Endless Knots

Memorial service for Carolyn Goodman, October 7, 2007

Carolyn Goodman's memorial service takes place Sunday, October 7, 2007, at 4:00 PM at New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street and Central Park West, New York, NY. Please send an email to melbrady at optonline dot net if you're attending.

I've done a number of posts here about Carolyn's remarkable life and career. Click on Obits in the Categories list to the right or click here or here or here, for the original post on her son, Andrew, and the remarkable and, in retrospect, extraordinarily sad postcard he sent from Mississippi on the day he was murdered in 1964. As mentioned, Carolyn's youngest son, David, was a classmate of mine at Antioch.

Wikipedia entry on Carolyn Goodman here.

IT spending as percentage of revenue?

Does it make sense to key IT spending directly to revenue? An email from a colleague spotlights perhaps unanticipated consequences of this policy: No more telecommuting. Despite the fact that a large majority of the company's employees (2:1) work most directly with people in distant locations. Now this global IT company is requiring everyone to come into work. Got it? You drive into an office to work with people oceans away. Costs more to support IT from people's homes than from central locations? I don't get this.

Dinner with Sophia Bracy Harris

We had the pleasure last night of having dinner here at our house with our dear friend, Sophia Bracy Harris, co-founder and executive director of FOCAL (Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama). For the past couple of decades, Sophia, a MacArthur Genius award recipient, has provided women with the skills to rise out of poverty. By-products: children with access to quality day-care while their parents can work. Over the years, Sophia's organization has developed programs that build community, dissolve racism, and develop leadership in both adults and teens.

As a young high school student in the segregated US South, Sophia was  one of the first children to integrate Alabama schools. Her family's home was firebombed.

We met Sophia in 1991 when she joined the Calvert Social Investment Fund Advisory Council, where we'd been members for a decade. I was immediately impressed with Sophia as a systems thinker and a calm presence in contentious conversations, which we had a few of over the years at the Advisory Council (which, to its members' disappointment, was disbanded in 2006).

When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the first person I thought of was Sophia. Many of her FOCAL clients live in areas still devastated by the hurricane. With Reed Montague, a talented staff person at Calvert, I helped mount a fund drive for FOCAL's Katrina Fund. A fair amount (never enough) money poured in quickly, providing insurance deductibles and the like for those with lives irreparably altered by Katrina.

FOCAL celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Family, friends, and colleagues: please click here.

And, enjoy this. Tania Burger, who serves as Organization Developer for FOCAL, brought dinner to our house (the best of guests), so delicious that Pasta Lover asked Tania to share the recipe:

Carolyn Goodman remembrance on NPR today

There will be a clip remembering Carolyn today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Listen if you see this in time. Otherwise, click to hear.Very nice, personal reminiscence from Margot Adler, who knew Carolyn for many years, and captures her spirit and the experience of walking into her apartment.

One more piece worth reading, an interview with Carolyn in Jewish Currents from 2005, shortly after the trial that convicted one of those responsible for the murder of her son and two others.

Dr. Carolyn Goodman - Oct 6, 1915-Aug 17, 2007

A few hours ago, I received this email from my friend of forty years, David Goodman:

My mother left this stage at 1:18 AM this morning and is now with my father and brother Andrew and others on the next level. I am sure she is having a fine time.

Complete obit in New York Times, Aug 18, 2007

Readers of this blog may remember my post of June 21, where I included, with his permission, the extraordinary postcard that David gave me in May when I had dinner with Carolyn Drucker Goodman (his mother) at her apartment on New York's Upper West Side. At nearly 92, she remained extraordinarily dignified, surrounded by the memorabilia of an historic life and the good taste of a sophisticated intellectual who'd lived in the city and known fascinating people.

Carolyn Goodman, as in the mother of Andrew Goodman, as in Goodman-Schwerner-and-Chaney, the three young civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964, here with the other two mothers at Andy's funeral.

David's light touch in reporting his mother's death is emblematic of her spirit. She carried herself with rare dignity and grace along avenues where others would have been crawling on the pavement begging. I don't know how anyone survives their child's death, no less brutal murder by the Ku Klux Klan, but she did, while maintaining a complex and influential career as a psychologist (assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical School among other honors-see the jump page for her entire resume and list of publications) and maintaining a lifelong dedication to the Andrew Goodman Foundation that she and her husband started in 1966.

From the moment I met Carolyn in 1969, I wanted to be like her. It was just months after her husband had died suddenly of a stroke, barely five years after her son's murder. ("Andy's death killed him," David once told me.) She was 54 and, at 22, I was overcome with admiration at the composure of this absolutely gorgeous woman, who'd lost her child and husband in such rapid sequence. I was struck also with her beautiful skin (milk baths were the secret, David said).

Many times since, when I've felt overwhelmed by the cards on my table, I've thought of Carolyn, her just continuing, never wallowing, just continuing, positively, without complaint or fury, just continuing.

In 2002, I was honored to present her with the Champions of Freedom Award from Freedom House, here in Boston. She was nearly 88 at the time, still very beautiful, warm, and articulate about the choices she'd made in her life.

So tonight I've lit a very special candle, given to me by Sylvia, my Antioch college roommate, about the time we both met David. Today is Sylvia's 60th birthday and she too was with me for our last dinner with Carolyn on May 18, 2007.

Bono's Africa, Part II

Wait, there's more. A bit stunned that I'm flogging Vanity Fair's July '07 issue again, I read on and have to relay this: There are also worthy reads on Jeffrey Sach's approach to economic development in Uganda, the effective use of anti-retrovirals, and a music festival in the Sahara, snapshots of 20-some inspiring leaders a la Mandela and the Ivory Coast Soccer Team, and ... because it is, in the end, Vanity Fair, Tina Brown on Princess Diana's "love that got away."

Bono edits Africa, July '07 Vanity Fair

I was going to wait to blog this great primer on Africa until I finished the whole issue but that would be selfish.

Oprah's on the cover whispering to George Clooney: “The children of mothers who have a primary education are 40 percent more likely to reach the age of five.”

Annie Leibovitz’s photo essay of celebs having “a conversation about Africa” is superb: Don Cheadle to Barack Obama to Muhammad Ali to Queen Rania of Jordan to Bono to Condoleeza Rice to George Bush to Desmond Tutu to Brad Pitt to … Madonna…Warren Buffet to the Gates to Oprah…and finally back to Don Cheadle. I’d like to see these photos in person; slide show is here.

There’s a short essay on science (we’re all out of Africa), “Generation Kenya,” on the confusions of a young nation, by Bingyavanga Wainana, writer-in-residence at Union College in upstate New York, Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm, etc) on oil, China, and Darfur, and “The Continental Shelf,” a superb roundup on Africa’s premier writers by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman. Among the superstars is Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who just won the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Zoetropers remember her: she workshopped there too.

Hello from Hanoi

Many people dislike Instant Messenger, find it intrusive, wish it had never been invented. Not me.

1. I have the luxury of working in a small organization so even if everyone interrupts me at once, it's quite manageable;

2. I don't have many other people on my buddy list (perhaps I'm unpopular, after all); and

3. It allows me to be in touch with my kids.

Such was the situation night before last when my traveling daughter's name came up with a big hello!

--How's Cambodia? I said, their last known whereabouts.

--We're in Hanoi and why don't we do a video ichat?

Which we did for the next two hours, with near-perfect reception, talking from our chicken coop to a hotel in Hanoi with faultless high-speed internet service, absolutely free, cheaper than Skype even.

Hanoi.

I couldn't get over it.

--Imagine, I said, 30 years from now, your child contacting you from Baghdad, then appearing as a hologram in front of you.

Remembering Andrew Goodman

"Dear Mom and Dad," the postcard reads. "I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy." Dated June 21, 1964, Meridian, Miss, 4-cent postage. That night, Andy, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, all civil rights workers, were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

Click on postcard to enlarge it.

David Goodman, Andy's younger brother and my classmate at Antioch College, recently gave me a copy of Andy's postcard, written the day he died. I keep it on my desk to honor him and to remind me of their mother, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, a buoyant spirit and hard working psychologist, at 92, still beautiful and kind.