Ending

Before we moved from Florida, we got so caught up in the leaving that I have no impression at all of our last trip to the beach. We didn't take pictures, we didn't commemorate it in any way. And yet it was the Most Sacred Thing for me. The reason, above all other reasons, for being there at all.

Things end while we are doing other things.

I certainly don't recall the last time I used a diaper on any child in my house. The last time I guided a tooth brush over tiny teeth, the last time my oldest sat on my lap during church (He is ten. 5'2" and 95 pounds. It was not recently.) You don't know the last time you breast feed a child. You don't recognize the last time you speak to someone in person, or on the phone.

Every ending is, by definition and experience, another beginning. This thing stops, that one takes its place.

Or at least, we are trained to believe this. Lyrics and hindsight seem to confirm it.

I was struck, this morning, by an artist's rendering of the Alaotra grebe, a bird, once in Madagascar. This bird was last seen in 1985.

I wondered if in his birdy thoughts, in his small bird-brain, he looked around and felt lonely. I feel certain, as he was dying, he had no idea just how alone he was. To be the very last of his species. Or maybe he died with his mate, on their small pond, their weak wings never taking them to other ponds.

Looking at the images of oil gushing into the gulf, I cannot help but wonder who else's end is now proscribed. What is going that will not be replaced? Who's lives - human and creature - are irrevocably changed, or destroyed altogether? What chain of events have been put into motion that cannot be reversed?

I cannot fathom the greed, the speciesist (like 'racist,' for species. Is there a word?) thought that says - de facto, we are better. Might = right. Oil will gush until we figure out a way to save - not the creatures, the habitats, the whole life cycles - but the oil. It is, in a word I rarely use, sinful. It defines, for me, sin.

We raise our children clumsily. Small lessons go missed, homework goes undone, days that should have order often disintegrate into chaos or murmers of mindless television. My only wish in that regard is that the things I say - my rants, my lectures, my late-night talks, stick in their back brains and form them in ways my clumsy day-to-day efforts sometimes don't.

I wish, I hope, I pray at night, that when my own Littles are big and in charge, when they are running things or working for things or doing whatever it is they choose to do to Contribute, that they know Beauty. They promote it. They know Others. They see them, and they care for them. They know Work. They seek it. They see what they have, and they are Grateful. And they recognize Wrong, and work toward Right.

Compassionate, passionate contributors. This - what is going on in the Gulf - what is happening to our beaches, marshes, lives - plant and animal and liquid - is Wrong.

I often forget to pray. I forget prayer at all. But I never forget to appreciate, and am humbled by the imbalances I see in all things. It's not quite religion, but it is a tugging sense of duty and awareness - and I go to church on Sunday in the hopes that in the hour of silence that sense will come to the fore.

Primum non nocere - The basis of the hippocratic oath. An oath, it appears, should ethically have been extended to far more than doctors. To bankers, businessmen, global energy companies.

First, do no harm.

I am praying now for this to resolve. For life to go on, for the ocean to self-correct. I am praying for the impossible. I am praying that this will not mean the End of things we cannot begin to foresee or quantify.

And I am praying for my children to pay attention, to think and see and absorb and carry forward to the next generation a sense of duty, compassion, passion, and heart-moving, soul-motivating, action-inspiring gratitude.

RIP Alaotra grebe.

Blog posts about the Gulf and this tragedy are gathered here. Stop by. Stay a while.:

Aughts

We were three of us at the start. We rang in the New Year with home-made hats. A brand new tiny baby boy (who was not, actually, all that small.) My sister had just adopted two daughters - six and eight, from Khazakstan. We were in a loft with painted harlequin concrete floors, giant drafty windows, and a cat that wouldn't come down from the overhead pipes.

We left the nineties, the loft, the extended family. We moved to New York. We added a nanny and new jobs. Graduate school. Towers fell. Another baby came. Taxis were hailed, umbrellas were spun inside-out in lower Manhattan wind-tunnels. I counted rats and listened to impossibly clear music with the stunning acoustics of subway stations. I learned something of bonuses, and something of crawling on my hands and knees for one more quarter for laundry loads.

We moved to Florida. We had another, decidedly final, baby. We were sand and salt and sparkly things. The Baby Bjorn, jog stroller, crib, and Avent bottles were dusted off and then retired. Hurricanes came. We lived out our thirties and returned to Georgia to each turn, implausibly and prematurely, forty.

This decade, we added cable and iPods and laptops and cell phones. We started carless and rode cabs, subways, trains, planes, buses, boats. We visited islands at either end of the decade - in the Caribbean at the start, British isles toward the end. We lived in three states, four moves. We went from the potential of family to a Family. With suppertime and homework and school dress codes and "go team" and "go outside!" and "go to your room."

Babies spit up sat up and stood up and learned to walk and then ran and talked learned to read and told jokes and did multiplication tables and wrote reports and begged for more time on their DS games. They cry less, they shout more. They laugh and they love and they try to believe in Elves and Santa and tooth faeries.

I attended three funerals and two births. I gave many, many baby gifts - and know dozens and dozens of fully-formed humans that didn't exist in 1999.

We watched the young senator on TV. I said "that is the next president." He said, with the authority and certainty that I know and love, "no way. Too green. Too black. We aren't ready. He isn't ready." And four years later - he was, he is. And we don't yet know what the reach of that is - but I am heartened by the fact that my children find it not a bit strange.

We are still fighting the same war. We've noticed the change in the weather, and we are talking about organic and local and reducing carbon footprints. We are paying down credit cards and know no one still getting real-estate rich.

We are defined by what we lost - in resources, in finances, in faith, in lives - and by what we have gained - in politicians, and expanded worldviews and tolerance and lives. We are prepared, really, for nothing. And we pray, futilely, that those unpredictable events and impacts will be soft and swift and enjoyable. That we will be spared tragedies, personal and global. That we will be kind, and generous, and peace-loving and patient and considerate.

For us, this last decade was about moving and changing and adapting and defining.

When this decade ends, Sebastian will no longer be a teenager. Patrick will be learning to drive. Annabeth will be in the middle of the college application process. We will be in our fifties.

A decade is a really long time. And, as observed by everyone who has lived through more than three of them, they pass at an unfathomably fast clip.

From here, we have no idea what that will look like. But we know - the two of us, the five of us - more than any other decade before - who we are doing it all for. We know that much.

Indoctrination

I have been neglecting the blog, even as I have been thinking about it more and more obsessively.

As much as I have an ongoing narrative in my head, this blog business has me thinking all the time "I could blog this..." or, "should I blog this?" (Never mind that I am enough of a word snob to wince a little at "blog" as a noun, let alone as a verb...)

But blog this is, and blog I do.

So it happens that after an amazing weekend at an amazing wedding (in ridiculous and insufficient summary: kid free, we travelled to Vermont for two men we love who bared their souls for the chance to be together, who bought a perfect house in an idyllic vista in a state that 9 months later enabled them to marry... on a weekend with blue skies and high clouds... covered bridges and food and food and drinks and a woman named Betty with countless gifts, and a man named Jay and a B&B with an abundance of porcelain dogs, and candles lit in little white bags, a hoe-down and a cow cake and live music and hiking and a tram and champagne and bonfires and dad-forged rings and friends old and brand new and every single person generous and joy-filled...) I needed something to blog about. I thought it would be that wedding.

But then all the furor around Obama speaking to elementary school kids came into my sight line. And like so much anti-Obama fury, I needed to know what it was about. I needed to understand it. And I really, honestly, could not figure it out. I read, and I read, and I searched and I read and I was dumbfounded.

Apparently, Obama speaking to children, and public schools broadcasting that speech, was threatening. He would indoctrinate. He wants us communists and socialists and he would start by controlling the minds of the smallest among us.

So, with son home not-so-sick from school (as I was nursing a three-day hangover born of carousing, it appears he was nursing a three-day hangover born of grandparental indulgences. But I digress), we watched it.

He is 9. And to him, every word made sense. Pretty standard American values and honor and all that - bootstraps and effort and the future. Stay in school. Wash your hands.

And at night, that same night, Sebastian (the 9YO son) had a pile of work sent home from school. And he needed to do it. And he complained and he griped and he might've slammed a book shut and got sent to his room. And maybe he had to take dinner in his room because we were STILL a little hung-over and Not Having Any of That.

And later, when he wanted to read himself to sleep, I said, "No. One better. Here. Watch the President's speech again."

And he was... well... (really) excited to "get" to do so.

So I handed him the laptop and he stretched out in his top bunk with the cat. Five minutes later he called "Mom, I am going to pause it and get a pencil and a piece of paper if that's OK."

Really.

And it was (of course it was), and he did.

And he took notes. On his own:

Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer.

You cannot drop out of school and drop into a good job.

The future of America depends on you.

If you quit on school, you're quitting on yourself. You're quitting on your country.

There is no excuse for not trying.

You make your own future.

And the stuff he wrote down - that stuff - a lot of it was in the NYT coverage of That Same Speech.

I do the indoctrinating in this house.

And thank you, Mr. President, for driving home all of my most important points.

Fairness

This is a fledgling blog, and I don't quite know it's tone yet - except that it will be the things that matter to me.  And sometimes that will be my sick kids (two home now) - and when I am feeling less lazy, I may just venture out of my house and into the world at large.

That's what's happening this time.  

Yesterday, I read the letter from former AIG executive Jake DeSantis.  I scanned it, really, and then walked away.  It woke me up in the night, and it gnawed at me on the way to the pediatrician this morning.  

The impression that plagued me, that I kept coming back to, was that somehow Mr.DeSantis was boiling this down to an essence that he somehow defined as fairness.  He makes the case that he personally had nothing to do with credit default swaps (I confess here that I have no real idea what these are, or what they look like.)  And, therefore, it was not his fault that the company failed abysmally and required massive government propping up.

Since it isn't his fault, and since he stayed on to face accusations and a poisonous work and media environment, he was unequivocally entitled to the retention thank you that came in the form of a big bonus - which as part of the larger AIG exec pool, he is now being encouraged to return.

According to Mr.DeSantis?  That's not fair.

DeSantis argues, almost convincingly, that he works real hard, he misses his family.  He has been dedicated, honorable.  And working hard?  Missing your family?  Being honorable in the face of inarguably trying times?  That is worth every penny of the $742, 006.40.  If taxed at 90%, as has been suggested, (and my less-educated math is correct) that would leave $74,006. 

(Although, wait, if I am reading it right - that 742K was already after taxes... so if the tax is increased to 90% from the current 40-50% bonus tax... then the starting point is something close to twice that 742K....and he will actually have considerably more than that to play with. I could be wrong about that.  And, I digress.)

A tidy sum, in any case.  

My own limited experience with bonuses in the banking world (my foray there was short-lived and not at all glamorous) was that our bonuses were always dependent upon performance.  And that "performance" had three tiers:  corporate, group, and personal.  Sometimes, one could all-but-cancel-out another.

Put another way, as an executive, you may be kick ass, but if your company fails to earn a profit- or, unimaginable 8 years ago- fails in a giant, public, horrific way that leaves taxpayers (who include teachers, the oft-celebrated plumber, writers, steel workers and newly fired line workers, middle managers, and corporate execs from other corporations alike) footing the multi-billion dollar bill... you may no longer be eligible for your 'deserved' and hard won high-six-figure bonus.  Even if it is retention.  Even if you did nothing wrong personally. 

But, here's the thing:  when you are paid especially well for a job well done, and you work in an industry that sits in a culture that maintains that as an "executive" you now possess magic powers and can expect high six and seven-figure salaries, bonuses, shares, and options...it feels SO much like you Earned It.  Every single penny.

But I argue, Mr. DeSantis, that the schoolteachers that raised you?  Working "multiple jobs?" And the steelworkers in the "world of closing steel mills" from your youth?  I'm betting that they all worked real hard.  And I further bet that they never dreamed of making in one year the sum of the remaining scraps of your bonus, that you will have the honor of donating to the charity of your choice.  

Something I say to my children ( who are arguably far too young to understand) when they yell "that's not fair," is that inevitably, "not fair" looks a whole lot like "fair" when it is in your favor - and pay attention, because next time, it MAY be in your favor.

Mr.DeSantis spent years in an industry where 'not fair' salaries played out in his favor.  And now?  Whether the bonus discussions are absolutely fair or de facto justifiable is not mine to say.  But it may be time to level things a bit.  It may just be Mr.DeSantis' turn.