What If?

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

–Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Readers of my blog may have noticed that several of my blog posts focus on time. That’s because I am fascinated by time–and by the past. (Probably good things for a historian.) I’ve always enjoyed stories about the past–and time travel—and as I grow older I’ve become more interested in my family’s past.

Recently I came across someone who disparaged what he termed “hypotheticals,” as if people don’t think about hypothetical situations all the time. “What if I had done this instead of that?”  “What if this happens? What will I do then?” Don’t most people carry on these soul-searching internal monologues?

 Or how about the middle-of-the-night wondering? “What if that shadow really is a monster?” Yep, been there, done that. 

We speculate how our lives might be altered if we had taken the other road. I wonder how my life might be different if my parents had not decided to divorce when they did, and my mother, sisters, and I moved to Havertown—where I met my future husband in our 9^th grade English class. Would he and I have met later? Would we have met at all? Perhaps I am the only one who thinks these types of thoughts, but I doubt it. The popularity of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film (and its many imitations), indicate that people enjoy speculating about how life would be if a person they know—or if they themselves—had never existed.

When a loved one dies, we experience a world that continues to exists, but with that person no longer in it. Yesterday I watched the Frontline documentary Never Forget to Lie, by Marian Marzynski,  about his experiences as child survivor of the Holocaust, and the experiences of other child survivors. It was incredibly moving, horrible, and thought provoking. I think it is common for Jews who did not experience the Holocaust to wonder how they would have survived. I know I have. Would any of my friends have helped my family and me? Yes, totally hypothetical, but don’t most people wonder about these type of things? After reading Anne Frank’s diary how can anyone not wonder what this talented young woman might have done or become if she hadn’t died in a concentration camp? We will never know.

I love reading historical novels, which are based on reality, but totally hypothetical. Robert Harris’s alternative history, Fatherland, takes place in a world in which Germany won World War II. In contrast, his novel Pompeii takes a historical event—the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius–and uses it as the basis for a mystery. We know that Vesuvius will erupt, but how will the hero escape? Or will he? Could anyone have done so? Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book has Oxford historians time-traveling back to the fourteenth-century–with disastrous results. In the brilliant and compelling City of Women, David R. Gillham tells the story of ordinary people who live in an extraordinary time and place, World War II Berlin. In reading about them–ordinary people with normal weaknesses and characters that are only truly tested as the war continues–I found it impossible not to wonder what I would have done in their situations. Yes, I do wonder what I would do if put in a fictional character’s situation. Because that’s what good fiction does. It transports us to other realms and makes us think about how we would react in various situations.

But hypothetical thinking—and dreaming—is important in real life, too. It is the human capacity to dream and speculate that make scientific discoveries—as well as great art—possible.  So I will continue to ponder the past. I will look back at roads taken and roads not traveled, and I will continue to wonder “what if?”

 

“If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.”

–Harriet Tubman

          

For My Mom: As Time Goes By

“You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.”

“As Time Goes By,” Herman Hupfeld

The song “As Time Goes By” was written in 1931, but most people know it from the movie Casablanca (1942). The song is heard and played throughout the movie by the character, Sam (Dooley Wilson). It is a sort of theme song for the lovers, Ilsa and Rick (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman) who are parted by war and circumstances, and by the decisions they make. As Rick says, “it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

The song “As Time Goes By” is about lovers. It seemed particularly apt for wartime lovers. (The British television series by the same name with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer is about a couple who were separated during the Korean War and meet thirty-eight years later.) My mom was a young woman when the movie Casablanca came out; she and my father married during World War II. It was an era when many people lived as though each moment could be their last, and yet, for many people it was it filled with every day routines and rituals. People still married, had children; they went to school or work (even though it might have been war work). Time went on, and so did people’s lives.

I thought of the song when I was thinking about my mom this morning. We see our parents differently—our children, too—as time goes by. When I was a child, I thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. She was wise and all knowing. She knew when I was sick or upset about something, even if I didn’t talk about it (which was generally the case). I remember when I was in seventh grade in a new school. We had moved to Havertown, PA from Dallas, TX in March. For some reason, after a few weeks, the teachers in the cafeteria where my class ate lunch decided that I could not add an extra chair to the table because it was too crowded. They told me I had to eat in the other cafeteria. When I got to the other cafeteria and asked where I should sit, a mean or thoughtless teacher told me to sit with a table of boys. I think the were “the bad kids.” It was done to humiliate me. I was a shy and quiet child, and I sat there. Even though I don’t remember telling my mom how upset I was, I must have mentioned something to her. After a couple of days, some girls told me I was sitting at their table now. The girls were not in my regular classes, but they were in my “specials,” gym and home ec. My mom had called the guidance counselor and told her what had happened. It was all arranged quietly and efficiently.

Recently my mom moved into an assisted living apartment house. My sisters, brother, and I helped with packing and arrangements. We were the ones sending emails and making calls–without her knowledge sometimes–to make certain that everything was done smoothly and efficiently—so she wouldn’t be left humiliated. Or homeless.

With the years, my tireless mother has become tired, but she still has a great sense of humor—and she can still put my siblings and me in our place. She has seen births and deaths, and amazing technological inventions. When she was child, her family did not have a telephone for several years. She could not have envisioned cell phones and computers, but she has used them. She has lived to see my daughters, her granddaughters grow up to become beautiful and accomplished young women.

Time goes by, and it brings changes, but my mom is still beautiful to me, and I love her.

Oh—and if you’ve never seen Casablanca, round up the usual suspects and watch it. Maybe with your mother.

Time is the Longest Distance Between Two Places

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
~ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

I mentioned my grandfather—my mother’s father—to a friend in a cycle class at the gym last week. I told her that he had been in great physical shape even when he was in his nineties because he walked everywhere. He walked several miles every day. (And yes, thank you, I do get the irony that I drive a car to the gym to ride a bike.)

Later I was thinking about my grandfather, and it suddenly struck me that he was born in the last decade of the nineteenth-century. Of course, I knew that, but now that we’re on our way to the second decade of the twenty-first century, the realization that I had known someone who was born in the nineteenth century—not simply the previous century, but the one before that—slammed into my brain like a thought-wave missile. Actually both of my grandfathers, as well as some other relatives were born in the nineteenth-century, so I’ve conversed and interacted with people who might even have known people who were born in the eighteenth-century. How wild is that?

 
Last weekend, my husband and I attended an honors and awards ceremony and dinner for our younger daughter, who will graduate from college in a couple weeks. I looked at her and her classmates, bright and glowing with that youthful radiance that does not last, but is oh-so-beautiful while it does. They are all so eager and fearful to face the world. Excited, trembling, and ready to vomit all at the same time. I imagine it is something like the feeling my daughter has when she is ready to make an entrance onto a theatre stage, only this time the stage is the real world.
I tell her it will all work out. Just decide what you want to do now; you don’t have to decide what you will do for the rest of your life. I want her to find success, but even more, I want her to be happy.

 
When my grandfather was about the age of these soon-to-be college graduates, he literally stepped onto a new stage, an unknown world. He crossed an ocean to do so, and never returned to his homeland. He was a Russian Jew, escaping persecution and hoping for a better life in America. He was one of about 1.75 million Jews who came from Eastern Europe to the US between 1900 and 1924, when tighter immigration restrictions were put into place. By 1920, Russian Jews made up the largest immigrant population in Philadelphia. Shortly after my grandfather arrived in Philadelphia, he was drafted into the US Navy, in what was not to be “the War to End All Wars.”

 
My grandfather was born before commercial air flights were commonplace; for that matter, before cars were common. (The first gasoline-powered cars were invented toward the end of the nineteenth-century. See .) However, he traveled in both. He did not have a telephone as a child. He died before computers were an essential feature of everyday life in the US. I suspect he would have enjoyed Facebook though and seeing photos of grandchildren and great-children.

 
My grandparents were practical people. College was for their son, not their daughter, who would surely get married, although secretarial school was an acceptable compromise. After he retired though, this practical man learned to paint and discovered the joys of ballroom dancing with other retirees in Miami Beach. When my husband and I got married, my grandfather attempted to dance with every woman, young and old, at the reception. I think he succeeded.

 
My younger sister and I saw my grandfather only once or twice a year. My cousins in Miami saw him regularly. The relationship between parents and children and grandparents and children is different. My mother was sometimes impatient and annoyed with her father—he was her dad, and he could be stubborn. My sister and I loved that he was the grandfather who had countless hours to play hide and seek with us, to take us on long walks, and to show us surprises like the duck pond that we did not know existed near our house. When I was in college he wrote letters to me—that to my regret, I did not keep. Each letter was one long run-on sentence. The words were spelled phonetically as he pronounced them in his accented English. I loved receiving these letters. He did not live to see the books I’ve written or to know my children.

 
When I was at college, I called my mom once a week. Collect. From the payphone in dormitory hallway. In contrast, I communicate with my college daughter through text, Facebook, email, and phone calls almost every day.

 

I only knew my grandfather as an old man. I look at a photograph of him as a young man, and I know he must have had the hopes, dreams, fears that we all have when we are young. He was born an ocean away and in a time that now seems like ancient history. Yet, he was young once. He sailed across a sea. He fell in love. He raised a family, and he lived to see his grandchildren grow up. Time and space separate and connect us.

“There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.”
EUGENE O’NEILL, A Moon for the Misbegotten

May: The Flip Side

Pollen reflections (Photo credit: cizauskas)

 My last post was a paean to the beauty of May  (apparently it somehow disappeared the first time I posted it, but you should be able to read it now).  At this time, I need to focus on the dark underside of that beauty—yes, I mean spring allergies.

 I woke up this morning with a sinus headache. The bags under my eyes are more like steamer trunks. My silver car appears to be a mutant vehicle with a fuzzy chartreuse exterior because it is so heavily covered in tree pollen.

 I wear contact lenses, and I have to take them out approximately one thousand times a day to clear the mucous from my eyes. (That might be a tiny exaggeration. I’m a fan of hyperbole, probably the biggest fan. Ever.) From what I hear, southern New Jersey might be the allergy center of the world. (Hmm. . .I’m not sure if that’s exaggeration or not.)

 Millions of people suffer from spring allergies, and they suffer far more than I do. Runny eyes, congestion, and scratchy throats are not fun, and many people have even more severe symptoms. When my older daughter was about four, we were at an outdoor party. Suddenly, the whites of her eyes were all swollen and looked they were about to close over her pupils. It was incredibly scary. She had probably touched her eyes and got pollen in them, which caused them to swell. It was not serious, and after some Benadryl, her eyes were fine.  So when it happened to her younger sister a year or two later, I knew exactly what it was. Score one for experience.

 So Spring, you can be cruel. But I guess sometimes we really do have to suffer for beauty.

May

“the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds.  For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in something to constrain him to some manner of thing more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes. For then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and likewise lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service, and many kind deeds that were forgotten by negligence.”

-Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur

In southern New Jersey, where I live, spring is in full force. Gone are the early harbingers, the crocuses, snowbells, and daffodils—we’ve moved on! Now tulips, azaleas, and other late spring flowers dot the landscape, along with the last of the flowering trees, still adorned with petals of pink or white. They sway lightly in the breeze like a ballerina’s tulle skirt, strong and fragile. The leaves on the trees are still mostly small and that yellow-green that exists only in the spring; the trees have not yet donned their larger and darker summer-green raiment.

The days are sunny and bright. The nights are cool and still require a blanket. There is hope in the gentle spring breezes. It floats in the air and sings a duet with the birds.

It is all so beautiful. My heart rejoices in the loveliness and makes me feel reborn.  This is the season of rebirth. A few nights ago my husband saw scores of bats swarm into the evening sky. According to what I’ve read, they are now emerging from hibernation and looking for suitable areas to set up their “maternity wings.” I hope they stick around and eat the mosquitoes that will soon be taking over our backyard.

Death and rebirth. These themes appear in religions and cultures throughout the world. The Corn Mother dies so that corn can appear to feed her children.  “The circle of life.”  “To every thing there is a season.” “And the seasons they go round and round.” These ideas are almost—but not quite—clichés. We all know that the seasons go round and round, but every one of us experiences it differently. Every birth or death of a loved one is unique. It doesn’t matter how many times it has happened before. The first steps or first words of your own children are minor miracles—to parents and grandparents, but not to anyone else.

Death and rebirth. There is a personal connection for me in May. My father died in May years ago when our daughters were young. He did not live to see them grow up to become amazing and wonderful young women.  Our daughters were conceived in May. Yes, “the lusty month of May.” Ahem. Death and rebirth.

In the United States, May is the month of college graduations–death and rebirth of another sort. The ceremony during which academic degrees are dispersed is called “commencement.” It is the end of a course of study, and the beginning of a new life.  Three years ago, our older daughter graduated from college, and in a couple of weeks, our younger daughter will do so. Millions have gone through this ritual, but to us, the proud parents, these two graduations are unique and wondrous, as they should be. One daughter has embarked upon her “grown up” life, and the other will soon do so. I am incredibly proud of them. 

In May, we see life reborn, both literally and metaphorically. In May we are restored, “for then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman.” And although we cannot go back, we can continue to hope and dream. As Joni Mitchell wrote:

“There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through.”

 

“When joy like these salute the sense,

And bloom and perfume fill the day,

Then waiting long hath recompense,

And all the world is glad with May.”

–John Burroughs, “In May”

 

 

Childhood Dreams, Childhood Memories

“Walkin’ through the world
Things happen
Right before your eyes
Things happen
Soon enough you’re lost
And thinkin’
When I’m gonna go back home”
–John Kander and Fred Ebb, “Go Back Home,”
The Scottsboro Boys

 

I was in my car today listening to Radio Times, as poet Lynn Levin described the doll on the cover of her new book Miss Plastique. The brief discussion brought back vivid memories of my daughters playing with their dolls. They loved playing with “the Barbs,” and gave each one a name. I remember Mary, Colonial, Tracy (aka Tracy-Hopping-on-One-Foot after she lost a leg). The Barbies had so many adventures—some of which, I recently discovered, I knew nothing about. It’s probably better that way. I did witness though, and participated in, many of the dolls’ escapades. Little Women Barbies was a favorite game of my younger daughter that we played together when her older sister was at school. She selected particular Barbie Dolls to be the main characters of Louisa May Alcott’s story. In my daughter’s Barbie version, Amy had superhuman gymnastic abilities and drove a car. And I’m pretty sure I remember Aunt March sang “Bare Necessities.” I’m not certain why.

 

Dolls have existed since ancient times and in cultures throughout the world. (See an example here.)
They can be made from all sorts of material. My daughters made paper doll families, seashell families, and on one family vacation, they made a family from the chopsticks they took home from a restaurant. I was never worried about them being unduly influenced by Barbie’s freakish body. Clearly, the dolls were merely props for the worlds their imaginations created.

 

These reflections about dolls and childhood came after my checkup with my oncologist. He said everything looks great. I was relieved, of course. I know how easily I could have been told something else. Yesterday I had attended the funeral of a young man who died much too soon. He was only 23, barely out of boyhood. I am happy that I am well, but it makes me feel almost guilty. I cherish the memories of my daughters’ childhoods, but they are alive, and this wonderful young man is not. His family has the memories of his childhood to cherish, but he is no longer with them, and memories are all they have.

 

Like many people here in the US, I’ve been feeling that “Right before your eyes things happen.” In the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” it was being on a freight train at the wrong time and place. Last week it was watching a marathon in Boston. Why is one person injured, while someone else moments before just happened to move away? Sometimes randomness is reassuring, but at other times it’s frightening. Since prehistoric times, humans have tried to understand fate, but it is impossible, of course. “Giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel”

 

Girl with collection of dolls (Photo credit: George Eastman House)

spins and we don’t know what it will bring. Perhaps that is one reason why children are so drawn to dolls. They can be held, loved, and cherished. They can be used to create a new universe where characters in a novel take on new lives, or where a family member still exists. They can help to bring shape and order to a random world.

Morning

 

Sunday morning coffee (Photo credit: krasi)

 

“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”

 

–William Blake

 

I am a morning person. Yes, one of those annoying people who wakes up able and willing to carry on conversations before having coffee.  I try to keep these conversations to myself—or I converse with the cats—because it is a struggle for my husband to put two coherent words together until he has had coffee and been awake for an hour or two.

I awaken with my mind full of lists and ambitious. I see the day before me as a fresh sheet of paper on which I can write a new story, one that I hope will include my own triumphs, accomplishments, and joys, and that will not include disasters—kitchen or otherwise—or despair

I want to do everything in the morning—writing, exercise, chores, and errands. I would be happy if mornings lasted all day.I decided to re-season my cast iron frying pan at 6:30 this morning, while cooking oatmeal. Who does that—unless they are a morning person? The downside is that I’m tired and barely articulate by eight o’clock at night, and when early darkness hits in December, I feel like I should be getting ready for bed at six. That’s six PM.

 

My biological clock is set to a preindustrial time when people arose with the dawn and went to bed at sunset. (I understand, too, why preindustrial people sometimes slept with their livestock to keep themselves and the animals warm. People with dogs or cat that sleep on their beds know how much heat they generate.) My body and mind, however, are firmly rooted in the twenty-first century. Waking up would not be pleasant without indoor plumbing, heat, and a coffee maker.

 

Although I realize that going to work, especially with long commutes, getting children off to school, and other chores make mornings less than fun for most people, I still love them. The mornings I love the most, however, are the quiet relaxing mornings when there is nothing I have to do and nowhere I have to be. For many years, my husband, daughters, and I went to a bed and breakfast inn in Ocean City, New Jersey in June. We took the attic “suite” –two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a sitting area with a small refrigerator. In the mornings, I woke up early and went out to the sitting area to read. After my husband woke up, we would go downstairs and sit on the porch. There, encased in comfortable chairs, we enjoyed the sea breeze and the promise of another day of vacation, as we drank coffee and watched early morning joggers, bikers, and dog walkers, and waited for breakfast to be ready.

 

This past Sunday, I woke up long before anyone else. Our children and their significant others were home and still sleeping, as was my husband. We had had our lovely and wonderful Passover meal the night before. The morning was quiet and beautiful. I was happy and feeling content with my life. I fed the cats, sipped my coffee, and read the newspaper–which had arrived on time, even though it was Easter morning. Perfect.

 

 

Passover

English: “Holyland” brand matzah, machine-made in Jerusalem and purchased at Trader Joes in the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. “

~Erma Bombeck

We held our big family Passover meal last Saturday night. No, it was not the first or second night of Passover, the time when the Seder is supposed to take place, but it was when my family could be there. Sitting around our dining room table—or more accurately, our dining room and kitchen tables pushed together—were the people I care about most in the world, plus a newcomer who fit right in with our crazy family. He wasn’t fazed by hugs or bathroom humor, and he discovered that he loved matzoh, which was fortunate.

The Passover Seder is about tradition, ritual, symbolic foods, and telling the Passover story. Like the spring holidays of many religions, it celebrates rebirth. Seder means order, and most Seders follow a sequence of steps, including hand washing, dipping greens in salt water, and eating bitter herbs, while commenting on and explaining in endless detail, and often in Hebrew, why these things are done. The Seder gets children involved by having the youngest ask four questions about the night and later having them search for a piece of hidden matzoh called the Afikomen. Drinking four glasses of wine is also part of the Seder. Our table always includes matzoh covers that our daughters made when they were young children. Although we somehow never finish the Seder, our family does go through most of the steps, using a Haggadah we’ve compiled. More importantly, our family tradition of Passover includes enormous amounts of food, much wine, and a play, now written by my daughters. Every year there is a new play, and everyone has a part to read. The plays very loosely tell the story of the Exodus while incorporating current events, pop references, and song parodies. This year, my brother’s Moses, in a sort of Marlon Brando On the Waterfront portrayal, stole the show. I guess you had to be there.

My younger daughter and I are the only people in our family who actually “keep Passover,” that is, we do not eat bread and other products made with leavening during the entire Passover period. I’m not certain of her reasons, but for me, the keeping of Passover is my own personal homage to my ancestors, to Jews throughout the centuries who were not permitted to observe Passover, and to oppressed people everywhere. As a historian, I know that Passover was often the time when the most vicious pogroms occurred. I know that Jews struggled to commemorate the holiday during the Spanish Inquisition, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in concentration camps, and I honor them, in my own way.

Our Seder is not religious or “traditional,” but it includes the traditions of our family, the in-jokes and the food mostly prepared with unwritten recipes. I know I am fortunate, that not everyone has family members they love so much—or food that is quite so delicious.  I am mindful that this was a Passover when everything came together just right—people, good spirits, weather, and food–to form a sort of spectacular perfect storm of Passover. These things might never coalesce in quite such a way again.

This year we laughed and sang, and then we ate, and ate some more. My heart was filled with love and joy. My stomach was filled with food and wine. Some might be offended by our non-religious celebration. But to me, food, love, and laughter cannot be anything but wonderful, especially when it is shared with loved ones. “Why is this night different from all other nights?”  On this night, our family gets together to share our traditions, to laugh together, to eat special foods, to drink, talk, and sing—and to eat matzoh. For me, that is Passover, and it is more than enough.

 

Maps of Life

Cropped section of original image of three ancient maps, public domain Scanned by WMF intern Mike Hoffman, uploaded by Bastique, and cropped by Editor at Large (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”

–Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

Recently the son of some friends did very well in his school’s Geography Bee. It made me think about the whole subject of geography—not really something I’ve thought much about. I’ve only had one formal geography course in my life, and it wasn’t even a full year’s course. This world geography class was part of the 7^th grade curriculum at Haverford Junior High School, but I didn’t enter that classroom until March, after we had moved from Dallas to Pennsylvania. As I recall, the teacher was a no-nonsense man with a crew cut and glasses. On one of my first days there he announced that the homework assignment was to read a new chapter in the textbook. I went home and read the chapter—because I always did my homework. But, as we all know there’s reading, and then there’s careful, in-depth reading. I was surprised by the “pop quiz” the next day, but my classmates had already learned to expect one with each new reading assignment. “Oh yeah,” they told me, “He always gives a pop quiz after he gives a reading assignment.”  From then on, I was prepared, but I don’t think any of the facts and figures I learned during that course remains in my brain. I wonder how much of what I learned then even applies to world now?

I seem to remember lectures about the Danube and Elbe Rivers in one of those first lectures. I assume the course of the rivers has not changed significantly—although I don’t really know. But when I was in that 7^th grade classroom, East and West Germany were separate countries, and Berlin was still divided by a wall. Much of Eastern Europe was controlled by the Soviet Union, which was still the Soviet Union. The Cold War was in progress, and US troops were fighting in Viet Nam. The names of African nations I learned as a child have changed. The world has changed—as it always has.

Over millennia, the Earth has been transformed many times.  Both physical and cultural geography have undergone changes as civilizations have appeared and disappeared. When Europeans first came to my section of New Jersey, there were vast forests on both sides of the Delaware River. There were islands in the river that no longer exist. English settlers lived in caves built into the banks of the river, and over time built roads and buildings that covered swamps. Since my husband and I have lived in our current house, new houses have been built on our block and trees have vanished.

Learning facts about geography is important and valuable, but it strikes me that it is like taking a snapshot of a particular time and place. The borders and names of countries and cities can change overnight during wars or political upheavals.  Physical changes can take place, too, as a result of natural disasters such earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcanoes, or human acts, such as bombings.

Even with satellites, photographs, and computers, maps identify terrains that are in reality fleeting and mutable. “Those maps of our private world,” as Alexander McCall Smith refers to them, are also fleeting and mutable, at least in the physical sense. The first house you lived in might no longer exist, but in the memory of your childhood, it remains constant and unchanged by time.

When I think of myself as that 7^th grade girl, I realize I had to learn and create many new maps. My own personal geography had changed. My family had moved to a new town, a new house, and I was in a new school.  Despite my terrible sense of direction (I’ve been known to get lost getting out of an elevator), I don’t remember having any problems navigating the physical geography. I felt a sense of excitement, along with the apprehension. I didn’t know what path my life would take, but I fashioned some new maps as I walked it.

As we go through life, we create many new maps and learn to live in different settings, both physical and emotional. We graduate, we marry, we find a new job, we become parents—all of these life moments change our own personal geography. Sometimes it’s scary; sometimes it’s exciting. According to legend, ancient mapmakers labeled unknown areas with the inscription, “Here Be Dragons.”  In truth, we all face dragons and uncharted territory as we go through life. Our futures are Terra Incognita to be explored and mapped. But really, would we want it any other way?

Saying Goodbye

“Remember me and smile, for it’s better to forget than to remember me and cry.”

Dr. Seuss

Last night, our old lady cat Tasha died. I made the very difficult decision to terminate her life. She was 19, and up until a couple of weeks ago, despite kidney disease and arthritis, she was still coping well and holding her own against the two little boy cats who shared her home. Yesterday though was something else, and when it seemed to me that she was actually in pain and not able to eat, I didn’t want to prolong her suffering. The veterinarian and the staff were kind and compassionate, and Tasha’s death was very peaceful.

Pets are part of the family. If they’re not, then why have a pet? I believe that once you have a pet, you are responsible for it, as you would be for any family member. Coping with their illnesses and death are part of the package. In return for your care, they give you love, keep you company, and provide you with an endless source of amusement. It seems like a fair trade. I resisted getting any kind of pet for many years after my husband and I married because I knew I could not do it lightly. But when our young daughters wanted kittens, my husband and I gave in. That was the start. I had grown up with dogs, and I never suspected how much I would love my cats.

As Tasha became old and frail, it became hard to remember her as the young cat who leaped into the kitchen sink to get lettuce—and that she ran to the kitchen at the sound of the lettuce spinner.  Or that she once had the curiosity and sense of adventure to figure out how to open the cabinet under the bathroom sink, crawl into the space around the pipes, and run around in the area between the bathroom floor and the kitchen ceiling.

One of my daughters (lovingly) referred to her as a diva, and she was. She demanded immediate attention, and this attitude increased, as she got older.  We referred to her as the old lady princess cat. She also began to howl (that is the only way to describe it) in the bathroom when she wanted water from the sink, which she did, constantly.

One time, however, her howling helped to rescue another one of our cats. After a period of very heavy rainfall, our basement had flooded. That night as my husband was trying to pump the water out of it, we think our cat Ricky got scared and escaped through the window, but we did not discover he was gone until the next morning. I was in tears for two, long days as we tried to find him, assisted by friends and friends of friends.

Finally, my husband and I camped out in the dark of our backyard. I placed fresh food, the litter box, and one of my dirty gym shirts on the ground near the window from which we think he made his exit. We accidentally scared Ricky away once. Then cautiously he returned. As we wondered what to do, from the open bathroom window, we heard Tasha howl and howl again. Ricky replied with one his strange little squeaky sounds. I called to him then, and he ran to me.  I scooped him up and brought him back inside. Ricky got food and hugs; Tasha got water from the bathroom sink.

Tasha did not like our other little boy cat, but she tolerated Ricky. She let him sleep next to her, and even let him lick her head.

Tasha could be annoying, and I do not miss cleaning up after her. But I would love to hear one of her howls now. Rest in peace, Tasha. You were well loved.