Driving Audhumla

More period photos

It's been fun for me to play detective with the handful of old family photos my aunt gave me earlier this month. I spent a lot of time looking at them very carefully for clues to time and place. It was a little difficult for me to date one of these two photos.  At first I thought the baby was the same in both pictures. But after  taking a good look at what people are wearing and the photos' backgrounds, I have to conclude they are different babies, and from different times.

The photo on the left is taken on my cousin Chris Blundell's  baptismal day in 1949 in Mt. Vernon, Washington. That's the family antique christening gown of delicate white cotton lawn I remember laboriously pressing four times, once for each of my kids' baptisms, and a fifth time when I sent it on to my daughter for her son. (That family heirloom is now in her custody). The two women in the photo are my aunt and my mother. One or the other was the godmother. As was the practice at that time, babies were baptized at a very young age, often before they were a month old. I think this had a lot to do with Catholic beliefs of that era about the fate of unbaptized babies. Back then, it was believed that if they died, would have to spend all of eternity in Limbo. (The Church has since changed its position on this issue that brought agaony to many parents who lost a child before he or she could be baptized). Mom had had a baby herself in January of 1949 and  and this photo dates from September of that same year.

My mom is on the right, wearing the large cartwheel hat, which I do not remember at all. Her dress looks vaguely familiar, but maybe I am thinking of some curtains she made for our first house in Lynnwood. Given the length of the skirts, this would have to be a very early  postwar photo, not long after Christian Dior's "New Look" brought hemlines down and nipped waists as an antidote to wartime clothing austerity.

I am struck with how elegantly both women are dressed. In those days baptisms typically took place in the baptistery in the back of church on a Saturday morning, and even then, they weren't that much of a dress-up occasion, except for the baby, who is smothering in the long long heirloom dress. I remember my aunt's very strappy shoes because they were so different from what most women were wearing at the time.

The second photo shows my youngest sister and my brother Eric, who is holding our cousin Joe Tobin. I think this was taken in about 1956, at my aunt's house on Capitol Hill in Seattle. My brother Eric, who is wearing his St. Joseph's parochial school uniform of navy blue sweater, white shirt and salt-and-pepper cords, is holding the baby so tenderly and gently. This prefigured the kind of terrific father and grandfather he grew up to be. My sister appears to be wearing pajamas under her pedal pushers, something I recall she used to do when she got dressed in the morning. There's a moire effect  pattern on this photo for some reason, maybe the results of drugstore processing. I remember the pale green plush sofa on which they are sitting. I used to get in trouble for using its arms as pincushions when I was sewing.

family photo genealogy fashion Catholic baptism 

Taking over the universe

About two months ago I emptied my huge compost bin and spread its wealth all around the garden.  I had forgotten that I had dumped several of last Samhain's (Halloween's) jack o'lanterns into the bin last fall when they got squishy and smelly. It seems that their seeds survived the composting process intact because now I have had pumpkin seedlings popping up everywhere. 

Clearly it's too late in the year for them to form pumpkins, but the several that I've left growing are stretching huge vines with monster-sized leaves across the garden. The compost in the pots must be the equivalent of steroids because these are the biggest pumpkin leaves I've ever seen. Below you'll see a couple of photos.  I'm going to let them go for a while longer and then pull the vines up and dump them back into the compost bin. For right now they give parts of the garden an interesting out-of-control look, something rare in a garden where everything grows in pots. That's my hand atop the leaf to give you a basis for size comparison. And I don't have dainty little princess hands.

compost gardening Samhain Halloween

It started with the bears

I belong to QuiltArt, which is a large Internet-based group of quilters, mainly those who do contemporary-looking art quilts. The list has been in existence for more than 10 years, and as the years have passed, many of us have gotten to know each other and our changing work.

Today I found photos of the very first quilt I ever wrote about for the QuiltArt members. It is a baby quilt I made for a newborn on my husband's side of the family. I had wanted this to be a very special quilt because I knew the baby would never have a chance to know my husband, who, by then, was already very ill. So I probably put a lot more care and thought into making this quilt than I would the ordinary baby gift.

I chose the bear paw pattern because it's so strong graphically, and also involved relatively simple piecing with none of the set-in seams I hate to sew. I seem to remember that I found this pattern--including the appliqued bears-- on the back of a sheet of quilt-themed gift wrap.

It was a fun quilt to sew. Like most quilters, I have more blue fabric than any other color. (I've heard the theory that as we get older, we gravitate toward blue as compensation for the gradual yellowing of the lens in our eyes). I used a bright yellow sashing and also bound the quilt with bright yellow. I made a big label for the back with the child's name and date of birth, information about when the quilt was made, and my husband's and my names.  Then I sent it off the the new baby's parents in Kansas City.  I was so pleased that I'd made such a wonderful-looking quilt, as I was still a rank beginner.

I was surprised that I didn't hear back from the new baby's parents right away. Several weeks went by and still nothing. Then I got a letter from the baby's grandmother. Several days after the quilt arrived, the baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The parents were too distraught to write or call us.

I felt so bad. And one of the reasons I was so upset is that I knew if I'd just made a generic baby quilt, the parents could have given it away to St. Vinnie's without much thought. But the quilt was personalized and I had clearly put much work into it.  I knew they would feel they had to keep it and that it would be a too-poignant reminder of their lost child.

The very first posting I ever did on the QuiltArt list was about this quilt, and I remember saying that I felt a little bit like the wicked fairy godmother who showed up at the Sleeping Beauty's christening. The others on the list were quick to respond, and several suggested the scenario that did, in fact occur. The parents kept the quilt as a precious memento of their lost child. And I learned about the wisdom and compassion of other quilters.

I have several rules about my quilts, One is that I won't sell them. The other is that I will never make a quilt for someone who asks. Only once have I broken the second rule.  Three years ago someone asked me if I would make a quilt for a child in her family who was seriously ill with one of the most dreaded childhood cancers, neuroblastoma. Things were very tough for that family, so I decided to honor the request. Then I was told that the two things the little girl loved were princesses and the color pink. Oh dear, I thought, we're talking about a Barbie quilt, and as a practicing feminist, I don't do Barbie.

Again I consulted with my friends from QuiltArt and I got all sorts of suggestions. Some women were eager to participate, and one made a fancy block with a fairy princess that I used for the back label, and another sent a princess scepter with a sparkling crystal star at the top.

Finally I settled on a design that used a lot of turquoise and deep purple to mitigate the intense pink.

With the help of a friend I put a row of dancing princesses at each end of the quilt. Some of the princesses represented real people--I'm the grandma princess with the long gray braids at the top--including her aunts and cousins. The child is in a Hapa (multi-racial) family so the princesses are all different races, with many differing skin colors and hair styles.

While I was sewing the quilt, I focused my energy toward surrounding this little girl with love and safety, mitigating her pain and her fear. I knew this was what would be most important for her.

I sent the quilt off to the family, and several weeks later, the mother responded, sending me this picture of her little girl sitting in the middle of her quilt. She's holding her scepter and it appears that she picked up a tiara too, somewhere along the way.  She and her family fought a valiant battle against the cancer, but neuroblastoma frequently has a poor outcome, and she did die last year. I assume the quilt is still with her family, again a remembrance of a precious child who was lost.

Of course I've made quilts for other kids over the years. And the other kids have all survived and thrived. Still, I will always think of loss--and the support of QuiltArt friends--whenever I see photos of these two quilts.

Incidentally, I read quite a bit about neurblastoma when I was making the little girl's quilt. And I was appalled to learn that the incidence of children's neurblastoma in Baghdad increased five-fold after the first Gulf War, with many health experts attributing the increase to the use of depleted uranium in the casings of the bombs we dropped on Iraq. Of course in that war we dropped just a minuscule percentage of the bombs expended in the present action. So I am afraid that there will be many more children suffering from this horrible disease.  This takes me back to the poster I had on my kitchen cabinets during the Vietnam War, "war is harmful for children and other living things." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

quilt quilting cancer war Iraq

So very 1950s

Here's another old family photo my aunt gave me when I was up in Seattle earlier this month. It was taken at Christmas, probably in 1954. The photo shows me and my three younger siblings, presumably showing off our favorite Christmas presents.  Additionally, I am holding a statue of the Infant of Prague made by my mother. Mom made and sold these to benefit the Discalced Carmelite nuns.

You will notice that we are not standing in front of the Christmas tree. Several years earlier, Mom had made a large ceramic nativity scene, and Dad build a huge wooden stable to house all the figures. He made space to attach a tree at the back. So we quit having Christmas trees per se and the tree we did buy every year served only as a backdrop to the nativity scene. This was, I am sure, fruit of the 1950s version of the Catholic campaign to "Put Christ back into Christmas."  It was all very pious, but I know we kids missed hanging ornaments on a tree. (But I also remember feeling morally superior since we didn't truck with such materialistic trappings of the holiday. Nothing like being a conflicted Capricorn kid!)

We three girls are all wearing skirts with blouses or sweaters, and my brother appears to be wearing pajamas, together with a cowboy hat. I think he's holding some kind of model airplane, as they were his favorite toys when he was young. 

Notice the small television set behind my brother. It was black-and-white of course, and the screen was much much larger than the very first television set we had, which I remember having a circular picture tube. My youngest sister is holding a Slinky toy, which was one of the fad toys of the 1950s. My middle sister has a big baby doll, and I am holding what was probably the last doll I ever received. (I had a collection of these Storybook dolls, when I was a little girl, and used to take them outdoors and set them up in a natural moss-covered grotto around the roots of a giant maple tree. They were probably the predecessors of the altars with goddess figures you will find around my house today).

We are standing in the living room of our house on Interlaken Boulevard in Seattle.  Behind us you can see the wooden paneling my parents covered with flat green paint, and above the wainscoting  is wallpaper in what I remember as a rather bucolic country scene. The decorating trend in those days was to cover up "all that dreadful dark wood paneling," just as, 50 years later, people spend money and elbow grease stripping it all back down to the bare wood.

None of us kids looks particularly happy. Christmas was always a tough time at our house. I think it was a time when my parents' cultural differences clashed. Dad's austere Norwegian immigrant Christmas meant lutefisk and Bible reading; Mom's meant midnight mass and family gatherings.  Add in a parent's alcoholism and you have a recipe for, if not disaster, certainly traumatic holiday memories. . 

When I look at this photo, I can hear my dad's voice saying "let your mom take a picture of you kids," and I can see Mom popping a flashbulb into the flash attachment of her Brownie camera. She'd take the film to the drugstore, which would send it out for processing. Generally, about a week later, she'd pick up the photos, which were all attached to one another in a long accordion-fold pack with deckel edges.  I'm glad this photo survived because it reminds me of what it felt like to be a child in the mid-1950s.

1950s Christmas family Catholic Catholicism Pagan Paganism Seattle

Farwell to Persephone

My coven sisters didn't know this in advance, but every single Saturday and Sunday for as long as my husband was healthy, we'd go hiking in Tilden Park in the Berkeley Hills, starting from the Blue Gum area with its grove of giant eucalyptus (Eucalyptus saligna). After his death in 1997, I found it impossible to return to this part of the park, as it was just too weighted with memories. But it wasn't until we started to drive up to Tilden yesterday that I learned this was where we'd hold our autumn equinox ritual.

Surprisingly, it was really pleasant to return to a place where we'd spent so many happy hours. I bet I have a dozen family photos of us there for various picnics and events. So in a way, everything was the same, while at the same time, everything was different. It made a great deal of sense to me that one of the songs we sang yesterday was "She Changes Everything She Touches."

We set up the altar on the ground in a flat area covered with fallen eucalyptus leaves. Before we went to Tilden, we stopped at the El Cerrito farmers market to buy the fruits and vegetables we could consumer at our post-ritual feast. They were the main event on the altar, although we had a bouquet of seasonal flowers, and I brought along the terra cotta image I made of Persephone.

I had decided when I was making my Persephone, that she was going to be a somewhat obnoxious teenager, the kind who drove her mom--poor Demeter--crazy by responding "whatever . . . " to anything Demeter said. When I think about the story of Demeter and Persephone, one of the things I see about Persephone's return to the underworld is that it's a paradigm for a daughter's sexual awakening, after which she can never really go home to be her momma's little girl again. The ache in Demeter's heart is mitigated because she knows this separation is necessary for Persephone's growth to maturity. 

Anyway, here's a shot of the altar, and here's Persephone as she generally looks when she hangs on my garden wall with the rest of Coven Terra Cotta. Yesterday when I was thinking about this myth we celebrate every year at this time, I realized that on some levels, Demeter would have to have been relieved that she wasn't going to have to deal with Persephone's attitude for a while. At the same time, her loss and grief are severe enough that she's moved to point her goddess finger and blast away all fecundity from the earth until her daughter's return at the vernal equinox. That's why we have autumn and winter, at least according to the ancient Greeks.

We made some charms from bright sun-colored fabric, filling them with intentions and magical energy to support and protect our coven sisters through the dark months. I sewed a lapis lazuli quarter moon to the charm I made. It had been given to me by one of the sisters from Gaia's Womb from when I taught a workshop there last year, and I decided it was time to pass it on to someone else. Here you can see Raven contemplating her charm, to which one of the sisters had attached a very cool patch depicting la Virgen de Guadaliberty.

Raven and Becky did a dramatization of the farewell encounter between Demeter and Persephone as Persephone leaves for the underworld. I don't think it was anyone's particular intention, but this triggered a very deep exploration of the mother-daughter bond. We talked about this intense, most powerful relationship we have with our mothers and/or daughters, and how painful it can be when there's loss or toxicity. More than a few tears were shed at this ritual, which proved to be very cathartic for everyone.  Here are Becky and Raven in character.

Often at rituals, I have trouble being in the moment. That part of me that is a trained observer, with more than 30 years experience as a professional journalist, is always tempted to pull back, to watch instead of participating, constantly making comments and judgments inside my head. So it takes a pretty extraordinary ritual to rip through this defense and force me to be truly present to myself and my sisters. This was one of those rituals. Maybe that's because I'm a daughter who lost a mother and a mother who has lost so much of the normal connection to her daughters. We didn't sing it, but I kept thinking about Demeter's Song--written by Starhawk, and how apropos it was to the sharing everyone was doing about moms and daughters.

After the ritual we feasted on all the wonderful seasonal produce. We had figs, two kinds of grapes, raspberries, strawberries, green beans, nectarines, apples and some very very good smoked salmon. All of it came from local farmers or fishermen, all in all a perfect harvest festival.

Here are a few photos from the feast. No, we did not light the candles on the altar. The fire danger is so extreme in the Berkeley hills right now that using any flame is unthinkable. But we did set the candles on the altar unlit to mark the four directions.

So now we prepare to enter the dark half of the year. I'll try hard to remember yesterday's golden sunlight filtered through the eucalyptus trees, the jay scolding us from a high branch somewhere, the scent of the crushed eucalyptus leaves (my college roommate was the one who pointed out how much crushed eucalyptus leaves smell just like Noxzema) and the strong bonds I have with my coven sisters as we promised to support and protect each other through the dark half of the year. So mote it be!

autumn equinox ritual mythology goddess Berkeley California Pagan Paganism

Bet you can't guess . . .

. . . what kind of plant this is.  I bought it at my favorite horticultural den of iniquity, Annie's Annuals in Richmond, California. Despite the name, increasingly Annie's is carrying lots of perennials too.

This happy little perennial spills out of a large container and blooms nonstop from May through the end of October. The foliage is no hint of its origins, but if you look carefully at the flowers, you'll eventually recognize that this is a member of the achillea family. It's a very special yarrow, Achillea sibirica, commonly known as "Siberian yarrow." 'Despite the name, it's a native American wildflower, most commonly found in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Alaska. It does seem to attract bees and butterflies, but because of the shape of the flowers, seems to be of no interest to the hummingbirds. I love its jagged leaves, very different from the more feathery foliage found in other members of the achillea family. Achillea are not particularly long-lived plants, but I've had this one for three years and it's still going strong. It does die back to its roots every winter, but returns anew in the spring.

gardening wildflower

They weigh a ton, but I still think they're cool

Whenever I've had a bit of terra cotta clay left over in pottery class, I've made a few beads. What I wanted was a string of very large round beads in bright primary colors. I was going to have them all strung in time to wear when I went up to Seattle, but given the security hassles with flying these days, I decided to leave them home. (Each bead is separated from the next with a metal spacer, which would make the metal detector go berserk).

Anyway, this is what they look like. Each bead is about an inch, or maybe an inch and a quarter in diameter. I figured they'd lose a lot of water weight when they were fired, but they still ended up being rather weighty. Many, but not all, are painted with various symbols, triple moons, pentacles, spirals, primitive Saami sun symbols, and one small Nile goddess.

I wore them today to our autumn equinox ritual up in Berkeley, California's Tilden Park. They're fine for an event for which I am sitting around quietly, but I think I would have taken these beads off if I'd been running around. This photo should give you an idea of their size. Next time I think I'll go for somewhat smaller beads.  Still, I like these a whole bunch.

ceramic pottery beads beading symbol Pagan Paganism

Cut out and ready to go

Tonight I'll finally start sewing my yellow Chinese lantern quilt. (This quilt is made to the courthouse steps pattern I found in Kaffe Fasset and Liza Lucy's Passionate Patchwork). I have all the strips cut out and lined up in two clean pizza boxes, ready to be sewn. I didn't think it was possible, but I did manage to find 140 different yellow fabrics. Here they all are.

I hope to have this quilt finished before the end of daylight savings time this year.  I always fall into a major funk when the days get so short, and figured flooding my upper-loft bedroom with a sunshine-colored quilt might help stave off the worst of the dark days.

Today my coven is holding our autumn equinox ritual to mark Persephone's return to the underworld. Each year, as I get older and crankier, I have more understanding of how grief-stricken and furious Demeter must have been to lose her beloved daughter. I can see myself in Demeter's place, pointing a finger at the blooming world and commanding all to wither and die in the face of her pain and loss. I'm OK with the falling leaves and the death of the flowers. But oh my, do I hate it when the days get short and nights seem interminably long. In the best of all possible worlds, I'd pack my bags every autumn equinox and head for the southern hemisphere, returning with Persephone and the vernal equinox, when the days lengthen and the world comes back to green growing life. 

quilt quilting light daylight depression sewing Pagan Paganism

Les anciennes éléves

That fancy title above is what alumnae of Holy Names schools are called in Montreal, which is where the order of nuns who ran my school was founded.  Last week I gathered with my fellow anciennes éléves for the 45th reunion of our high school graduation class. Four generations of women in my family have been educated by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, and even though I dance with the Goddess these days, I still have a very large place in my heart for my teachers, my school, and my former classmates.

From first grade onward I attended Holy Names Academy in Seattle, Washington. It is the very oldest school in Washington State. The school takes up an entire block on the city's Capitol Hill, and its giant dome is visible from all directions. (When I was a little girl, I used to get the HNA dome  confused with St. Peter's dome in Rome and the U.S. capitol's dome  even though they are all quite different from one another). Here's the Holy Names dome and a shot of the front of the 100-year-old school building. I shot these photos five years ago at our 40th reunion, but things are pretty much the same today.

The very first day I walked into the academy, my mother took me into the music department, which is where I spent a lot of my time, studying both piano and violin.  I can still remember being awed that first day by the life-sized statue of St. Cecelia, musicians'  patron--perhaps these days I'd say matron--saint, with her eyes cast heavenward. (Perhaps some of my fondness for various goddess images dates from my six-year-old self's confronting this big statue).

The foyer of the music department still has her statue, and the rows of drawers in which we'd keep our sheet music. In my day, the niches along the wall were filled  plaster busts of the great composers, and at Christmas, one of the nuns would give each of the old fellows a bright red velvet bow in lieu of a necktie. The days, thanks to the generosity of one of my classmates, the music department is undergoing a dramatic renovation and upgrading. St. Cecelia will remain, and so, I hope, will the composers' busts. Please excuse the poor focus on these two photos. They were shot in very low light without a tripod.

One of my strongest memories from my days in school is of gathering beneath the huge brass chandelier on the second floor during Advent. The chandelier would be converted to an Advent wreath. We'd sing "Come, Oh Come Emmanuel" and on each Monday morning, a new candle in the wreath would be lit. The chandelier's still there, I see, and probably is still be decked out in greenery each Advent.

The building has four floors of classrooms, and staircases at each end of the building that echoed with many footsteps at change of class. No talking, though, as in my day, we walked the hallways in silence in our navy blue jumpers. I was pleased to see the elegant carved newel post is still there at the bottom of the stairs, and the curving bannister that gives one an eerie perspective to the upper floors.

Here's statue of Mary out in the north garden. Every May we'd have a procession around the block, that culminated with crowning this statue with flowers. (No wonder I love doing Pagan rituals. Hey, with this many May processions and May crownings in my DNA, ritual's a natural. Besides, I met my husband over a flower be-decked salad at a company banquet. For some silly reason, I started singing the first line of the May crowning hymn,  "Bring flowers of the fairest. To my total surprise, the tall handsome silver-haired man to my left responded with "Bring flowers of the rarest,"  and the rest is history).

My class didn't meet at the school for the reunion, but instead gathered at a non-profit organization in Fremont headed by one of my classmates. It was fun to see a new-to-me part of Seattle, but when we have our 50th reunion, I hope we'll be back at the academy. I just have such a fondness for this great old building where I spent the formative years of my life.

I think about 40 of my classmates showed up for the reunion. We're all 60-somethings, and most of us now have gray or graying hair. It seemed as if most of us are comfortable with our bodies and faces, and certainly with the directions our lives have taken.

And considering the world in which we graduated in 1961, many of us have followed unusual career paths. We are all  about two years too old to have been true baby boomers, and instead, came along at the tail end of what is now known as the "silent generation," according to one Wikipedia article, "the suffocated children of war and depression, "  born "just too early to be youthful free spirits."

But in spite of the low expections what my friend Macha calls "the over-culture'"  had for us, we have musicians, engineers, artists, pharmacists, nurses, librarians, elected officials, real estate magnates, software specialists, fundraisers, and big-time restaurateurs in our class. And of course we have our share of teachers, most of whom are still teaching every day. I think I'm now the sole journalist, but others in my class have spent years as "ink-stained wretches," too.  One of our classmates is an Episcopalian priest, and hey, we're all girls, here folks. We also have many women who've married and raised kids, faced incredible challenges with kids'  health, partners' health, parents' slow physical decline or their own healh issues. The Salk polio vaccine came along just a little bit two late for two of our classmates, neither of whom ever let disablities get in the way of achievement.  Some of the women who entered religious life shortly after graduation are still in the convent, often doing jobs that could not have been imagined back when they were in the novitiate.

Ours was a clique-ridden class, but after all these years, that divisiveness has finally faded. I saw everyone talking to everyone, and with sincere interest and appreciation. After all, we are the mirrors in whose  reflections we can see ourselves the most fully. And I have to say that I like what I see. It seems as if the values the nuns tried to instill in us were caught, after all. We did indeed end up a group of strong, responsible and compassionate women. Of that I am very proud.

After the reunion, I went to a brew pub in the Fremont district with two of my classmates for a beer and extended conversation. I need to set the scene for you. The other two women were the shortest in our class, with neither of them hitting five feet tall. And I've been a six-footer since early puberty. These days I walk with a candy-striped cane, babying a bum knee first injured when I was covering a demonstration against the first Gulf War back in 1991. Two of us have very gray hair, mine still in an aging-hippie braid hanging down the middle of my back.  So we walked into this bar where everyone was younger than my kids. My two friends are boob-height with me. We must have been quite a sight. We sat down at a table and spent some time figuring out what kind of beer we wanted to drink.  All of a sudden it hit me, and I said to the two of them "You know, there's got to be a joke that begins  `two grandmothers and a nun walked into a bar . . .'  and we're the joke."

Here are my short friends sitting across the table from me, and the second photo is one someone took of the three of us at our 40th reunion five years ago. Not much has changed since then. We three were in the orchestra together at HNA, and I guess the bonds of making music together are lifetime strong.

For all my ties to the school, I did not graduate from Holy Names. Right before the beginning of my senior year, my dad was transferred to Cocoa Beach, Florida to work in the space program at Cape Canaveral, and I had to switch to a huge segregated coeducational public high school there. Granted that my year at Cocoa High School opened me up to a whole lot of new possibilities, I still deeply regret that I didn't graduate with my classmates at HNA. I will always have an asterisk by my name in the list of alumnae, always a "Holy Names girl," but never a graduate. But if you ask me where I went to school, I'd always think of Holy Names first and foremost. And you better believe I'll be back to see everyone five years from now, for that really big 50th reunion.

Here are a few more reunion photos. Lots of energetic-looking bright women of un age certain, including even a few who were in the same Girl Scout troop with me.

reunion education classmates Seattle Washington women

If things had been different

Last night I watched "Einstein's Big Idea," on the PBS science series Nova. The program focused on Einstein's development of his famous equation, and the "miracle year" (1905) in which he essentially invented modern physics.

It was a surprise to see Einstein played as a young man with many interests outside of physics. But I think the program did an excellent job of popularizing Einstein's theories in a way that made them intelligible to a lay audience.

What really intrigued me was the section of the program devoted to Émilie du Châtelet , the 18th century scientist who came up with the coefficient for what would become Einstein's equation. Her experiments with lead weights led her to understand that an object's energy is the result of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.

OK, that sounds kind of science wonkinsh, I know. But her contribution was incredibly important. And, besides that,  Châtelet was a true Renaissance woman. She spoke many languages, translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French, where it remains the standard even today, she played the harpsichord, could sing arias from the operas of her day, fenced well enough to defeat her brother, bore four children, and was, for many years, the mistress of Enlightenment  philosopher Voltaire.

When I was a junior in high school, I fell in love with physics. I suppose from the perspective of my now 60-odd years, I could say that the physics was like candy to this part of me that, like a 10-year-old boy, always wanted to know ho things work. I enjoyed every single day of physics class, from the friction experiments with the little cars we ran down inclined planes to light refraction to the physics of how music is made.  My physics teacher was one of my best teachers, one of those elderly but feminist Holy Names nuns who kept nudging us on to excellence and any career possibility.

She also pointed me to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who were the scientists of their day. I was fascinated with some of the explanations they provided for the way the world worked.  The "happy philosopher" Democritus was one of my favorites, but Anixamander's forays into cosmology--his Aperion anticipated particle physics and chaos theory--were also fascinating. I still think of Heraclitus every time I step into a river or consign something to a fire.

So when I went off to college, I was torn between physics and philosophy. And philosophy won, perhaps because I couldn't even imagine a woman physicist. (In those days we certainly never had a course in women's history, or I might have known about Châtelet or the German physicist Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission .  We were so far from even knowing there was such a thing as women's history that, when I was in college, we were told "the word `man' implies both genders." Yeah, right.

Philosophy was a good choice for me.  It played to my strengths as a writer. And as a philosophy major, I had the chance to spend more time with my old friends, the pre-Socratics. In later life, when I had to tease out the arcane metaphysics of patent law, I sometimes felt I was back in epistemology or rhetoric class.

Still, when I was watching the young actress portraying Châtelet, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I'd turned toward physics instead. Certainly it would have been tough, given how many women are even now diverted away from the physical sciences.

Years ago, when I was living in Louisiana, I had a chance to cover the annual meeting of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New Orleans. The high point of the meeting was an appearance and speech by Dr. Sally Ride, who has a PhD in physics and was the first American female astronaut.  You would have thought the roof would fly off the meeting hall, so excited and galvanized were all the attendees to hear a woman who had literally blasted through science's "glass ceiling."   

I remember sitting there feeling very wistful. I had literally grown up in the space program, and, in fact, lived next door to Cape Canaveral during the era of the  Mercury Seven astronauts. My dad spent many long hours in bunkers out at the cape, and I can still remember the immense excitement I felt the day we stood on the roof of our school and watched Alan Shephard be shot into space in May 1961.  It never once occurred to me that this was something a little girl could aspire to do.

The Einstein program I saw last night brought this all back home to me. Maybe I lacked the discipline and drive that would have been essential for a woman to have succeeded in physics back when I was in school. But it would have been wonderful just to have been able to consider the possibility. That's one of the reasons why I so strongly applaud Sally Ride's programs  aimed at encouraging girls toward the sciences.  I hope her work will make it possible that there will never be another generation of grandmothers like me who look at the stars and remember thinking it impossible that women could ever travel there.

And on this note, there's one more thing I want to applaud. That's the awarding of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" to David Macaulay. He has written and illustrated some wonderful books that literally peeled the skin away from cities, cathedrals, and pyramids, among other things, laying bare the technologies and artistry that make such creations possible. My kids loved his books, particularly Cathedral. And I have to confess that my nightstand has for years contained a copy of his The Way Things Work. It has answers to those 10-year-old-boy questions that still live inside of me. I'm going to look for his newest book, a detailed analysis of the construction and social-cultural details that go into the construction of a mosque. Macaulay wrote the book as his personal attempt to increase understanding of the Muslim world in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. 

science physics philosophy space women astronaut Einstein relativity