Noise Reduction
quiet reflections on life in a loud worldArchive for March, 2008
How Similar Are They?
I admit it: I’m a one-project-at-a-time writer, and again this week I was working on fiction. In other words, I don’t have much available for the blog. But I do want to point out something I noticed in the paper yesterday.
Anyone who’s been following the US presidential campaign knows that there are a handful of themes referred to repeatedly in the news coverage (race, gender, whether the extended Democratic contest is hurting the party, whether John McCain really is a straight talker, and so on), but none seems less contested than the idea that when it comes down to policy, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama really aren’t that different. I’d accepted this. They were different in other ways, I’d thought, important ways, but not policy ways.
Then yesterday morning my husband directed me to Obama’s speech on the economy, which I read just minutes before I sat down with the paper to read an article about it by New York Times reporter Michael Powell. In the middle of the article, Powell wrote: “Much of Obama’s speech, however, served as a reminder of the thin policy differences that separate his views from those of his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton gave a speech this week in Philadelphia on the housing crisis, and as often the two Democrats have walked in step.”
I read this as fact. I didn’t question it. I read the next paragraph – “Both Obama and Clinton spoke of an economy that binds the fates of financial institutions far more closely to those of Americans than many might guess.” – and looked forward to the evidence, which, when it came, gave me pause. Powell wrote,
Clinton said, “In today’s economy, trouble that starts on Wall Street often ends up on Main Street.” And Obama said: Americans must renew “that common interest between Wall Street and Main Street that is the key to our success.”
I don’t know about you, but in terms of meaning, perspective, tone and yes, policy implications, it seems to me these two statements are significantly different. Why does everyone keep saying they are the same?
Focused on Fiction
Pearl Cornioley, I Wish I’d Known You
I like obituaries, and have for a very long time, probably for the same reason I like social history: I like learning about other people’s lives. I came across the following the other night as I read through the newspaper with a glass of wine in hand, the husband’s delicious chicken stew warm in my tum and the hobbit fast asleep downstairs. The headline alone was enviable, but to read on was to be transported back through the last century, and to be inspired. Funny enough, I came across it right after reading the latest about the Geraldine Ferraro Barack-Obama-is-where-he-is- because-he-is-black absurdity, and I liked imagining what Ms. Cornioley would have said to Ms. Ferraro. Something blunt and French, I thought. Something much more cogent than the feeble “Oh shut up already” I felt like saying when I read the story. I mean, come on. Is anyone else as sick and tired of this gender-race chatter as I am?! Both women and black people (which includes black women, I might add) get shafted in this world – even people who think this is the divinely inspired way of things know that this is true. So why is someone as accomplished and intelligent as Geraldine Ferraro spending time saying stupid things that pit them against each other? Why is she fueling a fire that threatens to destroy the tender green grasses of a re-energized, optimistic, confident Democratic Party? I came across a blog the other day that was raging with anti-Obama feeling, sourced primarily in the fact that he was a man. I just can’t understand that. I mean, sure, as a woman, I notice that Hillary Clinton is treated differently as a result of her sex. For example, in the YouTube/CNN Democratic debates that I watched a couple of weeks back (very interesting if you ask me, I recommend a view), when the candidates were asked to say one negative and one positive thing about the candidate to their left, John Edwards said he wasn’t sure about the color of Hillary’s coat. Ha ha, what a chuckle. Not. It was a relatively benign but obnoxious comment in my opinion, and it revealed that, regardless of what Edwards thinks of Clinton’s policies and politics, at some level, he also sees (and probably always will see) her as a woman, meaning, in this instance, an object whose clothes should have made her attractive but (in his opinion) didn’t. Did any of the other candidates have his outfit commented on? No. Did this annoy me? Yes. But did it influence my opinion of candidate Clinton in any way? No. If anything, it made me think less of Edwards, but it was just one of hundreds of details I absorbed from the debate and not even close to the most important one. As far as I’m concerned (yes, my rant is coming to an end here), Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both good candidates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, and they are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, not White Woman and Black Man. To succeed as President of the United States, they will have to be able, with intelligence, articulateness, diplomacy, wit, experience, charisma, power and wisdom, to transcend their respective woman-ness and black-ness, so as to influence and lead with all of their capabilities. I think they both are able to do this, so what I’m evaluating is how and in what directions will they influence and lead.
Anyway, back to Pearl Cornioley, whose obit started this post and will end it. What a life! I do wish I’d known her, and I’m very glad she got to live to the ripe old age of 93. Hope you read right through to the end.
“Pearl Cornioley, 93, a British agent who led Resistance Fighters,” by Douglas Martin (as reported in the International Herald Tribune).
Pearl Cornioley, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to work as a courier between the British and the French resistance and rose to command 3,000 underground fighters, died on Feb. 24 in the Loire Valley of France. She was 93.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed to The Associated Press by Caroline Cottard, the secretary of the retirement home where Cornioley lived.
Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves. She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.
Her unit interrupted a railway line that connected the south of France to Normandy more than 800 times in June 1944, the month of D-Day. It also regularly attacked German convoys.
Sometimes carrying a case of cosmetics to pose as a traveling saleswoman, she had many brushes with danger. She hid in a cornfield as German troops fired random shots into the field. She was almost killed by a resistance leader who doubted her identity. The Germans offered a million-franc reward for her capture.
Pearl Witherington, as she was known at the time of her wartime exploits, was British by birth and French by upbringing. Her code name was Wrestler, her nom de guerre was Pauline, and in wireless transmissions to Britain, she was “Marie.”
Cornioley was an operative of the Special Operations Executive, which the British formed to support and coordinate resistance in the occupied countries of Europe. Agents from many walks of life, from business to journalism to academia, joined what was essentially a by-invitation-only club. Women were welcome because they might be viewed as less suspicious, and many proved to be excellent agents.
‘The girls who served as secret agents in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive were young, beautiful and brave,” Marcus Binney wrote in his book “The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive” (2002).
“At a time when women in the armed forces were restricted to a strictly noncombatant role in warfare, the women of SOE trained and served alongside the men,” he continued. “They fought not in the front line but well behind it.”
Cornioley stood out. In his book “Set Europe Ablaze” (1966), E. H. Cookridge called her “one of the main pillars of the network” of the SOE and the resistance fighters they supported. She was the only woman to become a network leader.
Cecile Pearl Witherington was born in Paris on June 24, 1914. A great-grandfather was a chemist who introduced the recipe for Worcestershire sauce to Lea & Perrins, and a grandfather was an architect in London, according to Binney. Her father traveled the world for a Swedish company that supplied paper for banknotes.
Her father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits shattered the family, obituaries in British newspapers said. As the eldest of four daughters, Cornioley started working at 17 as a secretary and made extra money by teaching English at night.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, she was working for the air attaché at the British Embassy. The family left Paris in December and followed a circuitous route to London. There, Cornioley got a job at the Air Ministry.
But she burned with anger over France’s defeat and began searching for a way to fight back. Luckily, her French was superb.
“And anyway I didn’t like the Germans,” she was quoted as saying in an obituary in The Independent. “Never did. I’m a baby of the 1914-18 war.”
Through an acquaintance, she found her way to the SOE, which she joined on June 8, 1943. In training, she was recognized as the best shot, male or female, the service had seen. The commander wrote, “Very capable, completely brave.”
On the night of Sept. 22-23, she parachuted into France, near Châteauroux. Her two suitcases landed in a lake, where they were lost. Within hours, she was reunited with her French fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had escaped from a German prison camp and joined the resistance. The two then worked closely.
This mix of love and war has caused many to see Pearl Cornioley as the inspiration for Sebastian Faulks’s popular 1998 novel, “Charlotte Gray.” In 2001, the book was made into a movie of the same name, directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Cate Blanchett.
Cornioley insisted that romance was not her motivation for going to war. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2002, she said: “There was a job to be done. I didn’t put my life at risk just so I could be with Henri.”
But in October 1944, after being separated and almost killed, the couple made it to London, where they married. They moved to Paris, where Henri Cornioley worked as a pharmacist and Pearl Cornioley as a secretary for the World Bank.
He died in 1999. Pearl Cornioley is survived by their daughter, Claire.
In 1995, Cornioley published her memoirs, which she wrote with Hervé Larroque. One tale concerned a “really cute” rabbit she took everywhere with her. The rabbit was oblivious to machine-gun fire.
Cornioley received many honors, but the one that stuck in her mind was the one she turned down. That was Member of the British Empire, or MBE She had been offered the civil version, not the military one.
She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely “civil.”
Backing Away From The Brink, A Tale of Domestic Power Sharing
This week, like every other, there are many subjects about which I could write. For example, I could write about Hamas and Israel lobbing missiles at each other (again). About the Venezuelan troops approaching Colombia because Colombian troops entered Ecuador earlier in the week. About the underground vault that is being built in Svalbard, Norway to safeguard hundreds of thousands of plant species against disasters like climate change and chemical and nuclear war. On brighter notes, I could write about Drew Barrymore donating $1m to the World Food Program, about opposition parties in Kenya giving power sharing a go, or about the still-interesting race between Obama and Clinton in the U.S.
Yet, I choose to write about my life with my baby (again). Ho hum. Compared to all that, it sure does seem simple. However, the fact is, my life with baby is a pretty big part of my life. So can I really avoid writing about it for the sake of feeling grand? Nah. Besides, there are plenty of other people writing about the above, and maybe the following will resonate in ways I can’t imagine (she writes, hopefully).
So. One thing you should know before getting into this post is that my baby, AKA “the hobbit” (so called because he is small, eats frequently with gusto, and has a generous, hobbit-like demeanor; not, as some have guessed, because he is hairy) really likes cleaning floors. I mean he REALLY likes cleaning floors. With big brooms, dust brooms, wet mops, dry mops, sponges, cloths, sticks, hammers, hair brushes, tooth brushes, whatever. He simply loves the movement. The sweeping of his arm back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The other day, I got a report from his day care teacher that said he’d spent part of his afternoon “cleaning the floor with the brush.” I had to laugh. That’s my baby! I’ve tried to figure out what it indicates developmentally, and maybe one of you readers will be able to illuminate this for me, but really, I don’t much care, because the fact is, sweeping makes the guy happy. It has for months and months, so much so that when my mom visited way back in October, she was inspired to buy him his very own, very attractive, very very zebra-striped broom, brush and dustpan set (which he LOVES). He is very focused when he’s cleaning. Very purposeful. He can do it for a half hour at a time, sometimes longer. Huffing and puffing as he maneuvers the big broom around tight corners or uses the tiny sponge to conquer the expanse of the kitchen floor. And I love watching him go at it. It’s great.
So, now that you know that, you should also know that we keep his zebra broom set behind a door just off the kitchen, at the top of the back stairway, of which the hobbit is afraid (because it is dark, steep and yes, a little scary).
And now that you know that, I can begin.
Starting in my teens, I spent a lot of time with children. I babysat often, worked at a day camp, played with my friends’ kids and spent a lot of time with my nieces and nephews (of which there are 8; 8 unique little creatures). From these experiences, I formed a couple of theories about babies and children, one of which says that they almost always understand what is happening or being said to them, they just take about 40% longer than adults to react. Taking this a step further, I concluded (based on very scientific observations, of course) that because most of us adults are usually in a hurry, we often fail to account for this extra time and consequently cause a lot of frustration for both parties.
I mention this theory as a lead-in to a sort of confession, a sort of public admittance that the other day I almost forgot it, and consequently, almost fell into a whole lot of frustration. Fortunately, I came to my senses just at the brink of a real power struggle, about which I’m still feeling a big Phew.
Here is what happened: The hobbit had just finished his dinner, and while I did some cleaning up and some snacking on the bits he hadn’t eaten (gross-sounding I know, but this is a confession, so full disclosure seems especially important), the hobbit walked to the door of the back stairway, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled with extreme caution to his zebra broom. Then he carefully dragged it into the kitchen. He’d never approached the back stairs this way, so I was a little surprised.
Anyway, as I snacked and tidied and listened to the BBC, the hobbit did his sweeping thing. What a merry pair we were. For a while.
Probably twenty minutes passed before I announced that it was time to stop cleaning and head downstairs for a bath. The hobbit looked at me earnestly while I spoke then went back to sweeping. This, I expected. After all, my announcement had come because I’d been watching the clock. The hobbit does not watch the clock. He just lives, which is great, if a little unpractical at times, and a pretty good argument for the existence of parents. Anyway, a few minutes later, I crouched down beside him and said, “I know you’re having a ball here babe, but you’ll be able to have a ball tomorrow, too. You’ll be able to sweep up a storm in the morning if you want to. But now it’s time for bath.” I smiled. I put my hand on the broom and applied a little pulling pressure.
The hobbit tightened his grip and applied a little pulling pressure of his own.
Uh oh, I thought, and then I took a deep breath. I said, “Sorry darlin, I know you want to keep sweeping, but really, it is time to stop,” and again I pulled at the broom, and again, he pulled back. My smile got tight, my tone a little less cheerful, I pulled at the broom. He pulled back, started to cry, and began moving toward the back stairs. I took the broom away. He threw himself down and pounded his forehead on the floor (as one does). My patience was just about tapped at this point, but then, suddenly, I remembered my little theory, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I had overlooked something. Maybe, just maybe, he was trying to return the broom to where he’d found it. After all, hadn’t I been trying to instill this virtue in him ever since he started moving things from one place to another?
I tapped him on the shoulder and offered him the broom, then waited.
He stopped wailing and looked up at me. I said, “Listen little one. If you are going to put the broom back where you found it, you can do that, no problem. But if you sweep just one centimeter more of this floor, I’m going to take the broom away no matter how loudly you cry.”
I waited.
He stood up and reached for the broom. Just for good measure, I repeated the terms of the deal before relinquishing it entirely. I was prepared for anything you understand, especially the unpleasant task of taking the broom away and carrying the very heavy, very strong hobbit kicking and screaming downstairs. But once again the theory proved its merits: With great sense of purpose, he took hold of the broom, dragged it to the back stairs, got down onto his onto his hands and knees and put it back where it belonged. Then, steadying it, he crawled back out, threw a terrified glance down the stairs, and came running into my arms.
That’s my baby!
(Okay, so I haven’t offered you a solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Or a penetrating analysis of the US presidential campaign. But this is my life these days, and this is my blog. Maybe next week I’ll go to Norway to check out that seed vault. Or maybe I’ll just get out a little more. Until then, happy living.)
Happy Mother’s Day
Here’s a benefit of being an expatriate I hadn’t expected: I get to celebrate my motherhood twice. English Mother’s Day (actually called Mothering Sunday) was yesterday (Sunday) and I had a great day. It all started at Mass on Saturday evening, when I was unexpectedly applauded and given a daffodil along with all the other mothers there. Then, Sunday, I slept in while the husband had first breakfast with the hobbit, and I actually felt refreshed when I joined them for second breakfast. Next, I volunteered for market duty so the husband could putter around the house with the little fella, and had the pleasure of bumping into some friends on my way (and they say London is a big city…). I walked with them a few blocks, delighting in the fact that it was just little old unencumbered me, them and their cute baby, and then I shopped slowly at the farmer’s market under a blue, blue sky. Finally, I stopped to sit on a bench and eat one of my favorite things – a sausage sandwich – before heading home. So far so good; and it only got better.
As the hobbit was finishing his lunch, we gave him his first haircut, which was a total success, if a little confusing for him, especially when we spritzed his hair with water. (This was actually a little amusing for us, I must admit. His confusion and the the scrunched-up face he made when we spritzed, I mean. Call me cruel, but it was just too cute.) Quickly, he got into it though, helping to comb his hair along the way. He really wanted to help with the cutting, too, but we had to draw the line somewhere, and just this side of sharp scissors seemed a pretty darned wise place to draw it, no? After that, we went out to buy him his first pair of real shoes! What a delight for this mom. Up to now, the guy has had these soft shoes that were great when he was crawling and just starting to walk, but now that he’s getting on toward running! Let me put it this way – the minute he had the first shoe on, he started stomping his foot like a wild man. He was laughing and honestly, I’ve never seen anyone so happy about shoes in my life. It reminded me of the good old days when my own mom would buy me sports shoes and I would go around showing everyone how much faster I could run with the new ones. Happy guy. Happy me.
On our way home, I stopped into a funky little massage place I’ve been eyeing for a while and found that yes, they could fit me in for a 30 min head, neck and shoulder rub. Whoopee! The husband and hobbit headed to the playground and I got to sit in a comfy chair and have some of my knots worked out. It was a totally unfussy pleasure, and completely without the bells, whistles, “relaxing” spa music, essential oils, and fluffy bathrobes that often make the experience of massage a little too precious for my taste. Ahhhhhhhhh.
We got in some family laughs before the hobbit zonked, and then we had a real hog up of a dinner (as my dad might describe it): enormous hamburgers and caesar salad by me, fried potatoes and ice cream sundaes by my husband. Wow-wee. Over dinner we caught up with each other before he heads off on another few days of work travel, and over sundaes we caught up with our friends on Lost, who just keep on being lost, albeit, fortunately for us, in an edge-of-the-seat sort of way.
A little reading before bed (Dreams of My Father, by Barack Obama; which I enthusiastically recommend), and boom, I’d say that was the best mother’s day I’ve ever had. And there’s another one just around the corner. Lucky me.
Let’s hear it for the mothers!
