Sunny Saturdays in spring.

I spent a lovely Saturday morning this past weekend at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. I've been wanting to check this cemetery out for a while, and then I found out that there were free tours this weekend. (This picture is not my tour, it's from their website, but you get the idea.)

I mean, I like cemeteries. I've said that before. I have a soft spot in my heart for random historical sites and local curiosities. But even better? Tours of random historical sites and local curiosities. I love tour guides and their command of, in many cases, socially useless knowledge. I love that one really zealous tourmate, who's always there to ask the important questions. I leave happier than when I started. How can you not?

Better still? That I have friends who indulge my quirks.

"The best part about being a nerd within a community of nerds is the insularity – it’s cozy, familial, come as you are...

"Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant."

- Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

The personal narrative.

A staple of grade school writing teachers, in our family we had a running joke that I was the one person without a single personal narrative. Every writing assignment became a struggle to come up with an idea, any idea, that could be expanded into narrative form. A shy, cautious child, I tended to avoid situations that could result in high adventure, major embarassment, and/or significant bodily harm. Nor was I creative enough to string a narrative through the mundane. (I still need to work on that... while I have since managed a few adventures, I have substantially more mundane.)

Thus, I have a fond appreciation for the narratives of others. This is one of the reasons I look forward to the Olympics. While I do enjoy watching the sports for their own sake, I love the stories.

This year has been generally lacking in drama (Quote: "I miss the Cold War." -- Jake Ricks), but my favorite so far has been Alexandre Bilodeau, the Canadian who won Gold in Men's Moguls the other day, out-skiing Austrailian spam-king Dale Begg-Smith.

Canada's first gold medal ever on Canadian soil! He gave up a promising turn in ice hockey and chose freestyle skiing instead to be near his brother with cerebral palsy!

How can you not love these? Syrupy sentiment and all!

A favorite among Olympic stories = Dan Jansen, flashback 1994:

How quickly we forget.

I'm so cold! It was 17.6 degrees when I left for work this morning (I checked), with a single digit wind chill. And the temperature will be somewhat similar for the next few nights.

I keep having to remind myself that I survived 6 years in drafty old houses in Boston winters, where the weather was as cold or colder for a very long time. And the wind, oh the wind! I even waited for the bus in early mornings and late nights. And walked to work. And had to dig my car out of ice and snow.

This was the dear Harriet House in February 2003. I remember this winter vividly. It was so cold and snowy that year, for so long, and it was only my second winter out of the desert. Thankfully, I guess, I'd had a "mild" winter (as Boston winters go) the year before to ease me into it. Here are some things I remember about that winter:

• The Friday before this blizzard, I (playing the ever-dutiful admin assistant in what felt like a scene from the Keystone Kops), spent 3 hours out in a raging snowstorm trying to get a faculty candidate a cab to the airport. It was utterly ridiculous, but the flight was delayed enough so that he did make it in time. And after all that, he didn't even take the job!

• At one particularly bitter point in January, they had to shut down the harbor ferry between Charleston and South Boston for a few days because the ice was too thick. I remember calling my mom, incredulous. The ocean was frozen! Where did I live? And when could I come home?

• One morning, probably late February, I had the radio on as I was getting ready for work, and heard the current temperature was 23 degrees. I clearly remember thinking, "Oh, it's so warm this morning!". And then, I thought, "Who have I become?!".

• When it finally got to the point in the spring when I saw my first non-frozen body of water, I felt real joy.

Basically, what I'm saying is, I don't deserve to be whining about the weather right now. Many of you are dealing with worse. But, if I learned anything from my time in Boston, it's that you can always complain about the weather. I'm so cold!

Home is where the heart is.

This is where I'm from. I haven't spent more than two weeks there at a time in over ten years, and I haven't even lived in Arizona for over eight years. Still, every time the pilot says we've begun our initial descent into the Phoenix area, and I look out the airplane window and start finding familiar landmarks, I always feel like I'm home.

Some people say it's brown and ugly. I say, as deserts go, it's actually pretty green. And, I'll show you pretty. Come in April, though. I'm drawn to western things. Not "westerns" (a narrow and stereotypical view of the west, on which I could say a lot more), but writing, art, aesthetics that are western in setting or color or culture. They just feel like home to me.

Since I moved to Atlanta 2 1/2 years ago (which I agree, is green and can be very pretty), I've never quite felt attached to the place. I like it, certainly enough to buy a house and plan to live here for a good while. Even pretty early on in Boston, I felt like I belonged there, too, but I'd just never clicked here.

While I was in AZ for Christmas this year, though, I found myself missing things about Atlanta. Not just my own bed and my own routine, as per usual, but my house. My yard. My street. So, Georgia, we've still got a lot to learn about each other, but it's good to be home.

Tradition.

Every December since 1979, hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights go up on the grounds of the Mesa Temple. This year marked their 30th anniversary. While we were walking around the grounds on Christmas Eve, we realized that we, too, have been there 30 years in a row. Both siblings have missed some years while on missions, but since we moved to Arizona in January 1979, I have never not been at home, and thus at the Temple lights, on Christmas Eve.

At some point after our big Christmas Eve dinner every December 24th, we drive over and walk around the Temple grounds, then go home and read the Christmas story from the Bible. We children weren't always willing participants. Some years only the threat of not being able to open one present on Christmas Eve got us into the car, tears and all. Dad sometimes read, "And there were in the same country shepherds..." to three still scowling children. But, we always did it.

I'm not generally big on tradition for tradition's sake, and while these days it may be more habit than anything else, I find the ritual comforting. I think we'd all feel like something was missing without it. At some point things will change, and that will be fine, too. In the meantime, I'm glad the five of us Reeds checked off another traditional December 24.

Mad men.

Preface: I recently read Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates, a pop-history of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She includes a chapter toward the end on Anne Hutchinson, who was tried in Massachusetts in 1638 for publicly veering from the traditional Calvinist canon. Anne was banished when she refused in court to back down from her beliefs. Her family and some close friends left Massachusetts with her and settled a new colony in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. In the chapter, Vowell recalls a recent visit to Rhode Island:

"In Portsmouth, Hutchinson and Dyer are remembered in a park called Founders Brook... A feminine hand has written "Hutchinson-Dyer Women's Healing Garden" in black marker on a small piece of plywood.

“I wish I could say that I find comfort in the words "women's healing garden." I like gardens and healing and quite a few women...

“That said, the words "women's healing garden" fill me with the same feminist dread I feel when a subscription card falls out of a magazine and I catch a glimpse at the address form. A potential male magazine subscriber is given the choice of one title, "Mr.", but a female magazine subscriber is given three choices, thereby requiring a woman to inform perfect strangers in the mailroom at Newsweek or Conde Naste exactly what kind of woman she is. She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabee male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).”

Disclaimer: Make of that what you will. The following post is about gender (and lengthy). I guess I've had a lot on my mind. I needed to put it into words.


I don't watch this show (Mad Men). Well, I have watched this show, but I wasn't terribly interested. I post it, though, because I felt a twinge of rapport last week during my work trip in Miami. I gave a talk to a room of 80 (mostly) corporate execs who oversee operations and security for their multinational corporations. Among those 80 attendees were a grand total of only 4 women. I wish I didn't, but I felt small.

Among my own coworkers, we are approximately 70% female, which is typical for public health. Unless I’m over in the emergency operations center at work, where the gender distribution is also mostly male, I forget sometimes how much upper management tends to be male-dominated.

Not all of the likely many reasons for this trend are sexist, but I do think a fair number of double standards still prop up the glass ceiling. I have no personal interest in management, so I don't feel terribly marginalized, but if I were, I'd likely be at a competitive disadvantage. Which is unfortunate, since I rather like being a woman.

More frequently, I am in conversations with male peers, even those whom I respect and am quite fond of, who are easily dismissive or flippant toward female peers. “You’re such a girl” is criticism; women are described using “crazy” or “needy” or "overly emotional". Just last weekend, I attended a church leadership training, and as one female speaker was discussing the importance of effective councils, she asked priesthood leaders to make sure they pay attention to the women on their ward councils. “We have unique perspectives,” she said, “We look at things a little differently than you do”. As she said that, though, I watched the two men seated right in front of me turn to each other and smirk. Differently, eh? Wink wink.

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Henry Higgins famously asks in My Fair Lady. Maybe because we’re not men? We are made up of different bodies, different hormones, and different social roles and expectations. Overly emotional? Compared to what? The implication being that the way men think or act or feel is the standard by which everyone should be measured.

I thought of a brief discussion in Sunday School the other week that had bothered me at the time. The lesson was on citizenship and government, and at one point the discussion came to the value of government by the voice of the people. Great, I thought, I love democracy. But then, someone essentially commented that the majority wouldn't be led astray so we shouldn't get distracted by the minority voice. Well, while I do love democracy, it is not a substitute for individual thought. There was a time, for example, when the majority believed that women shouldn't vote. Or hold leadership positions. Or own property. All of which I'm really glad that I can do now. Getting back to Sarah Vowell, she comments later in the same chapter:

"Here lies the deepest reason why the Women's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn – that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the nearby Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the signers were men. Anne Hutchinson wasn't allowed to sign the founding document of the colony she founded."

While we have things to work on, at least that changed. But, it took some people with a minority opinion to stand up and say, Hey... this isn't right. And then keep saying it until people started listening. It makes me wonder which beliefs the majority hold to now that in 50 years we'll be really glad they don't anymore. I have some ideas, but that's probably fodder for another time.


P.S. Since we're in the season of thanksgiving... Thing I'm thankful for: Both of my X chromosomes. Estrogen can be a messy business sometimes, but I think the world would be a drearier place without it.

Overheard in the airport.

I like airports. I find them oddly comforting. Every one seems to have its own unique personality. While in the Miami airport yesterday (work trip, more later), I noticed signs everywhere indicating that Miami was TSA's "2008 Airport of the Year". This, I soon gathered, was code for "Airport with the Most Neurotic Security Employees". It showed.

But, I did get to witness this exchange with the guy in front of me in line:

TSA lady (checking everyone's carry-on before letting people in the security line): Excuse me, sir. You need to check your bag. If it doesn't fit in that box it's too big.

Sir (dryly): I'm in first class. It fits.

TSA lady: I don't care what class you are. If it's too big, you can't carry it on.

I think he was annoyed. I was amused.


Aside: Also amusing were my two Cuban taxi drivers. Well, one was amusing. The other wrote his trip notes while driving with his knees, and when I leaned over to pay him, I noticed an open beer bottle in the cup holder. At 8:45 am.