Endless Knots

Advice to Hillary; thankfully never sent #imwithher

I have six things in common with Hillary. Both our husbands studied at Oxford where each lived at 46 Leckford Road, a house mine originally rented (and moved out of when hers moved in). We’re both 69 (I’m a few months older). We both loved the teen idol Fabian (I met him in person and he kissed me on the cheek). We both spoke at our college graduations (she was filmed; there’s merely a still photo of me). We both have worked all our adult lives. And we both are grandmothers.

When she was still thinking about running (or at least that was the public position), her first grandchild, Charlotte, was born. I felt impelled to give advice about her impending political decision, which in a moment for me of “the world [being] too much with us,” was simply this: Don’t. My argument against her running for president was based on my (and many others’) opinion and experience as to where the deepest satisfactions in life originate—in accomplishments or in love. They shouldn’t be such binary choices but for women they are.

I never sent the advice or published the piece; she ran; and now we’re in the range of double-digit hours until we know whether indeed she will be the next/first-woman/first-former-First-Lady President of this continuous experiment in democracy called the United States of America.

For her sake, I wish she hadn’t run. Far and away the most abusive campaign in our history; far and away the most shocking, so appalling in its turns that we writers find ourselves saying that a novel following the plot of this election would never find a publisher due to its unbelievability; and far and away the most dangerous for what it could mean if she does not win (not to mention mounting fears if she does, c.f., the threats of armed insurrection).

For her sake, I wish I’d sent this advice and that she’d followed it, which my fourth-generation feminist daughters were shocked to see coming from this granddaughter of a suffragist (she marched until 1920), born to a feminist mother (who didn't change her name when first married and always worked outside the home), I, who was lucky enough to turn 21 in 1968 at the height of the second-wave of feminism, which I embraced.

But for our sake, I’m very glad she ran. Her example is straightening the spines of little girls, young women, and even women my age; her grit is as incomparable as any of our peers, male or female; her ability to think of her feet is as good as anyone’s; and her skill at throwing off the insults, dismissals, and now the very threats to her life is, how do I say this, incredible.

Having followed her more closely these past two years, I’m betting that she’s found a way to take those calls from Chelsea anyway (see below).

And I’m sure she’s going to win.

Here’s what I wrote--but never sent--on September 24, 2014:

Rock, Grandma, Don’t Run

In the constellation of unwelcome advice, none is less desirable than re: family. Young mothers are the unwitting recipients of bounteous bromides as per the passerby, who, touching your baby, which, first of all, why are you touching my baby, catalogues a registry of rebukes:

• Don’t you think you should have a hat on her?
• Why are you feeding him avocado?
• Shouldn’t she be in bed by now?
• What? She’s in your bed?
• You changed him where? On the hood of your car?
• Your three-year-old still has a bottle?
• Your four-year-old boy wears pink?
• Your five-year-old girl refuses to wear pink?

It’s endless and annoying and so, with this in mind, I offer the following unsolicited advice to a friend of a friend, a woman I have never met, one so famous that she’s in the single-name league of Madonna and Beyoncé, the rock star of politics and world’s most famous new grandmother, Hillary.

“I’m baaaack,” you sang to the steak-fry crowd in Iowa. ReadyforHillary—not to mention 656 pages of Hard Choices—seems to answer the question of whether you’re running. But all of that was pre-Charlotte.

Today you are now like me (sorta kinda: mine had preemie twins; no one can spell my last name while yours is all but a verb), Hillary, grandmother to the child of your daughter, who is setting off into the rainforest of parenting—unexpected showers, strange storms of illness, odd creatures (which is how first-time parents often feel about their quirky newborns)—with abundant resources but no experience, because you are not a mom or dad until you really are one.

Until you’ve done it a hundred times, you don’t really know how to change a diaper without really waking up, or how to swaddle a baby, or whether to call the doctor for the millionth time because this one might really be the really real thing and what if you don’t, who knows, your baby might be really dead before they call back?

Your daughter will be a natural, of course, because that’s what we all say—and feel— about our daughters because in the end it is a very natural human thing to give birth—i.e. how could 100 billion have made it out of the womb in the past 50,000 years unless it were relatively ordinary? But the data is incontrovertible: until you’ve done it, you don’t know jack—or Charlotte.

Which is why your daughter will be calling you every twenty minutes or so for the next several years, asking you questions that begin, “Did I…” at which point you will spiral down into The Abyss of Guilt Just Over the Cliff of Forgotten Memories. I’m sure you, unlike me, kept a daily baby book recording every one of your daughter’s projectile vomits and major accomplishments: first time sleeping more than two consecutive hours, first time unclenching her fists, first time rolling over. And you, being a strong global figure and role model extraordinaire, won’t be hurt when she yells at you for not remembering.

Even with a staff to help her because what new mother doesn’t need an overnight baby nurse, a daytime nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, and a personal secretary (if only! if only!), she will still need one particular person who can’t be hired: you.

Which brings me to the point of this unsolicited advice: You need not to miss this. You need not to miss the tiny advances, the first time Baby Charlotte does this, that, and the other thing, the first time your back aches from holding her because nothing hurts so good.

Yes, you can be president of the most powerful country the world has ever known. Yes, you can sit at the big desk and put Putin in his place. Yes, you can out-Kissinger Kissinger but you won’t be there for those first kisses. Might it be a tad awkward as president to take Baby Charlotte’s first phone call, which is not that long from now because just as you can’t comprehend that your baby has just had a baby, you will not believe how quickly the little twitchling goes from blob to blogger, if you’re in the Situation Room watching ISIS cowards being taken out?

Trust me: I want a woman in The White House. And I want you to have the same freedom to make the choice to run that your husband had. You do. And if that’s what you choose, you’ll probably win but what you’ll lose may well be far more profound.

Rock that baby, Hillary. Don’t run. It will make you all much happier.

Published: "Some Peculiar Errand," my novel excerpt; Finalist, Solstice Fiction

I'm delighted to announce that an excerpt ("Some Peculiar Errand") from my novel, The Quintessence, about the return of the 19th-century phenom Margaret Fuller (Bucky's aunt), has been named as a finalist in the Solstice Literary Magazine Fiction Prize, and published here. Two excerpts from the novel have now been published; next up, the novel itself (hello, agents; hello, publishers). Thanks, Solstice.

Please keep shooting from the lip, Mr. Trump

Each time you open your mouth, you lose another supporter -- or maybe a thousand. It's hard to fathom that any decent people still are in your camp, any willing to excuse your latest unfiltered primitivism. But apparently there are still some whom you haven't offended. Please keep running your trap, blurting out whatever uninformed base thought crosses your mind. We knew before that you were uninformed and without scruples, without humility or empathy. Now we know you also had a heart removal along with an exorcism of your soul. There's not much left but please keep talking. By the time you're done, you'll have no boosters whatsoever. And then we can all move on with the important enterprise of being Americans.

Margaret's 206th Birthday

On this day in 1810 and not far from where these photos were taken, Sarah Margaret Fuller was born. In forty short years, the journalist-philosopher-linguist-futurist-feminist accomplished more writing by hand and traveling by carriage, train, and ship than a dozen jet-fueled, digitally equipped people combined today might. Although her name was among the handful of "most admired women" at the end of the 1800s (astonishing given that she'd already been dead for half a century), she remains relatively unknown today, except among the "Fullerenes," those for whom Margaret has gotten under their skin. That turns out to be a lot of people, including...me.

Since 1973, the year I discovered Margaret's work, I've made an annual pilgrimage to the Fuller Family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Margaret's father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and in the US Congress, and mother, Margarett Crane Fuller, along with their other children, are all buried there, as is their most famous relative, Bucky Fuller, and his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller. Bucky's grandfather was Margaret's brother. Re: me, insofar as this is my blog, Bucky wrote the Foreword to Jeff Stamps' and my second book, The Networking Book. There, Bucky makes the link between the seemingly overwhelming challenges we face and their resolution lying largely in the work required to build networks among nations, people, and ideas.

 

 

A memorial stone, bearing a 25-line inscription, stands above the grave of Margaret and her husband, Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli's, little son's body. All three of them drowned in a shipwreck in sight of land off the coast of Fire Island. Only little Nino's body was found; Margaret's and Giovanni's bodies were swept out to sea, along with a treasured trunkful of her European writings.

 

Why is Margaret so important, even today? She did things that women simply didn't do in her day--and that many still find it difficult to do. She supported her mother and siblings after her father died suddenly when she was 25. A contemporary of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, she was the editor of The Dial, arguably the first literary/political journal in the US. She was the first woman in the US to have a byline on the front page of a newspaper (Horace Greeley's New York Tribune)--and she had plenty, more than 250 in 18 months. She was the first American woman to serve as a foreign correspondent for a US newspaper, covering, among other topics, the Roman Revolution (1848-1849). She traveled alone both domestically and in Europe. And, among other books including translations of Goethe, she wrote the treatise that would serve as the principal manifesto undergirding the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

In that short book, Margaret did something that few (if any?) have managed to do: she laid out what it means to be fully human, declaring that no woman could be fully realized until man too was realized, a break with conventional Western thinking that polarizes opposites. Margaret integrated them:

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

No writer has inspired me more with their thinking or their example. Margaret Fuller has set me off on many paths over the years, including most recently lighting fire to a trio of novels ("Woman in the 21st Century") where I seek to reprise Margaret's thinking for our current predicament.

And, no quote of hers touches down more deeply than this:

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.

I try, especially each year on the day of Margaret Fuller's birth.

 

 

 

On this day in 1850, Margaret Fuller...

...drowned off the coast of Fire Island, NY, in a shipwreck that also took the lives of her husband, Giovanni Ossoli, and their little son, Nino. Five years (and one day) ago, a group of us Fullerenes commemorating Margaret's Bicentennial met to give her a proper memorial service at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

I blogged about it here. And I've blogged about Margaret (her grandnephew Bucky) here. And this is a picture of "the two of us" at Margaret's memorial stone at the cemetery in May 2006, taken just after I finished the first draft of my novel about her, "The Quintessence."

 

 

Repost of July 10, 2011 post: Mo(u)rning has broken

Strange things happen in blogland. Trying to fix a broken link earlier today on this post, originally written on July 10, 2011, it reposted as if it were written today. It wasn't. But it's still true:

 

Today marks 30 days, the traditional grieving period for widows in Judaism. In Islam, it appears to be four lunar months and 10 days. I watched my beloved Tibetan Buddhist friend recite prayers (puja) for 49 days after her husband's death (a year ago tomorow), the time it takes for the person to pass through one of the six "bardos," the transitions between life and death... and life. I'm keeping track of that marker too because of Jeff's deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism.

None of this means that grieving is over. Having lost a fair number of people since I was very young, I know the sneak properties of grief, how just when you think it's not going to grab you by the throat again, it does, how seemingly insignificant things can trigger it, how anniversaries and big events and chance remarks and maybe even a chocolate brownie can set it off.

Still that initial period of becoming accustomed to the altered universe -- the absence -- has a way of shedding its shock value and that's where I am.

My old blog readers are aware that I've posted practically nothing in the past few months. While I've continued working through this whole period - including some novel and interesting projects, I've lacked the urge to post, my mind consumed with what was ahead and what was happening right then, particularly in the last six weeks of Jeff's life.

So I offer this post as a gate to the next phase and a return to the many topics I've felt compelled to cover in the past four years.

And I can't get this hymn out of my mind, performed by one of Jeff's favorite artists, Judy Collins. Though the words don't all reflect what I'm feeling, mo(u)rning has broken.  

Happy 205th, Sarah Margaret Fuller

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.
--Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

On this day in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the singular genius and most prolific writer among the Transcendentalists was born. The first child of Margarett Crane Fuller and her husband, the Massachusetts legislator Timothy, Margaret, as she chose to be known, was an autodidact--a child who learned Greek and Latin, who read Shakespeare while others her age were struggling with the alphabet, and who became the first woman in the US to file articles as a foreign correspondent was a nonpareil. Biographies of her abound, including the 2013 Pulitzer-Prize winner by Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

I first became entranced with Margaret in the 1970s while researching women in the American Revolution for Addison-Wesley, whose best-selling American history textbook needed some updating. Joan Labby, who was editing that book, asked me and a few others to write features for the book and one of us, either she or I, came up with the idea of bringing some feminist history into greater relief.

I did, penning a straightforward account of such women as Deborah Sampson, who donned men's clothing, picked up arms, and fought in the American Revolution, serving 17 months as "Robert Shurtliffe." But before I could learn all there was to know about Deborah, I was stopped in the Encyclopedia of American Woman by another even more fascinating entry, the brief biography of Margaret Fuller.

And thus began my lifelong obsession with Fuller.

For many years on this day, I've visited her monument in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery, usually inviting others to go with me, sometimes going alone, and one year making a film with Cambridge filmmaker Ron Mortara (2008). Here are links to those visits. Today I'm traveling to my partner's parents' graves and there I will read a few words of Margaret's. Spirit knows no geography.

With John Halamka, whose birthday also is May 23, and who has attended several Margaret birthday celebrations with his Shakuhachi

And, for the record, Margaret is also a central character in my novel-trilogy-in-process, Woman in the 21st Century, of which the first volume, The Quintessence, is complete.

 

For Nepal, my essay from WBUR's Cognoscenti site #cognoscenti #nepal

In 1997, I made a lightning work trip to Nepal (and three other nearby countries in 14 days) for UN Development Programme. I enjoyed my time in Thailand, Laos, and Pakistan, but it was Nepal that settled deep into my soul in barely four days. When the earthquake struck on April 25, I bounded from bed to my keyboard and banged out a 1500-word piece, almost without taking a break. As I did, the numbers of dead increased, then increased again. And again.

Then, cognizant of word-lengths for op-edish type pieces, I cut it down to 900 words and submitted it to Cognoscenti, WBUR's "Idea's and Opinions" site. They asked me to trim it by another 150 words, which I did, and it was published this morning. They added photos, one sad, illustrating the devastation in Kathmandu, the other a picture of precisely the World Heritage site that I wrote about taken two years ago, much as it was when I was there.

Here's the piece, "In Nepal, Getting Back to Normal in the Dust of Time." 

Always say yes to students: an interview about virtual teams

Every so often in the past gazillion years, a student comes along, one who's doing undergraduate or master's or doctorate work around virtual/remote/distributed/global organizations. Some ask for interviews; others want an answer to a specific question. I always say yes--and I hope that other authors do the same.

Here's the most recent with Valeriia Denisova. Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, she "moved to Finland three years ago to study towards my Bachelor Degree in International Business (BBA) at Tampere University of Applied Sciences." This interview was for her final dissertation, "The Challenges of Virtual Project Management," enabling her to graduate from Tampere, following her spending time as an exchange student at Portsmouth University in the UK.

I post this also as a bit of historiana as we wrote the first edition (cover below) of Virtual Teams nearly 20 years ago. This interview also reflects my biases about the current state-of-the-virtual-art. 

You are one of the first people who recognized the tendency of virtual team management. Could you tell more how and when it happened? Was there any particular reason why you decided to write a ‘’Virtual Teams’’ work on this issue?

Virtual Teams was the fifth book I’d written (with the late Jeffrey Stamps) on distributed, boundary-crossing organizations, the first written after the Web had begun to take hold and Internet penetration had reached most countries in the world. For the first time in history, people had the infrastructure needed to work seamlessly regardless of their physical location.

 What can you say about ‘now’ and ‘then’ ? What aspects have massively changed in virtual teams industry over the time?

Work has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Whereas once “knowledge workers” could do very little if they weren’t in the office, now they often wonder why they have to go to the office at all. It’s hard to picture what it was like: the “important” people spent most of their days in offices around the rim of buildings, while the people who reported to them were in vast barns in the middle.

By the 1970s, these rows of desks started to be separated into cubicles. People worked in their “stovepipes,” communicating principally with those in their “departments.” Then, with the rise of the Internet, it became obvious that greater communication, more collaboration, and cross-organizational cooperation could radically improve innovation, creativity, productivity, and implementation. Very quickly, the walls literally started to come down and, with them, cross-boundary work became the norm. Once that began, geography became less the definer of co-workers than purpose, which brought disparate people together regardless of who they were working for.

 Was it hard for traditional workers to switch to distant work and accept it?

As with any innovation, some people took quickly to the new way; others resisted. The common wisdom is the familiar one: about 20% of people will always cling to the old way, while 80% rapidly adapt. With a new generation coming along that never knew life without the global mesh, the percentage of resisters will shrink ever more rapidly and eventually become a negligible number.

How does the management of virtual teams differs from traditional ones?

Good managers are simply that: good. One has to pay very close attention to people on their virtual teams lest they feel they’re being ignored or not encouraged to do their very best work.

Some writers and researchers have gone to great lengths to prove that virtual team management is different from in-person management. I’m not one of them.

While there are some peculiar aspects to managing people from afar (being more intentional about contact, for example, since there is no cafeteria for bumping into people), the principles are not all that different from good management in general. Pay attention, be kind, be encouraging, continuously refer to purpose, use multiple forms of communication, reward people for good work, recognize excellent teamwork, lavish people with meaningful praise when they far exceed expectations, continuously examine your own behavior, freely admit mistakes, learn how to apologize in a genuine way, and continuously educate yourself on cultural differences.

What are the main difficulties and challenges of running virtual projects nowadays? How does NetAge help to manage them?

The biggest difficulties and challenges are the same that they’ve always been: lack of clear purpose; inadequate methods—or attention to—maintaining good communication; lack of familiarity and camaraderie among team members; and insensitivity to cultural differences. We have more than enough technology and still lack a good deal of humanity. NetAge developed methods and tools for applying these simple ideas.

Do virtual team principles ‘people, purpose, links’ still remain the same nowadays or, in your opinion, we can add anything more to this concept?

Nope. It’s the same model and we have the same problems. Each aspect of the model has great depth and the more we understand what it means to recognize and honor people in their fullness, the greater the connections among the people. The more we appreciate the purpose and explore its implications, the greater the work people do. The more we expand and nurture our links, the fuller the web of creativity and ingenuity becomes.

According to my survey results, virtual managers do not use intranets anymore. How are the communication sources (‘links’) changed in general? 

The technology has changed completely. Some companies and organizations still do have internal webs of communication but the elegance of the expansion of the Internet, the development of cloud computing, and the move to mobile have all radically impacted the openness of connectivity.

This has brought about a paradox: a greater emphasis on security and a loosening of fear that people will “go online” while at work. Who hasn’t? It used to be that companies—and some still do—ban going onto social networks via the corporate network. People just move to using their phones. It can’t be controlled—mainly for the better but we also have too many grisly examples of the new global connectivity being used for the-so-much-horrifically-worse. 

What are the main ways of virtual trust and motivation establishment?

We wrote extensively about this in our books. Trust is established by deepening social capital, which results from personal ties, dependability, and generosity. Motivation comes from recognition and challenge, i.e. set high goals for people and then reward them in ways that are meaningful to them, both publicly and privately.

May I use this document in my dissertation?

Yes, of course. Please send me a copy and best of luck! In return, may I use this as a blog post? If so, please send a short bio so that I can credit you with the questions. Where are you situated and at which university are you studying?

"The Successful Virtual Office in 30 Minutes"

Ian Lamont’s “In 30 Minutes” series demystifies and simplifies topics that leave non-techies scratching their heads for insight, if not plain old comprehension. Over the past couple of years, he’s published short guides to Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Drive, Twitter, and Excel, among others, and a few non-techie delights like “Easy Chinese Recipes” and “C. Diff,” (look it up; you don’t want to get it), both generated by his larger network that includes experts on these two topics.

Comes now Melanie Pinola’s contribution to Lamont’s series with “The Successful Virtual Office.” A technology writer with a lot of data to offer, Pinola begins with many footnoted facts, including the Forrester stat claiming that 40% of US workers will work in virtual offices by next year. Only 40%? I’m going out on a very short limb here, feeling quite secure: 100% of American (and global) information workers already are working in virtual offices. Ever since mobile took over the desktop, every knowledge worker with a smart phone has been working virtually—which is why all the big apps for virtual work have migrated to that little device that your spouse/partner/child/parent wishes you would put down long enough to finish your sentence.

Stats aside, this is a thoroughly useful compendium of tips and tools for working virtually with many clever suggestions for how to work more effectively at a distance.

I have but three small nits with this otherwise well-researched potpourri of best practices (Pinola herself has been working virtually for the past two decades and her competence really comes through).

First, Pinola bounces back and forth between sounding as if she’s writing for independent professionals and those who work for companies. The former have great latitude in the software and services they can use for their work; the latter are typically highly constrained as to what their companies’ IT policies permit.

Second, she occasionally misses a key current reality: most large companies’ global workers are precisely that: global. The advice to always maintain some “real-time” communication is laudable but impractical for teams that span the globe; likewise the recommendation to keep everyone’s schedules within a four-hour window so that they overlap work hours is a nonstarter if your team is in the Philippines, California, Europe, and the Middle East. Many are.

And, third, she makes an assertion that, to the best of my knowledge, is not supported by any data: “Virtual workers depend more on email, chat applications, and text-based collaboration software than their counterparts in the office.” Everyone—as in everry single person whether virtual or not—depends on these tools now. What is supportable from a great deal of research is that purely virtual teams are more effective than their face-to-face counterparts.

Once one virtual team member is remote, all members are. Very little work gets done today without virtual teaming, which means there’s a huge market for this helpful book. I picked up a number of pointers in regard to beneficial apps I’d never heard of and you will too.

Beef and barley soup, encore

"Romertopf Chicken (cooked in a clay pot)", a 2008 post, prompted an unexpected comment from an unknown reader last week, leading to her requesting more recipes.

In anticipation of a crowd this weekend, I made the very unvegetarian family favorite, Beef and Barley Soup (2007 post), which turns out more like a stew once the barley and cannellini beans are added as they absorb all the liquid. So cook alert: add more water or broth after this sits either on the stove or in the fridge. I used an excellent broth concentrate this time (Better than Bullion) and substituted a Vidalia onion for cippolines, all to good effect.

 

Beef and Barley Soup

12 servings

3 lbs short ribs (use more if you like a meatier soup)
6 carrots 
3 turnips (or parsnips or combo of both) 
1 large cipolline onion (or 3 small or substitute another sweet onion)
3 shallots
1 leek
4 cloves of garlic
1 cup capellini beans (or other white bean, soaked overnight)
1 cup barley
bay leaf
1 strip of Kombu (or other seaweed - this is critical if making the veg version)
Salt and pepper as desired

1. Trim as much fat as possible from short ribs. Reserve a small portion of fat, cut into very thin slices, and use to grease bottom of large stock pot. Add a little olive oil to make sure the whole bottom of pan is coated and that you're not increasing your cholesterol intake unreasonably (just reasonably).

2. Add crushed garlic and cook for a minute or two, until the kitchen smells great.

3. Add short ribs and sear on all sides (about 10 minutes, turning side to side).

4. Dice all veggies while searing meat.

5. Cover meat with about 12 cups of water. If it doesn't look like enough, add more. Add salt.

6. Bring to boil and skim (before pot boils over, a delicate moment).

7. Add veggies, beans, barley, bay leaf, Kombu strip, and other herbs (dried or fresh if you have them, your choice).

7A. If making veggie version, add a can of tomatoes (also OK for meat version), another strip of Kombu, and four more cloves of whole garlic, slightly crushed.

8. Simmer for three hours.

9. Correct seasoning.

 

Slow down, keep right, I mean left

 

On the road with a skip, wombat, and koala

Cooling it at Conglomerate Creek

 

Conglomerate Creek, Vic., Australia, January 3, 2015—By some measure, it's my mother's 104th birthday but in my now it's only January 2 in Brooklyn where she was born, a universe away in terms of terrain and technology, me sitting here in the Victorian High Country in the south of Australia a century later with an iPad, her family on the corner of Myrtle and Clinton with a Victrola.

Outstralia. The Outback for sure. My camping seat is just a few grassy feet from the river bank. Lake and Finn are playing with Magna-tiles in the camper trailer and Miranda and Jay are setting up for a two-night stay, as are the other seven groups comprising three couples, two fathers and sons, and three families including us. We're on a 4WD (four wheel

 drive, dummies) tour sponsored by Great Divide Tours, the company through which my kids arranged to acquire their carefully kitted out Land Cruiser and camper trailer, both customized for their adventure of which these few days involve just one interesting side-trip in their probably year-long journey. 

You do not see Australia this way from a car, going to the traditional attractions. You can't get here from there. Off road. Off line. Out Back in the bush.

We're camping again, five of us sleeping in the camper trailer, a roomy set-up with canvas sides that folds up into a steel box for travel but which also does a back bend to produce a queen bed with an equivalent amount of storage space underneath, two sets of drawers, and a hard-floor platform big enough for three people to sleep. 

We joined the tour almost on a whim and certainly without a great deal of preparation. We thought about it for a day, then woke up the next morning, packed up, shopped for 75 meals (5 people times 5 days times 3 meals per day), and rushed off to “Talbotville”-- which sounds like it might be a town, right?, no, wrong—to meet the tour that had started two days earlier. Our aim was to be there with enough daylight to set up camp, meet the others, have dinner, and hit the sack.

And so we drove to the original campsite following the GPS (technically "Donna") to Mt. Hotham in the Australian Alps then peeled off the paved road for some 50 kilometers of various versions of dirt—rutted track, gravel, the reddest soil you’ve ever seen—itself a windy, barely one-lane wide curlicue up into Great Alpine National Forest. And by up, I mean a 30-degree pitch, a 40-degree pitch, a 50-degree pitch, and I’m not exaggerating.

 

At a certain elevation the trees turned white, without leaves, without branches, with harsh black scars on their barkless trunks. How odd, how odd, not like any vegetation I could identify until one of the boys said, “There was a forest fire.” Of course. Everything is so different that I'd forgotten to throw common sense into my backpack. Fire may be a natural part of the forest's cycle but it leaves a very bleak footprint. 

 

On we drove, to a sign for Grant, suggesting that there might be a settlement there (no), another for Grant's Cemetery (ok, something is settled there but it’s a bit hard to converse), until we started our descent, down to the Crooked River valley, so named for its meandering spine, and to Talbotville. Originally a mining town of 10,000 or so, today not a trace remains. Once the gold was scooped out, the inhabitants packed up their belongings—including their houses and shops and churches and stables and storehouses—and moved their infrastructure on to the next site of eventual abandonment. 

When we arrived, we found fifty or so tents and camper trailers scattered about the ghost town, one “pump out” toilet (don’t ask), and three camper trailers that matched the description we’d been given of the group we were to meet. But no people appeared to be with the camper trailers, nor were their cars anywhere to be seen.

We wandered over to a nearby family—George and Nicole from Melbourne, and their two children Callum (6) and Michaela (3), welcome specimens to our two five-year-olds—and asked if they knew where are fellow tour-ers might be. They’d left that morning, Nicole said, in a convoy across the river and up the hill. It was getting later and later and so we decided to make dinner. Out came the camp kitchen, supplies emerged from the refrigerators and drawers, and before long we were eating and sharing George and Nicole’s camp fire with Finny playing chef to introduce the Aussies to S’mores.

.

By now it was 9 PM and our group still had not appeared. Miranda called Vic Widman, Mr. Great Divide Tours, and asked if he might know anything. His tracking system had detected that they had been on the side of Pinnacle Point mountain for three hours or so earlier in the day and were now making their way back, implying that there could have been a breakdown with one of the cars or they found something interesting or…

My mind traveled over much territory landing on the possibility that the Outback might be where aliens pluck their next inductees. After all, it’s so sparsely populated that who would ever know—except Vic Widman and us and George and Nicole and eventually everyone—but there would be no eyewitnesses. Yikes. My first night in the Outback and flying saucers have abducted the people we’re supposed to be four-wheel-driving with for the next five days. Time turned to the next hour and just then, out of the darkness, a line of light appeared up the hill, one car with lights ablazing, then another and another and another, unmistakably our group.

“I’m free! I’m free!” yelled Michelle, leaping from her 4WD. She turned out to be the lynchpin of the group, taking pictures, befriending everyone, offering helpful advice, and telling stories that should be on The Moth.

 

***

Another day: It is hot hot hot, so hot that Miranda and I just waded into the muddy (squish, squich) river to cool off, so hot that we just sat down on the stones beyond the mud. It worked. We drove again all day—up and down, over the innocuously named “conservation mounds,” moguls, really, that break the pitch of roads that you would not in your right mind hike up, never mind drive. Steep is one word vaguely suggestive of the impression these climbs leave; straight up might be more accurate. If you were to walk it, well, would you? You'd—or at least I—would need cramp-ons, a pitchfork for a walking stick, preferably accompanied by a mountain goat who would know where to put a foot or four.

Every turn of the wheel in our creeping caravan—which could mean there were some thirty or more tires in front of us depending on our slot in line—kicked up the dust, so thick at times that rescue inhalers were necessary, so opaque that we couldn’t see twenty feet in front of us.

Our phalanx of heavy duty robots—for these vehicles are different from normal cars (they have twelve gears, for example, and some have hydraulics that raise and lower the chassis to accommodate the furrows and grooves)—inched along ten-foot-wide black diamond trails, sometimes even narrower couloirs, sometimes more, up up up, sheer snaking slopes, then down down down at 60 degree drops, crossing water after water—22 crossings of The Crooked River yesterday—and on again, now coated in red dust, crackling UHF messages from the front of the pack to the end: “There’s an oncoming vehicle, mate, so pull over;” “it’s a bit ordinary here so walk it down;” “There’s a stump in the middle of the track so it’s a bit tight.”

It sounded so innocuous until we were walking it down, the car having been shifted into 4WD’s “low 1,” which meant the engine did the braking not the foot. After twenty or thirty of these plus a string of hairpin turns that Jay executed perfectly, they began to feel like the only places on Earth as Route 93, EZ Pass, and Rest Areas Ahead receded to their historical niches like my grandparents’ Victrola. 

When a vehicle did come in our direction, we had to swing off to the edge of a ravine or nestle under a chalky cliff. It always seemed as if the oncoming cars were driving very fast as we crawl along rarely exceeding 20 or 25kmh, sometimes much slower than that.

It was day after day of bumpy roller coaster rides without the whoop and sans the stomach drop. Much of the time the forest resembled our beloved Bear Island, thick woods with dirt paths--only these were gums and eucalyptus and tea trees not maples and oaks and birches—and then it didn’t look like Earth at all.

So long as we stayed in the euphemistic comfort of our air conditioned car—which came to an end on the last day of the trip due to the need to conserve fuel—everyone was down to their last few kilometers as we hadn’t been able to fuel up since our second day at Dargo, the one live town where we stopped—a pub! a gas station! Bitumen roads!—we could tolerate the heat but once we left the car, a requirement of camping for the night, the heat sweltered us in blankets, electric spreads in which the thermostat continued to be turned up.

That was this evening when we made camp at Conglomerate Creek, internal temperatures rising for everyone, bull ants biting, adults and kids arguing, one couple exploding into a fight heard round the camp. Even the sudden wind doesn't cool these tempers until night fell and the sun moved on to the moods of other families, other campsites.

A mob of skips

Treetop Campsite, Ripples Creek, Vic, Australia (GMT+14, 22 December 2014)—A couple of hours north of Melbourne, certainly not more, sits this Boy Scout camp, where some 1100 pitched their tents just a few weeks back. It’s a campsite in transition, as Paul, the new manager, works to bring it back from extinction.

The odd human trait to believe that everyone—or no one—is doing precisely what you’re doing tips to the all-inclusive side for me. Thus everyone on my interminable flight here had packed their long johns and hiking boots for surely there is but one way to live Down Under. Data—my own personal history—reminds me that this is not in fact the only way people travel in Australia but it is the way I travel now. This is my third trip to Oz, the first two for work with perhaps the country’s best known brand—Qantas—one of the few words in English that gets away with following a Q with an A and autocorrect doesn’t even do its sorry-mate-but-you-really-still-don’t-know-how-to-spell.

But those experiences were not camping in the least, what with being housed in an Intercon (Aussies abbreviate via the diminutive with abandon: rellies=relatives; breakie=breakfast; firies=fire fighters) and engaging in fine-dining crawls in search of the country’s most supreme crème brulee. One Saturday during our first visit, our hosts hired a houseboat so that we could motor up the Boorowa toward the restaurant that Zagat’s deemed to have the finest burnt custards in the land.

This is not that.

We, now, are crossing the land in a different style, we being four of my family plus me (the sixth member having left just a few days before my arrival), who move via 4-wheel-drive kitted out for water crossings, steep declines on rutted tracks, and hauling that weird contraption known as a camper-trailer, steel box by day, spacious tent where all five of us comfortably sleep at night, with side drawers that slide out housing a sink, a camp stove, a broiler, several pantries, and a sizable refrigerator. And a faucet, and many more drawers, and an awning or two, a prep shelf, and a dozen other things that I can’t think of at the moment.

Windmill Holiday Park in Ballarat

These comforts do not include those of the 4WD with its fridge, four more pantry drawers, a snorkel (for those water crossings that go a little too deep, which one did in not precisely that way a few months before I arrived), a kangaroo bumper (absolutely not its name but alas, no Internet access, which means I write without aid of the world’s largest encyclopedia), two solar panels that generate the power we need for this three-night stop, and two gas tanks, which slurp up $150 AUD at each filling.

Solar panels on right at Treetops

Gas prices have been falling since this excursion began, a good thing for those using large quantities of it but a bad thing for those who believe consumption monitoring is a very good thing yet again an excellent thing for those who would like to see an end to fracking and tar sands and a dozen other evil outputs of the industry that has fueled a level of comfort for a percentage of the world’s inhabitants far superior to any known before.

But back to our topic or is this our topic? Having swapped Brooklyn for the Bush, my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons, are now into their fifth month of camping, principally in the Outback. Which is largely what Australia with its handful of large cities (wherein 90% of the population resides) and land mass that exceeds that of the US minus Alaska comprises.

The Bush, where wildlife abounds—emus, ostriches, alpacas, kookaburras, wombats, koalas, and, yes, those odd hoppers with the prehensile front legs/arms/paws. Until I looked it up in the dictionary just this very moment, I did not know its basic facts: This marsupial only found here and in New Guinea; its name came from a never-again-to-be-spoken Aboriginal language of the north Queenslanders. My kids are doing The Big Lap, a driveabout the whole continent-country, which could be some 20,000 miles, though it will be considerably more by the time they’re done.

People put such adventures on their wish lists then erase them with a dozen reasons why they could never. But these two did. Not exactly Brooklyn hipsters—though they did shop almost exclusively at the Grand Army Plaza Farmers Market, suffer the indignities of the sometimes-not-running B and the Q to take them to their from-the-outside-fascinating jobs in the city, and give birth to twins who knew their way around the Met, they decided and undecided to take this trip for quite a long time. And then they decided again, gave up their apartment, quit their jobs, dis-enrolled their nearly five-year-old boys from impending kindergarten in an overcrowded public school, put their stuff in storage, reduced their necessities to fourteen suitcases, and departed on July 30 for Sydney.

There they picked up their 4WD, which had been considerably modified from its original factory-form, and their camper trailer, and set out on their journey. They are documenting their five-Ws on their blog with such detail that the Australian Broadcasting Company has run a story on them and a camping magazine has contracted with them to write a series. It helps that they are fine writers and photographers—and that they have guts.

Within a month or so of setting out, they crossed a known challenge for 4WDrivers, Nolans Creek on the 55-km long Old Tele Track, named for the route along which the telegraph was taken all to way north in the east of the country. In their case, they happened to make that particular crossing (one of a dozen or so) in the company of three young men who were able to lend a hand when all did not go as predicted. They crossed the desert, this time without others in their wake, in 110-degree heat. They endured a night of snakes, winds, and a rainstorm so fierce that they, plus my younger daughter, who was visiting at the time, all ended up sleeping in the car. The car. Not the camper-trailer but, picture it, three adults and two little boys sleeping sitting up in a vehicle so packed with stuff that you can’t even see out the rear-view mirror.

And on they traveled—south to Longreach and Innamincka to remote stations, to The Flinders, the Great Ocean Road, and now, with my arrival, a few days first on Melbourne’s Cape Cod equivalent, the Bellarine [sp?] Peninsula; then a few more in Ballarat, an old mining town with a Sturbridge Village-like reconstruction, complete with the New York Bakery (we ordered the Devonshire Tea option, served with two scones, pronounced skons) and the Mechanics Library.

The boys were able to pan for gold (sadly, pebbles instead), peek inside the reconstructed tents of the miners, watch the melting of gold (or is it smelting) and go down into the first level of mine where gold was found both by mining companies and by father-and-son teams who picked along the vein of quartz that pulses with tiny flecks of gold; and now this campsite just outside Ripples Creek, where we were greeted by a mob of jumps. Are there as many words for kangaroos as for snow?

There couldn't be too many words for these strange creatures, who wander close to our campsite, chewing and pooping and hopping and rolling on their backs and tucking their joeys into their pouches then letting them out. They prance quickly, mostly at the end of the day when the sun is dialing down its bake temperature. And 1245 words later this writing session ends with the return of the family from a trip to town.

"O Night Divine on the Cancer Unit"

Robin Schoenthaler is a radiation oncologist at a hospital outside Boston. We met in the way friends often do nowadays, online, through a women's writers group. She's a wise woman and a very good writer. This piece, "O Night Divine on the Cancer Unit," from Upstate Medical University's literary journal, The Healing Muse, which drifted by in my Facebook feed, caused me to stop, click, and read. Here's one lovely paragraph. If you are dealing with cancer either as a patient, relative, or friend, it must be read. And if you say today, not me, well, then bookmark it because you will be that person. We all are/will be.

The Greeks have a word for moments like this—kairos—a time in between, a sacred time, a moment shared with the divine. Walking into a hospital room late at night I feel as though I am walking into a temple, a sanctuary, a secret tunnel underneath the trenches. Voices are muted; the patient is spent. Family may be drawn and pale, worn down to the last nerve. Our encounter is one of many stops in a long battle that began months or years before and their faces show it.

Medal of Freedom for the Freedom Fighters 50 years later

 

Next Monday, November 24, the three young men murdered by the KKK in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, will receive the Medal of Freedom from President Obama at The White House. Members of the families of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner will be there to accept the award, including my friend from college days, David Goodman. See his ongoing work with the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

The poignant note: None of their parents lived to see this day. Andy's father was the first to die, just a few years after he was killed, then Mickey Schwerner's father, then Schwerner's mother, then James Chaney's mother in 2007 (unable to find reference to his father's death), followed just a few months later, by Carolyn Goodman (post on her memorial service here.) Imagine if you can (I can't) the horror of being those parents, their children's whereabouts unknown for six weeks until their bodies were discovered mutilated in a ditch.

None of the killers convicted in the first trial served longer than six years of their sentences; in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen (yes, that's his name--"You can't make this stuff up," David said on the phone during the trial), who was described as the mastermind of the executions, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter on the 41st anniversary of the crime and is serving three consecutive 20-year terms. Mickey Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender, who was in MIssissippi as a civil rights worker herself when the murders happened, had the poise to testify at Killen's trial.

I've written a number of posts about the Goodmans. I met David the year after Andy was killed and just a short time after my own father died suddenly. Grief can create indelible bonds and so we have remained friends all these years. I can't wait to see the pictures, David.

"New York family trades urban jungle for outback adventure"

Nearly eight years ago, Daughter #1, Miranda Stamps, and her husband, Jay Albany, set off on a six-month trip to Asia. Although they were both gainfully employed in NY where they'd gone to college and met (she, Barnard, he, Columbia), they figured that this was a good time to chuck their 9-5s and have some fun before kids and grown-up responsibilities prevented exploring what might make them very happy. They chronicled their trip at the link above. I was lucky enough to join them for part of their New Zealand travels.

Nearly four months ago, they did it again, once more relinquishing gainful employment and a well-situated Brooklyn apartment. Instead of kindergarten, their five-year-old twin boys, Lake and Finn, are learning geography and botany and survival skills by doing as they travel through Australia, chronicled on their new blog and Instagram feed, Miles from Brooklyn.

Today Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Blythe Moore profiles their journey with the aptly titled "New York family trades urban jungle for outback adventure." Here's the pic, followed by some others from their blog that I love. Many dream of doing such things but few have the courage. They've barely met a single American so far--nor have they slept inside much! A very many Miles from Brooklyn and the life of the B and the Q (that phrase for the New Yorkers among us).

With thanks to ABC (Australia-style)

 

Finn, l, and Lake, r, inspecting the equipment

 

Poppa telling boys a story, which Mommy recorded as "Jay's Secret Parenting Sauce"

 

What it's like to live in the bush

 

Though sometimes you can run into a bit of a problem

 

But then you find yourself here, Miranda's photo
that's gotten 3200 likes on the Queensland Instagram feed 

 

Ray, not Tom, but what a pair #clickandclack

Seven years after Katrina, I traveled to New Orleans with a group of volunteers to put hammer to nail at a house on the aptly named Flood Street. Astonishingly, I never posted here about that trip but the death of Tom Magliozzi, the Click of the Tappet brothers, i.e. "the one with the laugh," allows me to rectify that error while quoting a favorite writer from a Facebook post I did at the time. Ah, vanity.

On the second day of our trip (I went with some 20 others affiliated with the Middlebury, VT, Congregational Church), I was moving some 2X4s when:

...This character jumped out of his car at the Habitat site, said exactly three words ("Hi, I'm Ray") to which yours truly blurted out, "I know who you are!" Within seconds, our whole crew surrounded him, all of us delighted. And he was as funny as he is on the air (look at this pic closely) and as hard a worker as any. This is his "7th or 8th" time here for Habitat. "It's just a good fun thing to do," he said. D'accord.

Bostonians unite! Ray and me

   

Ray at work

Ray made it an even more fun build than it already was. I'd never volunteered for Habitat before and didn't know what to expect. We stayed in the dormitory of a church that had had several hundred parishoners before Katrina but by the time we arrived two years ago only a dozen or so remained. We had the use of their kitchen, with each of us signing up to cook meals and clean-up. I made what's become a trademark dish (recipe here), Dan Brown, co-owner of Middlebury's Swift House Inn, made all the breakfasts...and there were other good meals too.

Ray was a delight. His photo-bombing me, which my cousin Bay Area Trail Aficionado Morris Older remembered, was in keeping with Ray's buoyant spirit. We all loved having him as part of our crew, or shall we say, krewe, since all of this took place during Mardi Gras, forever endearing him to me, who can't even remember what my own car looks like...speaking of which, why does the "check engine" light keep coming on?

Nice memories and my heart is aching for Ray and his family today. Even though every single one of us loses loved ones and even though every single one of us learns to live with immeasurable loss, each new death is a novelty, as if it's never happened to anyone before, and is singularly hard to bear.

A few more photos from that trip here, including our side trip to the Ninth Ward, where we snapped some shots of the houses that Brad Pitt's Make It Right foundation has built.

 

Map of where volunteers staying at church came from

 

 

Day 1 

Day 2 -- these things go up fast!

 

Rich at work

 

How it looked when we left

And now for a few of the houses that Brad built, the result of architectural competitions, designed to withstand anything like what Katrina wrought. The first is the sign in front of the spot where a new house has been built, where a family was devastated. I hope you can read the words.

On the 25th anniversary of my mother's death...

Here, from seven years ago, a repost with the letter she left for her funeral.

And a just-discovered Pottstown Mercury news item from Oct 30, 1945, announcing that this 34-year-old Brooklyn transplant, who'd been in Pottstown less than a year and who had an 18-month-old child, would teach adult ed classes in introductory and advanced lipreading for three hours each Tues and Thurs night at the Y. My mom.

And now the blog repost from Sept 9, 2007:

Eighteen years ago today, my mother, Ethel A. Lipnack, died at the age of 78. This morning, I had the chance to stand on the doorstep where she had passed so many times--at the corner of Myrtle and Clinton Avenue, where she was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. A Connectict Muffin shop occupies the candy store that my grandparents ran at the edge of what was then a very posh neighborhood. I write this tonight from our daughter's apartment, just a few blocks from my mother's original home. In all the years since she died, this is the first time I've been nearby on this anniversary. Sad and happy, all at once.

My mother liked to say that she started working at age five, delivering newspapers along Clinton Avenue. She was just 20 years old when she graduated from Hunter College at the height of the Great Depression. With a German major and a French minor, there weren't many jobs available yet she managed to turn her love of language into a lifelong career. She was one of the first teachers of lipreading in Harlem, a skill that she took with her to Pennsylvania when my parents moved there in 1945, founding the first lipreading school in the Philadelphia area. Coincidence: I married a man with major congenital hearing loss (60% loss in the speech range). My mother called my husband one of the greatest natural lipreaders she'd ever met.

In her late forties, my mother turned her attention to teaching high school English, where she got to spend her days with the age group she loved most--teenagers. She taught for many years at Daniel Boone High School, in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, where she eventually chaired the English department. After she retired, she continued teaching reading and English. She was leaving the business school class she'd just taught when she had a massive stroke on March 26, 1984; she lived for five-and-a-half more years, requiring round-the-clock care, but never losing her sense of humor and or her love affair with cigarettes.

I found a letter she'd written for her funeral in a drawer the day she died. About the young people she so admired, she wrote: "Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don't know that. They should take time out to discover this."

One paragraph from her letter stays present across the years, the last sentence so compelling that we made it the epitaph on her gravestone:

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn't, but I do think I raised people's consciousness about it. So we're different from each other. Good! Let's learn about the differences. They're fascinating. At least I've found them so. This is my legacy:

Love each other despite differences and because of them.

And now my mother's letter in full, which my cousin read at her funeral:

1989 

Dear Family & Friends,

I hope this is not a sad day for you. If I were with you, I would not shed one tear. I would, instead, say that I am glad for her. This is what she wanted and she finally got it. One can live too long and I think I did. When I could no longer work, I felt no need to go on. Life seemed pointless and endless, let alone empty.

My children and grandchildren have been a great source of joy to me. They are beautiful people and should be treated like fine crystal. These are the true values in life. The rest is all hogwash. Along with them were my students. I hope they knew how much I loved them and how I profited from knowing them. Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don’t know that. They should take time out to discover this.

Grieve appropriately but not too much. Just be glad we knew each other.

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn’t, but I do think I raised people’s consciousness about it. So we’re different from each other. Good! Let’s learn about the differences. They’re fascinating. At least I’ve found them so. This is my legacy. Love each other despite differences and because of them.

Let’s not have any more wars. They seem never to solve anything. All they do is make a shortage of men for our beautiful young ladies. O.K., I think I’ve said it all!! Make love, not war, grow and understand. Be happy today and in the future. I wish you all well. I’ve had the best of it—my children, my friends. I owe you all a great deal. I hope I’ve been a good friend to you—I wanted to be.

If I’m in Pottstown, I’m happy. It’s where I wanted to be. It’s not Paradise but it’s been home to me for over 40 years. Brooklyn is where my heart has been.

Your confidences were always safe with me as I’m sure mine were with you. OK—get it over with. Do not cry. I’m relieved—truly. Please respect my things, my books, my art, my collections. I enjoyed them. I hope you do too.

                               Ethel A. Lipnack

 

PS. Try to find an alternative to nursing homes. To do this, you’ll have to take the profit out of them. They’re horrors in their present state. People are segregated by age and they have very little in common. I have found them a terrible home. I’ve done the best I could but that’s not good enough. Had I been in this last mausoleum much longer, I would have gone mad.

Dani Menkin's "Is That You?" which might be me--or you

A rainy day in Montreal on our way elsewhere, a perusal of great things to do in this lovely ville, and we notice The Montreal World Film Festival, go through the guide, picking out films that fit our timetable, and agree on the first: "Is That You?", described thusly:

"Newly unemployed, Ronnie, a 60-year-old Israeli projectionist decides to travel to America to find Rachel, the love of his life, a retracing of 'the road not taken'."

Ever since my offspring departed for Australia a month ago under the rubric, "Miles from Brooklyn: Adventures Offroads Less Traveled," I've been thinking about that Robert Frost ponderable, which made me want to see the film. Plus who doesn't want to know what happens when someone goes after their unfulfilled childhood love?

Film stills taken from Dani Menkin's Facebook page -- thanks!

So with that much foresight and that little notice (an hour or two all told), we found ourselves at the festival in a mostly-full theatre watching what turns out to be an excellent film. How many movies cause one to laugh and to cry and to want to reach into the screen and help the characters? That's this film.

There's the brash brother of Ronnie, the main character, confidently played by Alon Aboutboul who's come to the US and now owns a used car lot, a tech-savvy son who although he barely speaks Hebrew wants to join the Israeli Army (possibly the elite Special Forces but the reference was over my head), a zany free-spirit filmmaker (the thoroughly engaging actor, Naruna Kaplan de Macedo), making a film about, guess what, "the road not taken," who joins Ronnie's search for his lost love, a cop who sings opera for the evolving documentary, a grandmother who smokes medicinal pot, and a retinue of cameos from regular folks, albeit colorful ones, who talk about their alternative roads.

Eventually, Ronnie finds Rachel (Suzanne Sadler), whose warmth and quiet charisma explain both why he was so taken with her initially and why we, watching the film, would want to know her. Her interview about other roads is profound. There are many untaken roads, she tells us, not one, and remaining alert to the ones we're on is the trick. Or something like that -- I need the script to be accurate here and it's worth seeing the film just to hear what she has to say.

Films within films, like novels within novels, are tricky and can be just one large heap of hoke but this one is not and an unexpected plot twist leads to double-take time: Is this a documentary after all? It's not but it's so well done that one could leave the theatre feeling as one (this one) did after reading Tomas Eloy Martinez's novel, Santa Evita, where he included so many footnotes that it was nearly impossible to tell whether it was fiction or fact.

OK, so all of that was great but then the kicker: The filmmaker, Dani Menkin, was there after the film to answer questions. Charming and forthcoming, he took questions from the audience, explained that the film was filmed principally in Syracuse (where an article appeared about the movie's production in 2012), and reinforced the mystery of distribution. How does such an excellent film go into wide release? Who knows what slender strands cause such things to happen but, as we left the theatre, I remembered that someone I went to high school with is now a producer and so I test the power of Google Alerts and mention Andy Scheinman, whose great sense of humor I recall, and whom I think would like this film very much.