Sometimes A Quick Text Is All That Is Necessary.

One of my grandsons, at 24, has a very good job with a major TV network. He has been there three years and done extremely well.  Recently he was offered a three-year contract with the parent network.

I text: “Congratulations! So proud of you!”

Return text: “It’s a great offer. I haven’t accepted it. I’m just not sure yet.”

 Ah. I do not know why he’s not sure but I know this young man. If he has doubts, the causes of those doubts are not frivolous.

I text back: “ I hope you will talk to a few people whom you admire and then trust your instincts. You have your own inner wisdom to call on. Don’t ever forget that! There are no mistakes, only learning. xox”

Return text: “Thanks, Gma!” (That’s me)

Later in the day I find myself  wishing that just once someone in my family or some mentor along the way had said something like that to me: wishing that someone who was important to me had affirmed my ability to make good decisions for myself. I would have grown so much from the impact, the treasure, of their confidence.

Are we instilling confidence in our kids, by helping them to believe in themselves, to believe that they can cope with their life situations? Or, instead, are we just giving them our best solutions so that they end up believing in us and thinking that we are the source of all wisdom rather than themselves?

Social Skills Are Marketable Assets: Who knew?

 On Saturday, The New York Times posted an article entitled, Why What You Learned In Preschool Is Crucial At Work, by Clare Cain Miller. Perhaps some of you saw it. I hope so.

Miller begins by telling us “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.”

“Skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility,” Miller goes on to say, ”have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”

And get this: According to Miller, research shows that “occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills. The jobs hit hardest” in the economic downturn “seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.”

What does this mean for our kids and us? I would include the world over. There is no doubt about it: We need to figure out how to work with each other in school, in the workplace and in the world.

I have been taught well how arrogant the United States seems to other countries. My first—of many--summer in the UK introduced me to how we are perceived. And the English are our friends! Culturally they are the most like us. Nonetheless every social gathering I attended offered me another earful about our irritating superiority, our failure to grapple with the subtleties of other cultures in order to come to the table with them effectively. In British opinion we are deficient in negotiating and mediating, in all manner of diplomacy. 

 The Times article goes on to reveal that “James Heckman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that non-cognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.”

Except in preschool and the early grades. By the time we are in college, we sit in lecture halls, rarely studying in groups, creating in groups or doing any serious work cooperatively. We are not invited to “engage in productive partnerships,” combining our various skills for a better outcome.

The Unquowa School in Fairfield, CT—preK3 through grade eight--has a room they call “The Maker Space” where kids can collaboratively or individually build things. Anything. There are all sorts of building materials in the space, available on open, reachable shelves and the kids are allowed to let their imaginations run. Four of them may be putting together a small table; a group may be painting one large picture, six or more may be constructing an elaborate edifice at the large Lego table.

The hope of the world

The Maker Space offers the perfect laboratory for collaboration and cooperation. What was once perceived as simply play time, according to Miller, has the potential for developing highly remunerative skills. It’s not about the table or the painting, although the product may please them—or not? It’s about the ability to cooperate on a project larger than one’s own perception and developing the ability to empathize and be flexible with your co-workers during the process.

We live in a demanding and increasingly global society. I am encouraged by Miller’s article which informs us that a person trained in empathic and collaborative skills, as well as good cognitive skills, is not made obsolete by robots or even our blind-seeming, non-stop drive for supremacy and power. On the contrary, statistics are demonstrating that such an individual is highly desirable in the marketplace and a valuable asset in our competitive and complex world, to say nothing of being a better human being.

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Some collaborative "what ifs:"

What if the all drug companies collaborated their cancer research toward a cure for the disease instead of engaging in a cut throat competition that puts cure out of the picture and makes "managing" cancer the goal: a goal none of us can afford. 

What if all of the prosperous countries of the world agreed to collaborate on the goal that no child anywhere in the world would go to bed hungry?

What if all the nuclear empowered nations collaborated to take nuclear weapons off the table? Period. Gone.

Crossing The Sound

I am on the Bridgeport, CT ferry traveling across Long Island Sound to Port Jefferson, N Y.  I’m going to visit my friend, Margaret, in East Hampton. It’s like going home. I can’t wait to be driving through Bridgehampton, my home for fourteen years. I left there in 1993 and I still get a nostalgic rush as I drive along the Main Street. Except for The Candy Kitchen— the local coffee shop--Bridgehampton has changed a lot since the emergence of “The Hamptons.” That is the reason I left. But still . . .

The enormous, white, car ferry with the bad food on offer holds memories, too. With much of my family in Connecticut, I came back and forth across Long Island Sound on this boat often: traveling in all seasons and in all kinds of weather.

This early Friday morning the ferry is unusually quiet; there are lots of empty seats. I’ve been on the ferry with dogs, cats in cages, families with assorted children, teenagers with tattoos, ripped jeans and shocking piercings, all of us slipping and sliding across the floor, quite unable to do anything but hang on and pray for the 1 hour and 15 minute trip to be over. Today’s ride is smooth, just a gentle rocking, which I quite like. Reminds me that I am on a boat: always a good thing for me.

Some ferry rides have been difficult in ways other than stormy weather. Even if the external weather was sparkling and clear, I’ve had rides when my internal weather was worse than any turbulence the sea could kick up. 

Take for instance the time on a Friday morning in the fall of 1987 when I raced in my car from Bridgehampton to Port Jefferson to catch the earliest ferry to Bridgeport because my mother had died. My father called me from Southport at 6:00 AM to tell me. We knew she was near the end. I had been there the weekend before, along with my brother who had come from California to see her one last time. Thank God we had said goodbye. She and I had spent precious hours together planning her memorial service. She had chosen the readings and we had laughed and contrived the service to suit her perfectly: a spiritual, non-religious service tailored for Mom. And I would lead it. Daunting, but I felt so honored to be entrusted with her wishes.

All the way across the Sound that morning a mantra repeating itself in my head: I don’t have a mother any more. I don’t have a mother any more. Choking back the tears. Not wanting people to see me sobbing helplessly and wondering if they should ask me if I was OK. Which I clearly was not, but didn’t want anyone to know.

My mother is dead . . . my mother is dead . . .

I was on this ferry, too, during the winter of 1992 when my father, at 87, had a series of strokes and was comatose in his bed at home. I never had a chance to say goodbye to Dad. I rode the ferry once again to join my brother and sister in order to decide what the next steps for Dad should be. He had signed a Living Will. “No unusual measures.”

Although I remember the trip across the water in February as “rock and roll,” my emotional state superseded the physical discomfort of the boat. What were we to do? Take out the tubes? My father could no longer swallow. He was being kept alive with a hydrating IV. Living Will, notwithstanding, as my brother had put it to me on the phone, “Are we supposed to kill him?” Oh God!

My whirling mind made that rolling boat seem like child’s play.

On the urging of Dad’s loyal and loving doctor, we let our father go: one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

 Finishing this blog on the ferry churning back towards CT after the holiday weekend.

 I stop writing for a while and gaze around at the other passengers. The ferry is crowded this day. All ages: a cluster of energetic twenty-something boys nearby, and in my row are several dogs straining at leashes. Across, in a booth, a smiling grandmother plays a board game with her two young grandchildren. Most passengers are on their cell phones or like me, on their computers. Some are munching the gluey cheese tacos available on board.

 I am wondering how many passengers are on this watery journey with heavy hearts, going toward something they’d rather not deal with: a family crisis, a medical issue, a troublesome job situation. I will never know, but I can’t help imagining that somehow the ferry, so much a part of life on Long Island Sound, has, all these years, transported and absorbed vast quantities of unspoken emotional distress—and joy. Back and forth, across the wide waters of The Sound, on its regular schedule, it will continue to do so forever.

The Ridiculousness Of It All

 Thursday morning and it’s cold. I was cold in the nighttime, adding blanket upon blanket in order to make it through. When I got up it was 68 degrees in my condo and I debated, momentarily, before I thought, what the hell, and turned on the heat. Just to take the chill off, I decided.

When I had showered, dressed and had breakfast, I knew it was time to face re-installing the duvet on my bed. I say installing because the duvet itself has been cleaned and spent the summer folded and zipped into a plastic case and the pale blue, flowered duvet cover, also cleaned, has spent the summer draped over a hanger in my coat closet. Fine. So what’s the problem? They are both there and ready to go.

It’s me. Armed with some “green” window cleaner, I’ll drag out the small stepladder and step right up to clean the chandelier hanging in the foyer. I’ll take books off shelves, dust and line them up, even clean out my desk with more enthusiasm and confidence than I can re install that darned duvet each fall. It’s queen sized. Shouldn’t be a problem, but it is. If there is a secret to this household task—and there must be—I don’t know it.

I decide to time myself.

 And my first attempt at stuffing the sparkling white duvet into the linen coverlet fails utterly. I simply do not have the sides lined up correctly. Perhaps if I turn the duvet around? I try again. I have already spent seven minutes just trying to figure out which is the length and which is the width of both pieces involved. They seem so much the same.

I try stuffing the duvet in a second time only to discover that somehow the duvet cover has become twisted, obliterating any hope of success on this round.

Finally I lay the duvet cover on the bed, nice and smooth, the end with the closure buttons hanging over the foot of the bed. Next I lay the duvet over it.

I stand back and stare at the layers on the bed thinking, now what? You can do this, Cecily. Anyone can do this. You just have to breathe and think about it.

I grab the duvet and, gripping the top edge I throw the rest of its pristine whiteness onto the floor. I then proceed to stuff the “lead” end of the duvet into the coverlet, pushing it and dragging it through, shaking the cover as I go.

Enough. I get the whole thing jammed in there in great lumps and then, grabbing both corner ends of the cover at the foot of the bed, I shake it as high and as hard as I can, over and over, trying to get the duvet to fill out its linen envelope. And by now I am laughing. Laughing and shaking that darned thing up and down.  Gradually the duvet begins to inhabit most of the cover.

 Somehow I fail to match up the closing buttons with the correct holes and I end up at the corner with more holes than buttons. So I need to begin again. On the second try, I do better. The duvet, if still somewhat askew, is finally secured within the cover.

The entire process has taken about twenty minutes.

No need to say this, I’m certain, but I must. This is not a world peace issue. This is just me bumbling through a silly household chore much in the way I bumble through so many things in my life: part determination, part, a pretty steady sense of the ridiculousness of it all. My own, especially.

Sent By A Friend Too funny!

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We mourn the deaths of the ten students in Oregon. Many of us wring our hands in despair. President Obama is angry and so are we. What is it with America that we cannot legislate gun control? These horrific mass shootings are our national shame.