Will We Someday Celebrate Edward Snowden Day?

It remains unusual for a young man to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize while Michael Hayden, the former CIA director compares him to Benedict Arnold and darkly warns that this "betrayal" will become the costliest to American intelligence and American security:

 http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/19/opinion/hayden-snowden-impact

Hayden overestimates Snowden's foresight, calling it arrogance, and underestimates his abilities, insisting that the contents of Snowden's laptop "must" have been harvested by the Russians and the Chinese.  

You mean the man who made it to Hong Kong and Moscow with the NSA in his pocket couldn't hide or destroy compromising data if he wanted to?

That's just the thing about which no one seems to be able to agree.

Jimmy Carter seems to be one of Snowden's supporters:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/16043-jimmy-carter-defends-snowden-says-u-s-has-no-functioning-democracy

Dick Cheney wants him "hunted to the ends of the earth."  No surprises there.

A worst-case scenario says that Snowden's judgement is abysmal.  Alternatively, he's planned everything brilliantly, and the lengthy stopover in the Moscow airport is all going just as expected.

Or he's winging it while hoping to land on his feet as the good whistleblower.

Every time I Google Snowden, I find at least one journalist calling him "mind-bogglingly naïve" and another calling him a manipulative, Machiavellian so-and-so.

I am sure he is working for greater appreciation of privacy in a world of people who don't understand what the loss of privacy means.

A Russian friend is sure he must now be working for Putin.

Edward Snowden may be our newest Rorschach test.  But that test showed more about the test maker than the testee. 

I wonder about the pressures on Snowden and about how resilient he is; I applaud his bravery, and I think both his actions and those of the U.S. government and the NSA are part of a long, Puritan-inspired tradition of self-examination and exceptionalism that routinely produce bouts of paranoia far more harmful than the situations they were intended to control.*

The U.S. Government and the NSA operate under the assumption that rigorous surveillance makes possible the prevention of attack.  But it is, Artistotle said, "a part of probability that many improbable things will happen." (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, sect. 2, 1139b).

Some disasters can be prevented, some bad guys can be caught in the nick of time, just like in a James Bond movie.  Some, despite or because of the best intentions, cannot.  The United States has a pronounced history of destructive overreaction to perceived threats.   Every tyrant creates his or her worst enemies, and what America has done to Arab-Americans will cause, at the most optimistic, several generations worth of problems.  Just as the Japanese-Americans are beginning to heal . . .

So, is Snowden's legacy going to be that he is a "costly leaker of secrets?" Or that he bravely defended privacy?  I'm with the Germans on this--I think he's both.  He's costing the U.S. money, power and prestige without having any impact whatsoever upon actual national security, in the sense of the safety of American citizens.   He is defending our need to decide what we keep to ourselves and what we show to the world.

And I'll let him have the last word:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/12/edward-snowden-full-statement-moscow


* Here is my favorite statement on political paranoia:

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the greatest gate of the city,
on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

The Guinea Pig Housing Development and The Critical Mom

In these turbulent political times, one thing I rely on for solace is the sight of my guinea pigs, Harry and Ginny, grazing in their outdoor cage or sniffing around their indoor palace--a three-story wooden carved piece of extraordinarily expensive piggy real estate.  If these pigs were living in Manhattan they'd be paying a rent equivalent to Donald Trump's. 

I like to watch them and imagine what goes through their little furry heads:

"Mmm, the grass feels nice on my feet."

"Grass pokes into my mouth and my teeth chew it.  Yum."

"Give me that dandelion leaf!"

"No, I want it all."

"Yes, dear."

After they eat, they nap for fifteen minutes.  Then eat for another fifteen.  Nap.  Eat.  Nap. Eat.  Nap. Eat. Nap. Eat.  You can clock them.  Fifteen minutes of sniffing and grazing; fifteen minutes of lying on their gorged little sides, panting. 

Then Harry gets ideas.  He chases Ginny, who squeals in the most forlorn, desperate, "I-am-a-battered-wife" way, and runs away from him until he stops chasing her.  Then she waits for him to chase her again, and runs up and down and all around so he can't catch her.  But eventually he does catch her.  Then he climbs on top of her and there's a noise from both of them like a buzz saw.

You would think there's a lot of piggy rights violation going on . . . I even thought of separating them . . . until I noticed that when Harry squeals and Ginny is definitely not interested (as opposed to the game of "Not tonight honey: I have a headache") she just swats him across the jaw and he looks mortified for a moment before going back to grazing.

So yes, Virginia!  There is such a thing as piggy foreplay.

I watch it in the garden when I am supposed to be doing the laundry, making a grilled cheese sandwich, or reading whatever it is I am teaching next semester.  It soothes me to see the two of them squeaking at each other  and crunching on their food.  They appear to me to live utterly peaceful lives, and from time to time I imagine that they are reincarnations of some relatives of mine.

On Bastille Day: Edward Snowden and the Hegelian Germans

Americans seems to believe that Edward Snowden is either a hero or a villain, a whistleblower or a traitor, a thief or a Robin Hood, a this or a that.  They think that if he's a good guy he can't possibly be a bad guy, and vice versa.  Call it our cowboys-and-indians sensibility:  the posse only chases the bad guys.  They never sit down with them and have a drink and a smoke, unless it's not really a western but a film noire (the category is already French, not American.) 
Take Bastille Day:  it's a symbol of freedom, the myth remaining that the good guys stormed the ugly prison and released the other good guys.  But the prison was almost empty and the event lives on as a symbol of the way the equally indecisive midnight ride of Paul Revere lives on in the stirring, but inaccurate, Longfellow poem.  The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen followed the storming of the Bastille, but so did the guillotine.  Le Roi est mort, feudalism aussi, but terror erupted when the democracy-seekers siezed power.  Can one separate the good guys from the bad?  "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," said Lord Acton.   Enough terrorizing chaos, and you get a balance of power eventually.  Unfortunately, PRISM has refracted our balance of power--distorted it, corrupted it.

The German perspective--captured by Der Spiegel--remains the idea that Snowden is a hero and a traitor.   If Americans find that hard to wrap their brains around, maybe it's because Hegel's way of thinking isn't part of the American national heritage.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a 19th-century German philosopher, loved to pose a "thesis" against its opposite or "antithesis" in order to get a new thesis, a synthesis.  He didn't think the thesis knocked the antithesis dead, or vice versa.  He thought that through their struggle, they produced a new truth--the synthesis--the child of these two opposing parents.  Here's an example:  

Thesis:  Marriages are made in heaven

Antithesis:  Divorces are made in hell

Synthesis:  Divorces are made in heaven

Well, more or less.  That's Hegel via Oscar Wilde, whose mother translated a number of works from German into English, and once remarked that "the Germans have ideas of freeing mankind on a vast scale too vast to be altogether practical. We have no idea how a crusade of nations would work."  Well, Lady Wilde, maybe now we do, now that the notion of nation is changing.  

If the Germans pose a thesis and its antithesis on the cover of Der Spiegel (Hero or Traitor?) then they feel that Snowden is the synthesis--a new category of thinker, who knows that a betrayal of "national security"is really only a betrayal of national paranoia and hysteria.

So who is Edward Snowden, really?  That depends on whether you're asking 

(1) an American woman my age, who reads The New York Times with, well, a sense of betrayal.  (Are they just angry that Snowden didn't give them the exclusives?) I'm someone who'd like to protect him the way I would protect my sons.  Or, 

(2) alternatively, an American man who expresses on an earlier post of mine his hope "that somebody kicks that fucker, Snowden's, ass!" Or,

(3) a German, who tends to feel that nobody can betray without protecting, or vice versa. 

 Snowden is protecting the right to privacy and betraying the desire of the state to have its nose in your love affairs, medical records, chosen websites, marriages, divorces, children (schooling of, health of, friends of, problems of).  Some cyberfile contains more information about me than the journals I've been writing since I was fourteen years old.  Whatever I forgot all about is stored electronically.  
This abuse of my privacy excuses itself as a weapon against terrorism.  How many times has America fought some presumed threat to national security by betraying its citizens?  McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, the plight of Japanese-Americans, Vietnam, Iraq, the plight of Arab-Americans . . .  much more harm than good was done by the "good guys."  The Snowden case almost makes me want to change my citizenship, but something--and it may only be sentimentality, but it may be the dream that I can still improve the situation as an American--holds me back.  He really is brave and he really has fought an honorable battle, and continues to fight, apparently aware that safe passage to some country willing to take him can only be achieved through major compromises.  He does not want to make those compromises--he's not going to work for the Russians or the Chinese or anyone else.  He's David pitching a stone at Goliath's forehead, and I hope he hits his mark.  
It is America's blessing and its curse to imagine itself as a "city that is set upon a hill" that "cannot be hidden," and America watches other countries as much as it watches itself.  America exists in the idea of its exceptionalism, but that always seemed to me to be predicated on its adolescence.  It's the adolescent who knows that the eyes of the world are upon him or her.  And the eyes of the world are on those traits that seem attractive--coca cola, promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  If we lose the right to privacy--or fail to regain it--we lose these fundamental Jeffersonian rights.

Is Edward Snowden Celebrating the Fourth of July?

The Egyptians will either be celebrating the third of July as the day democracy really began or they'll look back to the grim date as the moment things devolved into dictatorship and worse.  Meanwhile, somewhere in Quito, Ecuador, American expatriates are dreaming of inviting Edward for dinner.  I imagine he's wondering if he'll have to become a Luddite after he moves there and experiences an internet speed with a "mañana" attitude and a world where, as the NY Times observes, people still think the BlackBerry is really cool. . . that would certainly represent the worst punishment, not to mention a waste of amazing talent.  

On this day traditionally devoted to freedom from tyranny, I have only the freedom of my own mind in which to indulge.  No money--my credit card will crack in half if I use it again--and no turning back the clock and adding days to my life, which, now that I'm in my fifties, seems for the very first time limited.

Here is a Fourth of July dream:  Edward J. Snowden is sitting in a well-hidden office with a window overlooking a field upon which bunny rabbits hop.  He is smiling and writing computer programs.  Or he is smiling and reading other people's computer programs.  He is still highly paid, in fact, he's taken quite a pay increase, and he's working for Obama's people.  But the deal is, the guy who's sitting behind some tarp at the Moscow airport and who has been surgically or cosmetically altered so that he's a dead ringer for Espionage Ed--this guy has to endure a couple of perp walks and a trial, a televised trial, naturally.  He'll be well paid.  It will be the beginning of his acting career, even though he can't put it on his C.V.  The money will buy him freedom to do summer stock and a few commercials til he hits the big time. 

The real Edward, meanwhile, will go into a witness protection program, or get surgically and chemically altered to resemble somebody else.  Maybe they'll change his height or his race, too.  Certainly his name.  And a new star will rise in the N.S.A., and he'll cut some deal too, a deal involving transparency.  Both sides will understand that they are and are not talking about the same thing, that spying on everything but the thought I am thinking right now is currently the norm, and pretty soon that'll be gone, too.  
But not if Ed has anything to do with it.  I watch the video, below, and I think of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  That Edward Snowden speaks with honesty and a strong sense of justice remains obvious.  That those who abuse power will hate him for his best qualities is  inevitable.  I can imagine Obama trying to pull a Prince Hal, throwing out Snowden as if he were Falstaff.  But Snowden is no Falstaff.  Snowden holds the mirror up to the N.S.A. and the Obama administration.  What they see is Caliban.  Small wonder they hate him.
Anyone trying to change the ways of the world is naïve but we are all the better for Snowden's effort if he is successful.

As you fire up the barbecue and shoot off the fireworks, think about what the "nation" in "national security" means these days.  In--or should I say until the end of--the 19th century, a "nation state" seemed like an innovation, a good one, a way of consolidating power and establishing a healthy economy.  In the U.S. the Puritan notion of the city upon a hill, ultimately America as the example to the world, worked fine when folks were running scared:  "We better be good, we better look good, because God is watching us."  Once the idea that America as a chosen nation, exceptional in its politics and people, began to emerge, the sense of entitlement . . . that frontier is ours to push, and it's our destiny to push it, because we are bringing them Christinity, or democracy, or our big fat Western egos, then the nation state was already on the way out, an aggressive rather than a creative force.  We walk a tightrope between protector and patronizer, and technology knows no nation.  In a global world, some new, undreamed of form or forms of government will develop.  

Happy Fourth of July, if we can still celebrate, and Edward, you are, at the moment, our national fireworks.

Saint Edward, Barracuda Barack, and the Media

One look at the July 1, 2013 edition of Der Spiegel had me remembering the New Yorker cover of Obama as the black Thomas Jefferson.   But nobody could live up to Jefferson, least of all Jefferson.  The brilliant author of the Declaration, the Notes on the State of Virginia, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (just to name my favorites) owned slaves, bullied his daughters, tried to steal at least one other guy's wife (at least he was in love with her) and handled his finances disastrously.  Whaddaya expect of a genius?  That he be a mature, wise, consistent man?  

Obama is or was an advocate of exactly the kind of transparency Ed Snowden is demanding.  I wonder how Snowden is doing.  I keep remembering the Tom Hanks film about the guy stuck at the airport terminal because his country is in the middle of a revolution.  So are we.  In human understanding of how even as I sit right here typing something of little interest to anyone but myself, some dude is being paid to monitor my subversive desire to support Ed Snowden in any way I can.  Because I don't think Snowden threatened American national security.  I think he embarrassed the president and the N.S.A.

On the cover of the Spiegel, a photo montage portrays Snowden in a white light--only his halo is missing--and lurking in the background, with angry, shifty eyes, an Obama whom one expects to sprout vampire fangs--they look like they're already there under his lip.   "ALLEIN GEGEN AMERIKA" blares the headline ("ALONE AGAINST AMERICA") adding, "Edward Snowden: Held Und Verräter."  Hero and Traitor.  (No either-or for these Germans.  Let's get complicated is the name of the game in these parts.)
With whom would Jefferson have taken sides?  I want to say Ed! But the truth is probably that it would have depended on the day--and on Jefferson's mood.  "I am of a sect by myself as far as I know," he remarked about religion--an area in which his tastes changed with remarkable speed, and he did cut apart the Bible and rearrange it as he saw fit.  When he wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that the law should “comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination [sic],” he wasn't just granting equal protection to unbelievers, he was outing himself as "the Infidel of every denomination."  He seems to have enjoyed changing his mind and protecting those with equally volatile minds.   He liked underdogs, and a Jeffersonian democracy remains one that protects them.  I believe that Snowden is exactly the kind of underdog that Obama should take under his wing.  That undignified sweep-search of the Bolivian president's plane used resources that would have been better spent on the Boston bombers.    At the moment everything's reduced to--for lack of a less vulgar phrase--a pissing contest.  Ed won.  He made his point.  He's smart.  Hand him his passport and let him work for you, Mr. President.  No one has a better sense of national security than Ed Snowden.  

Tick, Tick, Tick . . . The German Teacher, the German Kid, and Lyme Disease

Our daughter went on a class trip to a gorgeously woodsy area of Northwestern Germany where, she informed me as she was just about to head out the door, 

"the teacher said there might be some ticks."

Ever anxious, I vaulted out of her room and returned with my preventive measures, namely the following "therapy-grade" essential oils: 

100% Lavender

100% Cedar

100% Rose Geranium 

 100% Citronella oil 

"No, no, Mommy!" she shook her increasingly determined little head.  "She said only maybe there might be some."  Time was on her side.  She was due for the bus right then.

And I figured Germany didn't really have that many bugs.  Surely the teacher would have said something.  So okay.

Well, we are folks who hardly ever use our cell phones.  We're old.  We don't like them.  And they would have been turned off anyway, because we were at the theater seeing King Lear--an astonishingly good King Lear by a Royal Shakespeare troupe performed in a replica of the Globe Theater.  I still can't figure what actors that good were doing staging a  show for the likes of us in . . . from their point of view, the sticks.  Anyway, there we were, enjoying the show, cell phones utterly off.

So we got home at midnight and the babysitter said the teacher had phoned twice.  "Was she allowed to remove ticks that had burrowed into our daughter's skin?"

Hyperventilating, I called her back.  "Yes, please do remove them right away!  You can always remove them!"
By the time she had tweezed out the things with a special contraption specially made for tick-removal, the ticks had already settled down comfortably for the night, having been cozily buried for the previous two hours under several layers of my daughter's epidermis.
Oh, it is so German that the law in these parts requires the teacher to phone us before she removes a tick from our child . . . because technically she is performing "surgery."  Or something.

How long does it take for infected ticks to transmit poison?  How likely are Northwestern German ticks to be as bad as American ticks?  Would a blood test show anything?  Should we dump a load of antibiotics into our little sweetie even before the blood test offers what are likely to remain inconclusive results?  It helped not at all that the New Yorker that I just received--the July 1 issue--includes an essay, "The Lyme Wars," all about how the lyme disease rate of infection continues to grow.

One reassuring statistic--that it takes 36 hours for a bug to transmit a disease--may be entirely inaccurate.

So do we call the pediatrician when the kid seems fine and has nothing to show for her ordeal but the faintest of pink spots where the teacher's tweezers pulled out the offending insects?  Then she checked my kid, and all the other kids, at the hairline, the ankle-line, and every other line except the places where they were supposed to check themselves.  I can rely on the German sense of order and of thoroughness:  there ain't no more ticks on our kid's body.

But what about the two the teacher removed?  Were they sick bugs or well bugs, and how do I find out which?  Probably by becoming God, and that doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

Would You Hide Edward Snowden?

Die Zeit ("The Times") Germany's most intellectually engaged newspaper, has a banner headline in the June 27 issue:  "Würden Sie diesen Mann verstecken?"  ("Would you Hide this Man?") complete with a romantically windswept photo melange of Snowden looking soulful.

Yes, Edward, yes, yes, yes!  We'd be one stop on your underground railway!  You could hide in our attic or in one of several rooms in our basement.  The guest room would be fine with us:  it has a comfy bed, a nice little blue rug and some lovely plants on the windowsill.  You could roll down the shade and no one would see you.

Ecuador?  Iceland? Venezuela?  En route to anywhere you want, do call us.  Code Name?  Secret message?  Gee, how do we do that one?  Hmmmm.  I have never done this before, obviously.  But hey, "Espionage Ed," I'm sure you'll find a way, and you know what?  You could even have the clubhouse the kids and my husband built in our back yard.

Now, I know we'll probably find ourselves disappointed, but we do have a well-stocked larder.  My real point: if every little blogger whom nobody reads sends you this invitation--I know, it sounds like that Peter Pan line, every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead”--but I persist:  if every little blogger with less than 30,000 hits invites you to tea, or to stay overnight, or even two nights, well, then all zillion of us are offering a roof over your head and what can "they" do?

I'm reading The Daily Beast and the New York Times and everybody hysterically speculating that you are not a hero but an egomaniac and are, as we speak, making deals with China and destroying American interests. Or they think you're a schizoid personality.  Maybe you are.  So what.  So was Johnny Appleseed.  Like him, you're a visionary.

I don't get the impression that all this paranoia and fanfare and gasping "The last time a spy defected. .  ." stuff has anything to do with you.  I think you did just want to show that folks out there are really reading my blog.

So, how about a few flash mobs, and everyone will sing (to the tune of "Bye, Bye, Birdie"):

We love you Edward

Oh yes we do-hooo

We love you Edward

And we'll be true-hoo . . . . 

I think you have a network of concerned citizens here who remember J.Edgar Hoover going nuts over the Berkeley Free Speech movement, (I'm not proud of him in general: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/hoover/12.html) Joe McCarthy questioning Lucille Ball,  Japanese-Americans herded into camps in the deserts, Arab-Americans persecuted for walking down the street and buying a pack of cigarettes, plus that Ur-event of them all, the Salem Witch Trials.  Right after 9/11 we happened to visit Salem and saw FBI manhunt posters of Osama bin Laden staring out of telephone poles and coffee houses.  And my husband said:  "Salem.  Proudly hunting witches for three hundred years."  That about sums it up.

Edward: We'll keep the light on for ya. 

P. S. Remember Daniel Ellsberg! 

Love, the Lovings, and The Supreme Court Rulings on Gay Marriage

      In March, 1924, the state of Virginia established a "Racial Integrity Act" plus a "Sterilization Act" that brings to mind the Nuremburg laws.  The Virginia laws required that every person be categorized at birth as "white" or "colored" and defined race by the "one-drop rule," meaning that any person with "one drop" of African blood must be categorized "colored."  The laws criminalized all marriages between "white" and "colored" as well as mandating sterilization of any person deemed "feebleminded."  Wealthy first families of Virginia claiming descent from the Indian princess Pocohantas got an exception . . . the one drop rule hardly applied to them.  Even if they had one-sixteenth Indian blood, they remained "white" under Virginia law.

     As gay people finally get to tie the knot, I hope we all remember how American ideas about race interfered with marriage in 1967 and beyond.  And how bizarre our ideas about sex continue to be.  How many folks commenting on the front-page New York Times article on the Supreme Court rulings complained that gay people ought to be content with legal partnerships, not marriage.  Separate but equal, the dismal failure that made a charade out of the right to equal treatment under the law,  continues to haunt us.  And it's all about sex.  Who's having it, who isn't, when it's legit, when it isn't . . . the Christian Right's temper tantrum about gay marriage just won't go away.  Witness: 

http://www.policymic.com/articles/49989/evangelical-christians-are-not-the-victims-of-same-sex-marriage

So, back to the Lovings, who were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified "miscegenation"--now, there's an archaic concept-- as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. The trial judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, reveling in the archaism, proclaimed: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. ” On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pled guilty and got sent to prison with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They did so, moving to the District of Columbia. 
 "Tell the court I love my wife!" Richard Loving said to his lawyer, who was to argue the case before the Supreme Court. 
 And the Supreme Court did listen. 
 And now, the Supreme Court listened to gay people too. 
 America the beautiful!

Jazz Up Your Chicken (or Fish) with The Critical Mom

If the kids are tired of the same old garlic salt on their chicken drumsticks, or if your husband yawns at the sight of your whole-lemon-stuffed-in-the-bird with garlic and rosemary special, then here's an answer to the problem that is easy enough for Peg Bracken:

The Oil and Vinegar herbs and rubs collection.  Oil and Vinegar is a growing chain--they started in the Netherlands, they're conveniently located at our local train station in Germany, and they have a number of stores in a number of U.S. States.

So here's the latest:

Rinse chicken drumsticks (or breasts, or a whole bird) and pat dry.  Arrange in smallish pan, so that the juices surround the bottom of the bird rather than dispersing and burning while the chicken is in the oven.

Take a spoonful or two of the Oil and Vinegar brand Tzatziki mix and sprinkle it over the chicken.  Add a little sea salt--not much, since the Tzatziki mix includes some salt. 
http://wpb.oilandvinegarusa.com/catalog/product/view/id/79/s/tzatziki-dip/category/21/
Sprinkle on a bit of Lemon Pepper mix over the bird and shove it in the oven.  

Alternatively:  Instead of the Tzatziki mix (or on top of it) use their Wild Garlic mix. Or their Australian Bush Mix.  Browse their collection; it's way better than plain ole garlic salt.

Try cooking this on fairly low heat--160ºC (320ºF) for 90 minutes.  If you're in a hurry, put the oven to 180ºC or 360ºF for about an hour--the chicken should be crisp, not burned.

The Teenager, The Party, The Electronics, and the Helicoptoring Critical Mom

Actually I only helicoptored during breakfast, when I made blueberry pancakes for my three children plus the seven friends of my fourteen-year-old who had spent the night upright and online.  I woke up around four and heard guffaws, realized that they came from downstairs and thought to myself:  they are not outside, they are safe in the living room.  Not one drop of alcohol has been served and no drugs whatsoever, unless you count the freakishly evil characters in the computer game--medieval music spews forth as figures in helmets sprouting antelope horns charge around hacking each other to pieces; blood spurts forth like champagne after a cork hits the ceiling.  Somebody resembling Bill Sykes, complete with big black stovepipe hat brandishes a repeat-fire assault weapon (but then why does he have a quiver filled with arrows strapped to his back?) Bill Sykes goes up in flames just as I hand a pancake to a kid so enthralled with the game that he can barely remember to eat.  

They are all laughing.  They are not drinking, they are not crashing into things in a car, they are not doing drugs.  This is now my mantra.

As the guests began to arrive yesterday afternoon, my fourteen-year-old picked up some gizmo (a gameboy, I believe--we never had one) and said, with an enchanting leer:  "Mommy, you deprived me throughout my childhood!  You only read to me instead of giving me Pokemon games!"

His nine-year-old sister picks up the Complete Works of Goethe lying on the table and reads out a poem she relishes, and has nearly memorized: 

Ein junger Mensch ich weiß nicht wie,

Starb einst an der Hypochondrie

Und ward dann auch begraben.

Da kam ein schöner Geist herbei

Der hatte seinen Stuhlgang frei,

Wie ihn so Leute haben.

Der setzt sich nieder auf das Grab,

Und legt ein reinlich Häuflein ab,

Schaut mit Behagen seinen Dreck,

Geht wohl erathmend wieder weg,

Und spricht zu sich bedächtiglich:

„Der arme Mensch, er dauert mich

Wie hat er sich verdorben!

Hätt' er geschissen so wie ich,

Er wäre nicht gestorben!''

And I think to myself:  yes, that was seventeen well-spent euros.  They are actually reading the Goethe I bought for them.  Thank goodness I got all of Nietzsche on sale for five euros . . . otherwise I'd really be going broke.  Here's a rough translation in modern English:

A young man, I don't know who

Once died of Hypochondria

And was then buried

Along came a handsome ghost

Who really had to go

The way people do

He sat himself down on the grave

And put a nice heap there

Looked comfortably at his poop

With a sigh of relief

And said thoughtfully to himself

The poor guy, I pity him,

How he made things miserable for himself

If he'd pooped like me,

He wouldn't have died. 

It's even more fun in German, a language boasting a long tradition of anal humor.  To which it has no exclusive claim, let me remind you--our own Benjamin Franklin having produced Fart Proudly, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fart-Proudly-Writings-Benjamin-Franklin/dp/1583940790/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371382729&sr=1-1&keywords=fart+proudly
I must admit, however, that Germans have even more imagination in this department, and if you will take the time to watch their version of Saturday Night Live, you will see what I mean.

P.S. Edward Snowden, don't come home.  Stay safe, now! And continue to save the world from your little eyrie, wherever it might be.  And you know what, PRISM?  You can refract every word of what I've ever written, said, and probably even thought every which way, but you will not find any knowledge of this brave young man's location.  I hope everyone has read the May 13, 2013 NYRB review of  Seth Rosenfeld's book about J.Edgar Hoover and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement: see http://www.sethrosenfeld.com/ 
for information about the book, and think of Edward Snowden's lonely battle. Why is a president who wanted a transparent government going after a lone hero who is into transparency?  Why we talking about those cute cupcake photos of Snowden's girlfriend instead of his discoveries?

Data Mining, PRISM, Paranoia, and The Critical Mom

Edward Snowden, I love you.
What the heck do AOL, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and YouTube, Microsoft and Skype, and some company I'd never heard of, PalTalk, think they're doing?  Are they picking through my emails, phone calls, conversations uttered while sitting home in my living room for evil thoughts?  Is some lonely government-employed schnook with a headset, an electronic game or a part of his own anatomy in his hand, dully recording the words "Arab," "Terrorist," and "Bomb? on his U.S.-government issued Mac?"  
Do they know about the time I was at JFK returning to Germany with my fifteen-month-old daughter on my back, several suitcases, and my mother trotting along wanting to "help?"  This particular incident would surely make any FBI guy keep an eye on me . . . or at least on her.
 We were standing at the counter.  This was about three and a half years after 9/11 and people were worrying about that and about the guy with the gunpowder in his shoes and the matches.  The woman behind the counter asked to see my knapsack and I handed it over.  As she unzipped it, she read slowly from a list.
"Do you have any sharp objects?" she began.
"No," I said.
"Do you have any--"
My mother interrupted:  "She doesn't have any bombs!"  and giggled, delighted with her wit.  The women questioning me looked very serious.
"I'm sorry," I babbled.  "I didn't say that.  My mother is, is, eighty-eight."  Which is about what she was at the time, but you'd never know it.  She could pass for a spry fifty-six, i.e. my age, and her face suggests something of the glory of the toddler who is always right.  She just sent me a photo of herself, posed appropriately under the Arc de Triomphe, her balletic foot elegantly stretched, her youthful face (she had a cosmetic neck lift at 89) gazing  poetically off into the distance.
You'd never know.
The lady behind the counter did not know, and clearly did not believe me when I stated my mother's age.
"You'll need to come with me, please," she said with the deliberately neutral professional air of someone dealing with a nutcase.
I hauled my suitcases over, my daughter beginning to be tired and howl and pull my hair, my mother keeping up a steady, loud stream of chatter: "My goodness, doesn't anyone have any sense of humor!"  Giggle.
"Please, Mom."
She dug her elbow into my ribs.  "Come, on, lighten up!"
The lady opened my suitcases and looked through the contents, closed them again.  I reminded her that I had not "said that," and that I did not believe the remark to be funny.   I was then allowed to stand online for the metal detectors.  My mother stood with me, discoursing on the lack of humor of folks at JFK.
When I was pulling my suitcases off the revolving belt at Düsseldorf, they looked different.  They had stickers all over them.  I rolled them out the nothing-to-declare door and opened them.  Every folded garment had been unfolded and stuffed back in every-which-way.  All items were topsy-turvy; the contents looked as though they'd been stirred by a Cro-Magnon and thrown back in. 
So yesterday as I sat watching CNN talk about PRISM and President Obama tell everyone their phones were not being tapped, I thought . . . hey!  Maybe someone is reading my blog!  Oh, you, out there underground in Utah, finger held over a button, or oh, you!  Somewhere behind a torn-open bag of potato chips and your own computer deep under the C.I.A. . . . I do hope you're enjoying this blog.  Especially after my teenage son, who was also watching the CNN segment on PRISM made a point of saying, when I asked if the guinea pigs had been brought in from their sojourn in their little cage in the back yard, "You mean the guinea pigs?"  It is hard to convey the degree of insinuation expressed in his tone of voice, followed by every word connected to every terrorist act he could think of.    Just because Mommy is paranoid.  He's a nice kid, really.  He reads Ken Follett and gets good grades.  And those really were little furry creatures who like carrots in our back yard.  Nothing else.  Honest.

Charlotte's Web and The Critical Mom

I have a friend who is a child psychoanalyst.  He is in his fifties, has a great deal of experience in his field, and belongs to one of the most prestigious psychoanalytic institutes in the United States.

When I mentioned Charlotte's Web to him, his face fell and his voice sunk to a whisper.  "I read that book when I was eight years old and I cried for three days."

"Three days?"

"When Charlotte died, I cried for three days!"  He won't be reading that one to his kids. 

When I was in third grade, I read the book after my mother bought it for me at my school's book fair.  I treasured it and Stuart Little because I had selected them myself, because they were hardcovers and came in a fancy box, and because she she actually bought them for me when I was sure she'd say "no."

I loved the illustrations.  I loved the story.  I don't remember crying when Charlotte died, although I know I must have been sad.  I felt sorry when the book ended. 

Armed with my friend's reminiscences, I proceeded with caution while reading Charlotte's Web to my sons, then ages eight and six, ready to reassure them that Charlotte lives a full life, has babies, and experiences the satisfaction of achieving her main goal, the salvation of Wilbur.  I even bought a children's book, David L. Rice's Lifetimes,  

http://www.amazon.com/Lifetimes-Sharing-Nature-Children-Book/dp/1883220599/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370337805&sr=1-3&keywords=lifetimes+animal+lives

which details the life cycles of a number of plants, animals, and insects, ranging from giant sequoias that last around 2,000 years to mayflies, who live only one day.  I wanted to be able to document that Charlotte lived a long life for her species.

My boys never asked about Charlotte or her death.  Taking me completely by surprise, they asked why the goose lays eight eggs, but one of them never hatches.  

We were all walking uphill to the tram stop when the boys started discussing the scene in the book when the baby geese are born.  Then came,

"Why doesn't that egg hatch?"  I had the answer the goose gives herself all ready:  "I don't know.  It's a dud, I guess."

 But they were not satisfied.

"Why, Mommy?"

 "That's just something that happens in nature sometimes."

"Did that ever happen to you, Mommy?"

Now came the moment where I didn't want to answer.  If I tell the truth, I'll scare them, I thought.  If I don't, I'm lying.   What good answer could I give?  

"Yes," I said.  "It did."  

"Why?"  

"That is just one of those things.  Sometimes an animal or a baby just stops growing, and no one knows why."

Is that the answer I should have given?  It certainly had them talking.  "The one that didn't live!"  is a phrase I have heard more than once.  

"Besides," I told them, thinking up a distraction too late, "That goose egg turns out to be really important.  Because of that egg, Charlotte gets saved from an untimely death:  Avery tries to whack her out of her nest with a stick, but falls backward onto Wilbur's trough, under which lies a goose egg that never hatched.  The stink of rotten egg drives Avery out of the barn." A friend of mine leaned toward lying or distraction, disapproving when she learned I'd told the kids the truth.  But my hunch is that children ask questions like this when they already know the answer.  They must have picked up, at some time and in some way, that I'd experienced a loss and felt sad about it.  My younger son had not been born yet when I had my miscarriage, but the eldest was a year old, and I'd had to hire a sitter for the day in order to go to the doctor, and he must have noticed that I wasn't feeling good and wasn't available.  In fact I'd been doubled over with cramps so bad they made me vomit in the bathroom, and he'd been alone for about fifteen minutes of that.  He may have been watching Barney, at the time, but he probably realized something was up.  Death is a shocker and a taboo topic because most people living in Western industrialized countries don't see much of it.  My daughter cried when Charlotte died.  She is almost nine years old, and "it's so sad, Mommy!"  I couldn't find the Lifetimes book the night I finished reading her Charlotte's Web, and had to read her a page of a Beverly Clearly Ramona book--Ramona's endlessly amusing misadventures distracted her.  But my daughter did not cry for three days, and I think it would have been a mistake to pretend that Charlotte comes back to life.  I told her all the things I had been planning to tell the boys about Charlotte, and I told her that death is a part of life.  I could see from the look on her face how unfair that was, so I moved on to Charlotte's babies and life going on.  

The Critical Mom and the Cost of Living

Twenty-three euros and nineteen cents after entering Lidl, a local grocery chain in Northwestern Germany,  I had a 5 kilo (11 pound) chicken, a 50 gram (1.7 ounces) bottle of garlic powder, another of paprika, a third of thyme, and the last of a chicken seasoner that reminded me of Lawry's salt.  I had three large lemons, a bunch of scallions, a small plastic pack of cherry tomatoes, a pack of sliced goat cheese, a pack of sliced Gouda, a small container of spreadable goat cheese, a pack of four small packages of salad seasoning, and five small chocolate bars for an upcoming birthday party.  And a heavy, re-usable cloth bag in which to carry it all home, every bit as politically correct (fair trade!!) as its American counterparts that'll cost ya, cost ya, cost ya.

The same items would run me about six times as much on the Upper West Side at the West Side Market.  Lidl lohnt sich runs the German store's motto, translating, approximately, as Lidl makes itself worthwhile, or Lidl creates savings.

Indeed.  We get on the tram--my daughter and I--me marveling at how much I got for how much I did not spend, she leaning back on the kind of plush seat that hasn't graced New York subways since I was five years old.  Eons ago.

We get off the tram and walk toward our house, which is like something out of a Thomas Mann novel, all gables and high ceilings and enough secret passageways to run several underground railroads--and again it occurs to me that in Manhattan I'd have to be Donald Trump to afford this much space and quiet--plus a gigantic back yard that comfortably accommodates a guinea pig cage, a swing set, a clubhouse built with materials that fell off the back of a truck when there was construction next door, and a small round swimming pool big enough to float in. 

So it is paradise.  The only problem with paradise is that it is here . . . not in New York.  But meals are always entertaining, the children at the moment honing their "diss" skills, pretend-insulting each other, as in: "You're so ugly that Medusa would turn to stone if she looked at you!" and "You're so fat your blood group is Nutella!" and "You're so dumb you order Weisswurst (the favorite Bavarian sausage) in a Chinese restaurant."  And I sit back, relax, take a sip of chilled white wine, and enjoy the show.

Head Lice, Critical Mom Style

The first time one of my kids had head lice, it took us a week to figure it out.  Jimmy (not his name) was four at the time, and normally a sound sleeper.  But for several nights in a row I heard him yell out in his sleep:  "Lemme ALONE!  Lemme ALONE!" and then I heard flopping noises, his legs crashing against the wooden frame of the bed, then mumbled imprecations, the worst insults he could think up at that age, then snores--loud ones.
The teachers at his kindergarten had checked all the children for head lice, they said, so I didn't think to look myself.  Until he scratched his head vigorously, and I noticed, when I picked him up from kindergarten, that the teachers were checking little scalps under a light so weak that one would go blind trying to read a book under it.
I should have known better when my daughter, then just four, started scratching several years later, but I was distracted.  She was visiting me in the hospital where I was recuperating from pneumonia and as she regarded me sadly, scratching, she asked, "Mommy, does the doctor you live with now say I can't nurse forever?"  I thought my sudden removal to the hospital and the ban on nursing (too many antibiotics coursing through my veins) had traumatized her.  So I said, "Sit on mommy's lap and I'll brush your hair." And I brushed her hair, thinking to soothe her, and after she'd gone home I brushed my own hair.  With the same hairbrush, alas.  I assumed that the extreme scalp itch I felt within a day or two resulted from the antibiotics--itching, they had told me, could be a side effect.  On my daughter's next visit I brushed her hair again, and happened to look down and see little gray things crawling through her scalp.  I called the nurse, who sent the doctor, who took a look and jumped back, gasping but this time not (as had my son's pediatrician) screaming.

So, pay attention, mothers and teachers:

(1)  Get a really strong flashlight or the kind of lamp that TV cops train on the face of suspects whom they are interrogating.  Train that lamp on your kid's scalp.

(2)  If you see the little gray things crawling along the edge of his hairline, or little white things stuck to hair shafts, do not do what my son's pediatrician did:  jump back shrieking, in a panicked fashion, and yelp, "OH!  These are more than a week old!"

(3) Do not buy that stuff the pediatrician prescribes--the Nix, The Rid, The Quell, and certainly not the stronger stuff.  At least, don't let the chemical carcinogens approach be your first.  Save the big guns for the last resort.

(4)  Mix together olive oil and a bunch of essential oils, better yet "Therapeutic Grade" essential oils.  Go on the net for everybody's home recipe, and you'll find many.  Here's one I like, which includes the kind of comb you'll need: http://thehomesteadsurvival.com/kill-head-lice-essential-oil-recipe-2/#.UaXYT4IWE7A 


Do your own research on essential oils.  Citronella, for example, repells not only mosquitoes but head lice, so if your kid doesn't have head lice YET but everyone in his class does, try a dab of this.  If he tolerates it--mine liked the smell, but some kids won't--you can rub a handful into his scalp.

(5) The basic idea behind  grease-based approaches to head lice remains simple:  cut off the air supply of the lice.  A scalp full of mayonnaise, a plastic bag firmly fixed over the scalp so that the stuff stays on all night (this is the tricky part--you want to keep an airtight plastic wrap or plastic bag around his scalp without asphyxiating him.  If the wrap is too lose, it comes right off the first time he turns over in his sleep.)

(6) I think the olive oil mixed with essential oils is the best bet--it's easier to get out of the hair once the cure is done.  Olive oil smells better than either mayonnaise, or--for the determined--industrial strength vaseline, a substance guaranteed to both asphyxiate and drown lice, if you put enough on.  Even if the plastic wrap falls off, the lice are buried in sludge.  Expect damage to your sheets, either way.  The drawback with vaseline is that it takes forever to get it out of the kid's hair.

(7) The night after the cure, you'll need to get a lice comb--the market simply abounds with fancy lice combs that light up the eggs with neon so they're easy to see, but the cheap one from the drugstore works fine.  Get a bowl, put in half water and half white vinegar, and then just keep combing, just keep combing, just keep combing, just keep combing . . . until you feel like Dory, the attention-deficit fish in Captain Nemo.  That should be about long enough to get rid of 'em without Rid.

Amsterdam and the Critical Mom

We're here on an overcast, cool day, unseasonably cold but still laid back as only Amsterdam can be:  some guy flinging his leg over his windowsill to have a smoke, leaning just far enough out so that one little push would send him crashing to the pavement but he's cool--he pulls back just in time.  Guys in feathers, guys in rubber, a guy in a pink tutu, great tits, and White Rock fairy wings just ahead of us at the hotel registration desk.  My eight-year-old advised me as we strolled the streets surrounded by uninhibited merrymakers, "Mommy, I don't feel quite safe here," and I reassured her that she was with us and once we got to the lovely little Portuguese restaurant near the Central train station, she enjoyed her meal very much.  We'd been standing on a corner so long trying to find something in the Lonely Planet Guide that we just gave up and decided to walk along one of those skinny, windy, twisty streets with bright round little beer ads above every restaurant sign.  And it all worked out.  We spent the afternoon at NEMO, the science and technology museum, being thrilled by bubbles, trick mirrors, chain reactions, the sound of DNA (animals, including spiders, sound harmonious.  HIV sounds dissonant).  There's no music of the spheres in disease, I guess.  It was indeed a curious experience hearing the sound of DNA--worth the price of admission, as was the slanted roof garden which overlooks much of the city.  It's a friendly city and the language is curious and gutteral--not like English, not like German, but more or less understandable to one who speaks both. 

Two of my children thought it might be fun to play their musical instruments and make a little money, so we set them up in front of a long line that we misconstrued as a wait for one of the ferries.  It turned out to be a wait for the Anne Frank house.  As my oldest remarks, "Good thing I wasn't playing the German national anthem."  My youngest was told folks were complaining, and that proved a good opportunity to explain that her cheerful rendition of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was not appropriate for the very sad story of Anne Frank, which we told her.   But P.S. both kids made more than I make in an hour.

The longer we're in Amsterdam, the more I think of the place as ancestor to a better New York.   Amsterdam is New York with a middle class, New York un-invaded by the ultra wealthy.   Amsterdam has cute little boutiques and gorgeously designed crafts at reasonable prices.  It has museums.  Outside the Zuidas district--"financial mile"--it's pretty much free of skyscrapers, and the red brick traditional, Cuypers-influenced school of architecture brings the Upper West Side to mind.  Plus there's more than an echo of The Strand in Amsterdam's American Book Center (http://www.abc.nl/) whose friendly staff and lively selections made me homesick--not as many miles of books, but service with a smile, even though the honest, friendly Dutchman at the front did not ask to see ID when I offered my passport as proof of age in order to get a discount.  "No, I believe you," he said, imagining I would be pleased.  I briefly re-considered Botox treatments, but realized that the amount I had just invested in books was equal to the cost of a single Botox treatment.  We took a tour of the Royal Palace and another of the Rijksmuseum, where among the Rembrandts and the Caravaggios and the Mannerists I sought images of William of Orange, since family legend has it that my ancestors, mercenary soldiers of the same, were granted lands in Pennsylvania after some war . . . now which one was it, because at last count there were more than nine Williams of Orange.  The Dutch Royal family re-numbered them, starting with the first, the second, etc. in the 19th century, because, my fourteen-year-old says, William the twenty-fourth sounds less cool than William the Fourth, and William the Two Hundred and Fiftieth sounds severely un-cool.  He has a point.  In any case my relatives are said to have landed in Pennsylvania sometime in the seventeeth century, where, had they remained, my family might have become Philadelphia Main Line--but oh, now, those tough soldiers marched on to the Carolinas, where we evolved into Southern Gothic.  Another story.

We toured the Royal Palace and a question that had been on my mind --why do the Dutch Royals look so much happier than the English Royals--got an answer: the Dutch have a tradition of abdication.  Queen Beatrix handed over the Queenship to her son Willem, just as her mother Wilhelmina had abdicated in favor of her.  Whereas Elizabeth just goes on forever.  The English, Shaw observed, think they are being moral when they are only uncomfortable.

Amsterdam is a delight--I highly recommend it, especially for anyone who misses New York

Angelina Jolie's Breasts, Modern Science, and The Critical Mom

Fifty years hence, mothers will be sitting down with daughters and saying, "There was an actress, sometime around 2011, or a year or so later--I can't remember her name--who had her breasts cut off because she thought it would prevent her from getting breast cancer.  And it didn't.  You know, they used to just cut everything out--"

And the daughter's jaw will drop.  She'll say, "Really, Mommy?"
  Journalists applaud Angelina Jolie for her bravery in parting with her breasts.  She appears to be acting in good faith on the advice of her doctors, who have informed her of the likelihood that she will, like her mother, contract breast cancer. Her mother died at 56--my age--from breast cancer, and Jolie herself has a "genetic variant" that her doctors have told her makes her likely to come down with the disease.  Her aunt, at 61, just succumbed as well.  Women with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations have a risk of 60-90% or of 87% depending upon which medical authority one asks.  Their children have a fifty percent chance, says the medical opinion of the hour. 

But unless you can act on it immediately and knowingly, such information remains harmful.  A so-called 87% chance might as well come out of my sixth-grade Math textbook, How To Lie With Statistics.  The Spring 2013 issue of Columbia Magazine offers an article on pre-natal genetic testing, asking the question whether genetic markers indicating potential problems in a fetus should be discussed with parents.  Yes and no.

It all depends.  Even things that are true can be proved.  Women worry when they are pregnant.  Why give them more to worry about especially when the squiggle in the genetic material suggesting a possible problem may just be a slightly sloppy hunk of human material meaning absolutely nothing?  They can't really tell whether certain squiggles are pathological or merely idiosyncratic.  Should a mother worry that her fetus might have developmental delays when the geneticists find something unusual?  Should Angelina Jolie really have had her breasts removed just because her mother died of breast cancer and Jolie herself has the "genetic variation?"  

She regards her own mother idealistically:  ‘I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving — she’s better than me.’  Meanwhile her mother-in-law, a health advocate, insisted she go get tested.   What if Jolie's decision is a contorted way of mourning her mother?  If Jolie is terrified, then maybe she has a reason to be, but it is she who should evaluate the sources of her terror. Not her doctor. Did her mother breast feed?  Jolie breastfed her twins.  Breastfeeding is one of nature's protections against cancer, but of course it's not foolproof.  Nothing is.  But the hunches of the woman diagnosed with problems or potential problems are more important than the diagnosis.  A pregnant friend dreamed repeatedly that her baby was being strangled.  She told the doctor her dream and he laughed at her.  The child had the cord around his neck.  I told my doctor that my second child was enormous.  With the most sophisticated ultrasound equipment then available, my doctor insisted that he was anything but--"maximum, 3,700 grams," insisted my doctor, who had done his Ph.d in ultrasound.  P.S. My son weighed 4,200 grams (9 1/2 pounds) and was 56 centimeters long (over 22 inches).  At birth, he'd outgrown the baby clothes mailed him by well-meaning friends.  

Now, my doctor knew much more about medicine than I did.  I know nothing.  But I was right.  I had a strong feeling and I did not tell myself "Oh, well, the doctor knows more than I do."  I wonder about Angelina Jolie.  Did terror or her own good sense drive her decision?

The Critical Mom's Memories

Somehow or other, I've always kept a journal, and I'm glad that even though I was writing almost in my sleep when my children were young, I recorded some doozies.  Samples:

First son, then age three, ran stark naked down the stairs after a bath when he was supposed to remain upstairs, donning his pajamas.  Picture the energetic child laughing maniacally as he escapes the clutches of the middle-aged (at this point 44-year-old; God, how young) mother who yelps ineffectually:

"You come back here!  Come here or I'll grab you!"

"Gwab me!  Gwab me!" yelled the imp, delirious with delight.  "Or I won't like you anymore!"  (Pause.)  Turning to the exhausted Mom at the top of the stairs with a winning smile,  he added, "It's just an expression!"

The same child, the same year, coming home from day care:  "Why does it rain?  Oh, I know, 'cause God is sad, and also it's good for our plants!"

Unsurprisingly, the kid's brother and sister have at least the same energy level.  The brother, same age (three does seem to be a self-assertive time in a person's life):  Mommy leaves the room for a nanosecond; comes back to find the brother has dumped an entire jar of strawberry jam on his 14-month-old sister's head.  She looks exceedingly startled, then appears to reflect and to conclude that this must be part of the normal course of events.  She seemed considerably less sanguine when I left the room for the proverbial nanosecond while she was in the bath, and her brother seized the opportunity to dump half a bottle of shampoo on her head. 

Now, this girl is most logical.  At six, she looked at an ancient and beautiful monastery which we were observing from the window of a home in a traditional Bavarian village, and when I said that for many years monks had lived there, she asked:  "What kind of monks?  Chipmunks?"

Ah, those were the days.  Now it's all about "Why can't I have Grand Theft Auto?" and "But he really is an asshole and I know I'm not supposed to say that but I don't know another word!  Asshole!" or "I don't feel like practicing my recorder today" (with an affecting sob).

It's true.  They are growing up.  And it's still the greatest show on earth.