June 25, 2021, Carson City- Even in mild heat, there is no finer place for children to meet and play together than in a park space, where they can be free to explore and exercise, while at the same time be monitored by parents or loved ones who are (hopefully) not distracted by the other duties and vagaries of adult life. There is, most definitely, no responsibility more imperative than the safe and nurturing rearing of a human being to own adulthood. So, we of adult age find ourselves accompanying our young ones to parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, nature preserves and each other’s houses, that humanity may long continue to thrive.
Much of this vigilance still falls to mothers and grandmothers. There are also men, like yours truly, who see every child as worthy of safeguarding-and are thus constantly mindful of where those immediately in our care are and what they are doing. The public space where I went with friends, yesterday, I will call Three-Story Park, the name by which the kids themselves identify the space, owing to its three-decker climbing tower, is almost ideal. The odious wood chips of the 80s and 90s have been replaced by a soft, rubbery padding. Metal slides have been replaced by large plastic ones and monkey bars, by mini-climbing walls. There is no place in the park that is not subject to line-of-sight vigilance, though my friend told her grand daughter, for good measure, to be within an area where I could reach her, in fifteen seconds or less. Thus, we planted ourselves in a shaded spot, proximate to the aforementioned tower and its accompanying slides and climbing wall.
This is the reality of this nation, and indeed this planet, in a world where too many adults view children as extensions of themselves, or who wish for a child to reflect even the most arcane attitudes and fancies of their elders. It is from the worst of such people, that I remain vigilant, on behalf of children-and teenagers, for that matter.
June 20, 2021- My Dad will have been gone 37 years, this Tuesday. His smiling countenance beams down at me from two locations, in the living room: One with my Mom, when they were in their early forties; the other, in his early fifties sitting in his office at the General Electric Riverworks plant, in Lynn,
Mom & Dad, dressed to rule.
Ferdinand Joseph Boivin had the gift of gab, loved to make the rounds and visit others, and was always holding court on the front porch, before dinner-with various men showing up to discuss what was troubling them, and either my brother Dave or I dispatched to grab some beer for Dad and the visitor. He always had a corny joke or two at the ready, would sing little love songs to our mother and would hold her close, in the kitchen, when he first came home from work-or from anywhere where he had gone on an errand. They’d kiss, as if no one else was around, while perfectly mindful that one or more of us was close by. The most important thing was that we knew how secure our home was-even in lean times, which came often.
Dad worked graveyard shifts, when I was very small, so our bonding was somewhat interrupted-and we both had to make a conscious effort at remaining close. He never took sides, in our sibling squabbles, but his watchwords were “Now lookit! Yiz need to look at each other from the other’s perspective.” His silent look of disapproval could speak volumes. He only had one hard-and-fast rule for us: “Never refer to me as your Old Man.” I know I disappointed him, by not going into the business field, but there was always my resentment of Riverworks’ management, for how he was treated-cast into a middle management role, seldom given credit and often receiving blame, if others caused missteps. “Freddy” was a trade school graduate, and a creature of habit, who did not particularly get along, at least at first, with fresh-out-of-university MBAs and Engineers, who were elbowing their way to the top. A man about ten years my senior, Peter St. Clair, befriended Dad and served as a bridge figure between him and the new up-and -comers. I hold Pete in the highest regard, for everything he did to help my father.
Dad slowed down, in his last four or five years, cutting back on his smoking, whilst enjoying a round or two of Scotch every evening. He and Mom flew out to San Diego, when Penny and I were married, in 1982. They loved their visit to southern California, taking several days after the nuptials to enjoy San Diego and Orange County-even going up to Knotts Berry Farm-as close as they got to Los Angeles. They stopped in Denver, on the way back and checked out the U.S. Mint there. A few years later (1985), they visited us in Arizona, being awestruck by the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and the vastness of the Navajo Nation-as well as being charmed by the Dineh and Hopi people. A year later, Dad made his flight to his Lord. Mom would return to the West, with her younger brother and sister-in-law, in 1990, to make the one trip that she and Dad had wanted, but never got to do together: Yellowstone, San Francisco and southeast Alaska.
The years since have seen me do my level best to raise a son into manhood. The times I struggled, or stumbled, were always covered well by Aram’s maternal grandfather and by Dave-sometimes in their visits or sometimes over the phone. Father-in-law Norm told me, though, “If I didn’t think you were doing well by Aram, overall, I’d have taken him from you.” That gave me a lot of confidence, going forward.
Being a father, these days, is a matter of checking in with Aram and Yunhee, now and then-just to see how things are going-or to offer counsel, when they are in a quandary about some curveball that life has served. This will long continue, into the years when starting a family, buying a house and/or making career moves present themselves. What I mainly need to do now, for them and for the rest of my family, is maintain self-care and be healthy, for whatever arises.
God knows, I had the full measure of a role model.
June 17, 2021- In the autumn of 1987, President Chun Doo-hwan, the autocratic leader of South Korea, came out with an amazing edict: Parliament was to investigate, and curb, the use of toxic chemicals in women’s cosmetics. The members of Parliament were appalled that this was going on, and swiftly complied with the President’s directive-not something that regularly happened, in the slowly changing South Korea of the late 1980s.
As newly arrived temporary residents of Jeju, where we were involved in teaching English to university students, Penny and I were also appalled at the toxicity of such a basic product, and gratified that the macho President had placed priority on women’s health. She was able to get non-toxic cosmetics, fairly regularly, from late 1987, onward.
Penny preferred a natural line of cosmetics, from a company called The Body Shop, which she regularly used, after we returned to Arizona, in 1992. She had enough of a struggle, with the hand she was dealt by heredity, without buying into the culture of toxicity.
It was with a considerable sense of outrage, then, that I read today’s report from Notre Dame University, which “found that 56% of foundations and eye products and 47% of mascaras contained high levels of fluorine- an indicator of PFAS, so-called ‘Forever chemicals’ that are used in nonstick frying pans, rugs and countless other consumer products.” (Matthew Daly, Associated Press, June 17, 2021, taken from the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, June 15, 2021) . The study also reports that the highest PFAS levels were found in waterproof mascara (82%) and in long-lasting lipstick (62%). Of all the products tested, only ONE listed PFAS as an ingredient on the label.
Fortunately, both the EPA and Congress are moving on this issue, albeit belatedly. One Congresswoman remarked that she could not identify PFAS, in her own makeup, as the products were not properly labeled. That is likely true, across the board.
Here is the wider issue: Besides poisoning and endangering the lives of so many who are near and dear to us, Dr. Graham Peaslee, the principal researcher into this issue, at Notre Dame, states that “PFAS is a persistent chemical. When it gets into the bloodstream, it stays there and accumulates.” This has implications for babies in the womb or who are being breastfed. Then, there is the environmental contamination, which surely results from manufacturing and disposal. What effects does PFAS have on our water and soil?
A wake-up call for the cosmetics industry? That is the understatement of the year!
June 7, 2021- I read an article, in the current issue of National Geographic Magazine, about a sizable number of Old Colony Mennonites, settling in rural, forested areas of Mexico, and clearing huge swaths of the forest, so that they could plant Transgenic (GMO) soybeans. The process includes aerial spraying of glysophate-a poison that has been shown to lead to metastasized cancer, when ingested through air and water. There has been conflict with the indigenous people of the region, the Maya, who have used the land for small farming and to raise bees. The Mayan bees have been dying off, since aerial spraying of glysophate began. The Mennonites say they have bees that can thrive, despite the presence of glysophate.
I have friends in Pennsylvania who are Mennonites, and who are committed to keeping the Earth both productive and in a relatively pristine condition. They are horticulturists, and much of their produce is raised in greenhouses. I am not aware of any widespread use of glysophate in their operation. So, the NGS account set me to thinking: Why are the settlers in Mexico so adamant about their mission?
People being creatures of habit, with deeply engrained genetic memory, it helps to trace the residential patterns of a group. The Old Colony Mennonites came from grasslands of central Europe and Russia, via Germany, and settled in the prairies of central and western Canada. They are accustomed to large farming operations, worked by large families. They are also given to hard work, relying on Biblical Scripture for guidance and practicing prudent business. A treeless prairie is turned into productive cropland, with relative ease, compared with the forest-which, whether tropical or temperate, is alien land. Thus, with no regard for any value the rainforest may have, the trees are cleared. The land becomes grassland, or cropland.
This has been repeated since the first nomads emerged from the steppes of Central Asia, millennia ago. The treeless land of their origins formed both their mindset, as to the status of the environment and as to the approach that should be taken towards any environment that differed from their native grasslands. Forests were meant to be cleared; deserts were meant to be irrigated; mountains were meant to be either terraced or laid low. The Old Colony Mennonites are no different, in that respect, from all who migrated before them.
That said, there remains the one thing that could lay both them, and their neighbours, low: The poison, that their interpretation of Scripture says is essential to maintaining their way of life. Glysophate has been shown to lead to several cancers, most commonly Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. While only a longitudinal study, of the people of Campeche and Tabasco, will likely convince the leadership of Old Colony that this practice is dangerous, such intransigence is going to cause harm to the very people for whom the leaders say they are engaging in large-scale farming: Their children and grandchildren. Even if the leaders can claim to be unconcerned about their neighbours, an unlikely scenario, for them to be blithely placing crop yield, profit and Manifest Destiny over their own families’ lives, proceeds from sublime to ridiculous.
We can debate the merits and pitfalls of transgenic farming for days on end, but the use of pesticides that are deadly to all life should no longer be up for discussion: Mexico, along with most other civilized nations, has banned the use of glysophate. Predisposition to dominance aside, it is time for the Old Colony members to stop its use, and seek to use methods of crop protection that are not lethal to humans, or bees.
June 5, 2021- The man in full sat in a lawn chair, next to his wife of 46 years, and enjoyed being surrounded by their seven children and twenty-three grandchildren. This was the type of family gathering to which he, and the other forty-seven of his maternal grandmother’s “babies”, had grown accustomed.
He grew into manhood by becoming a diver in the United States Army, which included service in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. One sultry afternoon, he paid a call on one of his cousins, who was also stationed in Vietnam, showing that there were still means for soldiers and family members to find one another-even in a war zone.
In civilian life, he distinguished himself by earning his degree in Business Administration, and using it in a variety of ways- serving as a civic administrator in six communities, across his adopted state of Maine and building his own contracting business, all of which kept home and hearth in good stead, as his seven children grew into adulthood.
He was the second born of seven, and kept his siblings close, especially in the dark days of 2006, when four family members passed on, within months of one another. He kept some of his cousins close, too, even as our lives diverged. When I was tossed out of my apartment, under what turned out to be false pretenses, in February, 1977, I had a place to sleep for a few days, until the next more permanent residence presented itself. He and his wife kept my excess possessions for a year, when it was time for me to move, of a sudden, from Maine to Arizona.
That was who John Edward Madigan, Jr., one of my closest paternal cousins, was. He built a solid family, alongside his darling Mary; built much of the house in which they raised their family; built trust and confidence, even among those with whom he disagreed, socially and politically; built a successful contracting business, from scratch. He even began to build a place for himself in the Maine State Legislature, before cancer and COVID-19 muddied the political waters.
The greatest thing John built, though, was his heart. He seldom, if ever, missed a child’s or grandchild’s special event, whether religious, athletic, scholastic or any of the once-in-a-lifetime keepsakes. There is no life he touched that wasn’t the better for his having been there. When, on June 2, 2021, he went to be with his Lord, and to rejoin his parents, brother, sister-in-law and nephew who preceded him in death, John would surely have entered their presence with his shining eyes and mischievous grin.
May 8, 2021- I received a supportive message from the principal of the school to which I referred yesterday. There will be some discomfort, for some people, but the children will be safe. In a few short days, my mother’s life will become more secure. I will be on the road, towards my childhood home, and will help with whatever needs to be done, for at least a week. This was not expected-at least not this month, but life does not compromise with want-only with need.
I received word, this evening, that her next door neighbour of 66 years is dying. He is in hospice- a man’s man, reduced to lying in a single bed. I can only hope that his extended family, his cousins and closest friends, can be with him. If he is still with us, when I get to Massachusetts, I will pay a visit and thank him for being a faithful friend of our family, like his parents were.
The next few days will see preparatory activities- a Mother’s Day call, a dental check-up, a car servicing, laundry and packing. There will be time, tomorrow, for a visit to a magical place: Montezuma Well. My Home Base will be secure, while I’m gone, and there will much to be done, when I get back .
School, though, will wait until Fall, or maybe Winter, as I honour marching orders, sent from a place unseen.
May 7, 2021- A young girl told me of the wide-ranging use of e-cigarettes, after a classmate accused her of using the substance, this afternoon, in what was likely my final assignment of this academic year. She said she had not used the substance, as her parents were always on her about the dangers to children and adolescents. I underscored that danger, stating what I know to be the risks for people under the age of 18, let alone the overall risk of e-cigarette use, or vaping, to anyone.
A short time later, someone in whom I am beginning to see the face of evil castigated me, in front of the children- very likely in the hope of discrediting my authority with them. It didn’t work, but did confuse some of the boys in the class. There is something very wrong going on, in the school where I worked today. There is little evidence that people at school are providing the students with e-cigarettes, or any other substances, yet adults, who have no obvious reason to make me uncomfortable working there, have made it clear that my talking with the students is interrupting their own flow of communication-and that it’s a good thing I’m gone for the rest of the semester.
I have learned over the years, in other venues, that where there is smoke, there’s fire-no pun intended. Through channels, justice will be done in this case, as well, whether the person I suspect is involved, or the threat to the students is coming from elsewhere.
May 6, 2021- The six and seven-year-olds watched, from the safety of the playground and grassy field, as a thick black cloud rose, five miles away. The four of us adults watching the group of fifty fielded lots of questions and assuaged the concerns of those watching, that the fire would be upon us, “any minute now.”
It had been a most productive day, from working on mixed addition and subtraction to working on a Mother’s Day packet. The children worked well in pairs and in groups of four, with a bit of “He said I have no friends” and “She scribbled on my Mother’s Day heart”. Some things never change, and are just handled with care.
I stood with a thoughtful little man and explained how the smoke would not affect us, while he continued to express concern about the chance it could zip across five miles of houses and fields. I assured him the fire department was on the job, and as the smoke drifted eastward, well away from us, we all happily watched as the thick black cloud diminished-then disappeared altogether.
It was a bad day for a junkyard owner, but a good day for some little ones to keep faith in their elders, and in their First Responders.
May 4, 2021- I spent the day with a group of people who ask nothing of me, other than that I help them learn, in as clear a manner as I can muster. They only want respect. They don’t pester me for money. They don’t demand political fealty. They don’t seek to blame others for their personal blunders. When wrongly accused, they speak up-honestly and, again, respectfully. They are a group of fourth-graders, with whom I have spent a fair amount of time, this academic year. When I arrived, a minute late, due to the luck of the draw with red lights, I was greeted with cheers, and a productive day with sentence building, graphing and the seven continents, ensued. These are not quiet, complacent people. They learn in small groups, embrace knowledge with relish and hold the teacher accountable for anything that is not presented clearly at first blush. Again, they do so in an atmosphere of mutual respect. They are not children of privilege-most families live rather simply and the children know Medicaid, recycled clothing and free/reduced-fee school meals, all too well. I have two other groups of people, who ask nothing of me except respect and learning assistance, with whom to meet, before heading back to the family among whom I grew up and learned what matters most in life. No begging hands, no loud political rants, no whining about being cheated- just showing respect and being respected.
April 30, 2021- The small girl spoke with a voice that was quiet, but full of thunder: “Don’t!”. Few people in my life, up to now, have shown the quiet determination to stand their ground and speak truth to power, at such a young age. She was not only speaking to me, but to several of her classmates, making it clear that the revelation she had just made about herself was the outcome of measured, long-considered self-evaluation.
For my part, everything within me said: “Abide this”. I had responded to her sharing with a standard concern, one that she had obviously heard several times before. The same concern came out of the mouths of her classmates. The notion of prolonged innocence is pretty well-embedded in our psyches.
Times, though, are bringing about a different, much earlier maturity-one that actually hearkens back to a pre-industrial past, while at the same time pointing to the evolving future of the human race. There is emerging a period of time, in early adolescence, when a person is examining feelings as to who attracts them, what it might mean for the short term, whilst recognizing that those feelings may very well change, over time. The person is definite about one thing: This is their life, and the number of people who get to weigh in on it is very much limited. Everyone else will be told, in terms that are, at least initially, respectful, but no less forceful.
I was in the presence of an indigo, someone fairly born with a sense of mission, a clarity of purpose. She is no less mirthful, spunky and mischievous than others her age, but in the quiet times when she ponders life, there is little confusion. All an indigo person needs from others is a respectfully listening ear and acknowledgement of the better angels of their nature. In turn, each of us gets to summon the better angels of our own nature. The appreciation of a child as an evolving, complete human being has never been more critical. We remain in good hands.
A Sagittarian Seeker 