Christina hadn’t called. We had dropped her at the airport hours ago. The flight to Burbank takes only seventy minutes. She should be home by now. 

But Jon and I still hadn’t gotten the, “I’m home. The plane didn’t crash. My roommate remembered to pick me up, and we didn’t get mugged in the garage,” phone call.

Christina at home with us -- where I know she's safe. c 2010 B.F. Newhall

It’s a phone call that we have come to need from our twenty-six-year-old, totally grown up, perfectly competent daughter.

Days can go by — a full week can go by — without a peep from Christina. Not a problem. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives hundreds of miles away, in Southern California. She is off our radar.

Jon and I go about our lives like normal adults, working, shopping, cooking and kicking back after dinner to watch TV, Jon in the den with the latest episode of 24, and me in the living room with House reruns.

But when Christina visits, or Peter, they are back in our lives in all their lovableness. My not-quite-extinguished mothering hormones - my overmothering hormones  — kick in. So when Christina, or Peter, departs and I can’t be absolutely sure that my kid is totally safe, happy, and equipped with a sturdy umbrella and 60-watt sunscreen - I start to wonder.

The next thing you know, I’m dialing Christina’s cell phone.

No answer. I finish clearing off the dinner table and go to the living room to see if I can find a House episode I haven’t seen.

Half an hour later, Jon calls from the den. “Have we heard from Christina?”

I wasn’t worried up till now. But if Jon is worried, I’m worried. I dial Christina again.

Still no answer.

It’s 10 p.m. Late, but not too late to phone Christina’s roommate. She won’t be in bed yet. I picture her sitting around the apartment playing with the cats, or eating popcorn and watching Ugly Betty, or flossing her teeth.

There’s no land line at Christina’s apartment, of course, so I look up her roommate’s cell number. I just happen to have it written down next to every phone in the house. Just in case.

I dial.

Christina’s roommate picks up. “Hello,” she whispers.

“Hi. It’s Barbara, Christina’s mom. Is Christina home yet?”

“I can’t talk now.” Roommate’s voice is muffled. Strained. Annoyed maybe. I hear voices in the background. “I’ll call you back,” she says. She hangs up.

Later that night, a phone call from Christina. “I’m home. I’m trying to sleep. My cell phone battery ran out. Talk to you tomorrow.”

The next day: “Mom. Please don’t call my roommate like that. She was in a meeting when you called.”

“You mean she wasn’t home, getting ready for bed?”  

“No. She was in a meeting. A business meeting.”

 ”Hmmm. How about if I get myself an iPhone — so next time I can just text her if I have to?”

 ”Mom. You’ve got a life. I’m pretty sure you do. Why don’t you go downstairs to your writing room and look for it. I’m sure it’s down there somewhere.”

I go downstairs.

I sit at my desk. I am surrounded by two walls of bookcases and a serious bank of file cabinets, both overflowing with important stuff. My desk and parts of the floor are covered with papers, three-by-five cards, unopened mail, thumb drives, half-read books, empty tea cups and coffee mugs cover – important stuff all.

And right in front of me, juicy story ideas jotted on sticky notes make a halo around my computer monitor. Whaddya know. Here it is. My life.

I almost forgot.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

The garbage collectors were making a mighty racket at the bottom of our canyon last week, clanking cans and shouting. I stood up and peered through my writing room window to see what was going on. Leaning over my desk to get a better angle, I spotted something big and white and cloudy in the steep canyon below our house.

A shrub with red berries, a Monterey pine, a rangy bay laurel. Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

It was flowering tree, growing wild.

I’d never noticed it before. You can barely see that tree from our house - or from the street below, for that matter. It’s surrounded on all sides by more predictable trees: A rangy bay laurel and its offspring. A couple of aggressive young live oak trees. An aging Monterey pine with two of its limbs, twisted and cracked in January’s windstorms, hanging loose. A gigantic cypress. Also, an anonymous prickly shrub whose fuzzy nondescript leaves and red berries I have never much liked. 

But here it is February, early spring in Oakland, California. And a fruit tree - an apple? a plum? - is blossoming right below my back yard.

I went outdoors to get a better look, only to lose sight of the tree entirely. It’s probably a beautiful thing, I thought. But what a waste. All that splendor and no one to pay homage to it.

The hidden tree comes into view as I work my way down the canyon.

I resolved to make my way down the hill later in the week and appreciate that tree up close. Take a picture. Record the poignant, fleeting lives of those white blossoms.

And so, last Friday I grabbed our camera, put on my hiking boots and a pair of old, expendable pants, and made the steep downhill journey through mud, blackberry, sourgrass, and a rotting tree stump.

When I finally reached the hidden tree, I saw that it was a tangled mass of limbs, branches and twigs, many of them dead. Clearly no gardener prunes or tends this tree. It’s on its own. And this season, all on its own, it has produced thousands of small white flowers, each one quietly surging with life and - it seemed to me - intention.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

I snapped my pictures, but I did not linger under the tree. I couldn’t get much of a foothold on the muddy hillside. Also, my feet were getting wet, and I needed to get back to my writing room. I had work to do.

Picking my way back up the slippery hillside, I felt satisfied that this patch of beauty had not gone unappreciated. I had personally given it its full fifteen minutes of fame.

Back at the house I kicked off my muddy boots and thought about the proverbial tree falling in the woods. If no one hears it crash, does it make a sound?

Likewise, if no one sees this small tree bloom, is it beautiful? What if I hadn’t been here to take note - and a snapshot? Could that cloud of blossoms have been beautiful without me? Without a beholder, is there beauty?

Maybe God is like that tree, hidden, and beautiful whether I show up with my camera or not.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

A plum tree? The result of an apple core I threw down the canyon twenty years ago?

Georgetown professor John L. Esposito was working on a book about the future of Islam — pre-9/11. He promptly put it aside in favor of more pressing topics – Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (2002) and Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (2009) are just two.

Courtesy Gallup Poll.

Now, nearly a decade later, Esposito finally returns to his subject with the publication of The Future of Islam from Oxford University Press. About 50 percent of the book was written before 9/11, he told audience of 200 last weekend who were attending an “Islam and Authors” series at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland. The rest is informed by the post-9/11 political and religious tensions around the world.

One of the most intriguing chapters in Esposito’s newest book addresses the topic of reform in Islam. People have been asking Esposito, who has been studying Islam and teaching Islamic studies for more than three decades, whether Islam is capable of change. They wonder, is it compatible with Western notions of rule of law, human rights and gender equality?

“When people ask a question about Islam, they assume there is only one answer,” an exasperated Esposito told his audience. They ask questions like, “What does the Qur’an say about violence?” “Is Islam capable of modernity?” “Can it change?” There are many, many answers to those questions, he said, and the answers are constantly changing.

With an estimated 1.57 billion adherents, the world of Islam is no less complex and varied than than the world of Christianity, which includes such radically differing elements as Pentacostal, Quaker, Unitarian and Coptic Christians. But many Westerners fail to see that diversity and, out of fear, tend to perceive Muslims as a single homogeneous — threatening — mass.

“When a Christian blows up an abortion clinic, we don’t say, ‘There go those Chrisitians again,’” Esposito said. “But if it’s a Muslim [blowing something up,] we call them ‘Islamic terrorists.’”

In fact, Esposito noted, Islam holds reform and change as a founding principle. Mohammed was a social reformer as well as a prophet, securing rights for women that were radical in the Arab world of his time. Islam calls upon Muslims to follow Mohammed’s example and reexamine their practices regularly, making changes where necessary.

Of course, what those changes, if any, should be is a matter of heated discussion among Muslims today — and throughout history. “Some people are conservative,” Esposito said. “Some people think there is need for adaptation and change.”

How various Muslim groups perceive the past is often a point of conflict. Some Muslims look to past practices and traditions as authoritative. Others view them as interpretations of scripture appropriate to particular contexts, but suseptible to reform.

Reared in Brooklyn in an Italian Catholic family, Esposito spent ten years in a monastery. Since the Seventies, he has devoted himself to the study of Islam and to promoting healthier relations between Muslims and Christians. At Georgetown University, he teaches religion and international affairs as well as Islamic studies.

Esposito founded the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and is its current director. He has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, as president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, and on the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy.

Want to know more about Islamic law?

Sumbul Ali-Karamali will be speaking on Shari’ah Law at the Commonwealth Club public forum in San Francisco on March 11. Sumbul is a writing buddy of mine from the Religion Newswriters Association. A neat lady and an attorney, Sumbul’s book, The Muslim Next Door, takes a thoughtful look at Islamic law. If you can’t make the event, do check out her book. She’ll also be speaking at an upcoming ICCNC Islam and Authors event in Oakland.

The Future of Islam, by John L. Esposito, with a forward by Karen Armstrong, Oxford University Press, 2010, 256 page, $24.95.

Sharon Olds gives a craft talk at Squaw. Photo c by Tracy Hall.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Want to meet a poet? Like say, Kazim Ali, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Evie Shockley or Dean Young?

Or maybe your more into prose, and you’d like to get a close-up look at people like Mark Childress (Crazy in Alabama), Glen David Gould (Carter Beats the Devil), Sands Hall (Catching Heaven), Teresa Jordan (Riding the White Horse Home), ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere) Luis Albert Urrea (The Hummingbird’s Daughter), Diane Johnson (Le Divorce), Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), and former California Poet Laureate Al Young.

Then think about applying to attend one of the conferences held every summer in the Sierra mountains by the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

I’ve attended the Squaw writers workshops three different summers and loved every moment. Mornings are devoted to workshops, afternoons and evenings to readings and very useful panels on craft, choosing an agent, publishing in literary magazines, and the like.

Squaw is a great place to work on your writing skills, pitch your book project to agents and editors and, best of all, talk writing all the day long with other writers. Two of those three summers I came away with wonderful new friends who formed two different writing groups that have given me terrific feedback on my own projects over the years.

The really good thing about Squaw is how darned friendly everybody is, including the writers and presenters. I can remember a workshop with Alice Sebold’s agent, Henry Dunow; waiting in line for coffee with Anne Lamott; pelting a panel of agents with questions, and watching scenes from “I Walk the Line” with live commentary from the screenwriter Gil Denis.

The dates this year:

Poetry Workshop: July 17 to 24, 2010
Writers Workshops: August 7 to 14, 2010 (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Screenwriting Workshop: August 7 to 14, 2010

You have to submit a manuscript and be accepted to attend Squaw. The application deadlines are May 1 and May 10. Get busy.

Sumbul Ali-Karamali, author of "The Muslim Next Door"

Attention San Francisco Bay Area Folks:

The Bay Area premiere of  ”Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think” will be screened at 5 p.m., Saturday, February 20, at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland. For details go to the ICCNC website.  Admission is $15 at the door. Doors open at 4 p.m.

The film is a documentary based on the Gallup Poll of Worldwide Muslim Public Opinion. Executive producers are Alex Kronemer and Michael Wolfe.

This Gallup Poll was a very big project. I’m curious about how this documentary uses the material.

John Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown University and author of  The Future of Islam, will deliver a keynote address.  Also present for discussion will be Hamza van Boom and author Sumbul Ali-Karamali.

Sumbul is a writing buddy of mine from the Religion Newswriters Association. A neat lady and an attorney, her book takes a thoughtful look at Islamic law. If you can’t make the event, do check out her book. Also, she’ll be speaking on Shari’ah Law at the Commonwealth Club public forum in San Francisco on March 11.

My friend Jake is a man in his prime. He does triathlons, reads good books, knows all the best hiking trails, drinks nice wines, and likes nothing more than a good, scrappy conversation.

In other words, Jake has never been anybody’s rickety old grandpa. 

Until recently.

A few months ago, Jake’s daughter gave birth to a baby girl. Jake couldn’t be happier about this delightful new creature in his life.

He wasn’t so sure about his new status as a grandfather, however. It would require him to make a decision, a big one.

What would this child call him?

Jake? Jakey? Jay-Jay?

Anything but Grandpa.

Grandpa - that’s what they call the old guys. And Jake was not an old guy.

I feel his pain. My own father went by Grandpa. My grandfathers were Grandpa Falconer and Grandpa Dick. My mother is Grandma. Old people all.

What’s more, where I come from, Grandpa is not pronounced Grand Pa. It’s Grampa - folksy and countrified, with a short, nasal, deeply midwestern “a.”

GRAMP-uh.

Likewise, at our house Grandma was never Grand Ma, but Gramma - also with a shot of that nasalized “a.”

My Grandma Falconer at age 97 with pearls, up-do and 19th-century pince-nez. c 1973 Ludington studio.

Grampa. Gramma. For me, those names have the ring of my father’s small town, Methodist - Mason County, Michigan - antecedents. No dancing, no drinking, no swearing. Reader’s Digest rather than Portnoy’s Complaint. Pie and percolated coffee rather than cruditees and cabernet - or even a Stroh’s.

In my husband’s cosmopolitan, coastal - San Francisco - family, on the other hand, the Newhall elders were known as Scott and Ruth. Jon’s father didn’t care much for small children. At dinnertime, they were always seated as far as possible from the head of the table. Preferably in the next room.

But once those small children became lovely, supple young women and bright, headstrong young men, they were allowed to approach the table for adult-to-adult conversation with their peers, Scott and Ruth.

My family frowned upon that kind of familiarity. At our house, parents and grandparents were addressed like royalty. Words like Mother, Father, Dad and Mom were honorifics, terms of respect. We’d no more call my parents Dave or Tinka than we’d call the Queen of England Betsy.

Which takes me back to my friend Jake. His first thought was to have the baby simply call him Jake. Or Jakey. Or Jay-Jay. Something cozy, but age-neutral.

After all, no way was he old enough or fusty enough to be anybody’s Gramps or Grandaddy. And if he really were old and rickety, he wouldn’t want it pointed out every time somebody called out his name.

On the Daily Show the other night, Julie Andrews confessed to seven grandchildren. What’s more, she said, she lets her grandchildren call her that most ageifying of endearments - Granny.

Granny Jules, to be exact.

My sophisticated friends Nancy and Steve - she’s a well known artist, he’s a professor at UC-Berkeley - sent us an invitation to their grandson’s second birthday party recently. They signed it, to my astonishment, Nana Nan and Papa Seeda.

Nana Nan? Papa Seeda?

Granny Jules?

How do these people do it? They must own buckets of self-esteem. How else could sophisticated, in-the-mix people like Julie Andrews or Nancy and Steve risk being thought of as - old?

Peter and Christina with their Grandpa and Grandma Falconer. c 1988 B.F. Newhall.

My friend Jake is a thoughtful guy. As I mentioned earlier, he reads good books, urges his friends toward good conversation, and likes to meet his life challenges head-on - with the aid of a nice cabernet if need be.

But maybe Jake, like Nancy and Steve and Granny Jules, was blessed with an abundance of self-esteem after all. (Or was a glass of cabernet involved?) Because somehow my friend Jake finally faced up to the facts.

He may or may not be old, he told himself, but he is a grandfather.

He isn’t this baby’s dad. He’s not her uncle or her big brother. Yes, he loves bicycling, swimming, hiking and scrappy conversation. But he is also this tiny girl’s grandparent.

And grandparents have responsibilities. They are the elders of the family. They provide continuity, stability, security, dignity and maybe even some enlightening dinner table conversation.

It was time, Jake decided, to accept his new responsibilities. And his new title. He’d be what this brand-new little person most needed. He’d be Grampa, with a twang.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

George Leonard at Esalen. c 2009 Esalen Institute.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I’ve thought of George Leonard often over the years. And when I read in the New York Times last month that he had died on January 6 at the age of 86, I thought of him yet again.

George and I knew each other in New York at Look magazine , where we both worked during the 1960s.

That is to say, we were aware of each other at Look - I more aware of George than he of me.

I was a very young editorial secretary – and not a very good one. (My bosses were people like Betty Rollin, Jack Shepherd and Pat Carbine.) He was a Look writer and a star. He was documenting - no, inspiring - the youth and human potential movements that were fermenting in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time.

George went on to write a number of books, including Education and Ecstasy, The Way of Aikido, Mastery and The Ultimate Athlete. He was a long-time influence at the Esalen Institute. And he was as formidable physically as he was intellectually; he took up aikido at mid-life and earned a fifth-degree black belt.

Though he barely knew me, George was kind enough to meet with me when I first moved from New York to San Francisco in 1969. During that conversation, he gave me some advice I’ve kept pasted to the inside of my forehead ever since.

We were talking about story ideas, and I told him I had one I thought was pretty hot, but I didn’t want to reveal it to him. At Look, story ideas were gold, we treated them like state secrets. If we didn’t keep them under wraps, our competition – Life magazine – might get wind of them and scoop us. We hoarded our ideas.

George’s response took me by surprise. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Ideas are not in finite supply. The more you give away, the more you generate. That’s the way the universe works.”

Those aren’t George’s exact words. But they are the way I’ve remembered, interpreted and reinterpreted them over the years.

Following George’s advice has been a useful practice. I’ve learned over time that the more willing I am to help out other writers and share my ideas and (hard-won) expertise with them – the more thoughts, ideas, inspirations and writing tricks (hot ones all!) pop into my mind.

I think of it as the Tao of writing.

Thanks, George. I’m going to keep on thinking about you.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, August 9, 1987

Up in Siskiyou mountain country, in the northwest corner of California, there is a spot known to the Karuk tribe as Kota-Mein.

In the Karuk language, Kota Mein means “center of the world.”

Like their ancestors before them, the Karuk people hike up to sacred spots like Kota-Mein, Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock to talk to the Great Spirit and to receive power.

I have never been to Kota-Mein, but I have been to Bass Lake, Mich.

If I were drawing a map of the world, its center would be at Bass Lake, just where its outlet flows into the great, blue Lake Michigan.

I have lived in California for nearly two decades, but like my forebears - my mother, her mother Toto, her mother Nana, and her mother, Grandma Harlow - I return to Bass Lake every chance I get.

I am drawn there as surely as a Michigan mosquito is drawn to the juicy ankles of anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors after dark in a Michigan summer.

Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock have been compared by their devotees to black holes in space, vortexes, whirlwinds of energy. Those spots on Earth have, it is said, the power to give the worthy pilgrim a vision of transcendence.

Last month, I left my husband behind in the Eastbay with a freezer full of spaghetti sauce and meatloaf.

The children and I boarded a Boeing 767 for a pilgrimage to Michigan. I wanted to show them my secret spots. Peter, 6, and Christina, 3, were enthusiastic.

They donned hats and mosquito netting to pick raspberries in the woods with their grandfather.

They watched the cherries being harvested. They caught a toad and inspected a patch of poison ivy.

Peter and Christina aboard a classic inner tube.

They learned to soothe their mosquito bites by wiping them with spit.

They met their great-aunt Ruth and made friends with a half-dozen second cousins, some of whom were drawn here, as we were, all the way from the West Coast.

They chased minnows in the warm, brown water of the Bass Lake outlet.

They took wet fistfuls of the creamy, miraculously clean Lake Michigan sand and let it drip off the ends of their fingers to make dainty drip castles.

They heard the story of the drip castle party their Uncle David and Aunt Alice once threw on the shores of the Pacific.

My brother and his wife, also a Midwesterner, once invited some California friends to a beach party, promising to initiate them in the intricacies of drip castle building.

They discovered, to their chagrin, that Northern California sand does not drip. The project was a flop.

Christina and Peter drift toward Lake Michigan.

When they grew sweaty, my children waded down the outlet into the Big Lake. They threw their bellies onto the breaking waves and dove for the smooth rocks buried in the sand.

Again and again, they climbed aboard a much-patched inner tube and drifted down the outlet into the Big Lake.

The hours passed.

My mother sat on a beach towel spread on the sand, watching her daughter and grandchildren. “This is life,” she sighed.

Behind her, Lake Michigan’s waves crashed noisily on the beach, just as they had crashed when I was a girl and when she was a girl and when our great-grandmothers were girls.

When I was a seventh-grader, I painted a picture of this beach in art class. Sand, grass and lake blended together in a misty - and I thought - very successful portrait of my beach.

My art teacher was displeased. “It doesn’t look real,” she said. “Too sweet.”

Before we left, I showed Peter and Christina one last secret spot - the view of the Big Lake and outlet from a high sand bluff to the north.

From this bluff, there is nothing to see but beauty. Even the human bathers, many of them grown fat on too much cherry pie and sweet corn, take on a certain grace when seen from up here.

Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

I had my Nikkormat along and, as always, I took a picture of the outlet.

The Siskiyou Indians forbid photographs of their “power sites.” When my pictures returned, I saw that, sure enough, it had happened again.

My magical spot was gone. What I held in my hands was a 3 ½ by 5-inch glossy of - just another beautiful beach.

I’ll have to go back and try it again.

© 1987  The Oakland Tribune

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

No doubt about it. After opening up the short, sweet and succint In Praise of Doubt by sociologists Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, I’m feeling really good about my doubter status.

Read more at www.stopasiancarp.com 

I know way too many people whose impression of Christianity has been shaped either by media accounts of the (noisy) Religious Right or by books written the (equally noisy) New Atheists.

As the saying goes, where religion in America is concerned, the loudest noise is coming from the shallow end of the swimming pool.

So many of my otherwise well-informed friends seem to be  unaware of the vibrant progressive movement that is alive and well today in America’s Protestant churches.

Open James A. Forbes Jr.’s new book, Whose Gospel? for a brisk tour of the progressive Christian take on sexuality, gender, race, justice and war.

Whose Gospel? A Concise Guide to Progressive Protestantism, by James A. Forbes Jr., with a forward by Bill Moyers, The New Press, 2010, 176 pages, $23.95.