Past Blogs

I recently heard a fascinating program on NPR on the virtues of introverts. Bravo! Introverts, for obvious reasons, are loathe to sing their own praises.

People who need periods of solitude, the speaker noted, are often society’s creators and innovators. This view of how things work flies in the face of the current cherished myths on creative thinking. At the moment, group work enjoys a godlike reverence in schools and businesses. We are expected to get our most creative inspirations as a loyal member of a brainstorming team. The best way to kill your grade or your job would be to say, “Let me go to a quiet place and think about that.”

I can report from personal experience that I have never conceived one creative thought as part of a committee given the task of “coming up with ideas.” And I am delighted that research into brainstorming now backs up the frequent futility of these groupthink exercises.

My best ideas strike when I’m alone, without pressure and free to let my mind wander. A long road trip or plane flight is often the incubator. Perhaps the motion puts thoughts in motion.

I love people and believe in contributing to joint efforts. But a distinction must be recognized between coming up with ideas and implementing them. My husband and I frequently collaborate. I conceive the idea for a graphic design and he provides the technical expertise to turn the idea into a reality. We bring our best, but totally different, skills to the table. I also work every week with excellent teachers and librarians. I come with ideas and programs: my peers tailor those ideas for their young people.

I would like to give Dr. Seuss the last word on introverts. He said,”You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.”

I must begin by stating that I still love lizards. Nevertheless, 65 lizards recently almost drove me crazy.

One of my favorite schools asked me to do one of my favorite programs, All About Lizards, for their sixth grade classes. Natural science, and lizards in particular, are not hot topics in our schools at the moment. I was excited about the booking. Then an idea popped into my head. I always conclude my science programs with a short art project. What if I told the students about the Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his wonderful lizard tessellations? Then we could construct a lizard tessellation.

Small alarm bells did go off in my head as math skills are not my forte. To be on the safe side, I decided to show a short video on the math involved in making a tessellation. Then I gave each student a pattern of a lizard to creatively decorate and  carefully cut out. Time did not allow us to make our own patterns.

All was going well until someone handed me the fourth lizard. It did not fit neatly as a puzzle piece into its other lizard friends. I had that old familiar sinking feeling: math is something that works for other people but not for me. In fact, math hates me. I felt a nightmare gearing up.

I took all the lizards home to decipher what went wrong and consult my resident math guy. Within an hour, two of us were going crazy. Several more hours later we solved the problem. The pattern I found on the computer was incorrect, 1/4 inch off and not a true tessellation. Surgery was performed with scissors and Scotch tape on 65 lizards. The post operative lizards were glued into place and all cooperated.

All’s well that ends well. I now have a perfect pattern and the kids have a mural up at their school.

I recently stumbled onto an alarming development. By this stage in life, I should be immune to the craziness of life in America. I am not.

When, I wonder, did Easter baskets morph into the size of wastebaskets and wash tubs?

I somehow had wandered into the seasonal aisle at Walgreens and was staring at a jaw-dropping display of Easter baskets on steroids. A large litter of Saint Bernard puppies would have fit easily into any one of them.

I imagined these behemoth baskets filled with chocolate eggs, jellybeans and peeps. Then I fantasized what a child who consumed these Easter sweets would look like….a cross between a Macy’s Parade balloon and a Pillsbury doughboy. Any group studying the causes of childhood obesity in America would be well advised to check the dimensions of these monster baskets.

I asked some younger moms I know if they are alarmed by the supersizing of Easter baskets. “Well they just aren’t for candy you know. They have to be big enough for the toys, too,” was the typical response. I guess teaching children to consume seven times their share of the world’s resources has to start early.

The best Easter with our children is forever lodged in my memory. We overheard our kids say “they always hide the baskets in such easy places!” Easter dawn arrived and we heard small feet patting around the house and exclamations of “it’s not here.” This scene was repeated for a long time and frustration started closing in.

“Give up yet?” we asked from our warm bed. We did toss out a few clues and the basket was located….on the roof.

Disclaimer: No child was injured in the fun of this basket hunt. Our roof was so low on the sides of our house that it could be reached by standing on a kitchen chair.

“People like to live on the edge,” I told the fourth graders as a prelude to our study of Lake Michigan.

“Tell me some major American cities,” I suggested. For almost every city the students called out, I named the ocean, lake or river that was nearby. The kids quickly made the connection that most of us live near the water, that critical substance to our existence. Coasts and shores draw our species like magnets.

One cloudless night I was on a flight to New Mexico. As we flew south to Albuquerque, what appeared to be a long necklace of sparkling jewels pierced the vast desert darkness below: the lighted cities of the Rio Grande Valley spill down the riverbanks for hundreds of miles.

Most of us are attracted to water for its beauty as well. When we drive on an unfamiliar road, round a bend and catch a view of a sparkling ocean, lake or river, our spirits soar. Real estate prices also soar for waterfront property.

Our lovely blue planet has a fixed supply of water. But, unfortunately for us, the water can change locations and form. The glaciers can melt, lakes and rivers can evaporate or flood and the oceans can rise. The weather news these days is grim. Extremes grab the headlines. Mega storms, mega droughts and mega temperatures are the new norm.

I recently read a brilliant article about global climate change. John Hockenberry, an award winning journalist, wrote in a recent issue of Metropolis of the small scale houses of indigenous people all over the world. These structures can often withstand extreme weather and earthquakes far better than our modern marvels of engineering. Mr. Hockenberry sums up his observations with these thought provoking and hopeful lines:

We have serious challenges to our well-developed human resilience in a seven-billion-person world that finds itself concentrated in cities close to the water’s edge. It may require enormous energy and investment to retool our collective sense of resilience, to scale our expectations, and to be more ready than ever in human history to embrace sudden new realities and alternatives. But if we look carefully at the record of human success, it is our adaptations that distinguish us more than our loyalty to ancient traditions and values. The greatest monuments are the ones that vanished, succumbing to the narrative of erosion and change while humanity moved humbly forward. Despite the challenges of our era and the potentially grim mathematics of changes perhaps already in the cards, resilience, it can be said, is alive and well.

Since most of us are not ready to forsake our love affairs with water, we best be open to the possibility of putting our homes on stilts.

“I just don’t have the right tools,” my husband remarked as he was updating the graphics on my website. It was not the first time I have heard him express similar frustration regarding the lack of proper equipment. I am beginning to suspect his words may be the universal primal cry of the male species.

As always, I sympathized, but in this case didn’t know what to say next. When he is fixing the kitchen faucet and lacks a tool, I just suggest a trip to Fleet Farm for a new wrench. Do computer tools come from that mysterious cloud?

I am fully aware that poor tools make jobs less efficient and, in some cases, more dangerous.”Those blunt little scissors won’t help your kindergarteners learn how to cut,” I advise teachers and parents. “You can’t paint with a brush that is having a bad hair day”, is also one of my admonishments.

But I have a conundrum. Despite a love of cooking, I have woeful kitchen tools. A “Swing-a Way” can opener (purchase recommended by my mother-in-law who swore by them), a 49 year old hand mixer (a wedding present), a 30 year old blender (a Christmas gift from my Aunt Jane), an antique apple corer (a favorite of my dads), a tarnished silver pie server (an inheritance from my Aunt Vi who never baked a pie in her life)…..that’s a representative sampling of my culinary implements.

My counters are not lined with state of the art kitchen tools. My drawers and cupboards are, however, filled with direct links to my family’s cooking history. Sometimes there’s more to tools than the cutting edge.