22 Oct 2014

Going to Africa, for Reasons Large and Small

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“Malawi….isn’t’ that in Africa?” “Yes, in southeastern Africa.” “Well, it’s still Africa, and with this Ebola, I don’t think I’d want to send my kid there.” Over Family Weekend at our son’s new school, I was at a presentation about Global Initiatives. The term abroad that used to be possible for college students seeking adventure—in Europe, usually– is now often available for high school kids who are, because of increasingly connected world, likely to see going even to Chile or … Read More
2 Aug 2014

Polly, Proliferating

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I had more or less gotten over the fact that I was not Joan of Arc, riding boldly on a horse smack into battle, when I discovered that my name—something that I had heretofore thought had distinguished me, at least slightly—was suddenly turning up all over the place. We aren’t exactly a field of dandelions, but my quality of Polly-ness, just as of this past week, has put me in a whole bouquet of other females. This has taken some … Read More
6 Apr 2014

The Varieties of Religious Experience, Updated

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When our first son was born, a good friend and upstairs neighbor gave us a HUGE black and white mounted photograph of the philosopher William James. I’ll have to ask him again where he got it, but he always did move in highly intellectual circles. Anyway, we were thrilled to put the towering thing right in the corner of the baby’s bedroom, so that he could feel no pressure at all about growing up smart. In one packing episode or … Read More
4 Dec 2013

Bring the Family to the Adventure Park, and the Adventure Park to the Family

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Been to an aerial forest park recently? Our family got to go to one last weekend, and the whole experience made me want to give thanks all over again. Swinging around on those harnesses was both refreshingly different from putting myself through the paces of daily life on the ground and also surprisingly similar to managing regular co-existence with a bunch of other individuals who happen to be my spouse and my children. Take the quality of balance, for instance. … Read More
16 Sep 2013

And We Think Our Kids Go Far…

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It absolutely positively could NOT have been a coincidence that on the very day before I brought my son to the airport to travel to the other side of the world The New York Times ran a story about Voyager 1 exiting the solar system.   What, I wondered, would that spacecraft’s mother be feeling?  Imagining, first of all, that a not-exactly-darling contraption like this could in fact have a mother, I envisioned her in Houston (where else?) coping with the … Read More

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