Day 484: Parental Guidance

Author: Nancy Gibbs (TIMES Essayist); May 17, 2010

Cancer hands you red-hot shoes and makes you dance with death every day for the rest of your life. So the question is, Who gets to lead? And what can the rest of us learn from watching?

Bruce Feiler is a writer with diverse interests and an adventurous spirit. His best seller Walking the Bible, about his 10,000-mile trek through the Holy Lands, became a hit PBS series; he wrote a book about his year as a circus clown and one on Abraham--nine books total, but none like his latest, The Council of Dads. It was basically born the day doctors told him there was a malignant, aggressive 7-in. tumor in his femur, a cancer so rare fewer than 100 adults get it a year. He was 43 years old, lying on his bed, wrapped in sudden uncertainty, when his 3-year-old twin daughters raced in, twirling and laughing. "I crumbled," he recalls. "I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the ballet recitals I might not see ... the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down."
(See the Landscape of Cancer Treatment.)

From that dark place came the need; a few days later came the notion, when he began making a list of men who represented, in concentrated form, all the qualities and memories he most wanted his girls to encounter, which they might not get the chance to absorb from him. One of those men he had known since the sandbox, one had been a camp counselor, another a college roommate, another a business partner, six of them in all. My girls have a great mom and a loving family, he told them. "But they may not have me. Will you help be their dad?"

And thus was born the Council of Dads, the friends he hoped would teach the lessons, send the signals, say the things he would have when his daughters fail a test, win a prize, fall in love. Proposing membership, Feiler recalls, felt like proposing marriage. The conversations defy the image of awkward men allergic to sentiment. Cancer was "a passport to intimacy"; it drove him to tell his friends why they mattered, ask them to be more involved in his life and particularly in his daughters'.

You could say that he reversed the normal arc: having close friends and having children is like trying to play hopscotch and knit at the same time--theoretically possible but requiring more dexterity than most of us can manage. During our prime parenting years, juggling work and home is hard enough; few of us are so emotionally double-jointed that we can manage much more than a book group, a chat with the other parents in the bleachers, intimacy on the run.

Reading The Council of Dads made me wonder at the great opportunity we miss. Sometime after you have kids, you are told to make a will, name some guardians, and on that occasion you wave, politely and formally, to your mortality as you carefully cross to the other side of the street. It's natural to avoid thinking about what your children would do without you. But being a parent involves planned obsolescence. We actually want children, as they grow, to expand emotionally, explore independently. Teenagers especially need advice from women who are not their mother, guidance from men who are not their dad.

This was once the province of godparents: in Renaissance-era Florence, a child could have a dozen of them--an extended family of providers and protectors. But since then, the role has evolved from spiritual mentor to social fixer. In some ZIP codes, preschool admissions officers find they get a lot of requests to serve, and Hallmark now makes a couple dozen Christmas-card designs for godparents to send, which is a sure sign the relationship has lost much of its meaning. "Always a godfather, never a god," lamented the much recruited author Gore Vidal.

Hillary Clinton said it takes a village, and she was mocked, but she was right. Is there any greater gift we can give our children than to be loved and lifted by as many adults as possible, beyond immediate family? Single and divorced parents do this informally all the time. Feiler, whose latest tests show him to be, for now, cancer-free, is working with the National Fatherhood Initiative, which has kiosks in 1,500 military bases around the world. The plan is to distribute literature about The Council of Dads and invite soldiers to convene their own; these are men and women who live with mortality and separation.

But maybe it's an exercise for everyone, not just in parenting, but in friendship and self-discovery. I'd like my daughters to have a Council of Dads, a Council of Moms--not, God willing, to replace my husband or me, but to remind us which values we value most, and help us make sure we transmit them.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1987596-2,00.html#ixzz0pZByapVS

Day 470: Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream

Walking on a dream
How can I explain
Talking to myself
Will I see again

We are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
Always pushing up the hill searching for the thrill of it
On and on and on we are calling out and out again
Never looking down I'm just in awe of what's in front of me

Is it real now
When two people become one
I can feel it
When two people become one

Thought I'd never see
The love you found in me
Now it's changing all the time
Living in a rhythm where the minutes working overtime

Catch me I'm falling down
Catch me I'm falling down

Don't stop just keep going on
I'm your shoulder lean upon
So come on deliver from inside
All we got is tonight that is right till first light

Day 467: Goodbye, Cruel World

Courtesy: buttersafe.com

Day 466: Free Lunch

Courtesy: toothpastefordinner.com

Day 465: Best Thing I've Read All Year

The Best Thing I've Read All Year

Published on May 04, 2000

Sunday, April 30, 2000

By SHARON UNDERWOOD

For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT)

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

"Sharon Underwood's e-mail is: sundervt@hotmail.com. I had the chance to speak with her yesterday. Her son is doing fine now, the first in his family to graduate from college.

If you have friends who think Jesus would have been a Republican -- on the side of billionaire Pat Robertson, et al, in opposing Hate Crimes Legislation, opposing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and, yes, opposing Vermont's extension of economic benefits to same-sex couples -- please feel free to forward this column to as many of them as you like. Can't you just see it? Jesus arm-in-arm with the NRA trying to maintain the gun-show loophole? Stumping the Holy Land in favor of a massive tax cut for the rich, while opposing a hike in the minimum wage? Somehow, I think not."

Source: http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/000504.html

Day 462: Underachievers

"We were underachievers. That's why we came to Middlebury. Chuckle."

-C Burleigh

Day 457: Worship of the Intellectual Mind

Listening to Deadmau5 - I Remember
Feeling like time's runnin out!

Health.

My mother always told me to prioritize my own health (and among others) over schoolwork and GPA's. No matter how many times I would nod in agreement but just do my own thing, she still never ceased urging me to get a good night's rest and finish the rest of my work early in the morning. She would tell me that by overly occupying myself with schoolwork, I would lose out on the good things in life - my health would suffer, and I would miss out on precious relationships with other people. Really - who knows what amazing relationships you could have built if you have devoted more time into them.

One thing I complain too often about Middlebury College is the agonizing difficulty in forming meaningful relationships with people. People here in general are just obsessed with "success". Without trying to sound too naive, what if everyone prioritized other good things over academics? How differently would people behave, and what kind of community would we see?

Kids should listen to their parents, and even more when they have important things to say.