Alberto's been in the hospital down in Medellin.  70+ years of breathing - and too much of it through a Marlboro filter.  His lungs can't cope with the mountain air.  He fell to pneumonia.  His sisters now have taken him home, but Monica and her sisters are mobilizing to get the medical bills paid and get their father out and back to the US or Costa Rica where his health insurance can cover these things up front.  (Eventually the US insurance pays, but meanwhile cash has to be gathered and spent.)  As the hospital bills' echo, however briefly, through the extended family's bank accounts, the migratory man may be losing the Colombian option in his itinerary.

We'd invite him here, but he's probably right that nothing would kill him more quickly than the New England winter.  He'll be bound for Southern California.

Nico . . . .

Chloe's been holding her grudge about the kitten.  

We've been putting some catfood outside on the step for her on the days she doesn't come inside.   But more than once we've failed to bring it in at dusk, and a skunk has grown proprietary of the food dish, now.  Tonight Monica and the boys had to come round to the front door because the skunk couldn't be bothered to move off away from the side door.  Monica wondered what it must be like to be a small creature so utterly fearless among the many larger beasts.

Photo by A.B.

Pine Point school was closed today for parent-teacher conferences.  Porter's friend Aithan and his sister Katia were over for the day.  I was working in the upstairs office, but even over a long conference-call, I couldn't help but hear the louder tussles outside in the back yard.  Four strong-willed and stubborn kids, two fifth-graders a third-grader and a second-grader -- squealing happily, hollering in outrage, screaming in mock terror, raging about some violation of the rule or spirit of the "leaf monster" game.  Cracking out in laughter at another story of Aithan's.  

I remember that everything important I learned about politics and people I learned among the kids of my neighborhood in what is now called (somewhat sadly) unstructured play.

They had a great time and are lobbying hard for a sleep-over.

There's been a breathing space in the research-scape, but it's passing.  

At midsummer we had finished 50 interviews on a project about framing national security issues in progressive terms.  By the time that was written up we were doing elicitations in New York about "disconnected youth" -- talking to both regular New Yorkers and policy-makers.   And ramping up into a set of 20 interviews in Ohio about people's conceptions of "the arts."  While I was looking after the elicitations projects, Joe and Axel were also focusing on smaller consultations with Demos and the Union of Concerned Scientists and some internet surveys for the Ford Foundation on government accountability.  

As the reports have passed over to clients there's been a lull, at least for the Research Director.  Time to do some overdue maintenance on the subjects' panel.  And go sniffing around the academic job market to see if there's anything there to tempt me to jump back.

But now we are wading hip-deep into some fairly complex research about communicating on global warming.  So, break's over . . . .

Betty, our Unitarian-Universalist pastor called me up the other Wednesday to ask if I'd be willing to speak for a few minutes that Sunday about my own "spiritual journey."  I was a little flattered that she felt she could ask me on such short notice.  I said I would and this is what I shared:

"I grew up in the Unitarian church.  My parents had both turned away from what they'd seen as the small-minded, rural churches that they'd grown up with.  But when they had children they got involved in the church in Lancaster, PA.  So I came up through the religious education program there and came out a fairly comfortable agnostic.

I had no real interest in what I saw as the big religious questions about the existence of God or whether there was an afterlife.  I felt no great need for a divine underpinning for my moral compass or the meaning of life.  I had internalized the central Christian tenet of my parents -- that you shouldn't put your own interests above the interests of others.  If you could live that, then you were doing good.

So I went on with going to school, working, traveling, falling in love with girls and all that.

When I was about 25 I was living for a while in Eugene, Oregon.  I was hanging around with pagans.  It was a very active and politicized scene.  And I knew some guys -- or rather I didn't know them very well, but our girlfriends were all getting together to do pagan witchcraft.  A lot of it excluded us males, and we got envious.  So we decided to do a men's sweat.

Someone knew someone who had a sweatlodge out in the woods and one evening we gathered there for the sweat.  You sit there and you sweat -- and then you jump in cold water and hoot and yowl and holler at the moon and then you sweat some more.  And the sweat pushes out of you; it pushes the dirt out of your pores; it pushes the toxins out of your body; it pushes the clutter out of your mind.  And someone had brought drums, so we sat there drumming and chanting and singing Simon and Garfunkel songs.  And someone else had brought some bowls of clay - gray, brown, white, black - and we painted each others faces until they were bestial masks.  And we sat around and gave each other names, guessing what each person's totemic name would be if they had one.  And it was fun.

That evening I looked around at these 8 or 9 guys and I realized that I loved them.  I just loved them.  And I knew for a certainty that they loved me, too.  This was shocking.  For mid-twentyish heterosexual males to just come to love one another like that -- well, I didn't even know that was possible.

I recognized that Christian tenet that I'd understood at an intellectual level: don't put your own interests above others.  Well this love was exactly that and it was something un-utterably beyond that.

And I realized that the spiritual practices and technologies that we were playing with: sweating, drumming, singing, masking, naming -- which humans have been doing for a hundred thousand years at least -- had an incredible power to open us up -- emotionally, psychologically, socially to connections and potentials that we didn't even know existed and which we couldn't achieve on our own.  I was amazed and I'm still amazed.

Now what I'm describing of course is an epiphany.  It's not something I live every day or would want to live every day.  But what I took from that experience and from others like it is the importance of what we have here -- where there is music and singing and sharing and candles are lit.  I carry the knowledge that spiritual practice does have this power to take us beyond what we can see and be on our own."

Photos by A.B.

Esperanza sent us a picture she took a few weeks ago as we were stepping out to a friend's wedding.

Photo by E.Gallego

With everyone from the Kenyans and the Indonesians to the Irish claiming Obama as one of their own, I'd like to point that we anthropologists also count him as a member of our tribe.  He's the first president to be raised by an anthropologist.  And it shows . . . .

Wow.

Americans showed that they could judge a man not by color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

It bears repeating: 

Wow.

While she was visiting Anna took the boys to Manfredi's farm to get pumpkins to carve for jack o' lanterns 

but they came back with a black kitten instead.  

Our gray cat Chloe hates it with a hissing hatred and has moved out.

Photos by A.B.

Happy Halloween . . .

Photo by Porter B.

On Sunday the sun was warm and brilliant.  I was sitting at a picnic table with a man with whom I'd just filmed an interview.  He was reminiscing about interviewing he'd done himself years ago as a merchant marine.  He'd been set the task of tracking down and recording conversations with men who'd been part of a submarine surveillance program during WWII.  

"The military had commissioned sailing yachts all along the coast.  Each guy would sail around in a 15 square mile box, climbing up the mast to look for sign of U-boats.  And they saw them, too."

Of course decades later the men were long scattered, but he'd manage to track down one, who'd know of a couple of others, and those would know of one or two more.  

He said, "My favorite part was when I'd say, 'Well, Joe Bates said that . . . '  And the old man would say, 'You talked to Joe Bates!?  He's still kickin'?  You don't have his phone number do you?'  And, I'd say, 'Yup, I've got it right here.'  And these guys were just so tickled to find out what the others were up to and get back in touch with them after so many years."

Tonight was the cub scouts Halloween party.  Porter looked like a mysterious traveler in my old gray wool Swiss army cape with its high-peaked hood pulled over his eyes.  Nico concocted something out of long purple gown, some pirate gear and a beat up cowboy hat.  Earlier he'd said something about ductaping a question mark on himself, but seemed to let that drop.

I brought along my recording equipment, since I needed to tape some interviews for the Demos project.  I'd been doing man in the street taping in Mystic during the summer, and last month Joe and I spent a day button-holing the lunch crowd in downtown Providence, but it's October now and getting cold for catching foot traffic.  So with Monica assisting I dragooned some of the cub scout parents into taking part.  

I'm sure they're still unclear on what it is I do for a living.

We were invited to a dinner held for the French teachers that are visiting with students on an exchange program.  So for the first time we left Nico and Porter home by themselves -- to put themselves to bed even.  (The neighbors had been clued in.)

And I ate well and a little too much, and drank red wine and talked about art with a music teacher who looked as though he might daren't eat a peach, but who told me of the time he spent bringing music to a women's prison.

Mom and Dad came for the weekend, after closing up the cottage in the Poconos for the winter.

I hiked with Dad down through the back woods -- out over the railroad tracks and down to the river.  He's become obsessed with native grass prairies and so we lingered in the glades and clearings.  He'd stroke the fall-brittle stems and rattle off the names: little bluestem, sweet fern, switchgrass, deer tongue,  sweet everlasting, false indigo.  He was struck by how few invasives there were.  These are like the prairies that he works to establish down in Pennsylvania.  The seeds of the deer tongue were nutty, like little sesame seeds.  

We tasted apples from three trees near where the Green family cemetery sits.  The first tree was drooping with smallish apples that were delicious; the second tree's apples had a bitter skin but sour-sweet flesh; and the third and largest was heavy with large green apples, astringent and inedible.  Maybe I'll try them again after the frost.

We found a freshly dead white-footed mouse upon the trail under the pitch pines.  It had no head, like a little macabre Halloween decoration.  Dad said that it's a telltale for great horned owls.  When they're not hungry, they'll kill prey and eat only the brains.  Only five minutes before we had startled an owl from a perch and it had flown off above a bog.  Probably it was the same gourmand. 

While Monica was off in New York with her mother and sister, the boys and I were camping with the scouts.  

A ropes course meant a climb upwards 35 feet into the trees.

And a nerve-fraying walk 

upon an uneven log

too far above

the pine-needly floor.

And then a rope descent

as you slip down

like a spider playing out

its silken tether.

Photos by A.B.

A dying,

and snail

encrusted

crab

suspires

on the sand.

I have 

flipped it on its back,

and shroud-white gulls 

with yellow hatchet beaks won't fail to notice.

Photos by A.B.

Family is visiting from California.

While Esperanza and Lila slowly shopped in soon-to-be-hibernating Watch Hill, Anna and I walked out Nappatree spit.

Monarch butterflies sip the goldenrod on their way to Mexico.

The stripers were schooling and the water was turbid with cormorants.

Photos by A.B.

It was the 2nd grade social at a corn maze in Preston.  So, filled up with pizza and ginger brew, they ran around in the labyrinth looking for the hidden stamp stations.  

One of Porter's teachers told me a story from the day before.  (A few nights ago at the house Porter had drawn an illustration for a book they'd been reading about a family of field mice.  He got out the pastels and drew a life-sized picture of a fearsome great-horned owl.)  Well, Mrs. Long told me how she had hung it up in the classroom.  Then this past week some bird rehabilitation people had come to the class to do a presentation.  They had a sawhet owl, and a red-tailed hawk and they had a great horned owl.   And the great horned owl stared at Porter's picture, mesmerized, and began hooting and humming at it, just as though it were real and it was trying to get it into conversation.  

A final irony was that Porter's illustration for the story wasn't meant to be of a real owl, but instead portrayed a realistic decoy that had fooled the story's main villain, Mr Ocax, the great-horned owl.