When Suzanne and Erik got married, it was a great occasion for photographs of family members who are seldom all in the same place at the same time. My sisters-in-law are especially good at seizing these opportunities, and Lisa made sure I lined up with my siblings at the rehearsal dinner. Here we are.
The brother on the left is usually found in Wisconsin, where he does research on retention of organ transplants. I’m the short one. The next brother lives in California and writes business books. My sister is an MD in New York City. I can’t remember when was the previous time we were all together.
I used to tell stories about one Sammy Seal to the boys. (They were older than my sister. She got other stories.) For reasons that have become clearer over the years, the stories were mostly about Sammy escaping from his pen at night and having adventures and then coming home. Recently, I saw a cute video that reminded me of those stories. I call this short clip “Freedom? Freedom!”
One of the most fun things about being a mom, I think, is seeing your grownup child developing into a really great parent. Here is proud papa John when our grandson was only a few months old. And here is John’s dad, a proud grandpa, yesterday.
And while we are on the subject of fathers, I don’t mind telling you that Suzanne’s company, Luna & Stella, has just added an intriguing gift for men — cufflinks designed to hold birthstones of your choice, a bit like a locket. You can get the cufflinks with birthstones of the dad’s loved ones, or you can get them empty and ready for your own mementos. Here’s what they look like. I could picture small treasures from children in them or a miniature fishing fly for a fisherman or baseball memorabilia — whatever the imagination suggests.
Send comments to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com. I will post your comment in an entry.
I’ve been thinking about a book I read earlier this year, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, by Arika Okrent. I thought it was a hoot! Even though some parts were impenetrable to anyone not a linguist like the author, I really enjoyed it. Okrent is a very good writer and knows how to choose and lead up to the funniest aspect of a constructed language — or of the inventor. I learned a ton of random facts, and I thought I knew it all, having a decent knowledge of Esperanto. Turns out, there are more than 900 known invented languages. One that was invented to express a woman’s perspective is Laadan and has words like this: “radiidin, non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”
Okrent gets into the wildly varied reasons people invent a language and why natural languages are more flexible. She covers some languages in depth (like Star Trek’s Klingon, invented only for artistic fun). I loved the part about the U.S. Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation asking “semiotician” Thomas Sebeok in the 1980s how to post warnings that would last 10,000 years on waste-storage sites. Sebeok recommended posting signs in all known languages, plus pictures, icons, and all sorts of symbols, and having the keepers every 250 years rethink the warnings based on current messaging. He also recommended creating a spooky mythology around the site that would be passed on from “priest” to “priest” beyond the time they could be expected to know the reason for it. All they would know is the “curse.”
Too many great tidbits to describe here. I laughed all the way through.
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Asakiyume writes: Your mention of Thomas Sebeok’s foray into how to convey a warning about nuclear waste sites reminded me of this article, “This Place Is Not a Place of Honor,” by Alan Bellows, which includes interesting images designed to convey horror and stay-away-itiveness.
The poetry of it–it horrifies viscerally.
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
I met my friend Mary Ann at the famous management journal where I met Asakiyume. Like Asakiyume, Mary Ann has too big a spirit for business management articles and has for the last 10 years been in a more artistic field. From soup to nuts, she edits craft books for Quarry — that is, she finds the authors and designs and edits the books all the way through page proofs. She has been instrumental in moving the field from how-to manuals for specific projects to a broader and more intriguing perspective. Her approach can be summarized as “here are some ideas about how to do a creative project; take the ball and run with it.”
Mary Ann was in the area last week to check in at Quarry headquarters. We arranged to meet yesterday in a suitable venue — an independent book store, with a nice coffee bar and extras like muffins and Vietnamese salad rolls.
It sure is fun to talk to artistic friends. Mary Ann gave me some great leads on websites that I have already shared with friends. Here is a fun one belonging to Massachusetts-based artist agent Lilla Rogers. Another one, Urban Sketchers, contains wonderful sketches from all over the world. (Perhaps you would like to add your own.)
Mary Ann’s latest craft book is Playing with Books, by Jason Thompson, and it looks wonderful. Check out the book on Jason’s website, Rag and Bone.
Mary Ann and I were happy to see that the book store we chose to meet in had some Quarry books. But later in the day I checked out a craft store in Concord (MA) and was disappointed that their books were mostly from another company.
In spite of my disappointment about the books they carry, I love this craft store. It has a great new concept. You can work on crafts there and just dabble, just try things out, while having a nice sandwich or George Howells coffee. Because the idea is to try out the equipment and materials and find out if you want to go deeper after some dabbling, the store is called Dabblers.
This blog is a project of birthstone jewelry company Luna & Stella. I will post comments of readers who contact me at suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com.
On the Tuesday after Memorial Day I ran into a woman I know who works in another department. She grew up in New York City, where her father worked at the United Nations. Her family is from Pakistan. After inquiring about her weekend, I learned that she had cooked for 80 by herself, serving everyone in her backyard! The meal sounded amazing, so I asked her to e-mail the menu to me.
hi, here was my menu, enjoy!
mixed vegetable pilaf, BBQ chicken with various spices, beef kabobs, fenugreek and potatoes, samosas filled with ground chicken, corn, cow’s feet, naan, yogurt, Pakistani bread pudding
Cow’s feet/trotters are considered a delicacy in Pakistan. Mine took 7 hours to make of which 6 hours were cooked on the regular stove and one hour was in the pressure cooker. Ideally, you should be able to cook them for about 75 minutes in the pressure cooker. However, since I was making such a large quantity I decided to cook them on the stove. After six hours, I gave up and cooked a few batches separately in the pressure cooker 🙂
So I got to thinking, I wonder how many different kinds of banquets prepared by people from different countries of origin are being cooked for backyard parties on Memorial Day. Or July 4. What a recipe book that would make!
Do you publish cookbooks? You may take the idea and run with it. This book will surely be too heavy to carry, given all the different groups that make up America. You may have to make it an online e-book.
Reader Asakiyune writes, “The woman who cooked for 80 TOTALLY INTIMIDATES ME. Cooking for 10 is about all I want to ever try managing! … maybe 15 or 20. 80? 80?? Yowza. And I liked your earlier entry, on the group doing mild ecumenicism for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I hope you can interest your religious ed director in hosting a lecture by the organizing woman.
When my daughter-in-law was about to be a mom and present me with my first grandchild,
her sisters gave her a lovely baby shower.
A couple of the women I spoke to there told me about a book group they enjoyed called Daughters of Abraham, located in a number of towns. As the organization’s website says, they are “a group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women who want to deepen our knowledge of our own and one another’s faiths. By reading books that teach us about each other’s faith traditions and learning about the practice of our respective faiths, we hope to increase our respect for all the Abrahamic religions. We are committed to building relationships among us.” They find that reading books and sharing the perspectives and insights from their different backgrounds is rewarding and fun.
One of the women had gone on to found a nonprofit that does something similar for the children of the three traditions. “Kids 4 Peace Boston is an interfaith, nonpolitical organization of Jews, Christians, and Muslims that fosters friendship, understanding, and respect among children and families in the Boston area, and hosts children [of our three faiths from Jerusalem] in a summer program. … Kids4Peace Boston practices hospitality — a shared value of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We strive to create a place where faith and friendship thrive.”
I have been trying to interest the religious education director at my church to bring in the woman I met at the baby shower to talk about the Kids 4 Peace program.
Please send comments to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com. Suzanne is the founder of the birthstone jewelry company Luna & Stella. She asked me to do a blog and write about anything I felt like writing about, which is exactly what I have been doing. Thanks for visiting.
Every once in a while the urge to write doggerel just overwhelms a person, and you have to give in. It seemed to happen more often when I had young children in the house.
Basil, Basil, you’re a cat
Never try denying that
Stand up for your kitty mother
Turn your back on no cat brother
When the cat god calls your name,
Let there be no cause for blame.
Future generations all
Will praise the cat that heard the call.
Or how about this ditty, which I associate with Suzanne’s friend Joanna, who must have been visiting when the urge overcame me:
Think how lovely it would be
Living always by the sea
Eating muffins with our tea
And jam.
Finally, when Asakiyume and I were working at a famous management journal and hearing lots of jargon, I used one such hackneyed phrase in a haiku I wrote about a dream Asakiyume described:
Watercolor moon
Grows larger nightly and yet
Is trending downward
My father was his class poet at Princeton, and I think he must be turning over in his grave right now.
I think I have always cut articles out of the paper to give people or to post on my fridge. (At the office, I post work-related clippings on the wall of my cubicle.) Suzanne and her brother, John, often teased me about how often the stories were dire warnings in the news. Around this time every year, they would be deluged with clippings about sun screen and melanoma or deer ticks and Lyme disease.
Now that they have grown up and have their own homes, the fridge is rather empty of news articles. But since they are reading this blog, I’ll post a typical dire warning from today’s Boston Globe, something I’ve been harping on since the mid-1990s. (Oh, well. They laughed at Columbus.)
Hiawatha Bray’s column for June 2 is about protecting oneself from possible cancer-causing effects of mobile phones. He has several pieces of advice any mother would love: “make like a teenager, and text instead of talking. Sending SMS or e-mail messages keeps the phone well away from your skull. The farther your brain is from the phone, the lower the risk of brain tumors. If you must talk, most handsets have a speakerphone feature to let you converse at a distance. I often use it because I’m too lazy to hold the phone. Now I’ve got a better reason.”
And a study done in Sweden a few years ago suggests that it isn’t just brains we need to worry about. Cellphones left on in a pocket can affect reproductive function.
Bray says, “I carry the phone on my hip, in a holster which keeps it the required distance from my body. I’ve mocked my wife for losing her Android smartphone in her purse, but carrying it well away from the body is the safest way to go.”
Among children’s books, I especially like books that are fifth-grade level. Although I enjoyed all the “color” fairy books when I was in third grade or so — Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, the Orange Fairy Book, the Rose Fairy Book, and so on — it wasn’t until about fifth grade that I really got hooked. Flashlights under the cover and all. I had a relative who worked for Dan Wickenden (The Amazing Vacation), and she sent me Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and the Narnia books. My cousin Patsy got me into George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. I reread that one a couple years ago, and it’s as great as ever.
After college, I taught fifth and sixth grade for a few years and read to the kids as time allowed. I remember how one class only gradually realized they were really starting to like Frances Hodgson Burnett’sThe Lost Prince. Reading can sneak up that way.
Today I am one of the volunteers who go out from our workplace to an inner-city school where there has long been a tutoring relationship. It started with a team who read picture books chosen by teachers to first graders. Then other teams were added (such as fourth grade math tutoring), and now there are teams reading with fifth graders. The books are chosen by the librarian. Each fifth-grade volunteer has a group of three children, and grownups and children all take turns reading and discussing. Even though the kids see teams once a week, most individual volunteers only go monthly. It’s not hard to fit into one’s schedule. I have learned about a lot of books by volunteering at the school. I already knew about From the Crazy Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, but not about Holes, Maniac Magee, Hatchet, or Hidden Talents, to name a few.
One colleague, having found out that I liked this age level, introduced me to the Golden Compass series. Heaven! I also like her suggestion of The Island of the Auntsand recommend it.
Better sign off. The last time we had a storm like the one outside my window, my computer was hit.
We drove back home from Rhode Island yesterday after three lovely days. The weather had been remarkably warm for a Memorial Day weekend, but very misty early. Every morning that I took my walk, I returned with soaking wet shoes.
On the drive home there was nothing much on the radio, so I read a children’s book aloud. The book had been recommended by Asakiyume because she knows I like children’s books, especially the ones she writes. The book I read on the drive home was Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin, and I haven’t finished it.
So don’t tell me what happens.
These Rhode Island photos show a path to the beach, a small shop on the main street, and fishing boats in the harbor. Comments may be sent to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com.
Last night we finally watched the DVD of “Waiting for Superman.” We had to wait until we were up for it. We knew it would be good, but painful to watch. It’s a documentary about the broken public education system in this country.
I see now why people come away from this movie saying, “It’s the unions.” But although we clearly need to find a way to dismiss bad teachers and reward good teachers, to just say, “It’s the unions,” seems too simple to me. Even if it is true, when you consider the context of poverty, unemployment, the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world, the War on Drugs, three other wars, confused approaches to immigration, Wall Street greed at the expense of the poor and middle class, antigovernment bias, and many skewed political priorities, to lay the problems of inequality in public education at any one door seems too simplistic.
Still, as the movie makes clear, we need to get rid of bad teachers immediately and make sure children get high-quality teachers before they give up hope. Lotteries to get into better schools are too cruel to too many. Activists can check out this site.
By the way, the film is very well done. We loved the creative graphics making the data real and the clips of Superman movies and past political speeches and TV shows.
Reader Asakiyune writes: “I very much agree with what you said about unions and teaching and the documentary–it bothers me when a problem as complex as that is reduced to one soundbite.”
Both because of my job and because of the jobs of many friends and family members, I keep hearing about small business. Suzanne’s birthstone jewelry business is one successful example, and you can read more about its history on the Luna & Stella site. Suzanne’s brother is an entrepreneur, too, in the optics field. And where I work, a number of my colleagues collect data on small businesses and work to improve conditions for them.
At lunch, I heard about an English woman who used to work on GIS mapping for environmental groups in Rhode Island, where I am staying this weekend. Today the woman lives with her husband and children in northern England, where she is into a whole new field (one that benefits the environment, but differently from GIS mapping) — she weaves local wool into scarves, blankets, cushions, and throws.
From a UK site called Keep Trade Local, I learn, “Green business ideas that might benefit the Yorkshire Dales National Park are being offered a cash grant to get started. The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s Sustainable Development Fund (SDF) – now in its seventh year of operation – aims to support new business ideas, community schemes and environmental projects that demonstrate ways of living and working in the Dales and that benefit the National Park and its communities.”
The site notes that support was “given to local businesses producing locally-sourced produce, such as the Sedbergh-based Laura’s Looms. With two grants from SDF, Laura has been able to develop and expand her business creating high quality woven ‘Howgill Throws’ using Bluefaced Leicester sheep fleece obtained from farms in [nearby] Garsdale and Dentdale. She is now selling them both locally and on her website at www.laurasloom.co.uk.”
Laura writes, “I create exquisite handwoven silk and wool scarves and I design and produce The Howgill Range, an exclusive collection of luxurious wool throws and scarves woven from organically processed pure British wool. Beautiful woollen baby blankets and covetable wool cushions can also be found in my online shop, along with the occasional appearance of my one-off, highly textured handwoven throws. I love to weave!”
An aside: Laura’s husband teaches in the international business school where Suzanne met Erik. 🙂
Comments should be sent to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com. And I wouldn’t mind having a photo of bluefaced sheep I could post. It sounds like something out of a fairytale.
Asakiyume answers the call with a photo she found at theshadowsheep.
My friend Asakiyume writes a blog at asakiyume.livejournal.com. Like me, she blogs about whatever interests her. She is also an accomplished children’s author under another name. Today on her blog she shares photos from the natural world she loves to observe and ponder: “Sometimes, you can be so sure the day will fall to rain, and instead the sun wins out. This evening the breeze was running through the long grass, making it undulate and shimmer silver.”
Asakiyume is also the mother of four exceptionally gifted children. One, who is in college, calls herself LittleMetalDrop on YouTube and did this adorable animation for the song “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
Although Asakiyume asked me to hurry up and activate my “comments” function, Luna & Stella is still testing the blog. So for now, please send comments to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com. I aim to include many comments in my entries.
Some mornings when I take my walk, it is still dark out. There is not much going on. Few cars — maybe just the newspaper delivery van, the bakery truck, or town employees flushing out the holes in the sidewalk where the flags go for special events like Earth Day or United Nations Day.
Most often, the other walkers are three elderly gentleman. One walks a King Charles Spaniel. One used to check all the bins for recyclable cans and bottles but has retired from that pursuit. One was a slow jogger a couple years ago but is now just a fast walker.
Then there is the lady on the bicycle. The lady on bicycle has a helmet, a bell, and a bicycle light. Also, she bikes on the sidewalk.
One dark morning I was walking along when I heard the screech of bicycle brakes behind me and turned to find the lady on the bicycle glowering. “I nearly ran into you!” she exclaimed indignantly. “You should wear a reflector vest when you go out in the dark!”
Now I take my walk in the street. There are no bicycles in the street at 5:30 a.m.
After a mostly cold and rainy month of May, the sun shone, and there was a lovely warm wind.
But the weather can change again. A surer sign of summer is something that happens outside my office on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the season. So I’m excited that the farmers market returned to Dewey Square today.
There were lots of fresh vegetables and flowers, baked goods (including bread from Maine’s ever popular When Pigs Fly), nuts, prepared foods, preserves, and more. I ended up buying some nice-looking granola. Also a Swedish almond cake because son-in-law Erik is from Sweden, and I am a sucker for pastries said to be Swedish.
The Farmers Market is at one end of the Rose Kennedy Greenway, across from South Station. I wrote about the Greenway a couple days ago, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
