Looking Up

There's a folder on my iPhone labeled Space, and in that folder is the NASA app, and a star gazing app, and apps that show the phases of the moon, and ones that let me explore the surface of both Mars and the Moon.  In my twitter feed are various NASA missions (to Mars and Jupiter)--I have a space list, in fact, that you can follow if you like.  They are there because of Susan, a blogging friend who was a Discovery program scientist at NASA, and whose writing about science, children, and space reminded me just how fascinating it is to look up at the stars and wonder.

There have been so many beautiful remembrances of Susan written by people who knew her better than I did, like Maggie and Bon (and of course so many words over so much time by Susan's best friend Marty).  I don't quite know what to say about such a remarkable woman--an astrophysicist, a breast cancer advocate, a friend.  Susan was smart and funny and savvy and prescient.  Her post about inflammatory breast cancer has been reposted thousands of times.  Her post about the idiocy of Facebook breast cancer awareness memes and the need for action instead got her a BlogHer voices of the year honor. Susan was unlucky, in some respects, getting so much cancer so young.  She blogged her life from the diagnosis on, and inspired and educated so many of us.  Breast cancer doesn't need to start with a lump. Early detection isn't the panacea we might think.   And we need more research into cancer.  Until we know what causes cancer, we can't prevent it.

I learned a lot from Susan's fierce writing about cancer.  But what I miss, most, are her posts about every day, her tweets about friends and NASA missions and science with her kids.  I miss exchanging tweets about what we were doing with our kids--I know how much she loved getting outside with her boys, showing them science in action, showing them love.  Last summer, when we were both reading posts by all the folks we knew who were at the BlogHer conference while we were not, we traded a series of tweets about what we were doing instead.  Nothing particularly eloquent, but a delightfully ordinary connection with words.

Susan wondered, back in 2007, What am I leaving to be remembered by?.  In that post, she mentions her ability to work with other people.  She was a connector, someone who brought people together, and the many, many posts full of love for her are proof of that.  Later in 2010, Susan thought ahead to questions her sons might someday have.  Reading this post again last week took my breath away:

One day, when my children ask, “Why didn’t my mother fight the cancer harder?”  I ask that you tell them, “She did, honey, she did,” and also, “Your mama also trusted in God.  She prayed for healing, and for her aches and pains to have a purpose.”

I don't know that any of us ever know the real purpose of our lives here--and I'm sure that each of us brings a different understanding of the role of God in those lives.  Susan's approach to living encapsulates a sense of purpose better than anyone else I've ever met.  As she put it in her mantra, "All that survives after our death are publications and people."  She tended to her words and her people carefully, loving her family so very much, using her words to encourage women into the sciences, to capture the history of space exploration, to advocate for cancer patients and research, to advocate for a better world for today's children.


She reminded me to look up, and to look ahead.  I can't see the stars and the moon without thinking of Susan.  I miss her.  And I will remember her.


Susan's family requests memorial donations to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or, in her husband's inimitable words:  "Or please choose to make a difference somewhere, anywhere, to anyone."  Susan did make a difference, and she made anyone who knew her feel that we, too, could make a difference.  Go and do likewise.

The Political is Personal, or, Teddy, My Daughter Hardly Knew Ye

Curious Girl and Politica are out of town now, and I knew they weren't listening to a lot of news together, so when we spoke first thing yesterday morning, I told Politica about Ted Kennedy's passing. Curious Girl was, unsurprisingly, curious about Senator Kennedy, and she's been peppering me with questions about him: what time did he die? Did he say anything before he died? What kind of good ideas did he have? It surprises me, a bit, still, how she creates such personal connections to figures in the world.

Senator Kennedy was still on her mind this morning:

CG: Mama, the one who died, the president....
me: Senator Kennedy, you mean?
CG: Yes, Senator Kennedy. I'm wondering if he is still at his house, dead.
me: Actually, he's not. He was so important for so many people that they are taking his body to Boston.
CG: Boston?!?
me: His brother was President Kennedy (she knows President Kennedy because we have his picture on two plates in our kitchen), and there is a special library/museum in Boston all about President Kennedy. We can go there when you are older. Senator Kennedy is there now so that people can go visit him, and then there will be a big celebration of his life on Saturday. President Obama is coming back from his vacation to speak at the celebration.
CG: OH! I WANT TO GO!!!!
me: That would be very special, but the celebration will be for people in Senator Kennedy's family and people who knew him and worked with him.
CG: I want to go! We could meet Barack Obama in person!!
me: It would be great to meet President Obama, but we can't meet him in person at the celebration.
CG: But there might be cookies!
me: they will probably have food afterwards for all the people who loved Senator Kennedy, but we can't just go and meet President Obama. It just doesn't work like that.
CG: But we went to Tante Mississippi Friend's after.
me: That's because Uncle Quiet was in our family, honey. We don't know President Obama and Senator Kennedy. They will probably show the celebration on TV or we can watch it on the computer.
CG: I can see it?!
me: Yes, we can look for it.
CG: I wonder whether the Senator had a bad sickness.
me: Yes, he had the same kind of bad sickness that Uncle Quiet had.
CG: That's very bad.
me: Tante Mississippi was a little extra sad, I think, when she heard about the Senator.
CG: Why?
me: I think she was probably remembering Uncle Quiet's brain cancer and feeling sad.
CG: Do you think she cried enough to make a river in her house?
me: I didn't ask her that, but I think she probably didn't cry that much, but she might have cried a little.
CG: I want to go to the celebration and get cookies.
me: Well, we can make our own cookies and have a celebration for the Senator.
CG: No, for Cat Who Died Last Fall. Will the Senator's mother be at his celebration?

The hopes, dreams, and love of a child, who just amazingly and perfectly--although I don't know that my transcription quite captures it--weaves together her family, her politics, and people she misses.

Then and Now

My first Broadway show was Shenandoah, starring John Cullum (and Penelope Milford, who played the oldest daughter, who was of course the character I fixed on). My mother took me, just she and I, into the city for a matinee. I loved going into the city with my mother, who is a rather shy and naive woman. The city transformed her into someone who walked fast and purposefully, who took control, who was in charge. My father--also city-born and city-bred, albeit in Queens, while my mother grew up in Manhattan and worked there for many years as well--is curiously cowed by the city, and that reversed their usual dynamic. Not that my dad is an overly domineering sort, but in matters of logistics and transportation, he was usually the one leading the way. But not in the city.

Shenandoah just blew me away. I'd always been drawn to narrative songs. Among the belongings in the basement that I need to decide what to do with is a box of records, including my childhood recording of Cinderella, and probably Danny Kaye singing Hans Christian Andersen. As I got older, I practically wore out my copies of Jesus Christ Superstar and 1776. I loved the vocabulary of songs (I learned rubicon from a song in 1776 and grippe from Guys and Dolls, e.g.). I loved the stories of the songs. So I went to the theatre expecting to love it, and love it I did (click through the link above and you'll hear selections from the touring production starring Cullum--very cool to see him as I recall him).

Magpie posted recently about the smell of Penn Station. I love the smell of Manhattan, generally. The pretzels, the people, the trains. I love the memory of walking along the city streets with my mother, and I love the magic of my Shenandoah memories. I thought the songs were amazing, the costumes so beautiful, and the story just gosh darn romantic.

So that was my introduction to Broadway. I don't know when Curious Girl will see a Broadway show on Broadway, living as we do quite far from the city. But today I took her to her first Broadway-ish show: H.igh S.chool M.usical's national tour came through. Maybe someday she'll be blogging--or writing in whatever technology she will have available--about her memories of her first show, comparing them to what her child's first big show will be. CG was transfixed (as much by the fact that her favorite teacher and her daughter came with us as with the show). We've seen the movie too many times to count, so CG knew the plot (but sometimes, I think, got a little confused by the rearranging necessitated by the move from screen to stage). Not all the songs are the same, and I found myself nitpicking about the sound system, which just sounded so electrified. Am I just getting old and crabby, or is more amplification reducing sound quality?

We had a good time (although I think the movie is better than the play, which plays up stereotypes more sharply and more meanly, and is less emotionally subtle than the movie). And for all I know, Curious Girl fell asleep as entranced as I was by John Cullum, Penelope Milford, and the rest of the cast sometime in the mid-70s. Sweet dreams, my theatre-going girl.

Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins inspired me to start sending holiday letters. A while back, Politica and I spent a year in west Texas, and we liked it. We left, coming (back) to jobs in the midwest, but we liked west Texas. That's a hard thing to explain to your lefty lesbian friends in the northeast. Molly Ivins had a wonderful column on the subject, so we decided to send it to our friends, and with that, came our tradition of the holiday letter/essay (this year, it'll be a Lunar New Year/President's Day holiday letter, I estimate). As Molly put it:

My favorite place in Texas is Lubbock, mostly because Lubbock, like Popeye the Sailor, is what it is. Lubbock's a place that'll keep you honest. It's hard to be pretentious or affected if you're from Lubbock. Damned hard.....I like flat land. Land you can fall off the side of makes me nevous. In Lubbock the world is about 88.3 percent sky, which I believe is the correct proportion: It takes a while to get used to, but after you do, Lubbock feels like freedom and everywhere else feels like jail.

Another of Ivins' Lubbock columns is here (and in the photo banner there you can see the sky). Lubbock isn't much to look at, but it has personality, and it was a good place to be for a while. Texas has attitude, and growing up in New York made me like a place with attitude. The midwest, not much on the attitude.

It was impossible to read a Molly Ivins column alone--they made me laugh out loud, they made me want to talk with Politica, share them with a friend. I have two of her books in a box on my dining room table now, getting ready to be shipped to my sister (who said last summer, "Who's Molly Ivins?" We gasped).

Molly Ivins died yesterday. She's far better known for her marvelous political writing than for her Lubbock pieces. What I loved most in her writing, though, shows up in her columns about Texas local politics. Her work showed how important it is to pay attention to the politics closer to home. (When the Texas Observer site comes back up, check out their Ivins links. They've set up a great memorial.)

Lately, Ivins has been writing a lot about Iraq. Her writing was syndicated around the country; look at how the Chicago Tribune version of her second-to-last column takes the Texas out of it (using the Dallas/Fort Worth version as the standard). No Bubbas in Chicago, I guess.

She was writing, as Elizabeth mentioned, until the end of her life. Her last columns sound so hopeful, so forward looking. Ivins believed in the power of the people (even as she railed against the results of our collective actions). She was pragmatic, someone with an eye on what we could do. I often feel vaguely guilty that I'm not doing more to rid the world of its myriad problems, but I appreciated Ivins' take on what we need to do now. Here's the end of her very last column:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.

Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge.

If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

What a voice, eh?