inherit. Full story »
 by Tom Shortell
The Supreme Court ruled Monday it’s unconstitutional to ban the sale of violent video games to children, striking a severe blow to lazy parents across the nation.
In a 7-2 decision that cast aside typical alliances of the court, the court ruled that video games as a medium are protected under the First Amendment as free speech. The decision struck down a 2005 California law that forbid the sale of games “that depicts ‘killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being’ in a way that appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors” to anyone under the age of 18. Full story »
 I don’t often do confessional. Yeah, a lot of what I’m going through finds its way into my posts in symbolic fashion, perhaps, but I haven’t done much in the way of personal narrative about my life, even though I have encouraged other writers here to do just that. But maybe this little bit is worthy of a slow news day.
I’m hardly the first guy to get a divorce. My guess is that a lot of other guys in my situation will recognize the sensation of emptiness that consumes the first year (or perhaps longer) after you leave. Once you had a house. Once you had someone to share meals with. Maybe you had a yard and grass that needed mowing and even a small garden to weed. You may have been unhappy and unfulfilled, but you had a life. Full story »
 My dad, David Morgan White, died last September. September 12 at just after 10 in the evening, to be more precise. I had been with him for most of the previous 60 hours. It was a long 60 hours–especially the last 12. We gathered on Sunday morning when the doctors removed the IVs that contained the drugs that were keeping his battered heart going: the coumidin, the lasix, and a bunch of stuff I can’t remember. It wasn’t doing him any good any more. He was conscious and looked around at all of us and said, “If you’re ready, I am.” And the nurse disconnected all the drugs except the morphine, which was making his remaining life tolerable.
The doctors told us that he would go quickly without his support meds–they were wrong. A few hours later, just before noon, my dad woke up and looked around at all of us with a rather surprised expression on his face. “What’s taking so long?” he asked. Full story »
Rockingham County, North Carolina
November 1962
“Go call your daddy and Uncle Kenneth,” Papa says, taking his big thermometer from the scalding trough. “This water’s near hot enough. We need to get to killing these hogs.”
He gestures toward the pen some thirty feet away. The hogs grunt and start away as if they understand him.
“Yes sir.” I rise from my crouch. I have been tending the fire, making the water hot enough for scalding the hair off the hogs after they are slaughtered. I trot up the hill to the house and stick my head in the back door.
“Water hot?” asks my uncle. I nod. He gets to his feet and pulls on his jacket. Daddy puts down his coffee mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Full story »
This is the road to the house where we lived.  It is Father’s Day 2008, and my husband and daughter are already at his parents’ house for the celebration. I am driving, alone, for no reason I care to examine.
Full story »
 Today is Father’s Day, and S&R would like to wish a happy one to America’s dads.
At the same time, and in the contrary spirit that often typifies what we do around here, I’d like to be the one who acknowledges that our relationships with our fathers are often less than we’d hope for. Frankly, some dads are complete bastards, and in many cases they’re probably at least a complex mixed bag. And why not – being a parent is hard, I’m told. This basic reality makes the guys who get it right even more worthy of our love and respect.
It’s no worse than fair to say that my own father lived his life out between Mixed Bagville and the untamed Bastardlands, and truth be told I have a hard time remembering him as more good than bad. Full story »
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