But some pieces of science are interpreted by university press offices who deliver them back to me. Sometimes, the message is so strong that I am nevertheless impressed, and need tooooooooooooo tell my beloved followers. Like an article I just read: “Modern Parenting may hinder brain development.”
As that kid in Peanuts says, “AAUUGGHH!” I had always believed that civilization progressed only forward. I became a history buff when I was a child largely because I believed a dictum (which was once attributed to Harry S. Truman; more recently, I think, to Winston Churchill and now, to George Santayana.)
Read more on Can past traditions be better than present ones?…
Filed under Family, News, Society by on Feb 6th, 2017. Comment. 
When I was very itty-bitty and went to synagogue, there were certain moments when I felt the presence of the Deity so clearly and strong that my eyes and ears would be fixed on the events on the pulpit and I would tremble. This happened at the point in the liturgy when the Cantor held the Torah over his head. The Torah is the set of scrolls that contain the first five books of the Old Testament, hand copied onto the parchment in Hebrew. This alone was a marvelous achievement for this man with a deformed hip who did not exactly look as if he pumped iron. He sang majestically, and the whole congregation knew this tune cold. Everyone also knew the words.
The words were those of Proverbs 3:18. “It is a tree of life to those who hold it fast….” As a child I regularly visited the cemetery with my family. My Father-Of-Blessed-Memory would speak the prayers for the dead for the whole family, as my mother did not know how and my brother was too young and I probably believed I was, too — except really I was too female, but not yet in any way ready to deal with that fact. Many graves had the shape of — or at least a drawing of — a tree of which the trunk or a major branch had been cut. For a child in a sunshine-filled cemetery, the idea of death being like a pruned version of the tree of life was accessible and acceptable in the context of nature. Read more on From Trees To Networks…
Filed under News, Religion and Politics by on May 7th, 2014. Comment.
At some time in our lives, we all need to be told we’re good or shown the way. A simple story about giving kids from Oakland’s toughest neighborhoods a chance to rise above the violence in their communities strangely touched me and compelled me to write. As I do this, I am not that far from Oakland. I have heard enough to tell you that the culture of violence described is not exaggerated. Patients who see me for marijuana permission are happy and delighted they do not have to drive there.
So there are children who grow up in a culture of violence. I see adults. Not too long ago, I was seeing adults for social security evaluations in Los Angeles. Many of them had been caught in crossfire, perhaps shot on their way to the supermarket or even in front of their own homes. They told me they did not know why or by whom, and sometimes they still had bullets in them somewhere. Other times it was just a memory that so overwhelmed them that the quality of their post-traumatic stress disorder was like the sort of thing that you see in Vietnam veterans. Read more on It Takes So Little…
Filed under Family, Government, News, PTSD, Violence by on Jan 25th, 2013. Comment.
“How in the world do you know how to say that in French?” I asked my hostess, in French. The reason for that was simple — we were in France and she was French. In fact, she was my closest friend at that time and in that place. As I look back, she was one of the best friends I have ever had, in a basically friendless world where I have received few favors. She told me — as we stood in front of a cranberry display on the Market of the Rue Mouffetard, in Paris — that she had learned the word when she had been on the team that discovered that DNA (and not protein) was the hereditary material. Afterward she had a year of sabbatical in Cleveland, Ohio at the Case Western University, and they grew cranberries somewhere around there. Her friends had known that this strange little fruit did not exist in France, so they showed it to her, and somehow they had tested and exchanged vocabulary, just as I had with her.
Although I had been born in suburban Boston, I had not seen cranberries growing in a bog until a high school road trip. My class had traveled to see Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction of the Mayflower (so tiny — they must have been really cramped) and other such things I had been told existed no other place on God’s green Earth except for Cape Cod. I was glad I had my French friend to help me break such myths of chauvinistic rubbish. How strong the myth had felt, how deeply I had believed it, and for so long. Read more on Canneberges?…
Filed under Family, Holidays, News by on Nov 22nd, 2012. Comment.
On A Cat Aging
by Sir Alexander Gray
He blinks upon the hearth-rug
And yawns in deep content,
Accepting all the comforts
That Providence has sent.Louder he purrs and louder,
In one glad hymn of praise
For all the night’s adventures,
For quiet, restful days.Life will go on forever,
With all that cat can wish;
Warmth, and the glad procession
Of fish and milk and fish.Only – the thought disturbs him –
He’s noticed once or twice,
That times are somehow breeding
A nimbler race of mice.
MERLIN
I loved Merlin – King Arthur’s court wizard — when I was a kid and that was just about the time that Disney came out with “The Sword in the Stone.”
WOW – nearly 50 years ago!
Later I was to love the Arthurian legend in many deep and symbolic ways — love it so much that for a long time I kept a light-up, plug-in sword which was (actually, fairly easily) removed from a plastic pseudo-crystalline rainbow light-shooting stone. Doing so didn’t make me a queen of anything, though.
It is almost impossible, I think, to be human and anything more than partially literate without knowing the splendor of the Arthurian legend.
Fast forward to the present, and I am a wizard in my own way – a doctor. I wanted every patient to have the smiling sense of the Arthurian splendor that I had when I pulled that ersatz sword from the ersatz stone. Most of them did, until that piece, like many dear to me, was lost in a series of moves.
Filed under Aging by on Mar 9th, 2011. 1 Comment.