What Kate Mulgrew and I Had in Common: Growing Up in the 60's

After hearing her read from her new memoir on the Diane Rehm show the other day, I ordered and began reading actress Kate Mulgrew's new book, Born With Teeth. I'm not very far into it, but I am enjoying her acerbic writing style.

I laughed out loud as she described growing up in a large Catholic family in the 60's, particularly as she described her mother's cooking, the paucity of food available to the children, and their mother's desire that the children spend as much time as possible playing outside. I laughed because it reminded me of my own childhood.

First was the mention of "fish sticks, tepid brown pellets served on a cookie sheet every Friday night." "[S]he'd sigh," wrote Mulgrew, "and say, 'I didn't make the rules.'"

Ah yes, fish sticks. The rules. Back in the day, before the Second Vatican Council changed things, good Catholics abstained from meat every single Friday. We were good Catholics, so my siblings and I had butter sandwiches for lunch and fish sticks for dinner, with little else. Perhaps some corn. My dad would pour himself a large glass of milk, then crunch up crackers therein and add some butter. I suppose I might of wondered what my little Protestant friends ate on Fridays, but I only had one; the rest were Catholic just like me, and we all went to the same Catholic school.

Mulgrew writes about how little food there was to go around in her family: "So much anticipation, and so little actual food. We never saw bread or fruit or sweets of any kind, and one small chicken divided among five starving children did not the trick do." She describes "the sound of five little mouths voraciously sucking on chicken wings the size of paper clips." 

Well, there she's got me there. We at least got drumsticks and thighs, but only one. I always wanted the drumstick. 

I never really realized how little food there was on our dinner table until someone from outside came into the family. My oldest brother got married, and my sister-in-law has told me that one of the things that shocked her was how little food there was for so many (five) kids. I never thought anything of it, however; it was my/our normal. 

Second Grade at St. Theresa's. I'm standing behind the kid with the chalk board.

I well remember, for example, coming home for lunch from St. Theresa's across the street and having, day in, day out, a bologna sandwich on white bread with ketchup. Potato chips or vegetables? Not on your life. Things improved when we moved and I started attending a public school: they had a cafeteria.

Mulgrew also made me laugh out loud when she described what must have been the dominant parenting method of the 50's and 60's: get the kids out of the house and keep them out for as long as possible. She writes:

"We were often gone for hours, and when we would finally return home, exhausted, thirsty and complaining of starvation, my mother would glance up from her book and say, 'You should be grateful. You were born in wedlock, you're an American citizen, and you live on dry land. Now go back outside and play."

I grew up in a similar environment. There were kids everywhere in the 60's (kind of like suburban Salt Lake City today), and my mother was very happy for us to play with them - but at their house, not ours. Our friends were never allowed to play at our house. But since most of the other mothers were just like my mom, the result is that there were packs of kids running around all over town, homeless every afternoon after school and on Saturdays.

Fortunately, I grew up in small towns, and my parents never had to worry about us running all over town, though I don't think it would have occurred to them to do so. I suspect the situation was similar in cities. Mark speaks of growing up in Tokyo, and his parents thought nothing of sending their kids across the city to go to school or doing who knows what on the way home. That's just the way it was.

What I remember most about playing as a child was that our world was very separate and different from that of our parents. They didn't know anything about what we did, unless we got caught doing something, like stealing empty Coke bottles from the local mom and pop market so that we could then bring them in for the deposit money. (It wasn't all bad, though; at least we used the money to buy candy from the store. Well, that's what we thought anyway.) Fortunately, we didn't get caught the time my brother found a way into an empty house down the street from us, but there was that other time ...

What did we do? Ride bikes. Play army. Go the pool in the summer. Explore creek beds. Go sledding. But not with parents! Who did that? That would have ruined all the fun. Besides, they were happily (or not so happily) preoccupied with their own lives and interests.

What I'm Reading Right Now

I'm spending a lot of time reading on the beach these days. Thanks to Kindle, I can read several books at a time. Here's what I'm reading right now:


The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius

My daughter, Hannah, recommended this book to me on Thursday. I'm now almost halfway through it. It is the remarkable story of a mother's determination to heed what she intuitively felt needed to be done to help her autistic toddler achieve his potential. What I've read so far is not only an amazing story, but a story that provides wisdom, insight and courage to parents, whether or not their children are autistic. Favorite quotes so far:

"I learned that *everyone* has an intrinsic talent, a contribution to make, even if it comes in an unexpected form. And I began to believe that each person's potential to achieve great things depends on tapping into that talent as a child."

"I had believed for years that any child will out perform your expectations [in various skills, academics, etc.] if you can find a way to feed his or her passion."

The book caused me to ponder how I helped raise my older children and given me much food for thought on helping my younger children - ages 8-15 - find their intrinsic talent, that which they are most naturally passionate about, and pursue that passion. I will finish the book before we head home next week.

Homosexuality and Civilization

I've been reading this book, by Louis Compton, for several weeks and am now 39% of the way through it. Though the author is an academic, I have found it to be very readable and quite fascinating. It begins at the beginning of recorded history and works its way up through the centuries, through Judea, Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations, Ancient Greece and Rome, the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance, where I now am, reading about homosexuality in Florence during the 1400's.

Along the way, I have learned how the writings of the early Israelites impacted early Christian fathers, then the jurisprudence of Rome, then Medieval Europe. How forgeries, misunderstandings, mistranslations, superstitious fear and brutality came to effect western Civilization's views on homosexuality for 2000 years. It makes for a very insightful, fascinating and sobering story. Did you know, for example, that Julius Caesar was the butt of many jokes as a result of a same-sex affair he had early in his career? Or that the practice generically known as "pederasty" in the Greek world existed for 1000 years until the burgeoning power of the Christian church finally succeeded in crushing it?

The David Suzuki Reader 

I knew of David Suzuki from my years in Vancouver, B.C., primarily from the CBC show, "The Nature of Things," which he hosted. I was reminded of this when we recently went to visit Mark's brother and sister-in-law, Tim and Marie, in Colorado. One night, we were sitting around talking about books, and Tim suggested the Mark read Suzuki's book, Tree: A Life Story, which is a "biography" of a single Douglas fir. Mark downloaded that book, but it is still a few books down in his queue.

I am not very far into the Reader, but I like that it is a collection of  relatively short essays about the environment, about sustainability, about climate change and about Suzuki's life story. Reading the essays has reminded me of when I lived in Vancouver and was attending law school at the University of British Columbia. Those were the days Gro Harlem Bruntland, the prime minister of Norway and chair of the United Nations' World Commission on Environment and Development, was advocating sustainable development. The Commission issued its report in 1987 - the year I commenced law school - entitled "Our Common Future," which I recall reading. Those were the days of "Think Globally. Act Locally." It was the time in my life when I was most engaged in what was going on in the environment.

Four Seasons in Rome

I read Anthony Doerr's book, All the Light We Cannot See, while we were in Europe. Although there was much about that book I liked, it was, in my view, dark and unredemptive. I decided to pick up Four Seasons in Rome because I had just been in Rome and hope to go back some day. It is a memoir of a year he and his wife and newborn twin sons spent in Rome in 2004-2005. This book is on my "slow read" booklist. I typically read a few pages at a time, then move on to something else. While I am not captivated by it, I am only halfway through. Perhaps it will get better.

Greece: A Short History of  Long Story

I came aware from our Greek cruise with a desire to learn more about the history of Greece - buy gently. I long, long ago realized that I am what I could call a "cyclic learner." I learn a little bit about something, then a bit more, then a bit more - in cycles. Perhaps many if not most people learn that way. I don't know. But when I searched about for a short, approachable yet serious history of Greece, I landed here.

I'm about 20% of the way through this book by Carol Thomas and have already learned quite a bit, putting pieces of information together that I learned while in Greece. This is another one of those books, however, that is not a page turner and which I have to absorb slowly.

The HeartMath Solution

This is another book that was recommended to us by Mark's brother and sister-in-law, Tim and Marie. I'm sure I'll blog more about this in the future. For now, let me say that I am finding it fascinating and enlightening. I'm only 13% into the book, but I think it's fair to say that the basic premise of the book is that science is proving that the heart has an intelligence, a brain, of its own apart from the mind's brain. And all sorts of things flow from that.

The Novels of Alexander the Great, by Mary Renault

Mary Renault was both a product of her times and in advance of her times. A lesbian, she wrote ground-breaking novels that had gay themes, primarily from the Classical period of ancient Greece. She was English, but spent the last few decades of her life in South Africa with her partner. When reading the first novel of her's that I've read, i.e, The Last of the Wine, I realized that I needed to learn a lot more about ancient Classical Greece in order to appreciate what I was reading. Renault was dealing with pederastic themes within the context of historical Greece during the Peloponnesian war. Thus, that first book was somewhat challenging. I kept waiting for the climax of the love between Alexis and Lysis ... but I came to realize two things: Renault was writing in the 50s' and 60's, and she was writing about a form of love that is foreign to 20th and 21st-century readers - even gay readers.

Now, I'm reading her trilogy about Alexander the Great. I still wish I knew more about Greek history; thus my reading of Greece: A Short History of a Long Story. But the story is fascinating. Alexander. His mother, Olympias. His father, Philip. Of course, Alexander was gay, or at least bisexual. Thus, I know the story is to be developed. Where I'm at in my reading, he's about eight.

My Chance Encounter With André Gide

Who is André Gide? I had known of him, yet not known him. I had heard of him, but not heard of him. Why? How? Because of quotes from his writings that had been scattered upon my way since coming out. Yet I knew him not; he was just someone whose name was at the end of a quote. 

The other day, however, I chanced upon a website which had as it's banner the following quote by Gide:

"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves."

I was intrigued. Who was André Gide? Turns out he was a French novelist and essayist, that he was gay, that he was friends with, among others, Oscar Wilde, and that he was the first openly gay man to win the Noble Prize for Literature.

As I poked around the Internet and learned a bit more about him, I came across this quote which in a way summarizes the process of coming out of the closet:

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."

These are very, very powerful words with which I was familiar from my early blogging as Invictus Pilgrim. 

I had also run across this quote:

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."

Now that I knew a little bit about the man who wrote these words, I wanted to learn more. His writing, as I became more exposed to it, reminded me of works of French existentialists that I had read in college. Upon Googling, I see that he was indeed considered a forerunner of existentialist thought.

Then the conundrum: where to start learning more about him. I decided to begin with his work Autumn Leaves. I can tell I'm in for a feast. The following are some of the selected quotes set forth in the introduction to the book:

"Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable."

"Sin is whatever obscures the soul."

"Dare to be yourself."

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."

"Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness."

"The color of truth is grey."

"The scholar seeks, the artist finds."

"Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you."

I can hardly wait to begin reading, then writing about what I read.