Ariadne’s threads [greatest hits]
- June 21, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, myths
8
[Still in reruns. First appeared Sept 17, 2007.]
I was seeing my girls off to sleep Sunday night when suddenly, without warning, the Bronze Age broke loose.
It was one of those breath-holding parenting moments when you can’t believe your luck at being there to capture it. Delaney [then 5] announced that she had made up a myth of her own. For some reason I had the presence of mind to grab my laptop and transcribe as she spoke. Read it, then we’ll chat:
The Wall of Parvati
There was a girl named Medusa. And she knew this wall, a big wall, and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat with her sharpest sword and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying, because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian), and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep, and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
Before I yak this to death, let me repaste her myth with elements cross-referenced to the myths Laney has heard as bedtime stories in recent weeks:
The Wall of Parvati1
There was a girl named Medusa.2 And she knew this wall, a big wall,3 and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat4 with her sharpest sword5 and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying,6 because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian),7 and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods8 down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes9 and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep,10 and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
1 She knows Parvati from Ganapati Circles the World (Hindu). Parvati is the consort of Shiva and mother of Ganapati (aka Ganesha or Ganesh). Parvati’s also a Gryffindor, of course.
2 From Perseus and Medusa (Greek).
3 The Iliad (Greek). Much is made of the hated wall around Troy in this excellent retelling for grades 2-4.
4 Several of our recent myths included sailing quests — The Golden Fleece, The Iliad, The Odyssey (Greek).
5 Perseus killed Medusa with the infinitely sharp adamantine sword of Hermes (Greek).
6 Shiva’s pro-wrestling name is “The Destroyer.”
7 No idea. We haven’t done any Egyptian myths yet. The Disney flick Prince of Egypt, maybe?
8 This has been a theme in several of the myths we’ve read lately — the sending of surrogates on tasks — including Cupid and Psyche (Greek) and Proserpine and Pluto (Roman).
9 We’ve encountered two magical snakes recently: in the Garden of Eden (Judaic) and in the Sioux myth of the three transformed brothers. And Medusa has snakes for hair, of course, so maybe she plucked one out and sent it on a mission.
10 A jealous Venus tricked Psyche into inhaling a sleeping draught (Roman).
In that context, maybe you can see why I was all agog. My five-year-old daughter had constructed a syncretic midrash.
Midrash is a process by which new interpretations are laid on old legends or scriptures, and/or new stories are synthesized out of elements of older ones, usually for the purpose of instruction. Though early Jews freaked about syncretism across party lines–don’t make me link to the golden calf!–the construction of fictional midrash from within Judaic sources is recognized as a vital part of Jewish teaching.
In The Jesus Puzzle, Earl Doherty argues that the gospel of Mark was just such a midrash, and that “Mark” did not mean it to be taken as literal fact any more than Delaney did. It was a teaching fiction.
But Laney’s work more closely resembles a deeper kind of mythmaking, one common in the Mediterranean Bronze Age and beyond: the syncretic merging of elements from different belief systems into something new and useful. There is much to suggest that the later character of Jesus is such a syncretic construct, sharing as he does the heroic attributes and biographical details of such earlier mythic figures as Mithras (born on Dec 25, mother a virgin, father the sky-god, 12 disciples, entombed in rock, rose on third day, etc), Krishna, Osiris, Tammuz, and countless others.
A fascinating tangent, believe you me, but I’ll never find my way out if I start with that.
So ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures spun new tapestries from the threads of religions all around them. Now here’s a 21st century kindergartener doing the same thing. Makes you think we’re onto something fundamentally human.
If we’d exposed Delaney to just one culture, one religion, she could be forgiven for imagining a no-kidding god on the other end of that one dazzling thread. By instead following a hundred threads, she realizes there are just lots of people on the other end — just plain folks, like Delaney — each of them spinning something lovely and new from the old threads they picked up. Follow enough of those threads and you find yourself outside the labyrinth of religious belief entirely, blinking in the sun.
The thing that left me most awestruck is that she even thought of mythmaking as a thing she could do. Picture a Sunday School kid making up his own bible story. Even though that’s just how Matthew and Luke were elaborated out of Mark, once the 4th century bishops weighed in and made it “gospel,” further creative energies have more often than not been (shall we say) discouraged. With rare but notable exceptions, we are now receivers of that written tradition, not co-creators. That’s why the experience of hearing Delaney spin her tale moved me so deeply. She recognizes other human hands in the spinning of the mythic tapestry — so why not add her own?
The Relaxed Parent Film Festival [greatest hits]
- June 17, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting, sex, values
- 13
[Continuing the reruns during my busy weeks. This one first appeared on May 23, 2007, so adjust ages etc. accordingly.]
Our Friday night tradition started sometime last year. Every Friday we get a pizza the size of a Buick and a family movie.
By family movie, I don’t mean “family movie.” I mean a movie that our whole family watches together, which believe you me is not often the same thing. And here’s where it gets interesting. It’s my job each week to choose the film. Here’s the audience:
MALE, 44, WRITER. Enjoys philosophical themes; unpredictable, non-linear narratives; line-crossing humor.
FEMALE, 41, EDUCATOR. Enjoys chick-flicks, ro-coms, foreign films. Has never seen a movie without crying.
MALE, 11. Enjoys science fiction, sports, fantasy, adventure. Hates everything he loved at ages nine and five.
FEMALE, 9. Enjoys character-driven dramas and comedies. Gets lost in non-linear narratives, requiring frequent paternal trips to the pause button.
FEMALE, 5. Enjoys an amazingly wide range of flicks, from Pokemon to war movies to comedies to space epics. Can’t read, so captions are out. Hides eyes whenever the music turns minor.
(As of this reposting, we are 47, 44, 14, 12, and 8. The 14-year-old now hates everything he loved at 11, and the 8-year-old reads better than I do, but still hides eyes when the music says to.)
Okay now…find us a movie.
When it comes to parental concerns on movie night, our guidelines might strike some as reckless. I prefer the word relaxed. And that relaxation is a good fit with our worldview.
Conservative religious denominations often teach that humankind is inherently sinful — that beneath a thin veneer of civility lurks a boiling depravity, just itching to stretch its legs. We must erect all sorts of protections and precautions to avoid opening the floodgates, lest we crack each others’ heads open to feast on the goo inside.
Not a Veneerist myself. Though we humans do occasionally screw things up rather royally, most of the time most of us behave well, especially if we feel loved and supported by those around us. It’s yet another gift of evolution. Populations with a tendency toward self-destruction would quickly lose the selective advantage to cooperative ones. The outlook that my kids are evolutionarily inclined to be good changes almost EVERYTHING about my parenting, especially compared to those who see their kids as simmering pots of potential felony and monitoring the flames beneath them as the most urgent parental task. It allows me, among other things, to focus on drawing them out instead of beating them in.
I don’t have to psychotically protect my children from scratches to their protective layer. I want to immerse them in the colors and contrasts and confusions of the world — gradually, yes, but definitely. I believe this fearless approach is ending us up with some pretty remarkable, multifaceted, complex, wonderful kids. You should meet them. I think you’d agree. So, dinner on Thursday, then?
I once had a student, a college freshman, who had never seen a non-Disney movie. It was the standard her parents had developed to protect her from certain ideas, images, and themes — call them “colors” — that could have scratched her veneer, damaging the porcelain doll beneath, or worse yet, letting loose the she-wolf within.
As a result, she hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz. She hadn’t seen E.T. Is there a Disney film that deals with the longing for home as beautifully as those two?
Since we began our movie tradition about forty Fridays ago, my kids have been exposed to a fantastic variety of themes and ideas, cultural touchpoints they refer to over and over. Yes, we’ve seen Flicka and Flipper, Over the Hedge, Little Manhattan and The Karate Kid. But then there are these:
Pleasantville • Edward Scissorhands • Cool Hand Luke • The Great Escape • Jesus Christ Superstar • Rain Man • Big Fish • Empire of the Sun • Life of Brian • Groundhog Day • Walking with Cavemen • South Pacific • Raising Arizona • Intimate Universe • The Truman Show • Walking with Dinosaurs • The Pursuit of Happyness • Stranger than Fiction • I, Robot • About a Boy • Brian’s Song • Parenthood • Bridge on the River Kwai
In addition to the Gs and PGs, they’ve seen plenty of PG-13s, and a few carefully-chosen Rs (like Rain Man). That means once in a while our kids hear a good solid swear or a reference to actual human sexuality, and have somehow avoided the plunge into foul-mouthed promiscuity.
I think this kind of low-key, normalized exposure makes it less likely they’ll gravitate toward these behaviors. If instead we hide these things, we make them powerful, attractive…forbidden fruit. When a Veneerist jumps for the remote at the first deep kiss or angry curse, he underlines the message that something truly magical is afoot.
Readers who tend toward Veneerism will naturally suppose that I’m advocating porn and slasher marathons for toddlers. Non-Veneerists know there’s something between Little House on the Prairie and Debbie Does Dallas — a great big juicy wonderful and textured middle. My kids have been there, and they’re all the richer for it.
In less than a year, the five of us have explored the importance of honesty (About a Boy, Liar Liar), felt deep compassion and empathy (Brian’s Song, Pursuit of Happyness), learned to care deeply about those who are different (Rain Man, Edward Scissorhands), admired courage and perseverance (Empire of the Sun, The Great Escape), contemplated the meaning of humanness (I, Robot), challenged smiling conformity (Pleasantville, Life of Brian, Big Fish) and questioned our assumptions about reality itself (The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big Fish). We even stood with Judas as he took Jesus to task for neglecting the less fortunate as he pursued his own fame (Jesus Christ Superstar), traced our origins (Walking With Cavemen) and learned never, ever to build a bridge for the enemy, even if your craftsmanship makes you proud (Bridge on the River Kwai). Can’t tell you how many times that lesson has come in handy.
My kids have cried with empathy for people who initially scared them.
Most important of all, they’ve learned that a man really can eat fifty eggs.
Yes, fine, Charlie Babbitt [Tom Cruise] says “fuck” about a dozen times in Rain Man. He does so because he’s an arrogant, selfish jerk — and arrogant, selfish jerks don’t say “boogers” when they’re mad. My kids didn’t want to be like Charlie Babbitt, so why would they emulate his language? Instead, they marveled at how his selfishness slowly transformed into first tolerance, then selfless love for his brother — something underlined by his changing use of the full palette of the English language.
About the tenth time Charlie cussed, Erin shot me a look and said, “Boy, you can tell what kind of person he is.” She had a chance to handle it, process it, and put it in perspective in our living room rather than on the schoolbus.
Best of all, they’re developing a taste for the unique, the creative, and the offbeat, for imaginative narratives and complex visions of the world.
Sure, sometimes I cringe and leap to the remote when a scene heads a little further than we’d expected. But it’s worth the risk. So next time you’re thinking about a film for the whole family, reach beyond G and PG. Let them engage the messy, fascinating world out there while you’re in the living room with them. They can handle more than we give them credit for.
Words fail me [greatest hits]
Six busy weeks coming up, including a week unplugged at the beach, a speech to the UU General Assembly in Minneapolis, a visit to Camp Inquiry in New York, and moving. Rather than let the blog grow all weedy, I’ll run a few of my own favorite posts from long ago.
Words Fail Me
First appeared Sept 28, 2007
Love is too weak a word for what I feel – I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you.
WOODY ALLEN in Annie Hall
I was born in the Sixties. My first two kids were born in the Nineties. But try to name the decade my youngest was born in, the one we’re in at the moment, and you’re left muttering clunkers like “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” or sounding like Grandpa Simpson by referring to the “aughts.” It’s called a lexical gap, a concept for which a given language lacks a concise label. German is said to lack a precise word for a person’s “chest,” while English speakers are left speechless when it comes to Fahrvergnügen.
When I first heard Alvy Singer struggling to express his feelings for Annie Hall, I thought it was just for laughs. But I’ve begun to struggle in recent years with precisely the same lexical gap — so much so that I’ve almost entirely stopped telling my wife and children that I love them.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The problem is the overuse of what was once, I suspect, a more sparingly-used, and therefore more powerful, word. The fact that Paul McCartney’s only response to the problem of “silly love songs” was to sing the phrase “I love you” fifteen times in three minutes seems to prove my point.
As a result of using “love” to express our feelings about everything from self-indulgence (“I love sleeping in on Sunday”) to food (“I love Taco Bell’s new Pizzaburgerrito”), I find the word “love” now entirely inadequate to describe the feeling engendered in me by my wife and kids. I don’t love them. I luuurve them.
No no, come back. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic. I’m zeroing in on a practical, lexical problem, that’s all.
Mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, twu wuv, wiw fowwow you, fowevah.
IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from The Princess Bride
Whenever I think of the reasons I luuurve my wife, I recall an event I attended two years ago — a debate between an atheist and a theist. I described the scene in PBB (pp. 96-7):
When the discussion turned to morality, [the theist] said something I will never forget. “We need divine commandments to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said. “If not for the seventh commandment…” He pointed to his wife in the front row. “…there would be nothing keeping me from walking out the door every night and cheating on my wife!”
His wife, to my shock, nodded in agreement. The room full of evangelical teens nodded, wide-eyed at the thin scriptural thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss.
I sat dumbfounded. Nothing keeps him from cheating on his wife but the seventh commandment? Really?
Not love?
How about respect? I thought. And the promise you made when you married her? And the fact that doing to her what you wouldn’t want done to you is wrong in every moral system on Earth? Or the possibility that you simply find your marriage satisfying and don’t need to fling yourself at your secretary? Are respect and love and integrity and fulfillment really so inadequate that you need to have it specifically prohibited in stone?
I first dated Becca because of conditional things. Non-transcendent things. Had she not been so unbearably attractive to me, had she not had the most appealing personality of anyone I knew, had she not been so funny and smart and levelheaded, I wouldn’t have flipped over her like I did. It may sound off to say it this way, but she fulfilled the conditions for the relationship I wanted, and I, thank Vishnu, did the same for her. I asked her to marry me in large part because of these not inconsiderable things.
But then, the moment I asked her to marry me, something considerably more transcendent began to happen between us. She said yes — and I was instantly struck dumb by the power of it. This splendid person was willing to commit herself to me for the remainder of her one and only life.
Holy (though I try to keep this blog free of both these words) shit.
No, I am not waxing, dammit, I am making a point. We were moving into the unconditional, you see. She had moved from being one of the many attractive, magnetic, funny, smart people I knew to The One Such Person Who Committed to Me. See the difference? And then, once she actually took three small packets of my DNA and used them to knit children — well, at that point, it became hard to look at her without bursting into song. I’m still not over it. What was a strong but technically conditional love moved decisively into unconditional luuurve.
So yes, there are things beyond the seventh commandment that keep me from cheating on my wife. Like the hilarity I feel at the thought of finding any other woman with any amount of those conditionals more attractive.
As for the children…
You’re an atheist? So then…you think your children are…just a bunch of…processes?
JEHOVAH’S WITNESS at my door last year
Last week a radio interviewer asked about my kids, with mild facetiousness: “So how about your own kids? Good kids, ya love ’em and everything?” In addition to the pure silliness of answering such a question, I fell head-first into that lexical gap once again — and the resulting three seconds of dead air probably did me no favors with the audience. I finally sputtered something about them being amazing kids, terrific kids, but it fell short, as it always does, of my real feelings.
I don’t make up for this lexical gap with the kids by telling them I luuurve them. Instead, almost every single day, I tell them, “I do not love you.” And they smile and say, “Oh yes you do!” — and all is understood.
They know in a thousand ways that I am transported by being their dad. They’ve become accustomed, for example, to the sudden realization that Dad is staring again. They’ll get that prickly feeling and turn to see me lost in a contemplative gawk. They’re very good about it, usually returning a smile rather than a roll of the eyes, which I think is very nice of them.
Recognizing that the love of our children is rooted in part in biology — that I am, in part, adaptively fond of them — does not diminish the way I’m transported by contemplating the fact of them, and of our special connection, of their uniqueness, and of the generational passing of the torch.
But it’s interesting to note that, unlike my relationship with Becca, this meditative gawking began on day one. The order of things is reversed. My marriage started in the conditional and added the unconditional. I loved her from the beginning, but only slowly came to be so completely slain by her.
Kids, on the other hand, begin in the unconditional and add the conditional. From the moment they emerged from my wife — seriously, reflect on that for a moment — they were unconditionally wonderful to me. They were half me and half she. They were our connection to the future. Etc.
Gradually we formed additional bonds based on their actual attributes. They are smart as whips, wickedly funny, generous and kind and fun to be around. But that’s all frosting on an unconditional cake. Marriage, on the other hand — if it goes well — starts with frosting and gradually slips the cake underneath.
So yes, my kids are “processes,” whatever that means, and so is my wife. But they are also the main reasons I wake up grateful and filled with meaning and purpose every single day.
(Wax off.)
Tooth and claw
- May 05, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, critical thinking, fear, humor, My kids, Parenting, Science
- 26
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“Rachel and I can’t decide whether to go down to the creek or not.”
Our home north of Atlanta has a fantastic backyard. A little lawn near the house drops away dramatically into a wooded slope of sixty-foot trees before plunging to a creek at the property line.
After two years of admiring the creek from a distance, Erin (12) began to take a more active interest in the past year, spending long hours exploring it with friends. During the winter, they could retain the illusion that they were the only living things present. But spring has brought the return of tangible biodiversity, and in recent weeks, Erin’s least favorite living thing has re-appeared on the property — snakes. That’s what had her second-guessing her fantastic new pastime.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, knowing.
“Snakes.”
“Ah.”
“Seriously. What should we do?” She and Rachel sat on the couch, dramatically-knit tween foreheads fully deployed.
“You should go to your room and curl up in a ball on the floor.”
She switched to Unamused Tween Expression #4. “I’m sure you have a point.”
Silly thing to be sure of, knowing me as she does. But she was right.
“If your only goal is to be safe, it’s your best move. But if you want a good life, you need to spend some time figuring out which fears are worth having.”
“Snakes, Dad, duh. It’s a fear worth having.”
“Not if it isn’t going to happen.”
“But it might!”
She’s right. It might. But I want her to learn to balance risk and reward — to recognize that too manic an obsession with safety wrings all of la joie out of la vivre, that we too often worry about the wrong things anyway, and that a little knowledge can often do more than anything else to put fears in perspective.
Now — before we get to the part where I sagely assuage my daughter’s overblown fear, let me point out that I have fears of my own, that my family has lovely sport with those fears, and that they are wrong. My fears are sensibly directed at an awesome predator, one much larger than myself — the cow.
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Okay. I can hear your self-righteous tittering. You know what, forget the word ‘cow.’ Cows are named ‘Bessie.’ Cows jump over the moon. Call them cattle and now who’s laughing? Cattle stampede, don’t they. Why yes they do. And when the bulls run in Pamplona, people run too. Like mad. And cows, you will surely know, have long been associated with human death. Mad cow disease? Look at the middle word. So don’t you sit there and jeer at me. Okay then.
(Back to my daughter’s baseless fears.)
It so happens that I had a quick chat with Google after our first snake sighting last year. “Did you know there are 41 types of snakes native to this part of the country?”
“That’s supposed to help?”
“…and that 35 of them are harmless, that only two of the remaining six venomous snakes are in this actual area, and that both of those have very distinctive patterns? Did the snakes you’ve seen have clear patterns?”
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“No. They were just kind of grey. But it was hard to see because they were moving away so fast.”
“Moving where now?”
“Away.”
“Fast.”
“Yes.”
“To getting a running start at you?”
“Dad.”
I know where she’s coming from. We see something wicked in certain animals. Spiders scare us off our tuffets. Snakes hand us problematic apples. We invest them with a kind of evil agency. They WANT to be and do bad. And no matter how much I know about the natural world, I am aware of a tiny sliver of this nonsense, probably wedged in my midbrain somewhere, that still sees them this way. Even though it IS nonsense, it’s really hard to shake. Our conditioning runs deep.
But shaking it was the key to getting Erin back to the creek, and the key to shaking it was thinking adaptively. We had to pry loose the picture of the snake, bwahaha, looking for an opportunity to bite the 100 lb. primate. There’s just nothing in it for the snake — nothing, that is, but a very good chance of getting fatally danced upon. It’s simple selection. Those snakes with a tendency to bite for the evil fun of it wouldn’t generally live to pass on those bitey genes. Eventually you have yourself a population of snakes that will bite the hairless monkey only as a very last resort, e.g. when taken unawares.
I told her these things, and she nodded. “Hm.”
“You both want the same thing, so do yourself and the snake a favor. Make some noise as you approach the creek. Take a stick and rustle the leaves in front of you. Every snake will take off like a shot and have a great story for his friends tonight. If all else fails and you end up next to a snake, it is almost certainly not venomous. And if it is, it almost certainly won’t bite you. It will run like hell.”
“And if it is poisonous, and it does bite me?”
“We’re three minutes from a hospital, and they’ll give you an antivenin, and you’ll be fine.”
She pondered warily.
“And I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
Big hug, and she was off for the creek, planning how to spend it.
What, Me Worry?
- April 22, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In critical thinking, death, fear, My kids, Science
- 16
Samuel Pepys had surgery to remove a bladder stone when he was twenty. He had seventeenth century surgery, the only type available in his day. Joseph Lister was busily pioneering antiseptic surgery less than a mile from where Pepys lay tied to the bedposts, but Lister refused to offer his new techniques to Pepys’ physician, using all the old excuses – “my techniques are too new, my methods are untested, I’m living two hundred years in the future,” blah, blah, blah.
The pioneers of anesthetic surgery were likewise unhelpfully unborn, but had the additional excuse of working in a whole different country. So Pepys’ doctor used what science he had: he got his patient drunk, tied his legs to the bedposts and stabbed and sawed away until, in a gush of blood and urine, out rolled a stone the size of a tennis ball.
Pepys survived the surgery, for some reason, and celebrated the removal of the stone each year with a party on the same March day. And each year at that party, in the center of the table of hors d’oeuvres, mounted in a stunning teak box, sat the guest of honor, the founder of the feast – the stone itself.
I had my gall bladder removed yesterday. Thanks to a hundred medical advances since the 17th century, I don’t even remember being tied to the bedposts. Four standard Band-aids now cover the relative pinholes through which a tiny camera and three tools were deployed to remove the mutinous thing. I was advised to avoid fried chicken for a while and sent home.
In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I had to decide whether to worry about dying on the table. There’s no such thing as minor surgery, of course. Google the phrase “routine gall bladder surgery” and you’ll find the phrase “what was supposed to be” pinned to the front of it, over and over, in articles on the deaths of Andy Warhol, Dan “Hoss Cartwright” Blocker, and Congressman John Murtha. Another gentleman was rendered paraplegic by the same surgery, and a woman sustained severe brain damage. It happens when one of the tools nicks the large intestine. Infection sets in, then sepsis, then, sometimes, death.
Connor (14) caught wind of these stories somehow — possibly by overhearing me — and began to worry about his dad. It was a great opportunity to chat about one of my all-time favorite insights: the news paradox.
I don’t even remember who first brought the news paradox to my attention, but when it comes to ramping down our collective paranoia, it’s hard to beat. There are countless real dangers in the world, things that have a high statistical likelihood of taking us out of the game. But those common killers (like car accidents and smoking) don’t make the news, because they are common. Something that actually hits the collective radar is uncommon by definition — otherwise it wouldn’t be newsworthy.
So a good rule of thumb: If you read about a threat in the newspaper or hear about it on TV (like terrorism or mad cow disease), you can generally relax. It’s almost certainly not going to find you. It’s those things you don’t hear about, those pedestrian everyday killers, that you should worry about.
Once I heard the names of the same three celebrity gall bladder victims for the fifth or sixth time — Andy Warhol, Dan Blocker, John Murtha — I knew the news paradox was in play and began to relax. When someone dies during open heart surgery, it’s sad, but it doesn’t shock. But when a handful of people go down after a “supposedly routine” operation, it leaps to the top of our consciousness.
Over 500,000 gall bladders are removed each year, 99.9 percent of them without incident. So yes, there was a risk, but the very newsworthiness of the times it went wrong comforted me. And my boy.
Foundation Beyond Belief in NYT
Atheists’ Collection Plate, With Religious Inspiration
BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
ALPHARETTA, Ga. –– Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.
Mr. McGowan went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.
Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.
All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice. And on that practice, this atheist felt lacking. To put it in church slang, he was convicted.
Rather than adopt faith, however, Mr. McGowan set out to emulate it, or at least its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate. By now, five years later, that impulse has taken the form of a nonprofit foundation that solicits donations from atheists and bundles them into contributions to organizations in fields like public health, environmentalism, gay rights and refugee aid.
Within the next week or so, Mr. McGowan expects to cut checks for a total of $12,025, the first benefits collected and disbursed by the Foundation Beyond Belief.
Unconditional love revisited
- March 16, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, values, wonder
- 13
[As a child] I had developed an attitude toward the world that is the essence of inquiry: I had fallen in love with it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and other popularizers of science, I’d come to the conclusion that the universe was wonderful, period, and that I was incredibly fortunate to get a chance to be a conscious thing in the midst of it. The wonder of it came with no strings attached, no “ifs.” I was unconditionally smitten with reality.
From “The Unconditional Love of Reality,” in 50 Voices of Disbelief
That essay of mine taps one of my favorite themes––the idea that we should encourage in our kids, and ourselves, an unconditional love of reality. It’s the positive form of discouraging self-deception, and it’s the shortest route to the kind of curious hunger that can keep a mind awake, engaged, and grateful for a lifetime.
Every once in a while I come across a comment that misunderstands the concept. “That’s just crazy,” said a recent one. “I ACCEPT reality, but I certainly don’t always love it.” And then, as always, the example of the Holocaust.
What’s being confused here is the love of reality and the love of what happens in it. When it comes to the Holocaust, we rightly consider denial of its reality to be a terrible thing. More than a dozen European countries have gone so far as to make it illegal to deny it — a mistake, I think, but never mind. By insisting that we look the Holocaust in the eye, we are expressing a love and respect for reality and a profound distaste for self-deception. Our hatred of the Holocaust itself makes us love and protect our honesty about it. That’s the unconditional love of reality at work.
In the same way, my unconditional love for my kids does not (believe me) imply a love for everything they do. But it does inspire me to want nothing but the best for them –– including a wide-eyed infatuation with their own existence that will endure the inevitable bumps and bruises their existence will contain.
Penny wise
My kids are weirdly consistent in their vocational dreams. They flirt with various ideas, but they always end up whipping back to their respective Norths like compass needles. By the time I was ten, I’d already torn through a half-dozen intended vocations: paleontologist, stand-up comedian, astronaut, clarinetist…stuff like that.
For years, Connor (now 14) has had his eye on engineering, and has recently narrowed it to alternative energy engineering. Erin (now 12) has wanted a career in medicine since she was 8 and has recently narrowed that (through questions like “What do you call a person who studies the way the body works?”) to research physiology.
Delaney (8) has pretty much always wanted to be a scientist of some kind.
A few weeks ago, Erin hunched intently over the kitchen table with a dropper to see how many drops of water would fit on a penny. Cool science project from school involving estimates, observation, averages, graphing. Good stuff.
Delaney suggested expanding the parameters of the study to see if water temperature would affect the results. I was reading in the next room when a small brouhaha broke out between the researchers. As usual, Erin came tromping in to me with a look of righteous determination.
“Dad, Laney and I are doing an experiment to see if a penny holds the same amount of hot water as cold water.”
“And?”
“And I’m trying to tell Laney that we have to use the same penny for both, because one might be a little different, but she…”
“They’re both the same! Shiny 2009 pennies!” whined Laney from the doorway.
I walked into the laboratory and saw two shiny 2009 pennies sitting side by side on the table, waiting for further instructions.
I asked Erin why you need to use the same one.
“Because there might be tiny differences — little scratches or nicks that you can’t even see, but they might affect the water differently.”
“Variables.”
“Yeah, variables.” Erin looked mighty pleased with her middle-school sciency self. I was too. But I wanted Laney to learn a cool thing about her life’s work, not to feel defeated. I told her to imagine that I was a scientist designing a study to see if people with blue shirts could get things off high shelves more easily. I opened the kitchen cupboard and asked white-shirted Laney to grab a cup off the top shelf.
She gave me a fumey look.
Blue-shirted me reached up and brought down the cup. “Well there it is. I’ve learned that people with blue shirts”
“Dad”
“are better at”
“Dad”
“getting things down from”
“DAD!”
“What?”
“You’re taller.”
“I think it’s the shirt.”
“Then you’re a dork.”
“How can you figure out whether it was the shirt?”
“I just wouldn’t use a tall person at all! I’d get two people who were both…” She paused. “Normal.”
I told her she had just removed a variable. She got it.
“But you’re obviously tall. The pennies are exactly the same.”
I admitted that they might be, then motioned her into the basement. We looked at the pennies under our microscope. Sure enough, canyons and craters loomed.
By this time she’d thankfully forgotten that her big sister had ended up right. It was just cool.
Ho ho ho no mo
And so, as predicted, Santa has darkened the McGowan fireplace for the last time.
Delaney (8) followed the same classic curve as the other two. She started last year with the ancillary technical questions of a child who’s begun to smell something funky but doesn’t reeeally want to dig to the back of the fridge just yet.
“Regular reindeer don’t fly. How do Santa’s reindeer fly?”
“Well…some people say they eat magic corn.”
Magic corn. The rapidity with which this sharp, science-minded, reality-loving inquirer would happily swallow lame answers of that kind and skip tra-la away demonstrated as clearly as anything could that she was more interested at that point in perpetuating this particular belief than in figuring things out—a fact further underlined by her disinclination to ask the obvious, direct question that we would willingly have answered at any point, namely “Is Santa real?”
(Sorry about that sentence, I’m reading Infinite Jest again.)
Same with many kinds of belief. It’s not that true believers of various kinds don’t ask questions — it’s that they so eagerly accept poor answers to those questions in order to preserve belief. It’s something we all do at various times and places in our lives. Yes you do, and have, and will. Me too.
At some point (with Santa, anyway) the weight of inconsistency eventually becomes too great, and the direct question is asked. And when it’s asked, you ANSWER, and congratulate the child for figuring it out.
Just before Christmas, Laney’s questions intensified, but remained oblique. At one point she looked Becca in the eye and asked the most convoluted almost-direct indirect question I’ve ever heard:
“When I’m just about to have kids of my own, are you all of a sudden going to tell me something that I need to know about something?”
“Uh…not that I know of,” Becca replied. Which was true.
“Good, because I love Santa.”
“Who said anything about Santa?”
“Never mind.”
Two weeks after Christmas, Erin (12) came downstairs at bedtime with a look of panic. “She’s figuring it out, and I don’t know what to do!!”
“Figuring what out?” I asked.
“Santa! Laney’s asking all these questions and I don’t know what to do!! I did your thing about ‘Some people believe…’ but then she keeps going and going!”
“That’s awesome! That means she’s finally ready to figure it out. Just answer every question honestly. Do you want me to come up?”
“Yes. No. Well, in a little while.”
I waited ten minutes, then went upstairs. The girls were sitting on their beds facing each other and looked up with little smiles as I entered.
“What’s up in here?”
Laney nodded sagely. “Well…I figured something out.”
“What did you figure out.”
“I figured out…the thing about Santa.”
“What thing is that?” Say it, girl!
“That…well, he isn’t real.”
“Oh, that.” I smiled and sat next to her. “How does that make you feel?”
“A little upset. I really loved Santa!”
Now with Laney being the youngest, I knew there was a risk of her feeling embarrassed at being the last to know. But we’d always played with a very light touch, allowing her to believe until knowing became more interesting — which it now apparently had. Time to let her walk proudly through that door.
The key is to underline the proud. I asked how she had figured it out, and she proceeded to describe a fascinating trail of clues that I hadn’t even known she was following.
She sleeps in my T-shirts, and one night found a half empty box of candy canes nestled in the drawer. “Who buys candy canes in a box?” she said, further noting that this year there were no canes on the tree, only in…the stockings.
“And all of the Santa presents were in Santa paper except the ones for you and Mom. And there was still a price tag on one of my presents.” And on and on she went. She had noticed these things because she wanted to, because she had reached a tipping point between the desire to believe and the desire to know.
So I turned on the praise. “Look what you did!” I said. “You used your brain to figure out all of those clues…and you did it yourself!”
She beamed.
“Was it fun to figure out?”
“Yes,” she admittedly, it actually was.
“And the best thing is that all of the good stuff about Christmas,” I said, “all the fun, all the family stuff, the presents, the yummy food, the lights and music and doing nice things for other people — we still get to have ALL of that. But now you know where it all really comes from.”
She has shared her findings with every significant adult in her life, proof that pride quickly eclipsed disappointment. “Guess what I figured out all by myself,” she says. Only one adult went into a “Yes, Virginia” genie re-bottling attempt.
“Grandma,” Laney said patiently. “You don’t have to do that. I looked at all the clues and figured it out. It’s fine.”
So I remain convinced that our family’s Santa period was jolly well-spent. As I wrote in Parenting Beyond Belief,
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists -– and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
And I wouldn’t have mythed it for the world.
“Time is amazing”
- January 27, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting
- 8
In the final section of my nonreligious parenting seminar, I offer suggestions for helping kids engage mortality gently but honestly. Treat death as a natural part of life. Take casual opportunities to talk about it before a loved one dies. Talk about the life cycle of insects/animals/plants, then gradually connect to us. Read Charlotte’s Web and Tuck Everlasting. Take a walk in a cemetery.
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Get a pet.
I’m not suggesting you get your kids a pet so that they can experience death, but it’s a nice side benefit.
That one always gets a gallows chuckle in the seminar, but I actually mean it. Now given my choice, I’d rather completely spare my kids any exposure to death ever, secondhand or firsthand. It would also be nice if they’d fart money, but they continue to disappoint.
Likewise with banishing death. Wish all you want, our kids will experience profound, painful, permanent losses in their lives. My job is not to pretend I can change that, but to help make that difficult reality as manageable as possible for them — and shielding them from the pain of heartbreaking loss is not the way. That may be easier on parents and kids alike in the short run, but it sets them up for much greater pain down the road when it’s Grandpa or Mom or (FSM forfend) me crossing over to the other side. Of the grass.
My convictions were put to the test just over a year ago when Erin’s guinea pig died. I blogged at the time:
Erin held him all evening, cooing and stroking and sobbing. In the morning, he was gone.
When Erin’s heart breaks, it takes every other heart in the room with it — and her heart is as broken now as I’ve ever seen it. Still, I know the loss of Max, as painful as it is, is an important experience for her. Pets can contribute, however unwillingly, to our lifelong education in mortality. Though we don’t buy pets in order for kids to experience death, most every pet short of a giant land tortoise will predecease its owner.
When we looked into the cage Thursday morning and saw that Max was still, Erin screamed, then did the precise opposite of what I would have done: she flung open the cage, grabbed him, hugged him to her and wailed…She stroked his fur and touched his teeth and gently rolled his tiny paws between her fingers, all the time whispering Maxie, Maxie. Please wake up.
Then came a monologue both stunning and familiar — that ancient litany of regret, guilt, and helplessness:
I wish I had given him a funner life. He didn’t have enough fun.
Do you think he knew I loved him?
I should have played with him more.
I wanted to watch him grow up!
Do you think I did something wrong? I must have done something wrong!
I want to hear his little noises again.
It isn’t fair at all. It isn’t fair. Things should be fair.
We buried Max in the backyard this morning under a metaphor of falling yellow leaves. Erin placed him in the shoebox on a layer of soft bedding. She put his water bottle to his lips once, twice, three times, convulsing with tears. She added food pellets near his head, like an ancient Egyptian preparing Pharoah for the journey to the next life. Flower petals, then Max’s favorite toy, and at last — this nearly did me in — she carefully dried her tears and placed the tissue in with him.
We talked over the grave about what a lucky guy he’d been to be born at all, that a trillion other guinea pigs never got the chance to exist, to be loved and cuddled like he was. She liked that.
A few weeks ago — a year later almost to the day — Delaney (8) got a guinea pig of her own. Erin asked to go with us to the pet store to help Laney pick out the toys, the food, the bedding. She led Laney up and down the aisles. “Max really liked timothy hay,” she said. “You’ll want to get some of that. Ooh, and look, there’s that little wooden thing he liked to chew on!”
As we stood in line at the register, Erin looked up at me. “I’m kinda surprised I’m so okay with all this,” she said. “I mean, I still miss him a lot, but it’s not so…you know…” She pressed a palm to her chest and closed her eyes, then looked up again. “You know?”
I knew. I reminded her of something she said a few days after he died. “You thought it would never stop hurting, remember?”
She nodded. “But it did. Time is amazing.”
And there it is. In addition to learning how much she could love and how much she could grieve, she learned that no matter how much a loss hurts, it will eventually hurt less. So next time — and there will be a next time — she’ll have a comfort she didn’t have before.
