2009 December

A — Contagious — Case of the Human Condition: Me vs. the Mighty Microbe

December 29, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, May 31, 1989

I believe in microbes. Microbes are like God. You can’t hear them, taste them, smell them or see them with the naked eye.

But you know they’re there. Closer to you than your jugular vein.

Lately, I’ve had more experiences with microbes than with God, so I’m a little more certain of their existence.

Microbes, we have learned first-hand at our house, can cause earaches, headaches, sinus aches, muscle aches, stomachaches, toothaches and temper tantrums.

Microbes can transform a perfectly reasonable person into a madwoman unfit for human society. She bellows at her children. She bellows at her husband.

At work, she groans at the stack of unanswered phone messages. At home, she blows her top at the plastic spoon melted onto the dishwasher heating element.

Nothing wrong with that.

Child care: Fingers, mouths, noses, shoes -- any microbes here? Ya think? c 1989 B.F. Newhall

Child care: Fingers, mouths, noses, the soles of shoes -- any microbes here? Ya think? Photo by BF Newhall

Unless, of course, everyone else in the house is also sick. Instead of shrugging off the madwoman’s pyrotechnics and gently leading her to bed – they bellow back.

What happens next verges on child abuse. Or spousal abuse, depending mostly upon proximity.

Which is why, one day earlier this spring, I found myself pressing an elevator button with my elbow rather than my forefinger.

It was a ridiculous thing to do, of course. An uptight, paranoid thing to do. But I was on my way to lunch. I planned to use my fingers to eat my bacon and avocado on rye.

Surely there was at least one pneumococcus bacterium lurking on that elevator button, at least one flu virus waiting to make its home in my upper respiratory tract. A Type B Victoria most likely.

Some folks, I notice, are fearless. They press elevator buttons. They trade bites at Paloma. They kiss.

They kiss friends, neighbors, near-strangers. They kiss in broad daylight and on the mouth. They seem unaware that, according to Alameda County health statistics, 89 different rhinovirus types and one subtype are on the loose in the Eastbay.

I kiss my children. Sometimes I kiss my husband. But, outside of that, I don’t do much kissing anymore.

If I shake hands, I long to do like the pediatrician swabbing for strep – wash my hands before and after.

In my youth – which, looking back, I see ended the day baby Peter arrived in our house – I didn’t worry much about microbes.

I gulped vitamin C daily and got my heart rate up to 120 beats per minute three times a week and let it go at that.

Elevator buttons didn’t worry me. I pressed them with impunity. Door knobs and telephone receivers were simply door knobs and telephone receivers. They were not habitats of the adenovirus.

If an old friend wanted to kiss, I kissed. What the heck.

In those days before kids, I was not often sick. When I was, I went directly to bed like a sensible person and stayed there until I was well. But things are different for the working mother of small children. If she sleeps at all, it is during the night. Days and evenings she is on duty.

As for the children of working mothers, they go to child care. When they are sick, Mom thinks twice before staying home with them. She does not want to be Mommy Tracked.

So, every once in a while, she finds herself sending the sore throat and the green runnies off to day care. She hopes the provider thinks it’s allergies.

There, her children trade baseball cards and microbes with the children of other working mothers.

Zachary gets the Mark McGwire and the respiratory syncytial virus. Caleb gets Candy Maldonado and the klebsiella bacterium.

Zach’s mother, as a result, assumes that at any given moment, summer or winter, she is incubating something grisly. Parainfluenza, staph, strep.

And so, when one of the legion of fearless folks who like to kiss puts out a hand and offers a gentlemanly kiss, it is not simply her own health that concerns her.

She grasps the proferred hand and deftly turns her head. The kiss lands safely on her cheek, not her lips. She holds her breath.

Now, if her courtly friend will just remember to wash his hands before dinner, he’ll never know how close he came.

Reprinted by permission of The Oakland Tribune

I never lost the elbow-the- elevator-button habit, especially during visits to my mother in the hospital or at her assisted living apartment building. And I’m really keen on those alcohol wipe dispensers I see everywhere these days — at the entrance to the supermarket next to the grocery carts, at the gym by the elliptical machines.

Filed Under: A Case of the Human Condition Tagged With: child care, infectious disease, motherhood, sick children, working mom

The Writing Room: Feng Shui for the Work Room — and the Bedroom

December 18, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Thumbing through a book on feng shui at the now defunct Gaia bookstore in Berkeley a few years ago, I ran across a chapter on decorating the bedroom. The author wanted her readers to know that bringing pictures of family and friends into a bedroom is a sure way to wreck its romantic feng shui.

Who, after all, wants to have sex with mothers, mothers-in-law, small children – or even one’s college roommates – watching from all over the walls and dresser tops? For that matter, who can sleep with crowds of people rattling around the room, posing, smiling, hugging, and crying out for attention?

My mother's desk -- tucked away between a recliner and the fax machine.

I’ve decided that this feng shui principle for bedrooms applies nicely to my writing room. There are no big photos in my study. No kids, no parents, no family, no one I know.

Pictures of my children send me into worry mode. If a photo of Christina as a 12-year-old catches my eye, four-figure orthodontia bills spring to mind. If it’s a picture of Peter as a 2-year-old, I see the red bite marks he once left on a babysitter’s arm.

Pictures of my parents are even worse. “When are you going to get a real job, Barb?” they shout from their frames as I enter the workroom. Peering over my shoulder as I write, they pass judgment on me and my thoughts, “You’re writing about that? Shame on you.”

Which brings me to a decision I faced earlier this week – where to put my mother’s old, carved desk with its matching chair? It was a wedding gift from a rich aunt. And, like my mother, that desk with its graceful curves and sworls has never left me.

When I was a girl, it stood in the living room window at the front of our red brick colonial house in a new, post-war Detroit neighborhood. Ditto in our more ample cape cod house in the suburb, also new, where I spent my teens. Space was short in my parents’ tiny retirement ranch house on the outskirts of Phoenix, however, and the desk was left forgotten in the guest room.

A few years ago, when my mother got ready to move from Phoenix to an assisted living apartment here in the Bay Area, I rescued the old thing from the Goodwill giveaways and had it delivered to my house.

Photos c 2009 B.F. Newhall

It’s a beautiful desk. A curved top, delicate swooping legs, solid wood drawers. It was probably expensive. My mother tells me that the rich aunt had had a few drinks over lunch with my grandmother before the two of them set off to shop for my mother’s wedding present in downtown Chicago.

Beautiful as it is, that desk is so saturated with memories of my mother and my childhood that being in the same room with it is like being in the same room with my mother. Sometimes, it’s just a lovely, graceful desk, complete unto itself. At other times, I am cooped up indoors beside it on a dark winter’s day in Detroit with no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nobody and nothing to play with, no thoughts to call my own.

Jon and I have tried putting the desk in different rooms around our house here in California. It looked very pretty in our living room – in its rightful place at the front window. But its petite lines were overwhelmed by the other furniture in the room, especially the heavy Victorian tables from Jon’s side of the family. Finally, we moved the desk into the den, where it’s now tucked away – wasted really – in a dark corner, anachronized by our big screen TV, the fax machine, and our sprawling black leather recliners.

Some people would insist that the logical place for this lovely example of prewar workmanship is a corner of my writing room. There’s plenty of space down here. The colors and the proportions of the desk are right. And a writing desk for a writer’s room – what could be more fitting?

But those would be people who don’t understand a writer’s work and how much it has in common with sex. Which is – you can’t do it with your mother in the room.

Filed Under: A Case of the Human Condition, The Writing Room Tagged With: antique carved desk, bedroom, feng shui, my writing room, writing process, writing tips

Books Openers: Harvey Cox — You Don’t Have to Believe to Be a Christian

December 12, 2009 By Barbara 1 Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I’d like to recommend Harvey Cox’s newest book to all my non-believer friends.

Members of the Religion Newswriters Association were treated to a visit from Harvey Cox at their September conference in Minneapolis. Photo c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Members of the Religion Newswriters Association were treated to a visit from Harvey Cox at their September conference in Minneapolis. Photo 2009 B.F. Newhall

So many of the sophisticated, highly educated people I know labor under the assumption that they have to believe – to assent intellectually to – the factuality of traditional Christian teaching.

It seems that the one thing they have retained from whatever Sunday schooling they had as children is that they must believe every word of the Apostles’ Creed or Nicene Creed.

They don’t. That’s my opinion. And here’s why: The idea of a fixed creed to which a true Christian must subscribe dates back, not to the life of Jesus, but to the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and took control of the church.

Constantine saw great possibilities in the popular new religion that was spreading like wildfire across his empire. But beliefs about the nature of Jesus Christ were diverse and often contradictory in that early church. A common religion with a common creed, Constantine reasoned, would help him to unify — and control – the many and varied peoples of the Roman Empire. With that in mind, he insisted that church leaders come together and settle on a single set of beliefs.

The bishops complied, and in the centuries that followed – right up into the twentieth century – Christians were taught that, to be a true Christian, one had to believe.

So powerful was the Christian belief in belief, that in some eras, heresy – incorrect belief – could get you burned at the stake.

But now, according to Harvard professor and theologian Cox, the age-old Christian belief in belief is becoming a thing of the past: the Age of Belief is over.

Harvey Cox’s ground-breaking The Secular City was a best-seller in 1965. It sold more than 1 million copies. Now, with his newest book, The Future of Faith, the Harvard theologian presents fresh food for thought: that Christianity is entering a new era. He calls it the Age of the Spirit.

Cox identifies three ages in Christian history:

The Age of Faith. In the first three centuries of Christian history, Cox argues, the early church was not concerned about creed, doctrine, belief or hierarchy. Theological ideas about the nature of God were not as important as following the teachings of Jesus.

The Age of Belief. In the fourth century, Constantine asserted control over the Christian church and insisted that everyone in the empire subscribe to a common creed. As a result, until well into the twentieth century, the church focused on correct belief, on doctrine and orthodoxy. For centuries, Westerners assumed that belief – accepting traditional Christian doctrine – was essential to faith.

The Age of the Spirit. Since the mid-twentieth century, more and more Christians have been ignoring dogma and creed and turning toward a more spiritual Christianity – while finding commonalities with other wisdom traditions. Faith and belief are two different things, Cox argues. Beliefs are opinions, while faith – fidelity – is a way of life, a placing of one’s confidence in Spirit.

Until recently, Cox was the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has been teaching since 1965. He retired in September, but he is staying on at Harvard as research professor and is turning his attention to religion and science, and Christian-Muslim relations.

As for my non-believer friends — I hope they’ll open Cox’s book and free themselves of the burden of belief.

The Future of Faith, by Harvey Cox, HarperOne, 245 pages hardcover, $24.99.

Filed Under: Book Openers, My Rocky Spiritual Journey Tagged With: belief, christianity, faith, future of faith, harvey cox, secular city, spirit

GodsBigBlog: When It Comes to Religion, Americans Like to Mix and Match

December 10, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

The Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita

Catholic? Lutheran? Evangelical? Buddhist? New Age? Americans are no longer as brand-loyal as they used to be when it comes to church attendance and ideas about the spiritual realm.

Americans religious beliefs and practices simply don’t fit into traditional categories any more, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. The Pew poll has found that many Americans have adopted multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many say they attend worship services of more than one faith or denomination, even when they are not travelling or attending a wedding or funeral.

One-third of Americans (35%) say they regularly or occasionally attend religious services at more than one place, and most of these (24% of the public overall) indicate that they sometimes attend religious services of a faith different from their own.

The U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country, but large numbers of Americans report embracing Eastern or New Age ideas. Twenty-four percent of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation. Twenty-five percent of the general public and 23% of Christians state that they believe in astrology. And nearly 30% of Americans report communicating with a dead person.

Cathy Lynn Grossman has an interesting article on the topic in today’s USA TODAY.

Filed Under: My Rocky Spiritual Journey Tagged With: American beliefs, Cathy Grossman, church attendance, New Age, religion, syncretism

The Writing Room: Journalists in Jail Around the World — More and More Are Freelancers

December 8, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that freelance writers now make up nearly 45 percent of journalists imprisoned around the world, a percentage increase that no doubt reflects changes in global news reporting. For details, go to CPJ’s website.