26 May, 2014

{this moment} 107

{this moment} is a Monday ritual that my father started in May 2011, and that I have maintained since May 2014. He described it as "A single image - no words - capturing a moment from the past. A simple moment along my life's Journey - but one over which I wish to linger and savor each treasured aspect of the memories it evokes." When he passed away in February 2014, he left a folder containing images that he hoped to share in the months and years ahead. For some, I share my perspective of the story behind the moment on Thursdays, in a companion ritual called {this memory}. For others, the story is lost in the ocean of time, but I welcome flights of imagination and speculation from readers.

My great-uncle Bill McAleese (my mother's mother's youngest sister's husband) is second from the left in the back row.

{this moment} was adapted from cath's wonderful blog ~just my thoughts. She, in turn, borrowed it from Pamanner's Blog. My dad suggested, "Check out their blogs, and if you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your {this moment} in the comments for each of us to find and see. If you are moved or intrigued by my {this moment}, please leave a comment." I encourage the same.

AECB

22 May, 2014

(this memory: then and now} 1

This is the story behind last Monday's {this moment}.

A simple story: 
1) Me, aged 14 months, in front of our Christmas tree in Oneida in December 1982, wearing my father's boots
2) My son, aged 21 months, in my parents' kitchen in December 2013, wearing my mom's boots. 

20 May, 2014

On bolts of lightning and bubble gum bubbles

Last night, my son and I flew back to Colorado from New York. On the outbound journey, I was optimistic that this would be my last time departing from DIA, perhaps for several years. On the return, I was somewhat depressed to realize that we would likely be repeating the trip again in a couple weeks and then once more at the end of June, when we leave Colorado permanently.

(After some debate, we decided against a cross-country drive. Instead, I'll sell my much-despised Jeep - an applicant for our fellowship nicknamed it the Loathsome Liberty - and we'll fly back. I am looking forward to leasing a new Mustang...I loved my first Mustang, a black 35th anniversary edition from 1999, almost as much as my dad loved his. But I digress again...)

We connected through Chicago, where I tiredly observed a pregnant woman and her husband persuading the Southwest staff to allow them to pre-board. I would have considered it degrading to claim that my pregnancy prevented me to walking down the jetway in a timely fashion, but I am trying to apply a lesson from a college course in Buddhist meditation and practice assuming the best of people...maybe she truly had an unseen and severe medical or psychological condition related to her pregnancy that necessitated the extra time.

During take-off, I pulled out a piece of gum to chew and casually blew a bubble with it. Finn noticed and promptly burst into fits of hysterics, accompanied by outright begging, More bubble, please, Mamma, please more bubble, and more tentatively, I blow bubble? Despite his excitement, both his manners and his grammar were unexpectedly stellar. He was simply delighted beyond belief by the concept of bubble gum. I was delighted to distract him from a piece of waffle that had dropped on the floor and that he wanted to retrieve. He also seemed puzzled by what, precisely, was making the bubbles. When I leaned toward him to give him a kiss with an unpopped bubble, he quickly squirmed away, and when I finally succeeded in planting one on his nose, he squealed in disgust. 

After about thirty minutes, when I was started to worry that my TMJ would never be the same, I glanced out the window at a huge and ominous - though clearly quite distant - storm cloud. I claim no metereological expertise - at first, I thought, wall cloud, but after Googling a bit, I think shelf cloud might be more accurate. It reminded me of this photo by Jason Weingart, initially posted on Twitter, but which I stumbled across while looking up the weather last week.


I pulled Finn away from his iPad and into my lap. He has not been overly interested in clouds thus far - I could stare at them for hours and contemplate their fascinating, frightening, heartbreaking loveliness - but I told him that he needed to watch this cloud very, very carefully, and that if he paid attention, he would see it light up. With lightning, I added, and he repeated, Ligh-een? because he now immediately repeats any new word or phrase anyone says to him. 

We sat very still, faces close to the glass, for a few minutes, and then a remote corner of the cloud flashed. It was subtle, but Finn noticed and his eyes widened slightly. A larger flash followed. Then finally a brilliant bolt burst from one part of the mammoth cloud to another. We watched the eerie cloud-lightning dance until our plane was hundreds of miles past. After I could no longer see the storm, Finn peered over my shoulder, between the seats and pointed excitedly toward the window behind us. His interest never faded.

Last summer, I flew sans bébé directly through an electrical storm for the first time. It was utterly mesmerizing, thanks to my deep faith in science and technology. Doubly so, in fact, because I mean not just that I trusted the plane's ability to withstand of a bolt of lightning, but also because I felt like I had the smallest glimpse of God in the power and beauty of the storm.

My best childhood memories of my dad mostly involve science and the kind of faith that goes with science, a certain belief that curiosity, inquiry, and skepticism are almost without exception really good things. Things to believe it, things to value, absolutely, but also things that go hand in hand with the kind of wonder and awe that many people seek in mainstream religion. I especially remember watching the Nova series on PBS with my dad and dreaming about being an astronaut or an astrophysicist or maybe a biochemist when I was grown up. (I am fairly certain that I devoted much more time to these daydreams than to planning my future wedding.) 

As a grown-up now, I realize that I never believed in a God who made man in His image but that I never stopped believing in the God who is everywhere, who is the mystery of existence, the unknowable answer to our deepest questions. For me, God is there in everything from the mathematical equations underpinning physics, to the Impressionist haystacks I revisited in the Art Institute of Chicago last week, to the chance for a young woman to hold her little boy and watch a storm from 30,000 feet in the air. 

The most important gift I hope I'll ever give Finn is that sense of wonder and awe...knowing that extraordinary things happen every day, that there is meaning in our existence, and even if we never discover it for ourselves, that it is always worth seeking. 





19 May, 2014

{this moment: then and now} 1

{this moment} is a Monday ritual that my father started in May 2011, and that I have maintained since May 2014. He described it as "A single image - no words - capturing a moment from the past..."

{then and now} is a twist on that ritual. People often ask me if my son looks like his father, because he is blonde and blue-eyed, while I am dark-haired and dark-eyed. In fact, aside from those features, we are very much alike in looks (and, for better and worse, personality). Even more so, my son strikingly resembles my father as a young child. He has the exact same shade of steel blue-gray eyes that his grandfather had. Every so often, I stumble across a photo of myself as a child that seems like an echo of one I know I've taken of my son. {then and now} is a space to revel in the sometimes surreal elements of the passage of time.


{this moment} was adapted from cath's wonderful blog ~just my thoughts. She, in turn, borrowed it from Pamanner's Blog. My dad suggested, "Check out their blogs, and if you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your {this moment} in the comments for each of us to find and see. If you are moved or intrigued by my {this moment}, please leave a comment." I encourage the same.

AECB

11 May, 2014

{poetically plagiarized} 24: Mazur

Why You Travel
by Gail Mazur


You don't want the children to know how afraid
you are. You want to be sure their hold on life

is steady, sturdy. Were mothers and fathers
always this anxious, holding the ringing

receiver close to the ear: Why don't they answer
where could they be? There's a conspiracy

to protect the young, so they'll be fearless,
it's why you travel—it's a way of trying

to let go, of lying. You don't sit
in a stiff chair and worry, you keep moving.

Postcards from the Alamo, the Alhambra.
Photos of you in Barcelona, Gaudi's park

swirling behind you. There you are in the Garden
of the Master of the Fishing Nets, one red

tree against a white wall, koi swarming
over each other in the thick demoralized pond.

You, fainting at the Buddhist caves.
Climbing with thousands on the Great Wall,

wearing a straw cap, a backpack, a year
before the students at Tiananmen Square.

Having the time of your life, blistered and smiling.
The acid of your fear could eat the world.


"Why You Travel" by Gail Mazur from Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems. 
© The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

10 May, 2014

A tree grows in Aspen

I can't replace Saturdays with the Tree, but being pretty fond of trees in general, I have more than a few favorite photographs of them. This one is from the Rio Grande Trail in Aspen, Colorado in September of 2013. I'm thinking of turning it into a huge, wall-spanning metal print when we get settled in our new house. 
~AECB

09 May, 2014

More pictures from the Last Day of Classes

I wrote briefly about the celebration my dad's colleagues held in honor of what would have been his final class after 39 years teaching on Wednesday. Here are some more pictures from that day.

Dr. Behforooz, who patiently tutored me in calculus in tenth grade (that post is coming soon and promises to be hilarious), spoke. 

My dad's former student, Dave Roberts, whose writing has been an inspiration to me this spring, took over teaching his class for the rest of this semester. My mom is standing next to him. 


Steve Specht wrote the poem below and read it.

Steve's poem.


The Tree video was played...of course.


When I was in med school, I told a therapist that my parents were so extraordinary, and I was so lucky to be their daughter, that I wasn't sure I deserved to have anything else really good happen in life. It is a bittersweet thought, but my father really was that amazing.

Light For The Navigator, III

Wednesday Without Words

Currituck Beach Lighthouse, Built 1875
On the Outer Banks at Corolla
North Carolina

Originally posted three years ago, my father planned to revisit this series of lighthouses this year. Although he never did, I have chosen to repost these monthly on the day of his passing, in his memory and in celebration of his love for lighthouses.
AECB

See: Birth of Salvation
Digital photograph
Copyright © 2011 Thomas G. Brown

08 May, 2014

(this memory} 106

This is the story behind last Monday's {this moment}.

It's June 2003 and we're in Passau, Germany at the Institute for the History of Psychology. I'm 21 years old, and the Institute's director, Horst Gundlach, has just offered to let me test my hand-eye coordination using this World War I-era flight simulator, intended to assess the aptitude of aspiring Luftstreitkräfte pilots. My dad took the picture. (I'm also wearing a ridiculous purple silk scrunchie, but that's okay, because apparently they're making a comeback.)

Spoiler: I don't have a future in WWI aerial combat reenactment, if that ever becomes a thing that people do.

The stop in Passau was something of a midway point on a three-week research trip that I took with my father. He was exploring topics in the history of psychology (chiefly following Descartes' skull around Europe) and I was killing time - so to speak, savoring life might be more accurate - before starting medical school. Earlier in the year, I had moved briefly to Copenhagen, where I spent most of my time drinking coffee, lingering in design stores and reading Kierkegaard, visited an old friend in Milan, and finally, broke, returned to the States, where I memorably froze in Immigration when asked what I did for a living and replied, "Nothing." (Since it was technically not illegal to be a recent university graduate on an extended European holiday, the irritated immigration agent was forced to let me go with a sigh. What happened to the days when they said "Welcome home!"? Now I get asked if I've ever committed a crime. Once the agent added, "Are you sure?")

Anyway, we had come from Paris via Florence and Leipzig, and were headed back to Copenhagen, then on to Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg, all of which my dad has written about in previous {this memory} posts. Although I was intrigued by the museum, Germany was something of a low point in the trip for me. I am horrifically allergic to Western Europe in the late spring...or at least to something that grows well in England, France and Germany (not as far south as Italy or as far north as Denmark or Scotland) during May and June. My eyes water and puff, and I wander around in an antihistamine-induced trance. (Diphenhydramine, sold as Benadryl in the U.S., was modified to create Prozac, the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for depression, when people noticed that it had antidepressant and anxiolytic effects. I'll attest to that...a few doses of Benadryl make me blithely indifferent to pretty much everything. The sky could fall, and I'd just order another glass of wine.)

In addition to my miserable allergies, I don't speak a word of German...but after France and Italy, my dad was used to relying on me to read signs, ask for directions and order in restaurants. At one point, in one museum, he asked what the tour guide was saying and I replied, "I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T SPEAK GERMAN! I'm just smiling and nodding because that is the polite thing to do!!" And because of the Benadryl.
~AECB

07 May, 2014

On this, the last day of classes, ever

This morning I attended my last class of my third postgraduate degree. Once upon a time, I would have been less precise, but after four degrees, residency and fellowship (which involved an awful lot of lectures, if not anything called classes), I know better that to assume that it's really the last anything.

I can't remember my last day of high school, but I assume it was probably fairly anti-climactic. My last day of medical school officially took place in Guatemala, where I was doing an elective rotation. And I also can't recall my last day of my first postgraduate degree, at Oxford, although I remember finishing the fourth and final day of written comprehensive exams and the raucous celebration waiting outside, which was mainly the friends of the finishing undergraduates. Somehow, the "last" day of classes feels a lot more final at the end of undergraduate studies. Maybe we delude ourselves into thinking that we've actually completed a phase in life, a metamorphosis, become grown-up. Because, of course, I do remember the last day of my undergraduate classes, though it was not terribly exciting. Mostly, I remember that my roommate ended every third sentence with a dramatic flourish and, "...on this, the last day of classes, ever." 

Much to my deep chagrin, I only learned this evening that today was also the last day of classes at Utica College, and therefore would have been my father's last day teaching before his planned retirement, the conclusion of a 39-year career. The faculty at his institution have a tradition of accompanying the retiring professor to their last class, and so his friends and colleagues upheld that tradition as best they could. They shared memories and a poem, watched the video of his tree, and finished with a champagne toast.

Blue ribbons on Tree, which is starting to blossom...

I am so sad that Finn and I weren't there. I thought about my father a lot today, though I'm not sure there are days when I don't. I picked up Finn's school pictures today, and it felt like a huge stack for so few people to share them. Finn scribbled on cards and tucked a few inside to mail to my dad's mom and brother in Virginia. Lately, he has been asking to read "Mamma books", and tonight, he chose a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda, in both Spanish and English, and illustrated with photographs of Machu Picchu. My dad gave it to me for Christmas in 2004, after I had spent part of the summer in Cusco, Perú. The card fell out when we opened the book.

As I was finishing this post, lightning appeared it the sky and now the rain is falling. When I first moved to Colorado, I missed thunderstorms terribly. The man I was dating then had very few charms, but he did once text me while I was on call to tell me to listen for the thunder, because it was finally raining. I love a good storm.

I used to sing the Emilia song Big Big World to myself when I was being a mopey teenager about a break-up... Miss you much, Daddy.

06 May, 2014

Mighty Finn - Update #26

Mamma got a little behind...and I've been ridiculously busy, so this post is a little longer than usual.
I've been spending a lot of time at the playground. I've discovered that if I yell "GO! WHEE! MAMMA!" all the way home after school, more often than not, we stop and I get to go whee.

Oddly enough, the same strategy didn't work on the rocks. Here we are at a nature preserve. I tried yelling "MY ROCK!" at the top of my lungs, but I still didn't get to take one of the boulders home with us. I even tried, "MY BIG ROCK, PEASE, MAMMA!" to no avail.
Swings that require holding on are kind of a new concept for me.
I climbed this enormous purple mountain all by myself. Mommy didn't come with me because she was wearing high heels. Then I realized I was going to have to find a way back down...
What, haven't you seen an upside-down aqua-blue rocking elephant before? It is only the BEST toy ever.
Sometimes we walk to our local market when they grill hamburgers outside. This week, they had homemade ice cream sandwiches too...it started out yummily enough, but then it dripped all over my legs and I got really, really sticky and cried. My mommy said she would have cried too, and that one of her childhood dreams was to someday be big enough to eat French toast without getting sticky.

I am not sure how she's doing at keeping herself not-sticky, but keeping me not-sticky is her job now too. Epic fail, Mommy.

Don't judge a book by its cover, you say? Yes, but this one is yellow...and everyone knows yellow is the best color.

See? My new bike is yellow too. That just proves my point.
I have my first-ever job: watering the herbs in the windowsill. This one is lemon thyme.

I am well on my way to being called "such a responsible young man." I hear that's how you win over parents.

This is just...weird. What was Mommy thinking?

05 May, 2014

{this moment} 106

{this moment} is a Monday ritual that my father started in May 2011, and that I have maintained since May 2014. He described it as "A single image - no words - capturing a moment from the past. A simple moment along my life's Journey - but one over which I wish to linger and savor each treasured aspect of the memories it evokes." When he passed away in February 2014, he left a folder containing images that he hoped to share in the months and years ahead. For some, I share my perspective of the story behind the moment on Thursdays, in a companion ritual called {this memory}. For others, the story is lost in the ocean of time, but I welcome flights of imagination and speculation from readers.


{this moment} was adapted from cath's wonderful blog ~just my thoughts. She, in turn, borrowed it from Pamanner's Blog. My dad suggested, "Check out their blogs, and if you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your {this moment} in the comments for each of us to find and see. If you are moved or intrigued by my {this moment}, please leave a comment." I encourage the same.

AECB

04 May, 2014

Finn's Nursery Retrospective


Two and a half years ago, I put the finishing touches on Finn's nursery...




Of course, he didn't actually sleep in his beautiful crib for another year...


It's been rearranged a few times since then, 
but before starting to pack up and move, 
Finn posed for some pictures in his room...




03 May, 2014

The lone candle

Last week, I posted a poem I wrote a few months after my good friend's violent death.

One of my oft-cited (at least, lately) favorite books is The Fault in Our Stars. In it, one of the protagonists struggles with what he perceives as the lack of meaning in dying "of" something - he wants an epic death fighting "for" something. I struggled a lot with my need to see my friend's death in those terms - I wanted to see her murderer as someone truly evil, in a black-and-white, epic battle for the fate of the universe kind of way. I wanted him, in some deep, metaphysical way to embody the devil or Satan.

And he didn't. He was just a guy. A stupid guy who got angry, who had never been taught to control his temper, who didn't think about consequences, who let his bruised ego get in the way of seeing other people as people. Like my friend.

As I mentioned when I posted the poem, I'm not a good poet. I'm happy to discuss the imagery in the poem in detail with anyone who feels the need to know exactly what I was thinking. I'm also happy to leave it to readers' imaginations.

But there is one image that I think is worth explaining, and that's the lone candle. The lone candle refers to a visualization that our unit's chaplain gave me when he prayed with me the day after Melissa had died.

When I described my need for something epic, someone to hate, someone standing in opposition to an omniscient, omnipotent God, my chaplain instead spoke of a different image of God. A simpler but somehow more powerful one - God as a lone candle flickering in the dark.

Just before the one-year anniversary of my friend's death, and a couple of weeks before my father passed away, I came across this brilliant installation by Kanokphan Nok Hoontrakool:


A Flicker in the Dark
MFA Thesis Exhibition by Kanokphan Nok Hoontrakool
Originally posted at: http://vimeo.com/25541450

~AECB