Mom, Dad & Khrushchev, meeting to set up our cover identities  . . . .

See below for explanation!

One of the reasons I thought it would be good to start a blog* was that it might provide an incentive to write down some family stories for the Niece and Nephew.  They’re 12 and almost 17, though, so I’m confident that they’re not interested in listening to Aunt Amy drone on about the weirdos in their extended family.  This way, I can have the fun of telling the stories, and they can read them at their leisure.  Since it’s public and since I love them very much, I’ll spare them the dysfunction** and let them uphold a fine family tradition by digging it up later when they get good and curious.

I’m also sort of hoping some of these stories will inspire other folks to share theirs, which I’ll post or not depending on whether you let me.  And how many really funny family weirdos they involve.

So I thought I’d start with two related vignettes from my parents’ experiences in the late 1950s.  This, dear Niece and Nephew, was the world into which your father and I were born: The Cold War.

Vignette #1.  My Dad writes from law school in 1957:***

My train ride up was most enjoyable.  I sat next to an air force corporal who works in the control tower at Westover Air Force Base.  He told me a lot about the base, including that there are bombers on constant alert loaded and ready to go with hydrogen bombs in them.  And that the pilots have a special course in Russian cities which he knows from the air like he knows the palm of his own hand.  I supposed that I should have taken it for granted that with all our preparations we would have some of the weapons actually ready to use, but it still is a little shocking to realize how completely we are on a war footing.

Vignette #2.  My Mom writes from Moscow, one stop on their European honeymoon in 1959:

Before I go any further, I must tell you about my experience of this morning.  We went to The Kremlin.  After seeing the museum, the group was set loose to see the cathedrals at our leisure.   . . .  After a stroll through the churches, Peter and I started walking through the grounds.  As we were walking down a smallish street, we heard cheering behind us and went back to see what it was.  Out from the middle of the crowd popped Khrushchev, headed down the street in our direction.  Peter gave me a shove and I shook hands and exchanged pleasantries,**** then introduced Peter.  I think K was a bit flabbergasted, but no one stopped us.  After it was all over, one of the boys in the group rushed up with his Polaroid camera and said, “I think I got you!”  We waited impatiently the 60 seconds it takes and it’s a beautiful picture!

I’m hoping my mother can find the photo and that she has a scanner.  My memory is that the photo features my parents and the back of Khrushchev’s bald head.

No, Niece & Nephew, we weren’t Russian spies raised as suburban kids in the 1970s.  We all had ugly haircuts, even the real Americans.  Especially the real Americans.

What I found striking about both of these vignettes is trying to imagine parallels to today.  Chatting with an air force corporal about drone targets?  Taking a tour of Tehran and chatting with Ahmadinejad?  It seems to have been simultaneously a scarier and more innocent time.   Was it?  Or is every time equally scary and innocent because it’s the same species – us – stumbling through it using the same small fractions of our hominid brains?

***************

* WordPerfect — which I use to draft — still thinks “blog” is a typo.  I love it anyway.  It’s a dysfunctional love, but devoted nonetheless.

** Unless it’s really really funny.  Like the time my father threw an ice cream cone at my brother and me.  It was only dysfunctional for a nanosecond or so, and then passed immediately into family legend with much hilarity.  The precipitating cause was the fact that the Dairy Queen had large soft ice cream cones on sale for less than medium cones.  Dad requested a medium amount of ice cream at the – lower, large, sale – price.  No go.  Anyone who knows my brother or me knows what came next:  There is no way anyone with our nerd DNA would tolerate such an offense to logic.  A fierce legal argument ensued which – not being in control of the soft-serve machine – my father lost.  All it took was one smart-ass remark from his kids — and with both of us in our teens, that came almost immediately — and my father launched a large ice cream cone in our general direction.  We have recognized that precise place on Route 1 every time we’ve passed it in the 40 years since.  There was talk of a plaque.

*** I’m correcting most of his typos.  Although he was a brilliant lawyer, my father never, ever learned to spell.

**** Yes, Niece & Nephew, your Grams***** speaks Russian.  How cool is that?

***** Yes, she asked to be called Grams.  But then we often called my grandmother “G’Ma,” pronounced “gee-ma.”  I think it was because we could not spell “grandma,” so the spelling thing might be genetic too.

Just curious – how many of the folks whining about LeBron James are also accusing Obama of socialism?

Sure it’s true that the All LaBron All The Time media programing was fairly nauseating, but the man simply did what we’re all supposed to do in a capitalist system:  negotiate at arm’s* length to get the best deal.

So James is supposed to redistribute his basketball talent to Cleveland, while Obama is supposed to, what?, protect the good capitalists at the insurance companies from sick people?

Apparently the biggest accusation of socialism against Obama is that we’re going to be required to sign up for health insurance.  (Please don’t tell me it’s the bailout – initiated by and necessitated by the ineptness of his predecessor.)  We can’t have a system that covers everyone regardless of preexisting condition if you can wait until your condition preexists to sign up.  No one would buy insurance until they need it.  The only rational alternative would be to refuse health care to formerly heathy people who suddenly find themselves sick – which would be fine by the newly anti-socialist sign-misspellers  . . .  until they get sick, at which point the illness itself would be Obama’s fault.  Really, teabaggers. would you rather pay for universal preventive care or massively expensive emergency care?  Or just let people die?  Very pro-life of you.  (More on that later.)

And another thing!  Isn’t health care really part of our national defense?  I mean, when we say we’re defending America, what the heck are we defending if not Americans?  Certainly not just American soil, because most folks don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to the soil, the air, the trees, the animals, the ocean, etc etc.  And the opponents of health care can’t possibly mean they’re defending the American constitution – they’re perfectly happy to toss that out the window in an effort to secure the image of toughness abroad and a hetero monopoly on marriage at home.

No, dammit, when we think of defense spending, we should think about what it really takes to defend the American people, for example, making sure we don’t die in a terrorist attack AND making sure we don’t die because some bureaucrat denies our chemo claim one too many times.

Now this is why I love blogging.  Not only did I not have to have a point, see (as we say in the law biz) supra, but I also don’t need to draw this all together with some sort of concluding sentence that manages to connect LeBron to health care policy.   Even better, this post will be sufficiently far removed from the front page that I can completely change my views on the socialization of basketball when Carmelo Anthony becomes a free agent.

*I’ve never know whether it was “arm’s length” or “arms’ length.”  Are both parties sticking their arms out or just one?  Or maybe one party is sticking both arms out.   No, you can never overthink punctuation.  Why?

We said good-bye to our 1993 Caravan today.  We’ve been keeping it out in San Francisco where we have a fair number of cases, because paying the monthly bill for long-term parking at SFO is cheaper than renting an accessible van — at $120ish per day — every time we’re out here.  We just bought a new van in Colorado, which permitted us to bring our 2002 Caravan out here, and say farewell to the 93.  We’re parting from the van we got married in!  *sniff*  OK, we didn’t strictly speaking get married in the van, but we did get a free meal on the way to our honeymoon when the drive-through lady saw the “just married” verbiage all over the side of the van.  Thanks, Mark!

Enough sentimentality!  We also say goodbye to the dead radio, nonfunctional odometer (really!  only 60,000 miles in 17 years!), and a steering wheel that made driving from SFO to Berkeley feel like piloting a small plane though intense turbulence.  The Caravan has hubcaps, but only following hours of intense philosophical debate after the theft of the old ones:  hub caps do not, as an engineering matter, contribute to the operation of the car vs. hub caps are essential bad-ass accessories.  I’ll let you guess who was on which side.

I have been lucky enough to have reached the age of almost (still almost) 50 while having parted from only two cars:  the 93 Caravan, and the 1978 Malibu that belonged to my father, that I drove during law school (85-88), and that I sold when I got the Honda Accord that I still own.  The 78 Malibu was the Worst Car Ever Made.  I know some of you Pinto and Gremlin owners want to claim this title, but in the 1978 four-door Malibu, the rear windows didn’t open.  Didn’t Open.  Not as in the handle (remember them?) was broken; it didn’t have a handle.  Or an automatic opener.

When my father took it back to the dealership to point out this obvious defect, he was told that it was a new feature designed to “increase the leg room.”  Any further questions why the Japanese auto industry kicked our asses in the 70s?  If I recall correctly, the car was also stuck in second gear for most of the first year my father owned it, which the dealer did finally correct.  My dad was thrilled with the improved mileage.

No, we’re not very car savvy in this family.  “Change the power steering fluid?  Power steering has fluid?”  That’s me, wondering why the Malibu suddenly wouldn’t turn.

In law school, my second biggest expense after tuition was new alternators, which the Malibu seemed to require every few months.  Upgrading to an Accord in my third year brought the revelation that you can actually drive a car for weeks at a time without requiring repairs!  And the 88 Accord continues to thrive — 22 years later — stubbornly refusing to fail and provide a good excuse for a new second car.

Update:  We may be able to sell the Caravan to our co-counsel — see above, Josh; you’ve been warned! — leaving open the possibility of visitation rights!

Since blog comments had not been developed during the paleolithic period, my cro-magnon friend continues to respond via email.  He & his neanderthal colleague insist I come down one way or the other on the use of the word “idiot.”

If I’m candid, I have to admit I’m on the fence.  The history of “idiot” is just as noxious as that of “retard” but history does not supply the full answer.  It also matters how the word is meant and heard in contemporary speech.  I can say that when I hear the word “retard” I hear an effort to disparage the target by a comparison to a cognitively disabled person; when I hear “idiot” I interpret it to mean simply “stupid.”

So I would like to hear more from others — in the comments if you’re a modern human, email if cro-magnon — what you think when you say or hear the word “idiot.”

I was trying to think of other examples of words that have lost their true meaning as epithets, and are in general use without reference to an earlier offensive meaning.  It’s easy to think of examples in the opposite direction:  it doesn’t make the word “bitch” innocuous that its dictionary definition is “female dog.”  I’ve heard it’s a false etymology that has rendered the word “handicap” unacceptable.  It was thought to derive from a reference to begging — “cap in hand” or “hand in cap” — but in fact goes back to betting conventions involving the announcement of odds.  Its real meaning, in other words, is the one at the racetrack.  While I suppose it is mildly offensive to for a disability to be analogized to odds in betting, the ADA definition is “substantially impaired in a major life activity,” which seems much more explicitly harsh than being burdened with longer odds.   Or maybe I’m just remembering fondly our last vacation in Vegas.

One of the reasons I would like to hear from other folks is that I have recently been called on a couple of words that I now try not to use but have not gotten to the point of busting others’ asses for using (as I generally do with “retard”).  Among these are “crazy” and its synonyms and “lame.”  All of these disparage by comparison to people with disabilities, and there’s just no way to spin that comparison that makes it OK.  Seems to me disrespectful to use a group characteristic as an insult.   That is, until “Republican” is seen for the insult it truly is!

Here’s what I’m thinking about today, in addition to Tim’s excellent steak fajitas that we will share with the in-laws, and the ensuing patriotic display of vanilla ice cream with raspberries and blueberries.

The Constitution, and the fact that has been amended to increase our freedom over the years.

All of the people who argue about what it means to be free.

Our kick-ass miliary.  Seriously, while I may not agree with the way a certain just past president chose to deploy it, it seems deeply deluded to think we’d be protected in its absence.  In addition to talking back to the television, I tend to talk back to bumper stickers — for example, to the ones that assert that war is not the answer, I quote a rival sticker I’ve seen:  “except in cases of slavery or totalitarianism.”  Many ordinary — no, extraordinary — men and women sign up to put their asses on the line to protect us, and I honor them today.

I also honor the many other men and women who have put their asses on the line to protect and increase our freedom … whether facing the fire hoses of Selma, enduring the police batons of Stonewall, or sitting in a federal building til they enact the damn regs.

And the many other things that make us the free people we are today, including but (as we say in the law biz) not limited to:

People who sport bumper stickers with over-simplified political theories.

People who show up in parks with misspelled signs and no real sense of what the words on them really mean and those who show up to yell back at them.

Youtube

The Onion

Innovators and the people who believe in them.

People who sit in the front of segregated buses and people who park their wheelchairs in front of inaccessible buses.

Update:  People who teach their children about the First Amendment.

Everyone who calls bullshit on easy answers and accepted truths.

Happy 4th, everyone!