"Put those lazy low-income kids to work!"

Are American families living in poverty? We could end the cycle easily by teaching poor people’s kids a thing or two about work ethic and the value of a hard-earned dollar – because being poor has nothing to do with racial or social inequality or a floundering economy: it’s about a lousy work ethic and a culture of government reliance.

So argues former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in his fiery, primary-winning performance at the Republican Presidential candidates’ South Carolina debate last week. We can fix the lives of kids on food stamps by hiring them as school janitors when they’re as young as twelve.

Gingrich drives his righteous view home in the debate, using New York City as an example, because of its criminally expensive janitors’ union. Fire the janitors, he says: for every janitor booted, a school could hire thirty-seven kids to do the cleaning.

The kids would learn responsibility, job skills, a good work ethic, and receive an early education in the satisfaction of getting your own paycheck and managing your own money, instead of expecting government handouts.

Plus, as Gingrich is sure to emphasize, when you’re poor, money is good. These kids need money as much as they need a lesson in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. The only people who hate the idea of earning money (besides, apparently, America’s poor) – are America’s elite. This is a golden chance for kids to improve their lives.

Author 3rd row from front, four kids from the right. Age at which Gingrich recommends becoming a janitor.

I have a lot of questions.

Does Gingrich believe, as he seems to imply, that janitorial work for kids would make a difference in a poor family’s financial situation? If adult parents can’t keep their families out of poverty, could twelve or thirteen-year-olds’ working after school provide the solution, at Gingrich’s apparently proposed rate of 1/37^th the pay of a professional janitor?

Gingrich is sure to point out that he’s not advocating anything he wouldn’t encourage his own kids to do. He insists that his own daughter had a janitorial job at her church at age thirteen, and that she enjoyed it and benefited enormously from it. But is this situation comparable to that of America’s poor children? Surely Gingrich’s child did not work out of necessity or face hunger at home. There is a big difference between working for the experience, or for a little of your own spending money, and working as a matter of survival.

Did not have to aid poverty-stricken family.

If adolescent janitors could indeed improve the finances of their destitute families, does that mean they should? Is that an appropriate pressure for a child or teenager?

If a school were to adopt Gingrich’s plan, firing its janitor and arranging a rotation of kids, would all the students be required to participate, or only those who had the initiative to volunteer? If nobody volunteered (on the off-chance that scrubbing the toilets after school does not appeal to the kids), would certain children be forced or cajoled into the program based on their parents’ income level or other factors? If poor children became the janitors while more affluent children headed off to drama club and soccer practice, would this not create even more income-based divisions among our young people?

What activities would the working children be missing or minimizing due to their new responsibilities? Would their homework or grades suffer? Would it be healthy for children to see their school as a workplace?

Plus, who would train and supervise these student staffers? Would teachers just add this onto their current duties? I’m sure teachers and school administrators wouldn’t mind staying a few extra hours every day to teach kids how to wax the floors and make sure the kids do it properly.

And isn’t it more than a bit demeaning to janitors, declaring that a bunch of kids could easily do the job at a fraction of the pay? As at least one writer has pointed out, janitors are professionals who routinely work with dangerous equipment and chemicals. Janitorial work isn’t just taking out the trash and sweeping the hallway. Yes, janitorial work is not glamorous, but unlike politicians, janitors are crucial to society.  It seems to me that by declaring janitorial work as appropriate for the nation’s children, Gingrich is denigrating those who work these necessary but already under-appreciated jobs. How does this attitude encourage a good work ethic?

Does using this stuff safely require any training or expertise?

All these questions, for me, point to the value of letting kids be kids, instead of pushing them into a role of the adult realm, especially when this role would fall disproportionately on low-income children.

But I have to tell you the whole truth.  Gingrich’s proposal mirrors my own childhood – a childhood that always made me and my parents proud.

Perhaps it’s genetic. One of the oldest pictures I’ve seen of my grandfather shows him in his little short pants, pulling a toy wagon full of dirt. Before he turned five, he had started his own business: digging up violets, tenderly putting them into his wagon, and pacing around the neighborhood to sell them. Today, in his mid-eighties, after 25 years as the mayor of his town, Papa could fill an entire room with congressional citations and lifetime achievement award plaques (though he’s modest and tasteful and only displays a few of the handsomest ones).

Growing up in my own family, my own parents’ stellar work ethic was an early example. Allowances were never just doled out – they were earned through assigned chores. I have a very clear memory of the family dinner-time when my parents said it was time for me to get a job.  I was thirteen. My family wasn’t rich and we weren’t poor either. We didn’t need the extra income – this was about life lessons.

Given my love of animals, my parents got me a chance to start working for the owner of the kennel where our own dogs stayed while we vacationed. In retrospect, I’m not sure this arrangement was strictly legal, but I was an unusually dependable kid.

I worked there for the next six years or so. Every summer, as a teenager, I’d sock away a few thousand bucks working for $10/hour.

Janitorial? I know of what I speak: I mopped the floor and washed dog bowls by the hundreds, Cloroxed and vacuumed and scrubbed. I also bathed dogs and dealt with customers. Looking back, I realize I had an extraordinary amount of responsibility for a teenager: running the place on my own when my boss was out of town, personally handling toothy, muscular canines which were larger than I was, and administering medication to clients’ animals. As an added benefit, kennels are busiest precisely when everyone is on vacation, so I never had weekends, summers or holidays off: on Christmas or 4^th of July, just as everyone else was having some pie or getting out the bottle-rockets, I was going to work.

The author in high school. Blond hair and purple outfit near the left. By this time I'd been working for about five years.

Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I worked part-time all throughout high school and college at various jobs and internships, in addition to full-time classes (I also thought the world would end if I got anything below an A+), and somehow found time to participate in a couple theater productions each year, acting, directing or stage managing. Did I mention becoming co-editor of both my high school and college newspapers?

Author in college, first row on the left (forgive the pants). Almost forgot, I was on the Student Orientation Committee too (future husband at left).

I had work ethic in spades. In fact, I hardly know what to do with myself if I’m not working. Whenever I stop, I’m inundated with guilt and anxiety.

Before I began freelancing full-time, I had a full-time job in the tourism industry.

I piled on the overtime for three years, especially when I wasn’t feeling well (keeping busy is the only strategy I ever had to cope with a chronic illness). I routinely worked shifts of fifteen hours or more, outside in all weathers, in addition to freelance work on my “days off”.

I ignored signs that it was too much: month-long bouts of laryngitis, agonizing back spasms, coming home from work at 3am. Once I ignored an infection through an 18-hour shift, and landed in the ER the next day.

It wasn’t entirely my fault: my boss would threaten to dock our hours (and therefore our pay) if we took weekends off or failed to work overtime (he referred to this as an “incentive” to us, rather than a punishment). There were no paid vacations or sick days. Our manager would curse about customers in the office and got drunk onsite with employees on a regular basis. Staffers were routinely fired without warning.

At staff meetings, I suggested that better policies were needed.  He subsequently fired me for my “negative attitude”.

This month marks the first year I’ve been freelancing full-time.

Has my work ethic benefited me? Perhaps contrary to Newt’s expectations, I don’t have much money. I don’t think anyone can fault my productivity in this matter: it just happens that writing isn’t always the most lucrative career today, and it takes a lot of time to develop and promote. Sometimes my parents help me to meet my outrageous health insurance payments. But generally, I can pay my bills.

Especially in a world where endless chats and games and movies are available at a single touch, I’m grateful for the habit that pushes me to work without a boss or manager telling me what to do and when to do it. Would I be capable of this, had such commitment and responsibility not been ingrained in me at such a young age? The US needs individuals with the wits and the drive to create their own jobs.

On the other hand, the downside to my mindset is that I am almost capable of relaxing. It sounds stupid and self-important and excessively martyr-like when I say it like that, but it’s true. “Babe, sit down!” is my husband’s domestic refrain.

When I visit my parents or go on vacation, I am often engulfed by feelings of anxious uselessness, pacing around the house.  I work on unassigned essays, set up meetings, and scrub the kitchen.

In retrospect, I’m also concerned that perhaps going to work so young cultivated in me an over-developed sense of responsibility that lacked an adult’s capacity to question or resist unfair treatment. As I remember my past job, there is something unpalatably naïve and childlike in my long-term acceptance of my former working conditions, and my boss’s behavior.

The question had actually never even occurred to me until I heard Gingrich in the debate: should I have had so much professional responsibility as an adolescent? Did a premature obsession with work set me up for an unbalanced lifestyle and an embarrassing inability to see if I am being treated unfairly? Or is it merely my own personality, regardless of my experiences, that has made me the woman I am today?

Throughout my teens, most of my friends spent their summers vacationing or hanging out by the pool.  During my college summers, while I often worked all day at one job and then left for a second one in the evening, my friends backpacked through Europe. Nowadays, most of the teenagers (heck, even some of the twenty-somethings) I know have never had a job, and I think some part-time responsibilities would set them up nicely for the real world. I think it’s a problem when people finish college without any job experience at all.

But despite Gingrich’s prescription for prosperity and work ethic, and my own experience, I don’t want our middle or junior-high-schoolers joining the nation’s janitorial staff, or any kind of staff. The modern school day – not to mention homework and extracurriculars – is a job in itself. Life lessons should entail more than the value of a dollar and the evils of welfare. Even if my own problems have nothing to do with the fact that someone handed me the mop when I was thirteen, surely there’s a better recipe for American success than hiring our children.

I would love to hear from you on this issue. Are you a teacher, a janitor, or a parent? Did you start working early or late? How did it affect you? What do you think about the value of jobs for adolescents?

from maryroach.net

Mary Roach recently took a break from poring over an “ancient French journal” (I’m desperately curious as to what she’s learning in there) to chat with me by phone about her books and career.

It currently seems as if there’s nothing Roach won’t tackle as a bestselling nonfiction writer. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2004) illuminates everything you never knew you wanted to know about the adventures of the deceased. With a measure of nausea almost equal to your fascination, you’ll learn about cosmetic surgeons’ training, the proving ground of forensic sciences that lets police investigators determine the cause and time of death in crime victims, and much more.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2006) journeys into the efforts of scientists to prove or disprove the existence of the afterlife, including forays into reincarnation and the infamous spirit mediums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2009), Roach finds stimulation in the history of sexuality studies, chasing the answers to questions like whether or not female orgasm really does aid conception. She also brings her husband into an MRI lab for some very unusual joint imaging.

While the scatological aspects of her latest book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2011) arguably got the most press (really, how does one poop in zero gravity?), she tackles equally interesting studies, like how long a small group of people can live locked in extremely close quarters, to ascertain the psychological effects of long space voyages, as well as the loopy mental effects documented in space walkers.

Did I mention all these books are as hilarious as they are well-researched?

Alaina Mabaso: Would you have predicted the career you have today, when you were first starting out as a writer? Or did you always have the goal of writing the kind of books that you do now?

Mary Roach: I didn’t really imagine ever writing books, because I have such a short attention span. You know there’s narratives that sort of suggest a book, but for a long time I thought, oh, I’m always going to be writing short pieces, because what kind of book could I possibly write? So no, I had absolutely no image in my head of A) writing any book, and B) writing the kinds of books that I do write. No, absolutely no inkling.

AM: That’s often true of a lot of us, that it’s just mind-blowing where we actually end up. It’s cool that that’s true of you as well.

MR:  I started out below the bottom rung. The first thing I wrote – and I was thrilled every step of the way – was this really dumb piece for an advertising supplement for the San Francisco Examiner…this is not even the real newspaper, this is the pretend part when they sell advertising and then they have these fake stories to go along with it…like for a section on home security, various home alarm companies would buy ads and they would need to fill them out with some bogus stories, and I’m like, “Oh, I get to write a story about guard dogs! How exciting!” So yeah, I started absolutely nowhere, just happy to be writing as long as I can, and I figured, if I can keep finding people to pay me to do this, I’d be thrilled.

AM: So out of all the books and articles you’ve done over the years, obviously a wide range of stuff, is there one topic that’s closest to your heart or that you most enjoyed learning about?

MR: Well, I guess I’ve ended up writing about science mostly and things relating to the human body…I don’t have a background in science so I can’t go very far with it, so obviously I’m not going to cover anything on a molecular level or anything totally abstract or having to do with particle theory…

AM: String theory?

MR: Yeah, exactly (laughs). Every once in a while I wander into that, like in Spook I had a chapter that had to do with consciousness theory – pretty hilarious, my trying to understand what people were saying. So I enjoy that realm of research – the human body is kind of a weird, strange planet and lots of interesting things go on there that I am endlessly fascinated by, so that’s been a source of material for a long time for me.

AM: It’s obvious you do a huge amount of interviews and research – I know, as a writer, out of what I initially find out, there’s not nearly space for it all in the work that actually gets published. So if there was a general percentage, how much of the info you’re actually getting do you think is included in the final product?

MR: There’s always a period when I start a book with a few months of random flailing, and I don’t really know the thrust of the book, though I claim to – I’ve pitched this book – but I really don’t know what I’m going to cover, so there’s really a lot of wasted time and a lot of ground traveled that I won’t use. There’s usually a couple chapters that I’ve gathered material on, maybe even flown somewhere and done an interview, and I just don’t put it in. It’s maybe a 10^th of it that I’ve gathered and I’m not going to use.

AM: I was chatting once with a political writer, and he told me his take on writing: that research should be nine tenths of the work that a writer actually does. Do you think that’s true?

MR: Nine tenths of the work…I don’t know about nine tenths…in terms of the hour by hour, sure, yeah, in terms of how much time I’m spending tracking people down, sending them e-mails, bugging them, traveling, going to see them, looking at books, requesting them, going to UC Berkley Library to pick them up, all of that stuff, yeah, compared to the actual sitting down at the keyboard, writing, yeah, that’s probably not far off.

AM: I’m a little nervous to say this next one to a writer that I admire so much, but one of my favorite things about Packing for Mars was your use of all the verbatim transcripts from researchers and astronauts, and I think you’re a brilliant humorist, but somehow these transcribed bits were absolute comedy gold on their own. So did you always intend to showcase that source material that way?

MR: I think it’s just my recognizing them as, not just funny, but even more golden because they weren’t intended to be humorous. But they so showcase the humor involved in a serious pursuit like space exploration. To me, the scenarios are funny and fabulous, but taking the actual words from the transcript of a Gemini mission, and the fact that there can be hilarity in something so dangerous and noble, just appeals to me so much as an author.

AM: One thing I love about your books is not just the great science you’re writing about, but the fact that you make science an egalitarian pursuit instead of something that only experts can get close to or learn about. We’re in this interesting spot where for the first time in history we have boundless learning available in the digital world, but at the same time, especially in the US, many aspects of science and scientific discourse are becoming hugely politicized. So do you think that we’re moving closer to a society where science is more accessible to all of us, or is it the opposite?

MR: It’s both more accessible, and among a depressingly large percentage of the population, irrelevant. I am very dismayed by the trend now to treat science or intelligent pursuits of the mind as elitist or not necessary; we’re kind of moving back to the sort of Medieval attitude: it’s my intuition that this is true, and facts and hard work and intelligent research and critical thought don’t matter – it’s just whatever I think is true is true. Don’t get me started, because you’ll never get me to stop – it’s so sad, and it’s such a massive step backward. So yeah, we have this access to all these incredible journals and books…I mean, now, I don’t have to request an interlibrary loan and wait two weeks, I can go on to Google Books and find something from the 1860’s that used to take weeks and sometimes traveling to an archive. Now you can get this stuff but nobody wants it, nobody’s interested! Who cares about that old stuff, and I’m like, “I do! I care!” this tiny voice: “You should care too!”

AM: Well, I’m glad that you care. I think it’s good for all of us that you do. So now that, especially in your books, you’ve dwelt at length on bowel movements in space, masturbatory experiments, and cadaver studies, do you think there’s any topic that the modern public would refuse to read about?

MR: (laughs) Possibly my next book, but I’ll just leave it at that.

AM: Do you think that there is anything you yourself would have zero interest in writing about?

MR: Here’s something! When I was writing Stiff, somebody said, “Ooh, you should write about necrophilia…There’s this mortuary in Las Vegas where if you pay enough money…” But it didn’t really fit the topic and the scope of the book, and I really don’t even want to go there. Even me, no, no, sorry. But somebody DID, a European writer sent me a note saying, “I’m writing a book about necrophilia”, and I thought, good luck with that! I’m sure people would be curious in that sort of train-wreck way, but I can’t imagine that that book would do very well, despite people’s morbid curiosity.

AM: I have one more last really important official question for you. I want to say, to kind of assuage the jealousy of the rest of us writers who are still laboring away from feature to feature and we’re not going on TV with Jon Stewart, what are the absolute worst things about going on a book tour?

MR: (laughs) Imagine you’re promoting the book Stiff and you have to get up at 4am to catch a flight in order to get to the next town in time for the early morning Fox affiliate talk show where you’re going to be a segment in between the adoptable pets from the SPCA and the gardening lady, and you look like shit, and you don’t know how to do your make-up, that’s a given for me, and then the host turns to you and goes, “ok, coming up, Mary Roach with cadavers.” That experience, really, you can skip that and your life will be better, not worse.

AM: I’m sure that will help a lot of us feel better. In TV interviews I’ve seen with you, you always seem to have really great hair. So congratulations on that.

MR: Oh, ok, The Daily Show, Daily Show and Colbert…Colbert has the makeup person that used to do “Sex and the City”, and I forget who the woman on the Daily Show is, but they’re miracle workers, and same with the TED talks, they have a hair and makeup person.

AM: Who wants to learn about science if the speaker isn’t at least attractive?

MR: (laughs) It’s true, if you saw some of those early morning, four hours’ sleep, bad makeup interviews with me – those should be online, fortunately they’re not. Those people don’t have the hair and makeup person: “Arrive camera ready!” That means you’re going to look like shit.

AM: I’m sure most of us wouldn’t have a very good idea of what comprises camera ready.

MR: Camera-ready is, you look like some sort of clown freak, it’s like this heavy orange make-up that on TV looks great, and then you leave to go somewhere else, and people are like (gasps), what’s wrong with her? She had her makeup done by one of those corpse makeup people.

AM: Ok, well, we’re all going to hold that real close in our hearts, in case we never write bestselling books.

MR: You will! I spent fifteen years writing magazine pieces, and one thing leads to another.

Many thanks to Mary Roach for stopping by Alaina Mabaso’s Blog!

I had a chance to bring my husband along for this one, and we drove from Philadelphia to Niagara today.

I packed for the weekend, including the parts of all the electronic devices we can’t stir a step without. If I tied the charger cords for our phones, computers, iPod, iPad and GPS together, it would form a cord long enough to wrap around planet Earth at the Equator.

I packed them all while my husband voiced his acute disappointment with the white Hyundai Accent furnished by Enterprise Rent-A-Car. I pointed out that since the rental was on the magazine and wasn’t costing us anything, there was no need to complain so strenuously, but he cared little for such technicalities.

Winter decided to begin in New York State today, by the way. For six hours every snowflake in the northeast flew at our windshield while winds buffeted the car. We passed at least three serious accidents, each one leaving us to wonder how the crashed vehicles had possibly ended up oriented that way.

I’m ill-accustomed to long car trips. My husband dwelt happily on his impending first-ever jaunt over the Canadian border. He asked me if we were going to see lots of French Canadians. I explained that the falls weren’t exactly a hotbed of French Canadian culture, and he was  deeply disappointed.

Later, as the weather worsened, I apologized for the timing of my assignment. 

“I didn’t know there was going to be such a bad snowstorm, Babe,” I said.

“I did,” he said matter-of-factly. 

“Really? You saw a detailed forecast?”

“No. It’s Canada. Of course there was going to be lots of snow.” I was glad that not all of his Canadian expectations had been dashed, especially since it meant he was totally unfazed by the hellish roads.

We scanned for NPR stations through most of Pennsylvania and New York, but lost out for a stretch near Scranton and tried Rush Limbaugh instead. We learned that Newt Gingrich was a deplorable candidate because of his ill-concealed belief in manmade global warming, and that Conservatism is about ideas. 

Later we tried a local pop station which announced its “stupid fact of the day”. 

“Did you know that the first grilled cheese sandwiches were served in the 1920′s, and that they were served with the cheese toasted over a single piece of bread?”

After so many hours in the car, somehow, it was the last straw for me. 

“That’s the most inane thing I ever heard!” I cried in a sudden rage. “Who could possibly even want to know that?! And if the first grilled cheese was really just cheese toasted over bread, then the first grilled cheese was a pizza.”

My husband looked benignly at me from the driver’s seat. “They said it was a stupid fact, Babe.” 

We found a rest stop and had the joy of choosing between Roy Rogers and Dunkin Donuts for dinner. On the way out I became engrossed in a wall of text about the founding of the Mormon Church and the history of western New York’s 19th century towns, until Lala grew impatient. Of course highway driving at dusk in a snowstorm is far preferable to reading a historical placard, even for an instant.

I was interested to see that the Texas Roadhouse steakhouse chain persists right up to within a few miles of the Canadian border, and then we were across. We made it to our motel and ordered a pizza while I learned that I had somehow failed to pack my own computer’s power-cord.

Driven by the need to publish something before I sleep, I picked up the iPad in bed while my husband watched TV. Suddenly a French newscast filled the room and the remote control prodded my knee.

 ”Hey,” my husband said happily. “French Canadians!”

I can only hope our next day across the border will be as satisfying as this one.

Love in the Age of Santorum.

I’ve gotten this far without paying too much attention to former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, but now that he’s done well in a January poll, everyone says he’s going to start getting a lot of scrutiny, so I figured I better get on it. Honestly, part of the reason I sometimes hold off on blogging about America’s political circus is because I know a lot of you, my valued readers, are not from the US. So why go on and on about US politicians, especially when most of them make me embarrassed to be an American?

For anyone who hasn’t been following this Presidential election season, the Republican party candidates are the rodents in a whack-a-mole game, and the liberal media is holding the mallet. Every week or two another mole pops up – Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich and so on – and we gleefully whack ‘em with an avalanche of reporting on their racism, anti-intellectualism, homophobia, economic knuckle-headedness, megalomania, sexism, extramarital affairs, and so on.

Santorum’s mole just appeared, and the rules haven’t changed a bit.

You don’t have to look far to see that Santorum fears and dislikes (possibly hates) homosexuals, that he idealizes a sexist, outmoded vision of society where women would do better to stay home with the kids, and that given the chance, while proclaiming a reduction in government control, he would do everything he could to restrict personal rights that lie at the very heart of our notion of privacy.

His comments on the use of contraceptives are particularly troubling, as he spoke publicly in the fall about “the dangers of contraception in this country”, pledging to make a reduction in the availability of birth control an important part of his mission as President. Contraceptives bother Santorum fundamentally, because they’re “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Cue endless references to the “condom police” once, God forbid, Santorum takes office.

In case you think Santorum is just another misguided but well-meaning campaigner for pre-marital abstinence, who believes that removing access to birth control will stop single people from having sex, he believes that married couples shouldn’t have the right to use contraceptives either. He opposes the Supreme Court’s 1965 reversal of an 1879 law in Connecticut which threatened anyone who “uses any drug, medical article or instrument for the purposes of preventing conception” – or anyone (a doctor, etc) who helped someone to do this – with at least 60 days in prison. The Supreme Court decided that invading the bedroom with this law was a fundamental violation of married couples’ right to privacy, the right to privacy being implied in several Constitutional Amendments, especially Americans’ supposed protection from unwarranted search and seizure.

Santorum argues that the states have the right to make and enforce any laws they see fit, including Connecticut’s former law banning contraception, and also declares that the Constitution does not give Americans any right to privacy, sexual, procreative or otherwise. He believes that in this case, the Supreme Court improperly legislated a right that should not exist: it’s dangerous to declare that “you have the right to consensual sex within your home”, because if consensual sex is ok, then we’re also promoting bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery: “you have a right to anything.” He also offers myriad comments on the evils of homosexuality, from his sadness at the lifting of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to his declaration that homosexual acts are as “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family” as adultery and polygamy.

It seems fair to me to say that as President, Santorum wants to allow only one form of sex among his citizens: sex between heterosexual married couples for the purpose of conceiving children.

Santorum’s purpose in sticking his nose so far into citizens’ private lives is the ostensible foundation of his Presidential platform: the “traditional” family, a unit of society that, according to his campaign website, is at the root of social, national and economic success. A household with a husband, wife, and their children is the foundation of American triumph.

I wouldn’t be the first writer to point out that Santorum, as demonstrated in numerous campaign stops, is being dangerously blind to the reality of American society. Crime, illness, death and poverty ravage millions of families. When so many families are made of single parents,  divorced or re-married parents, same-sex parents, or adopted children, or any example of the endless arrangements of human habitation that have always existed in the world, the promotion of a single version of family as better than all the others is ultimately what troubles me.

I don’t want to overlook Santorum’s many bigoted and often hyper-religious comments (on January 5^th he declared that America “always needs a Jesus candidate”) – I’d rather look beyond them to a bigger underlying message, which demonstrates exactly why he’s so poisonous to America.  A somewhat less-publicized comment, from a campaign stop in Ottumwa, Iowa, typifies to me the message which underlies every aspersion Santorum casts on Americans whose lifestyle doesn’t match his.

“Diversity? Have you ever heard of e pluribus unum?” Santorum asked, explaining his ire at the former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who, in a debate, claimed diversity was America’s most important quality.

“The greatness of America is people who are diverse coming together to be one,” Santorum says. Fair enough. But does becoming one country mean disavowing our differences? Yes, Santorum believes: “If we celebrate diversity, we lay the ground for that conflict. We need to celebrate common values and have a President that lays out those common values.”

I think it’s worth noting that though Santorum is ostensibly speaking about “values”, he invokes the “conflict” diversity causes in the midst of an intense, deliberately-focused campaign in a state that is over 91% white and 96% American-born, according to Iowa’s 2010 census (apparently he himself is the child of an Italian immigrant who fled Mussolini).

What is more chilling here? That, as President, Santorum envisions the best America as one in which everyone has the same values? Or that he believes that any one person’s values (in this case, his) should serve as the standard for the values of every citizen of an entire country?

Santorum's America.

A robust embrace of differences is what makes e pluribus unum possible. Writer Merry Farmer, in a recent blog post, noted how dreadful it would be if we were all motivated by the same causes. Isn’t it great that some of us care passionately about the environment, while others work to end poverty, and others care most about civil rights? Take us all together, and we have a whole society that lurches towards the greater good.

I don’t argue with Santorum’s belief in the value of strong families at every level of society. My own nuclear family (which is very much in the style of Santorum’s ideal) has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. But I would never presume that it should therefore be the mold for everyone else’s life.

I don’t mind that Santorum enjoys being a married, Christian heterosexual with seven children.  I have fourteen goldfish instead of children and rarely attend church, but there’s room in the US for both of us – as long as he doesn’t tell me to throw out my birth control, and I don’t force him to raise goldfish.

Are many of Santorum’s views repugnant to me? Yes.  But what is even more repugnant to me is his assertion that he – or any individual – should serve as the standard for us all, whether on the inside, with the values we hold, or on the outside, with the kind of household we keep. While ostensibly secondary to his views on more practical aspects of national policy, Santorum’s view of the American President as the proper policer of our sex lives gets to the heart of the way he would like to strip individuals’ differences away, even in the most private sanctums of their lives, to re-make them in his own image. It is the worst kind of arrogance.

Is that what America should be?

A slightly more honest version of Santorum's campaign slogan.

My genes are waiting...

I have been reading about evolutionary developmental biology. It’s hardly my proper purview, but when a dude who worked on Jurassic Park says a real-life resurrection may be in store for the dinosaur…well, please, tell me more.

I recently tried this stuff out at a dinner party and it didn’t disappoint, so I thought you guys might like to be in on it, if you weren’t already.

Evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, is the subject of archeologist Jack Horner’s 2009 book, How To Build A Dinosaur, co-authored by New York Times science editor James Gorman.

Horner is not simply a movie consultant (though the character of Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park film is based on him). He’s a world-renowned paleontologist who discovered the first dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere and developed the foundation of everything we know about dinosaur nesting, parenting, and even fossilized dino embryos.

As How To Build a Dinosaur unfolds, evo-devo does not seem to me like a new field of science, but rather a glorious, unheralded mash-up of paleontology, embryology, microbiology, genetics and evolutionary science. There’s something for everyone, except, of course, the Creationists. To them, a chicken is a chicken because the Bible says so – rest assured: there was a coop aboard Noah’s Ark.

Plus, if I were Noah, I don't think I could have gone forty days and forty nights without an omelet.

Contemporary evo-devo devotees want to know how different creatures’ development itself evolved. What can we learn about relationships between different species by looking at similarities in their embryonic development? Can we track the evolution of their developmental processes? To scientists and thinkers like Horner and Gorman, the humble chicken, just like you and me, is a punctuation mark on the whole stunning spectrum of life on Earth. Instead of seizing upon the profound personal insignificance this perspective could excite, I would rather dwell on the amazing reality of my connection to everything else that ever lived on the planet.

Of course, most of the things that swam, walked, hopped, crawled, ran, photosynthesized and flew on the face of the earth are extinct. Six billion years or so is a long time. If Earth’s history was a 24-hour TV schedule, humans probably wouldn’t even fill up the time-slot of a Geico commercial.

Anyway, part of the reason we’re all so well-connected – whether living or extinct – is that nature is more economical than my Aunt Doreen, who refused to throw out yogurt cups in case someone could use them.  Just as Aunt Dor knew that the yogurt cups could become bead-holders or kindergarteners’ projects, nature knows that the genes of different species need only be modified, not replaced (you, my friend, share almost 60% of your genes with the fruit flies in your kitchen).

Evo-devo helps us to understand that when new species of animal emerge, nature hasn’t formed their genes from scratch. Instead, their genes are sculpted and modified from existing genetic codes. In many cases, vast physical differences between earlier and later species who share a common ancestor are less a matter of different genes and more a matter of similar genes being expressed (switched “on” or “off”) in different ways. If you go far enough back on the evolutionary tree, you’ll find some pretty surprising common ancestors. For example, it is generally accepted nowadays that if you want to glimpse dinosaurs’ living relatives, don’t look for geckos and alligators. Hang a birdfeeder.

Q: what kind of dinosaur is this? A: a chicken.

Based on what they can deduce about the bone structure and anatomy of dinosaurs, paleontologists have been suggesting for years that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs. As Horner points out, there is even a distinctive kind of bone tissue found nowhere in the world but in female birds just prior to egg-laying. Now, we’ve also found it in the fossilized bones of a female T-Rex.

As Horner explains at length, the field of paleontology, traditionally a realm of fossil-hunters and educated guesses based on the assembly of fossilized skeletons and maybe a few eggs and footprints, is merging with radical new technologies that allow us to look into the microscopic physical and chemical structure of dinosaur bones like we never have before. As new technologies allow us to extract proteins and collagens and even the traces of blood cells and vessels from fossilized remains (though not DNA, not yet) and compare them to the make-up of living creatures, it becomes more and more clear that birds and dinosaurs are not-so-distant cousins.

Here, I would just like to say that it’s about time someone pulverized a dinosaur bone and put it into a mass spectrometer. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mr. Horner.

Embryology joins the fray as well. The history of the relationship of embryology and evolutionary science is complicated – a formerly popular, overly-simplified theory states that developing embryos can be seen to briefly exhibit characteristics of all the species that preceded them. This view has fallen in and out of favor, and while it’s far from an exact science at this point, it’s at least been invited back to the party along with modern paleontology, microbiology, genetic and evolutionary sciences.  I’ll tell you more in a minute.

As Horner explains, the idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life with preserved DNA à la Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park will always be fiction. As far as we can tell, there just isn’t any actual DNA to be found in bodies that are over 65 million years old.

Unless you know where to look – and you have a modicum of genetic science at your disposal.

How about the genes of a living animal which calls the dinosaurs family?

Here is where embryology looms large in the research Horner profiles. Did you know that while no modern bird’s skeleton includes a true tail, a chicken embryo (given to exhaustive investigation due to its size and easy availability) briefly and confidently exhibits the beginnings of eighteen extra vertebrae – a very long tail for an embryo the size of a quarter. Then, in a process that shocked observing scientists, the growth process of this tail comes to a complete halt and then reverses itself into the modern single nub of bone that modern birds sport at the end of their backbones (this is a drastically over-simplified version, read the book for yourself, ok?).

Just as paleontologists puzzle over exactly when certain anatomical changes occur in the great sweep of evolution, with slowly morphing fossil forms as their evidence, modern lab scientists hang giddily over chicken eggs to figure out exactly what gene factors regulate both the growth and the disappearance of their chickies’ tails. Are these the same genes whose modification over time led to the loss of a tail in birds, whose species owe their lineage to the dinosaurs?

In other words, the genes for dinosaur tails may be running all over the henhouse – they’ve just been switched off.

Can we figure out which factors are responsible for halting that tail growth in modern bird embryos? If so, could we turn those factors off and hatch a chicken with a great big tail? Or teeth? Or arms instead of wings? It’s possible.

There are massive challenges – like proving the chicken-with-a-tail has in fact harkened back to a natural earlier genetic form, rather than being a one-time modern freak. Plus there’s the problem that no-one’s really studied the development of tails like they’ve studied the development of, for example, limbs (it seems that people are chiefly interested in the structures they possess). What would we compare the results of our dino-tail experiments to, if we’re not even sure of the basic laws of normal tail genetics? Scientists are working on it.

Those who would throw up their hands and wish that science could devote itself to something more useful than vestigial dino tails should remember that tails are extensions of the backbone and spinal cord, and therefore the study of tail growth could unlock new knowledge of spinal growth factors in all vertebrates, including, for example, babies born with Spina bifida.  Knowing what gene factors contribute to proper spinal growth could open a whole new world of prevention for life-threatening birth defects. Thanks, dino-chickens.

It all comes back to the same idea, you see. We’re all connected.

And now, I have little more to add but two pieces of my own scientifically-based artwork, which are sure to have invaluable benefit to scientists working in every aspect of this field.

fig. 1: Chickosaurs

fig. 2: Ch. Rex

P.S. If you’re interested in reading more about evolutionary science at work in American culture, particularly if you are religious, I highly recommend Monkey Girl by Edward Humes and Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller.

You may remember the giant centipede incident from this past summer. Alas, this Christmas was yet another example of family gift-giving gone very, very wrong.

Here is a box I received from my mother on Christmas morning.

A promising box.

What could be inside?

I carefully opened the blue tissue paper, and beheld these:

These are salt and pepper shakers shaped like feet.

Someone, somewhere, once considered these saltshakers a tasteful addition to the table.

There is more to this gift than meets the eye. In fact, a particular feature of these shakers is what compelled my mother to purchase them for me.

For many years, my feet have been the laughingstock of the family. Apparently, my big toes point skyward to an alarming degree. Now, even if my feet are as freakish as my parents would have me believe, I have always said that their amusement is unfair because who but they were responsible for the genes that shaped my feet? It must be owned that these salt-shakers are not the first foot figurines of this style that I have been given.

Readers, forgive me if what follows is too much for your delicate sensibilities. But I want to know, once and for all – are these gifts of pointy-toed foot figurines justified?

The salt and pepper shakers.

The author's feet.

In my mother’s defense, she also gifted me some really nice new linens, several excellent books, aquarium supplies, the new Jane Eyre film on DVD, chocolate-covered pretzels, and purple yoga pants.

Don't ask me, you're the one who Googled it.

The very best part of visiting my blog’s administrative dashboard might just be a little box that tells me what Google search terms led people to find my blog. Chronicling the public’s secret desires this way is hardly a unique theme for a blog post, but I think the end of the year is a good time to reflect on just what phrases have led you here.

“Sweatshirts about duct tape and Jesus”, anyone? Or “Evil santa claus bunny rabbit”?

This search term feature is quite useful for a blogger. The good news is that the overwhelming majority of blog hits due to search engines were people Googling my name or my book (though a few variants intrigued me, like “asteroid alaina” and “hurricane alaina”). Most flattering was the simple phrase, “Alaina Mabaso says”. I’m so glad you care what I think. On the other hand, over the last year, though I’ve published what I thought were worthwhile essays on death, grief, politics, literature, gender issues, the digital world and more, I found that the blog topics people searched for most were goldfish fry, pharmacists’ tattoos, and the hats of the royal wedding (I am not the only blogger who now knows that the American public has a bizarre obsession with the headwear of British royalty).

I divide other search terms into categories.

The first category is Ambiguous Concepts. This included “Katherine heigl extra terrestrial”. Maybe not so strange for people who think she is an alien. Or perhaps she starred in a sci-fi movie I’m not aware of.  If I were to Google her in connection with another term, I just wouldn’t know what to say other than perhaps “Katherine heigl attractive uptight woman who needs a man to loosen her up”, but clearly some Googlers have more imagination than Hollywood screenwriters.

Take me to your leader.

A second confusing search term was “snake bites on Goth kids”.  Who wants any kids to get bitten by snakes, even if they do have poor taste in clothes? Or are “snake bites” a kind of jewelry or accessory I’m not aware of? Also, is there such a thing as a Goth kid? I am picturing a five-year-old in eyeliner, combat boots and a black trench coat.

Another head-scratcher was “multiple breast fiction”. Is there a genre of erotica dedicated to fantasy involving more than the usual allotment of breasts? Or was this written by a person who does not know or believe that women are endowed with two breasts? More importantly, how did my blog pop up under this search term?

To sum up this category for today, I’ll add the possibly unfortunate search term, “Alaina smells”.  I’d like to think that this Googler was trying to find an essay I wrote about bad smells, but there’s also the troubling possibility that “Alaina smells” is someone’s opinion.

A second category brings a fascinating range of stories to life: Long Search Terms.

“a man bought a goldfish in a petshop. upon returning home, he put the goldfish in a bowl of recently boiled water that has been cooled quickly. a few minutes later the fish was dead. explain what happened to the fish”.

I would dearly love to know the source of this inquiry. Is some student cheating on a biology test’s curiously sadistic question? Or is this simply the plea of a heartbroken would-be fish owner seeking answers?

Or try this one:

“just saw a commercial saying that if my kids eat fruit snacks, a kid in africa might get a laptop. wouldn’t it make more sense if I buy a laptop, africa kids would get fruit snacks?”

I am picturing a suburban housewife ashamed to voice her musings on “africa kids” to anyone else in the neighborhood, but turning hopefully to the internet to see if anyone else had privately noticed how bizarre it was that American kids should get fruit snacks while African kids got laptops – shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Or, “why is it that when you hate someone, everything they do is offensive, look at her eating those crackers like she owns the place”.

Then there are the Questions or statements that I wish could answer personally.

One is “surname Mabaso in English”. Guess what: it’s “Mabaso”.

Also, to all the people searching for “good morning translated to Tsonga”: it’s avuxeni.

Another is “What age can you sell goldfish fry” or “how old are goldfish before you can sell them”.

Despite pet stores that would lead you to believe that goldfish are, in fact, a salable item, the answer to this question, for the home aquarist, is your home-hatched goldfish will never reach an age at which they can be sold to anyone. If you can wheedle your friends into adopting a few of your goldfish fry for free, you should count yourself lucky.

To the person who Googled “What does Alaina want for her birthday”: it’s several months away at this point, but I would like the 2008 miniseries version of “Sense and Sensibility”.

Just check in with the other readers before you buy it, I don't need hundreds of copies.

To the person Googling “what is the solution to the story peanut butter rhino”: if you simply want to know how the book ends, the sandwich is stuck to his ass. If you’re wondering how such an inane storybook made it on the market, I have no answer.

There are also the Terrifying search terms, namely “Large clear centipede Philadelphia”, “centipede clear feathery legs” and “Worst centipede real”. Pretty many people are Googling centipedes and we all now know we’re not alone in our fears.  Worst of all, “scutigera coleoptrata giant” and “Scutigera Coleoptrata bite”.

More enjoyable are Fun imaginary scenarios, like “Female hans solo” or “Stinkybugs go to camp”.

Of course, there are also many mildly embarrassing or intriguing Sex-related searches.

“Breaking dawn sex excerpt”, for example. No fair: go buy the book and turn down the corner of the page where Edward and Bella Go All The Way if you want to.  You ain’t gonna find it on this blog. Let me just throw in here that an alarming number of us are Googling questions about Edward and Bella’s wedding night, as well as Kody Brown’s polygamous bedrooms (one Googler even shows a peculiar interest in this Mormon’s feet).

More troubling, perhaps, was “Harry potter sex comic”. Though I admit I did write a Harry Potter-themed blog which questioned the sex ed standards at Hogwarts.

I wish I knew who found my blog by looking for “Leonardo dicaprio hyperventilating attractively” – and whether anything I wrote tickled their fancy.

I hope the timid soul Googling “images of men’s and women’s reproductive part” did not get more than he or she bargained for by taking to the internet. I also hope they weren’t too disappointed by the lack of these images on my blog.

I think some bloggers tag their stuff like crazy to drive hits to their site, when the content of the blog actually has little to do with the tag. Therefore, my favorite category may be Search terms that are highly satisfying because these people probably found exactly what they were looking for on my blog.

For example: “e.t. comes”. Here is an illustration of this exact statement from my blog post titled “The Truth About E.T.”

I don't care what you say, E.T. is the stuff of nightmares.

How about “sprained ankle humor”? Why yes, here you are!

I didn’t know it when I began writing poems on extremely random topics, but there is a large segment of the population who wants to find them. Who knew that somebody out there was specifically searching for “heat wave poems”? Hey, try this! And yes, I did write a “poem about stink bugs”! Whaddaya know, I’ve got an “airline poem” too. “Porsche poem”? Sure, here it is. I’ve been slacking on the poems lately, and now I feel bad, because it’s obvious there’s a large contingent out there who wants poems on non-traditional topics.

However, I doubt that everyone who found this blog through Google searches came away satisfied. But I do keep a category of searches which will inspire me in the coming year – it’s good to know what potential readers want. Things I hope to offer you in the future based on what people are Googling: “Poems about stink”.

Thanks, mystery Googler. I think I can manage that.

Christmas morning 2010, c. 9am

This is the face of readiness.

As you can see, Cuda, the cockapoo who replaced my brother and me in my parents’ home when we grew up, gets his own stocking. He knows which one is his, as I will prove to you in a few moments. But he knows as well as any child who deserves a visit from Santa that he can’t open it until we say he can.

He keeps checking.

Christmas stockings have always been a focal point of Christmas morning at my parents’ house, and while families who emphasize Santa Claus may experience a decline in stocking-related excitement as the children grow up, the fact that my mother calls explicitly for delivery of the household members’ stockings before bed on Christmas Eve night, so that she can fill them, never diminished the anticipation at all. In fact, the stockings’ role in the festivities seems to have intensified over the years.

It’s a painful memory from early in the marriage for my parents, but apparently, before I was born, Dad forgot to fill a stocking for Mom. The following year, to atone, he filled one at least three times the size of her old one. Over the years, I’ve shouldered a lot of responsibility for Mom’s oversize stocking. First I was just heavily involved in the selection of the items, but then one year Dad decided that each item should be individually wrapped. This tradition stuck as well, and one of the benefits of my marriage has been that now my sister-in-law helps me wrap. No-one does more to make Christmas special than my mother, so it’s a joy to make sure she gets the best stocking of all.

A few years ago, I made her a new extra-large stocking out of royal blue fabric with fish figurines sewn on it. Among the odder elements of my family’s Christmas, the most prominent decorations are tropical creatures.

My personal fave: the fish with fish on it.

Oh, sure, we used to have a Christmas tree with glass icicles, genial Santas and shiny, colorful bulbs. We would drive to a nice Christmas tree joint as a family and pick a fragrant pine. Upon set-up, the cat immediately began to drink from the tree’s small metal basin, eschewing her own dish for weeks, and scrabbled repeatedly up the trunk in a wild yuletide jungle fantasy that rattled the ornaments.

But for the last several years, my parents have gone with something easier and more in tune with their year-round decorations than the deliciously piney Fraser firs I loved so much. I think the six-foot artificial palm tree made its debut by the bar at my wedding over four years ago. When we came home for Christmas the following year, it was in the living room, hung with Christmas lights and ornaments.

Last December, Mom brought the lime-green plastic crocodile lights in from the hot tub patio and added them to the tree.  This year, it’s decorated completely with birds and tropical fish, though the old Christmas tree skirt emblazoned with Santa’s elves riding trains has remained.

I have to say, it’s growing on me.

As my mother’s penchant for Christmas decorating veered from Santa, rocking horses, bears and reindeer toward a Caribbean beach vibe, one wholly traditional aspect of her yuletide collection has only intensified over the years. From one home-painted crèche set (a representation of Jesus’s birth in the stable), her collection has mushroomed into enough Baby Jesuses to start her own museum. If you don’t believe me, take the video tour.

There were other traditional aspects as well, especially when we used to go to my Dad’s parents’ house for Christmas. My brother, two cousins and I slept out by the tree on Christmas Eve, reading comic books and playing games until we fell exhausted into our sleeping bags. My aunt would tuck us in with all the standard reminders about no shaking, poking or sniffing the presents.

“And no fantasizing,” she added.

“Aw, Mom, can’t we fantasize?” my cousin cried.

“No!”

Good times. That's me second from the left.

Mom made a gingerbread house (always with a gingerbread dog) which sat tantalizingly on the table until after Christmas dinner, the ultimate exercise in self-denial.

My brother and me. Judging from my face, there's still a day or two to go.

Then, the cousins would demolish it.

The aftermath.

Later, grown-up family members would go through my grandparents’ vast annual Christmas card haul. They would sort them into categories and declare a winner for each one. As to what the categories were, I wish I could tell you, but I’m sworn to secrecy.

Christmas is about anticipation, and, as you’ve seen, no-one knows that better than Cuda. In fact, he has even more to anticipate than the average family member, because in addition to enjoying his own gifts, he has had a passion for cardboard tubes since he was a puppy – but he must always wait until the moment is right.

As you can see, there is an important musical component here.

When Mom puts on his Christmas wreath, Cuda knows that guests will be arriving shortly. I agree that the wreath is cute, and he wears it happily, but I also insist every year that he looks like Queen Elizabeth.

Breakfast, Your Majesty?

The Saturday before Christmas, a large crowd arrives for my parents’ annual Christmas party. Dad makes a beverage that, in a cooler, is known as “Beach Power” on summer vacations. In late December, it goes into a cut-glass punch bowl and is called “Peach Power”.

My brother and me, Christmas bash 2011. I swear there was no advance consultation on the sweaters.

Around midnight, Dad performs an annual highlight of the party: flaming Mexican coffee.

A non-drinker for medical reasons, I am always steeped in the mildly uncomfortable holiday wonder of watching upstanding church members and friends’ parents get mildly snockered. I’ve never made it to the end of the party – I always retire to bed, listening to the laughter and the thunks of the darts games that go into the wee hours of the morning.

Like an impatient little brother, Cuda often worms his way into the bedroom early Christmas morning. Watch what is possibly the greatest example of pure joy ever caught on film, when we tell him it’s finally, finally time.

Whatever you’re celebrating this December, I hope you have as much fun as my family does. Happy holidays!

In the end, my presents were just as good as the dog's.

What's your relationship with Santa?

“I hate Santa,” my Dad announces, watching the holiday-themed commercials of the Sunday football game.

Dad is not a holiday scrooge. He has just presided over a large Christmas party in his home, in which one guest, unaided, drained a $50 bottle of scotch while Dad betrayed not the slightest lapse in hospitality. He buys beautiful Christmas gifts for Mom and joins the church choir for holiday services. But he has no love for Santa.

Ultimately, his objection is a practical one: “There’s no way, even if Santa was real, that he could get to every house before Christmas.”

I pointed out that not all of the world’s children celebrate Christmas, so it’s not, by a long shot, every house in the world.

“It’s Christian homes all over the world,” he allows. But it’s still an “inane idea that he could fit down the chimney that had a roaring fire six hours ago, carrying a giant bag, and know what every single person wanted.”

I have to say I agree, though I don’t necessarily harbor any ill will against the idea of Santa. While my brother and I (and now my husband and his sister), as well as the family dogs, always received lavish stockings, my parents never emphasized the idea of Santa. On Christmas Eve nights, when mine and my cousins’ family would stay with my Dad’s parents, I, my brother and our cousins would sleep beside the Christmas tree, more to immerse ourselves in the festive setting and increase our proximity to the waiting presents than in hopes of catching Santa in the act.

Once, very early in the morning, I woke up to see my grandmother, in her long white nightgown, adding some premium markers to the stockings. She was flustered to notice me looking.

“I’m just adding to what Santa put in,” she explained guiltily. I nodded dutifully for her sake, because far from believing in Santa myself, I didn’t want to scuttle her belief of my belief in Santa.

I can’t remember ever believing that a fat, red-clad, white-bearded man would enter the house in the wee hours of Christmas morning, on his way to every other (good) Christian child’s house. The logical impossibilities of this made Santa a complete non-issue in my life. I participated in the assembling of family members’ stocking stuffers from an early age.

But Mom wasn’t sure of my detachment. After attending a mother-daughter Christmas party with me one year when I was in elementary school, I was sitting in the car on the way home, pleasantly distended from Christmas cookies in my red velveteen dress, and thinking that “White Christmas” was the most boring movie I had ever seen. Mom said she wanted to talk to me about something.

“Laina, did you know that Santa isn’t a real person?” I was surprised she thought she even had to mention it.

I know that when I have my own children, I won’t encourage them to believe in Santa. I realize I may be letting myself in for several years of grocery-line grief when I cannot say, “Santa is not going to bring you anything this year if you don’t put those M&Ms down!” But I’m willing to risk the fall-out. To me, family gift-giving provides all the magic Christmas will ever need.

But I’m also aware that many people recall the shocking moment when they (or their children) learned that Santa is not real. I’m interested in my readers’ histories with Santa.

I know many of my readers don’t celebrate Christmas. Feel free to chime in with any stories of your own holiday traditions. And to the Santa contigent: please share your stories in the comments about the time you (or your kids) learned the truth about Santa, or why you never believed in the first place.

My grandfather and my Great-Aunt Doreen during this past summer, using the internet to talk to a faraway sister.

“Marge died last night, Aunt Dean,” I said when I went in to wake her up. “It was very peaceful, in her sleep. We thought you’d like to know.”

“Lucky girl.” Her wasted hands slid back and forth on the comforter’s edge and she sighed from her pillow. “I thought last night it might be me. But here I still am.”

Doreen is my grandfather’s sister. Half the family calls her Aunt Dor, and the rest call her Aunt Dean. No-one knows why. It doesn’t matter. As I write this, I realize that today or tomorrow might be the last time I ever refer to Aunt Dean in the present tense.

A few weeks ago, while she napped in her green recliner, I read a small lavender booklet which had been tucked into her medical folder next to the caregivers’ diary. It had a butterfly on the front and it was called “Strength for the Journey”.

“It is our hope that this booklet will provide you with all the strength you may need for the journey,” the first page said.

As if all the strength you need to watch a loved die could be found in a small purple book, tucked in among the blood-count and blood-pressure results.

But in caring for Aunt Dean, I’ve learned some things about death. No, not death. What I mean is, I’ve learned some things about dying.  And to be fair, the butterfly booklet did help me to understand.

It refers to something that is a new idea to me: the “process of dying”.

At 92 years old, Aunt Dean, comfortable in bed and surrounded by caregivers and family, is about to slip into what seems like death’s best case scenario. Now that I stop to think about it, it’s strange that a very old person’s final decline – the most natural kind of death you could possibly have – has made me completely rethink my concept of death.

I had never seen death as anything but an expected tragedy:  cancer, car crashes, suicide, heart attacks. All of these have recently happened to people in my community. Death is sudden, shocking, and difficult to bear. I had never realized it before, but my innate concept of death has almost nothing to do with death in its most natural form. I have had to get reacquainted with death not as a dreadful event, but as a natural process. Caring for a hospice patient demands a radical perspective shift – not just the reality of letting go of someone you love, but welcoming death in the place of convalescence.

All my life, I’ve had a recurring nightmare that I’m watching someone in a life-threatening emergency, and I keep misdialing when I try to call 911. The importance of calling 911 when someone is in trouble is one of the first things drummed into us as kids. What will it feel like to override that, if Aunt Dean dies on my watch? The idea of sitting silently by while someone breathes her last is almost as strange to me as imagining life without that person.

“When you realize that your loved one has died, it is not necessary to call someone immediately,” the butterfly booklet explains gently. This still and quiet death is not a call-for-help crisis. Will that make it any easier to handle?

It’s difficult for me to handle this in relation to Aunt Dean, partly because my Aunt Dean is one of the most capable people I know. Even now, it seems a little ridiculous that a person like her has to die. As her short-term memory faded to almost nil, her essential practicality struggled to keep her in the game.

“No notes,” my aunt Jody, Doreen’s niece, said to me at the beginning of my first afternoon as a caretaker.

“No notes?” I asked.

“She always wants to write notes to herself, because she thinks she has to remember things,” Jody explained. “But then what happens is, she sees the note but forgets why it was written, and ends up calling me anyway to ask me what it’s about. It’s just better not to have any notes, because then she doesn’t get worried or confused about them later.”

It was a pretty good rule. Aunt Dean, reading the community newsletter, would contentedly write down on one of her myriad slips of paper – her side-table is a clerical storehouse – that the local orchestra was performing at three o’clock on Sunday. Ten minutes later, she would grasp the note in consternation.

“What day is it?” she’d ask. “Is it Sunday? Did I miss the orchestra?”

With caregivers constantly present who would remember the orchestra, Jody was right: the notes weren’t helping anyone. But I still didn’t have it in me to stop her from writing them – with her independence slipping by the day, I couldn’t squelch this perfectly sensible coping mechanism for the memory which she knew was failing. I would give her pencil and paper to write the notes, and then quietly remove them as soon as she was distracted.

Keeping track of the small things is an indelible part of who she is. Aunt Dean is a dedicated career woman. Born in 1919, she never married or had children, but took a bookkeeping job at the bank right out of high school. She retired as the bank manager, and busied herself with many volunteer pursuits as well as her passion for bird-watching. She also made it her life’s goal never to throw anything away that could possibly be of future use. Right now, she has wax paper in the kitchen from 1964, and when I opened her bedroom drawer, hunting for something else, I counted at least fifteen identical plastic combs, neatly confined with a crumbling rubber band. And even when her memory seemed to have completely deserted her, she could still tell me exactly where most things were in the apartment: which room, cabinet and shelf.

She and her sister Joyce (who also never married) kept a house which was always open to the rest of the family, especially the children. With three married brothers (including my mom’s dad), one married sister, and all the routine crises of a large extended family, Aunt Dean and Aunt Joyce were lifelong fixtures in their nieces and nephews’ lives, as practical as they were joyous. Once she moved into the retirement village, Aunt Dean’s door was notable for never being closed.

“Pull harder, Joyce!” Aunt Dean called good-naturedly from her bed last week, after telling me about a dream she had the night before in which her father walked, smiling, into her room. Joyce died of cancer about fifteen years ago.  We’ve been telling Doreen that they’re about to be reunited, and she squeezes our hands, though her eyes stay closed.

“When she goes, I’ll be happy for her, but sad for me,” says Geoffrey, my Grampa, who is Doreen’s only surviving brother.  He lives in a different wing of the building, and comes to see her daily. My grandmother died over five years ago, but he has never seemed really lonely til now. Grampa was born with a twin who didn’t survive, and he and Doreen were always especially close. I’ve seen many pictures of them from their younger days, but somehow the strongest image I have of the two of them is one I never saw but heard about over the years: Doreen taking him to the train station to join the service in WWII. Someone in the family once claimed that Doreen named the happiest moment of her life as the time she sat down to breakfast with all three of her brothers, safely home from the war.

Grampa and I played umpteen hours of cards with Aunt Dean over the last several months. About two weeks ago, it was her sudden disinterest in joining us for a game that convinced me more than anything else that she really was dying.

“What’s going to happen in the future?” she asked me and my cousin, her niece Gwen, one night last week.

Gwen gently explained that pretty soon, she was going to leave this world, and that her mother, father, brothers and sisters were waiting for her.

When she asked me the same question an hour later, I told her that Tasha, the friendly night nurse, would be arriving shortly. Practical woman that my aunt is, I figured both answers would be of interest.

Over the last few months, Aunt Dean would stop every once in awhile and, with shrewd impatience, ask, “Do you suppose it’s going to go on like this forever? Or am I going to get better?”

Because she’s a person whom others have relied on their whole lives, a self-sufficient woman born in 1919 whose bookshelves are full of do-it-yourself building and plumbing tips, I wanted to be honest.

“Aunt Dean, we just have to take things a day at a time,” I would say instead.

“Well, here you are,” Doreen said one day to an occasional caretaker who bustled in to replace me for awhile. “I didn’t know that I was still going to be here, though.”

“Now, now, none of that!” the other woman scolded affectionately.

But I reply differently. Aunt Dean has strong religious faith, so I simply tell her that the Lord is going to decide when she goes, that it’s ok to talk about it, and I’ll be here to take care of her til then.

“Did you know that Marge died?” Aunt Dean’s friend Ruth asked Tasha, when she appeared for her evening shift.

“Yes, I did – she died on my shift,” Tasha said with matter-of-fact warmth, settling in for the night. I wanted to ask Tasha what to expect, but kept quiet in front of the old ladies.

When I cleaned Doreen’s little kitchen that weekend, I noticed a strange shortage of dishes. They were all stacked in the fridge, Saran-wrapped with tiny, barely-eaten dinners. My mind immediately went to the purple booklet, with its so-called “normal signs of dying”: loss of appetite, increased sleeping, changes in body temperature – as if dying were routine as pregnancy or a cold.

As Aunt Dean has deteriorated, the butterfly booklet, with its earnest platitudes about “the Journey”, has not supplied us with all the strength we needed. Doreen grew anxious and disoriented, trying to rise from the bed though she was too weak to sit up unaided, and thrashing until bruises bloomed on her legs. A hospice nurse visited and increased her anti-anxiety medication, leaving Doreen to sleep peacefully most of the time.

Last weekend, her eyes popped open at about seven o’clock in the evening, and she uttered her first clear words of the day.

“I have got to get out of this bed,” she announced, as if she was mortified to have been caught oversleeping.

I soothed her as well as I could, explaining that she didn’t need to get up.

“I still think it’s so unfair that people have to leave this world most of the time under great distress or pain.  I just can’t figure out why this is necessary,” my mom said in an e-mail to me this week. “What do you think?”

I don’t know what I think – I’ve just learned that sometimes it’s ok to accept that death is coming, and pray that it will be easy.

Perhaps all this sounds a bit banal to people who have lived a bit more than I have. I’m only 28. While I’ve cared for sick or elderly people before, I’ve never sat by a bedside and watched a hitch in breathing grow into a long and quiet pause, and wondered if the chest will rise again.

While there have been bumps along the way – like the conviction that every new pair of socks would bankrupt her – for the most part, Aunt Dean has faced the final stages of her life with grace. Since she is such an independent person, I had feared that she would prove difficult to care for. It’s understandable that some elderly people fight the trappings of aging at every step: the loss of a driver’s license, the installation of grip bars on the bathroom wall, and the use of a walker become minor battles. I worried that Doreen wouldn’t like to rely on others for help.

But she gained an almost childlike quality as she became weaker – I was touched every time she happily donned her bib before eating. You might argue that with her mental state deteriorating, she couldn’t have questioned the changes in her life, or perceived the potential embarrassment. But I prefer to believe that her nature was merely manifesting in a new way: the remaining essence of her lifelong practicality was to genially accept the help that she needed.

My aunt wakes up less and less, and her hands grow chilly. I’m trying to remember that these are nothing to worry about – just signs of dying, that’s all. The impending moment of her passing is a question mark for me – will I cry or sigh with gladness and relief? Probably both. I’m sure it’s all part of the proper process, and that is something Aunt Dean could appreciate.

Update: Aunt Dean  died peacefully about five hours after I posted this. Even after all the preparation, there’s a hole in the world. I’m going to go see my grandfather.