The Cardinal Rules

For about the last two years, Norm and I have experienced an interesting avian phenomenon: a cardinal repeatedly flying into the windows around the house.

Whether or not it is the same red bird, I can’t say; one male Northern Cardinal looks pretty much like the next (only the males are red, of course. Females are tan.) You would think that if it has been the same bird, his head would be a little flatter, or his bill worn away after flinging himself against the glass thousands of times.

We have speculated about the reasons for this, although from the research I have done, it simply seems to be a case of bird machismo - fighting off those other pesky cardinals that keep appearing in the glass. Our house has windows on all four sides, and some of them are quite large, so there is pretty much a 360 degree battlefield for our feathery fanatic.

It was October of 2006 when I first noticed the annoying avis, and at first it was somewhat amusing. I figured he would go away, a wiser, if dizzier, bird after he did this a few hundred times and still had an adversary. But it is not an accident that the expression "bird brain" is a pejorative. Weeks, and then months, went by and still the redheaded rascal continued hammering away at the glass.

A few months into the aeronautic assault campaign, I discovered an essay in Newsweek by a woman who had the same experience. I read it to Norm, and we both laughed that the woman became so unnerved that she resorted to avicide to keep her sanity.

That was, of course, two years ago.

I have tried hanging things outside the glass to stop him. But, we have a lot of windows, and the cardinal uses them all. So, I gave up on that idea.

This experience has made me ponder Einstein's definition of insanity: to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Perhaps I feel a kinship with the cardinal; I know that I have, on occasion, been guilty of trying something again and again, thinking that this time, the results will surely be different (like dieting).

Recently, as the cardinal bang-bang-banged into our family room windows for the umpteen-thousandth time, Norm grimly (and only half-jokingly) started talking about getting a BB gun.

I have become accustomed to the banging, and tune it out most of the time. I am not ready to go all Clint Eastwood on the poor deluded creature, at least not yet. I was hoping that perhaps Cardinalis Cardinalis would live a few years, and die a natural death, and hopefully not pass his headbanging genes on to his offspring.

That is, until I read that the average life span of a Northern cardinal is 189 months.

I do not know how old the cardinal is, but he still seems pretty spry. It doesn't appear that thousands of blows to his noggin have dimmed his prospects at all.

I am sure that, one day, he will just stop banging on the windows.

Any day now.

My Name is Asher Lev

Last Saturday Norm and I saw a brand-new play at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia. We have a subscription there with friends, and the evening is always enjoyable; especially so when the show is as good as the Arden’s current offering.

It is an adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel My Name Is Asher Lev. I never read the book, published in 1972, although in high school I did read and enjoy Potok’s novel The Chosen.

I was not sure how the play would be; it had only three people in it, and went 90 minutes with no interruption. We went to dinner first, and with a full stomach sometimes I have struggled to sit in the dark and stay awake during the deadly 9 to 10 p.m. hour.

As it turned out, the play is positively riveting. It takes a little time to get into; the first scene sets up the environment of a devoutly orthodox Hasidic Jewish family living in Brooklyn, and the occasional Yiddish words used take some getting used to. But after about twenty minutes I was drawn into the story about a boy born into this culture with a prodigious artistic gift. He soon clashes with his family, particularly his father, about his inclination to paint, a frivolous and unholy enterprise, rather than study, and brings anguish by copying Renaissance masters, who frequently paint crucifixions.

There are many arguments between father and son, each trying to get the other to understand their point of view. Asher's mother is caught in the middle, and suffers greatly.

Eventually the Rebbe, or leader of the sect, understands Asher’s need to pursue his vision and sends him to an artist who mentors him. Asher becomes a great artist, but never resolves the conflicts between himself, his family and his sect, and ultimately chooses to leave after the crucifixion-themed masterpiece he paints, which expresses his view of the family conflict, horrifies his community.

There is a sequel to the book, The Gift of Asher Lev, which continues the story.

The play, like the book, is a study of the conflicts between the religious and secular worlds, between artistic vision and religious faith, between father and son.

All three actors were marvelous. One actor played Asher Lev, and two other actors – identified as Man and Woman – played all of the other characters in the play; it was amazing to see their transitions from one disparate character to another, simply by walking off stage and walking back on with different clothing.

The play was commissioned by the Arden Theater and was adapted from the novel by Aaron Posner, one of the founders of the Arden.

I thought that the story showed tremendous insight into what it means to be an artist, with a need to create and express a particular vision, even when it creates unhappiness for loved ones. I would like to get and read The Gift of Asher Lev, to see how the story turns out.

Interestingly, Chaim Potok was himself an accomplished painter, and created a painting called "Brooklyn Crucifixion".

The play is at the Arden through March 15.

4707

Happy New Year!

Today is the start of the New Year according to the Chinese calendar; it is year 4707, the year of the Ox.

Obviously, there are other calendars than the the Gregorian, or International Calendar, the one we use in the Western Hemisphere. I am fascinated by these different ways of marking time, and I will try to explore the various other New Years as they occur in the different cultural or religious calendars.

After all, the idea of a fresh start is always nice, even when it occurs in September.

The sun and the moon have risen and set for perhaps billions of years, at least from a scientific perspective; homo sapiens or some forbear has populated the globe for millions of years, and yet it is only within the last 5,000 circumnavigations of the sun that we humans have given the years numbers, or names, or both.

The origins of the Chinese calendar, or Yin calendar, go back to at least 1700 BCE and the Shang dynasty and perhaps much further, to 4,000 BCE. It is based on the rotation of the moon rather than the sun, so it is a lunar calendar, although the months are named after agricultural seasons, so technically it is lunisolar, if that's not too confusing (New Year is also known as the Spring Festival in China).


The Chinese calendar has a twelve-year cycle, each year named for one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac; each animal symbolizes a different temperament, not unlike Western astrology. The twelve years of the cycle coincide with Jupiter's orbit around the sun.

The first day of the lunar new year occurs on the day of the second new moon that follows the Winter Solstice. Every few years there is a thirteenth month inserted to keep the calendar on track.

Being born in a particular year is said to affect your temperament, so that a person born during the year of the Ox may be patient, hard-working and self-sacrificing, but can be inflexible.

Earlier I said that the Chinese calendar is called the Yin calendar; this begs the question, is that Yin as in Yin-Yang, the well-known symbol?

The answer is yes. Yin represents the moon and Yang the sun in the symbol. The Yin (moon) side is the darker side; ancient Chinese used an eight foot stick, the position of the sun in the heavens and the length of the shadow cast by the stick to map the entire path of the sun during a solar year. Each position of the shadow was marked on a circle; the dots were connected, and the side with the lengthier shadow was colored dark. The resulting pattern of dark and light originated the symbol.

The small circles in the symbol mark the shadow at the Summer Solstice, at the top, and the Winter Solstice, at the bottom.

So how do Chinese clebrate the New Year, or Spring Festival? In much the same way that celebrations are held the world over: with firecrackers (to ward off evil spirits) and lots of good food. Red paper lanterns are important, because the color red is a positive and festive color in Chinese culture. The traditional Chinese dragon is danced through the streets.

This year's celebrations may be a bit dampened, because, not surprisingly, this year of the Ox is not being regarded as an auspicious one, at least from a financial perspective ("bullish" metaphors seem not to apply.) Perhaps this one will turn out to be better than feared; perhaps the patience, hard work and self-sacrificing qualities of the Ox may save us yet.

After all, the person best positioned to affect the year's outcome was born in 1961, another year of the Ox: Barack Obama.

The Paper Lake

photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

I sit here surrounded by a vast sea of dead trees, adrift in a paper lake. It covers every surface I see.

The floor. The chair next to me. The drop-down desk.

If I move, I will step on a checking account statement, or a PECO bill.

I am held in bondage by white bond.

I decided that instead of our annual frantic and unseemly scramble for tax records in April (which, of course, is the cruellest month, as T.S. Eliot informed us) I would get the jump on the situation by starting in January.

The problem is, I do not have a good relationship with paper, unless it is bound into book form, and then I pretty much worship it, or at least the words written on it.

Miscellaneous pieces of paper that come in the mail I do not like. They multiply in ways that are objectionable to me. They require judgment and organization to deal with, two qualities that I do not possess in abundance.

Going through the mail is a chore to be avoided as long as possible. I have to focus on the individual item of mail and decide what it is and what to do with it, an agonizing task for a Myers-Briggs personality type of INFP (for you Myers-Briggs fans, at some point I will revisit this fascinating topic). After many years of dealing badly with this task, I have learned to carefully scrutinize and sort incoming mail into the following hierarchy of importance:

• A greeting card – most important, open immediately. Someone cares!

• A bill – open, wince, stash on the bill pile, even though I pay my bills online for the most part.

• A magazine - stack on the coffee table to read later, unless it is Good Housekeeping, which is stored in the powder room (read "library".)

• A statement – pile up unopened, since I do all of my banking online, but cannot bring myself to eliminate the paper statements. I am a belt-and-suspenders kind of gal.

• A catalog – stack on the coffee table, grumbling about the fact that although I do all of my shopping online, a Luddite in my household prefers to use catalogs, which take up space, and use paper, which I don’t like.

• A request for a donation that includes return address labels – pile unopened until labels are needed (I donate to charities, but not just because they send me labels).

• Anything else – toss in the junk mail bin after a few anxious minutes spent wondering whether to open or not.

After I pay bills, I stack the residual paper on a pile that includes any other piece of business that we do during the course of the year. So, by the end of the year, I have a three-inch-high stack of paper that is an archeological dig whenever a specific bill/statement/invoice needs to be referenced. I also have a pile of unopened statements.

Then April comes, and …

Perhaps this will be the year that I stop squirreling away all of these sheets of paper, the vast majority of which are never referenced again after they are filed. They are, after all, mostly a backup system for online transactions. Perhaps I will have the courage to stop the murder of innocent trees by requesting all of my statements online, and just print what I need.

There are opt-out services that can get rid of junk mail.

Perhaps only then will I live in a utopian world where trees will get to live their lives, and people will lie in the shade under them contemplating the clouds. There will be no stacks of statements, no oceans of invoices. The only mail that comes will be greeting cards, and magazines.

And, of course, catalogs for the Luddite.

Deep Pockets

I believe that I may have the world's highest bed.

We purchased a new box spring and mattress a few years ago, after the fifteen-year-old set we were sleeping on started to look like a dromedary camel (which, I am happy to tell you, is a large, even-toed ungulate. Not only is that a really cool factoid, it has provided me with some new ammunition in the war of words with my son, to whit: "Bring down your laundry, you large, even-toed ungulate!" Calling him a three-toed sloth had kind of lost its punch.)

The dromedaries, of course, are the one-humped camels. I can't even begin to speculate what would cause a mattress to look like a two-humped (bactrian) camel.

But I digress.

The hump in the middle of the mattress (which was so high that I could barely see Norm on the other side) was no doubt due to the fact that we never, ever turned the mattress every year the way you are supposed to. Just like we don't change our oil until the oil light comes on and we don't start Christmas shopping until, suddenly, one day it is December 20.

Perspicacity is not our middle name.

So, we had the lumpen mattress. We mattress-shopped at one of the many obliging mattress-giant-warehouses in the area, and test-drove a few models. Our criteria for selecting a mattress were simple: the mattress could not make our backs hurt any more than they already did, and ideally should make us hurt less.

We tried out the Tempur-Pedic mattress, but I somehow could not come to a full and complete stop when rolling over on this technological marvel. Plus it was eerily sharp-cornered.

We settled on a plush, plump, pillowtopped thing that stands roughly 5 feet off of the ground. We signed the paperwork and left the store eagerly anticipating the arrival of our new sleep system.

When the mattress was delivered and placed on our bed, the sleigh headboard that had dominated the room was barely visible. This, clearly, was a mattress that even the pea-averse Princess of farytale lore could sleep on.

After clambering (with some difficulty and the help of a few Sherpas) up onto the top of Mount Ever-Rest and reveling for a moment in the pillowy softness, I went to the linen closet and got out a set of sheets.

Which, it turned out, fit the bed like a bad toupee.

The fitted sheet barely came down over the pillow top, much less reaching down to the bottom of the mattress.

This is when I became aware that fitted sheets are in fact three-dimensional objects, the additional dimension being depth. The depth of the average fitted sheet that we owned (about ten years old) was nine inches.

The mattress was eighteen inches thick.

During the night these paltry sheets sometimes would come off of the mattress entirely. Oh, the unbearable horror of the naked mattress.

Thus began my tireless quest for that rara avis of the linen world, the deep-pocketed fitted Queen-sized sheet.

I have trekked through the linen departments of many and many a store; sometimes I would actually find a sheet that advertised itself as deep-pocketed, but usually the pocket was a paltry fifteen or sixteen inches.

I became tireless, an Ahab in search of the White Whale of the eighteen-inch pocket. Shoppers would see me lurking in the linen aisle, muttering "Only fifteen inches! What, are they crazy?"and give me a wide berth.

Doesn't anyone else care about this issue?

Until, one happy day in Target, I found my white whale, the Moby Dick of bedmaking: the Queen-Size Extra-Deep Twenty-Inch Pocket Sheet, in a lovely shade of aqua. It completely covered the mattress, with room to spare. And, it was reasonably priced.

No more does my mattress look like a strumpet in a too-skimpy skirt.

Of course, I only bought one set, because that is all that Target had, and have been washing them and putting them right back on the bed. So, it is time to buy another set.

It is January, and the white sales are on. The stores beckon. I must go.

Why, you ask?

Because they are there.

Bead Attitudes

In my last post I mentioned les tricoteuses, the ladies who knitted at the site of the guillotine during the French revolution. I stumbled onto an interesting study connecting the activities of the knitters with the use of worry beads.

Worry beads are, of course, fingered by people in times of great stress to calm the nerves. For me, this immediately conjures up images of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, reaching into his pocket for some small stones to handle during his examination on the witness stand.

The use of worry beads is an ancient practice common in many parts of the world. In Arab cultures they are called misbaha. They are prayer beads, with particular prayers recited for each fingered bead. The misbaha have either 33 or 99 beads in them; to correspond to either the number of years in Jesus Christ's life on earth (multiplied by the Trinity) or, in ancient Sufi tradition, to meditate on the names and attributes of Allah.

Roman Catholics, of course, are very familiar with prayer beads. The Catholic Rosary in its current form, with 59 beads in five "decades" of Hail Marys, seems to date back at least to the 13th century and St. Dominic; the saying of the rosary (the word is derived from "garland") is central to Dominican worship. The true origins of the Catholic rosary are somewhat lost in the mists of time, but the use of stones to count prayers had been used by mystics for many centuries.

In the Buddhist tradition prayer beads or rosaries are called japa mala. They are frequently worn as bracelets and have 108 or 111 beads for the repetition of a mantra.

The use of worry beads is also common in Greece; the Greek name is komboloi. They have no religious connotation, and are simply for the alleviation of stress.

All of the beads previously mentioned tend to be made of natural materials such as amber or coral or polished stone, or polished wood or ivory, perhaps because these feel better to the hands and would not impart a metallic smell when handled, as minerals might do.

So, back to the study about the knitters at the French Revolution. It is generally thought that they were so callous and unaffected by the terrible things they witnessed that they placidly worked their needles and gave their opinions (typically, "Off with their heads!"); their archetype certainly is Madame Defarge from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

The study, however, was intended to determine if the use of the hands in a visuospacial task during a traumatic event would help over time to keep the terrible images from being encoded into memory. Results showed that keeping the hands busy at a repetitive task (using a keyboard to repeat a pattern while watching videos of horriffic car crashes) reduced the number of intrusive memories afterward, as compared to a control group.

So, perhaps the knitting of les tricoteuses calmed them, and helped keep them calm, rather than being an indication of how unfeeling they were. Perhaps they did not have vivid memories of what they had seen because they used their hands to knit. Perhaps that is why worry beads (or prayer beads) have been used to calm the mind during times of great stress for many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

It is interesting that it took a 21st-century scientific study to recognize what the mind/body has probably always known. And, considering the times we live in, maybe now would be a good time to put those beads to work.

Or take up knitting.

Update: From the Strange Little Coincidences File - After I finished this writing, about two hours later I turned on the television. Turner Classic Movies was on, and a movie was starting in about five minutes - The Caine Mutiny.

Turn The Page, Quick!

Well, gentle readers, we finally get to bid goodbye to a very, very bad year. An annus horribilis, to quote Queen Elizabeth II in 1992 after Windsor castle burned and the royal family collectively got caught with its knickers down.

It was bad pretty much from every perspective, especially so for the household of your obedient scribe; we will gently close the door on that discussion and move on to the wider world of woe.

Terrible economy. Continuing warfare. Public discourse at an all-time low. Banks shriveling up and blowing away like so much chaff. Net worth doing likewise. The big black dog of Depression lurking around every corner. Fires, hurricanes, floods. Earthquake. Global warming.

Rich people forced to sell their yachts, for goodness sakes. And their estate jewelry.

OK, I really don't feel very bad about that. Indulging in schadenfreude when the rich get their comeuppance is a time-honored tradition, going back to les tricoteuses who were knitting in the Place de la Concord while heads rolled.

Even Aristotle recognized this feeling, using the term epikhairekakia to describe someone who takes pleasure in another's misfortune. I am sure that if Aristotle knew of the people who invented and profited from credit default swaps, he would feel epikhairekakia in spades at their misery when the house of cards collapsed.

I do feel bad about all of the people who have lost their homes, whether those people were feckless or not.

And yet, with all of the unpleasantness of the past twelvemonth, hope springs eternal.

Some good things happened at the end of the year. A much-needed change came to Washington. Gas prices plummeted from astronomical to economical.

Our beloved Phillies became World Champions for the first time in 28 years.

On the home front, Spencer transitioned seamlessly to a new high school, achieved honor roll, and found a girlfriend. Allie taught full-time and extended her performing schedule. Jess's pottery entered the world of the high-end artisan show. Jess and Allie together started the process of rebuilding their mom's home.

Norm and I discovered panettone, which is Italian for "a specialty cake so insanely delectable that you will dislocate your jaw just to get a bigger piece into your mouth."

And so, we firmly and collectively plant our boots on the withered and ghastly posterior of 2008 and give it a shove out the door. We hitch up our pants, roll up our sleeves, cinch in our belts, and look towards 2009 with good thoughts and our fingers crossed.

And we turn the page without looking back.