Encrypted messages. Ciphers. Codes. Intelligence. Artificial intelligence. Imitation Games.

I have never associated the word decipher with the word cipher. I didn’t know ciphers existed. I’ve never used a matrix to decode an encrypted message, either, but I tried it after watching The Imitation Game–a movie about Alan Turing and the quest to crack the codes of Nazi Germany’s infamous Enigma machines.

I first learned about German Enigma machines at the Museum of World War II Boston, about six years ago. In spite of several visits to the museum, the mechanics of how the machines worked remained to me–how else can I say it–an enigma. I hoped watching The Imitation Game would help me understand the machines better and bring to life the drama and the history surrounding their legendary use in World War II.

German Enigma machines look like a blend of typewriter, adding machine, and Lite-Brite toy. They were used by Nazi Germany to send encrypted war messages and plans for attacks. The Nazis were convinced, beyond any doubts, that their secret messages could never be decoded by the enemy. If you study the Enigma machine and how it works, and/or watch The Imitation Game, you will gain fresh appreciation for the serendipitous plus sides of human error.

At the Museum of World War II Boston, a special exhibition of German Enigma code machines is on display now through May 1st. The museum is private and visits are by appointment only. The first time I went, it was Halloween and a relentless haunting commenced. Not only are there official documents and objects on display which were penned and/or owned by the most famous good guys and bad guys of World War II, but there is also a heart-numbing collection of the belongings, personal effects, and weapons of anonymous soldiers, resistance fighters, spies, prisoners of war, and other innocent citizens and victims. The museum is a hands-on experience. It is not politically correct or government funded or government controlled. The collection of propaganda is frightening on any day of the year–and is arguably one of the most important exhibits any contemporary kid should see. The Big Brothers of the world are continually trying to get inside our heads and control how we think. The stealth science of propaganda has been utilized as an effective weapon of war for a long time.

The museum, when I first went, was a bit off the radar. It didn’t cost anything to go and when we went, we had the place to ourselves. As the years have moved on, the museum is becoming more well known. Now, there’s a $25.00 fee and the hands-on aspect has been reduced. But it’s still an unusual and unique excursion into one man’s private vault and life-long obsession, offering the visitor different perspectives on the stories of history.

*****

ENIGMA: A person or thing that is puzzling, ambiguous, or inexplicable. A perplexing speech or text; a riddle. [Latin aenigma, Greek ainigma, ainissesthai, ainig-, to speak allusively, in riddles, ainos, fable.]

There’s a scene in The Imitation Game, when the main character, Alan Turing, publishes a puzzle in the London Daily Telegraph attached with a challenge for the general population: Anyone who can solve the puzzle within twelve minutes, might be blessed with the kind of speedy brain power Turing and his team are looking for. It’s wartime in Great Britain and the government is desperate to crack the German Enigma codes–and win the war.

*****

I like puzzles–even though the solutions, if they come to me, arrive at the speed of light traveling through a brick wall. I looked up the puzzle from The Imitation Game on the Internet and discovered what I already suspected– that I would have never made it as a candidate for the British Government’s Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

I don’t have a mathematical mind and, furthermore, I’m not a quick study. I notice, though, that this doesn’t stop me from designing gardens utilizing geometry, ratios, and probability. Nor does it stop me from puzzling out schematics for painted pictures and patterns on the walls, doors, and ceilings throughout my house. And, recently, one of my girlfriends, who is a mathematics professor at Holy Cross College, turned me on to a new pattern-recognition game called Set. I start my day with The Daily Set puzzle on the Internet, or the daily KenKen puzzle in the New York Times. (Hard copy, delivered to my driveway, perused, puzzles attempted, the whole business recycled–through my brain every week and through the trash every couple of weeks and sometimes into art projects.)

I learned to play KenKen puzzles a few years ago when I was visiting my daughter at boarding school. Her math teacher demonstrated how the puzzle worked and teamed parents against students to see who could solve the puzzles the fastest. There were parents embarrassed about being wrong who feigned indifference, there were brilliant parents who stood with their hands in their pockets copping bored expressions while casually rattling off answers, and there were parents like me–curious newbies, delighted to discover a new pastime for those moments during our days when you need a break from whatever it is you do, but you can’t just do nothing, so you do a fun puzzle. 

I’ve become a little bit faster at solving the KenKen puzzles, but I can still hear the click, click, clicks of my brain as it works. I haven’t achieved the level of humming along with my puzzle-solving skills and will never have to worry about being called upon to withstand the pressure to crack secret codes quickly in order to save lives and end wars.

Even if you aren’t good at puzzles, I recommend starting the day with them. They come in varying configurations of colors, shapes, numbers, and fun. Best of all, when I solve a puzzle, the day begins with a little victory. It beats checking email or social media first thing–either of which can be booby trapped with problems–both of which (email and social media) came to us in the age of modern computing, which came to us through the work of several mathematical minds, including Alan Turing’s, at work cracking secret codes used during wartime. (Fun fact–the Brits got a head start on their code breaking work at Bletchley Park, from Poland. Land of my father’s forebears.)

*****

Alan Turing and the Allies, as they say in The Imitation Game, were at war with the clock. The German Enigma machines, which could combine codes into 159 million, million, million different configurations, were used to change codings every day and the encrypted messages needed to be decoded within minutes, every day. These war efforts, on both sides, required multi-faceted cleverness and a lot of resources. This is what confounds me about war: The capacity for human beings to expend so many resources and so much human devotion to the work of having a war. This misguided complexity–this rounding up of resources–this romance of heroism–this coming together of one group of minds, in order to baffle another group of minds, or seduce other minds, or brainwash other minds–is all dependent on annihilating Earth’s environment and killing or destroying the most beautiful minds of all.

The most beautiful minds are those of the innocent peace lovers.

*****

A lot of themes run through The Imitation Game and if you see it with someone else, there’s plenty to talk about. The film reduces one man’s complicated life and complicated world to the part-fact, mostly-fiction, drama of entertainment. It’s only a movie. Nevertheless, absurd ironies of heroism, propaganda, espionage, ignorance, brilliance, prejudice, and all the other maddening aspects of war and peace, sift through the scenes of the film as if the dust of every war–ever fought–keeps floating back down upon us, keeps being breathed back into our capacious lungs, and keeps being set free to gather into tornadoes and hurricanes all over again. We are never done with it.

What mother ever forgets the day her son and daughter first settled in to watch the film Life is Beautiful? How the children, afterwards, became unmoored? How they felt a newfound heartache pull a veil of sinister fear over their world? How it caused them to grow as old as time? “Momma,” the children said, tears pouring forth. “Was the Holocaust really true?“

I had to answer. Yes. And didn’t want anymore questions. Especially this one: “Why?”

Any mother, raising her children in lands of milk and honey, never takes for granted being able to teach them about the horrors of humanity through the art that is produced because of it.

I took them–my own children–and still take them, to war memorials, war museums, war cemeteries, war battle sites. We read war stories. We did it because they have to learn to study history. They have to learn to see it from different perspectives. They have to learn to think for themselves. They have to know it’s true and it keeps being true.

They have to learn to be grateful for their charmed lives, and understand that all lives lost through war and other forms of violence, were at one time, just as charmed.

*****

How heroic it was, to crack the German Enigma codes and win the war and advance the sciences of artificial intelligence and the building of modern computers. Every war brings about great leaps in technology and modernization.

Yet we can’t seem to crack the codes or ciphers that have encrypted human nature with the desire to wage wars of all kinds against each other. Discrimination. Humiliation. Persecution. Torture. Murder.

At the Museum of World War II Boston, there is a copy of a letter Otto Frank, (Anne Frank’s father), wrote to friends after the war. He was liberated from the German concentration camps only to discover that his wife and two daughters had not survived. I copied the letter into my journal on a day when I brought my daughter and my niece to tour the museum:

“25 VIII 45. Dear Paul and Daisy, I beg you to excuse my answering so late to your lovely letters. I knew you were informed by Robert of all that happened and I am convinced that you share the great loss I had to undergo. No use enlarging upon it, we all have to bear our fate. I try hard to stay firm. We all grow old. I hardly can imagine you being 70 Paul, and I am so glad that you feel well as in old times. How I would have liked to bring the girls, to whom I talked about you frequently, even of Daisy’s lovely complexion.”

“Of course, the entire household was taken away by the Germans. I still have a small amount of money, so I am not in need, as I don’t want much. “

Much affectionately yours, Otto

*****

At the end of The Imitation Game we discover that not even Alan Turing, a hero on the side of the victors, was safe from the unbreakable codes of depraved human nature. He, too, became a victim of persecution. Brilliant minds, under the auspices of a grand system of laws, convicted him for a crime that didn’t even exist and never has existed. He was sentenced, by his own government, to endure irrational and unreasonable forms of punishment.

*****

I returned home from seeing The Imitation Game and found my Museum of World War II Boston newsletter in the pile of mail. Not only had the newsletter arrived on the same day I saw the movie, but I had also learned, via the movie, the derivation of the newsletter’s title: Action This Day:  Alan Turing and his team of code breakers had appealed to Churchill during the war, in a confidential memo, to be given more resources for their work at Bletchley Park. Churchill responded with a memo, stamped with the words: ACTION THIS DAY: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.”

*****

ACTION THIS DAY: Remember to keep studying history and sorting through resources available and accessible about history. It might seem like a depressing thing–to study war–and it is. Visiting the sites of battles and cemeteries and destroyed places on Earth is exhausting for any human being with a beating heart, linked in with a soul, and connected to a brain.

But I have found that my excursions into history all over the world have led me to great sources of hope. It is, more often than not, the triumphs of the peace lovers and the innocents that grow my heart bigger. Of course, the great warriors and so-called masterminds are fascinating figures. Yet when my own life has veered into the darkness, I did not look to the great warriors to lead me out. I looked to human beings like Otto Frank, who, in spite of losing everything and never, ever being able to understand why, chose to keep living. His words are more comforting to me than any that were broadcasted to the masses during World War II. They reveal his own simple and honest acceptance of the unfathomable.

*****

One of the definitions for the word intelligence is: The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.

Imagine if we could crack the code on why human beings engage in war–we still wouldn’t be able to remove the behavior from the species–indeed, many would argue it is their right to enjoy the “excitement” of war.

I puzzle over the need for war. I acquire knowledge about it. And I apply what I learn into my own codes for finding hope. Here’s another coded message I copied into my journal from the Museum of World War II Boston. It’s from a letter written by Miep Gies, the woman who risked her life to hide Otto Frank and his family and four other people from the Nazis. She wrote the words in June, 1990:

“I don’t give a photo of me, everyone want it and I feel myself not an important person. But we are no heroes, we only did our human duty: help people who need help.”

This is some of my acquired knowledge–of altruistic behavior–performed under the most terrifying and inexplicable conditions, by an individual who was thinking and deciding to take a course of action to help others who needed help.

That’s behavior worth imitating and applying to life–real intelligence coded with real love.

I write, this morning, underneath welcomed streams of sunlight, burning waves of heat through an east facing window. Every year, we move a table to this location for its preferred wintertime position. The sun rises low each day and traces a brief arc across the sky–a white rainbow–which does not wane, but grows brighter and brighter and rises higher and higher as the Earth spins into spring. Sitting here in the early morning, I take shots of dayshine through squinted eyes, furrowing my forehead, smiling a little bit.

In my cold region of Earth, haunched-shouldered shiverers rush in and out of warm buildings, to and from provision providers, and often curse winter for shoveling them above and beyond and over the banks of their wits end.

Poets mine winter for its cache of symbols representing despair, loneliness, death, old age, and sad endings.

Masses of living human beings, wish the season away.

*****

I took advantage of a great and sunny day a week ago to make an excursion one hour southwest from home, to where my daughter is studying and partying her way through the university years. We had lunch together. I marveled at the snow where she lives and told her all about the snow where I live. We ate hot soup; talked about life.

After I took my daughter back to her dorm, I intended to drive directly home, but got distracted by the vast expanses of snowy hills overlooking campus. I took a detour to cruise through the views. Bright afternoon sun pulsed forth a shimmer of present day light that competed with the silence of time gone by. I snapped some photos of how it made my heart ache–wondering if I could capture on film the ghosts squeezing through the bare branches of winter’s steadfast trees.

I had told my daughter, over lunch, that the cold and snowy campus reminded me of the year I dropped out of school–finally defeated–a young woman unsure of who she was or who she could ever be. I told her about one friend I had that year–I couldn’t remember how I met the friend, nor could I recall her last name, but we used to sit together over pitchers of beers, sharing spirited conversations. Whenever I was with this friend, life wasn’t so bad and she made me feel hopeful. Had she been a real person in my life? Or had she been a Clarence “It’s-a-Wonderful-Life” kind of person just passing through?

*****

Shadows over the snowfields were growing longer, so I knew I better start driving home. I nursed lingering nostalgia with music by the Eagles, played very loud. Then, a sea of taillights spread out in front of me as soon as I hit the Massachusetts Turnpike. I was only about a half an hour from home. The traffic slowed to a standstill. I turned the music up louder. My engine temp warning light came on. I found what was left of the breakdown lane, cozied the car up against a snowbank and cut the engine. I turned down the music and called Good Sam–our auto rescue service. They said: Sorry, we aren’t authorized to tow anyone on the Pike.  I called the police. They said: There’s been a bad accident. All tow trucks are in service.

I felt a sick feeling in my gut that someone had been killed. He was only 23 years old. He was operating a tow truck and was trying to help another motorist in the breakdown lane. A passing truck hit him.

My day had been so splendid. But for this young man’s family and friends, life would never be the same again.

A long and stressful wait, in my car, began. The sun set. I crawled into the back and retrieved some of the blankets we keep in the car just in case anyone is ever stranded during wintertime. 

Emergency vehicles raced up behind me, then avoided smashing into me at the last minute as they made their way to the scene of the accident. It got colder and colder and darker and darker.

After two hours, I called the police again. I wanted to make sure they knew where I was because every time a car came into the break down lane, I braced myself for a possible collision.

I was glad I didn’t have any children or elderly people with me in the car. But I did wish for a friend. Another hour passed before a tow truck was able to get through the traffic and take me and my car off the highway. I told the tow truck driver I was so sorry to hear that someone he worked with had been killed. He complained bitterly about the behavior of other drivers. Barreling down the breakdown lane, he texted, talked on the phone, and blasted his horn as he drove at a good clip with me in the cab and my car hoisted up on the truck bed. I overheard him mention his daughter in one telephone conversation, so I made a point of asking him about his daughter and I told him I had just gone to visit mine. He still drove while texting. I closed my eyes.

He deposited me and my car in a shopping center parking lot just off the turnpike where I called my service provider to tow me home the rest of the way. The call to my service provider didn’t go well–they were overwhelmed with the accident, too. It would be a three and a half hour wait–many people had run out of gas waiting in the traffic.

My husband was out of town.

I saw a Friendly’s Restaurant one plaza north of where I was and hoped to get a restorative cup of hot cocoa. The waitress called me hon. “Are you okay, hon?” “You sit there as long as you need to, hon.” “I’m sorry your car broke down, hon.” She was so comforting–singing her own lullaby style of sweet care–that when she asked me about the hot chocolate, “I hope you liked it, hon. Was it just what you needed?” I lied, telling her it was great. But, it wasn’t. It was watery and lukewarm–a great disappointment I had no energy to care about.

The second tow truck showed up just before 10PM, driven by a young man. He was alive with energy–worked 55 hours a week doing tows and also attended college. He came to America as a 6-year-old, with his mom, from Poland, to meet up with his dad who was already living in Brooklyn. “Greenpoint?” I asked him. He said, yes. I told him my son lives in Greenpoint, right in the Polish section. I also told him my father’s family came from Poland–New York City–through Ellis Island. We talked about Poland, Polish accents, Polish food, and figuring out how to settle into the kind of life that suits you best.

By the time I got home, it was past ten o’clock. I didn’t need a drink. I couldn’t fall asleep. I stayed up for hours, unsettled by the experience of how one young man’s life could be over while the rest of us scramble to battle winter and all the dangers and pleasures it might bring.

I told my husband to make sure he has a blanket in his car and to make sure he keeps his gas tank filled. He’s like a lot of people–wonders what the chances are that something like that will ever happen. Or, if it were to happen, thinks there’s no way you could be stranded for more than six hours so close to home, or on such a major highway.

This morning–as he was making his way into the city of Boston, there was another accident on the turnpike. His wait, in standstill traffic, was only three hours. His car didn’t break down, so he had heat. He also had a few passengers to keep him company.

But, please, make sure to keep a blanket in your car if you live in a cold region of Earth. Keep the gas tank filled up as much as you can, too.

Without music, conversation, or the ability to concentrate on reading–I sat in my cold car for a long time, knowing things could be so much worse.

Repairs to my car totaled well over $1,500. We didn’t fuss about it. That winter’s day was a good one for me–I’d visited with my daughter, I’d examined memorable experiences from my past, and, I was able to tell my husband all about it, over the telephone, when I was home again in a safe and warm home.

Please. Keep a blanket in your car. And don’t wish the season away.

Buenos Aires. Easter. 2014.

Ash Wednesday.

If you are lucky enough to have lived, and survived, Catholicism as a young child, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Catholicism is a moveable fast.

(Apologies to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”)

But Ernest might have done his borrowing from the Catholics, because Easter is probably the original Moveable Feast—a feast preceded by a season of fasting—which begins on Ash Wednesday. Every year, the fasting and Easter Sunday feasting move around on the calendar.

Pope Gregory XIII, (and his posse of astronomers), created the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 seeking, in part, to honor the origins of Easter established by the Church in AD 325. It’s a calendar still in use to mark the comings and goings of days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, eras–and birthdays. This year, my birthday falls on Easter Sunday, April 5th. At last! All my life, I’ve come close to having an Easter birthday, but never have the planetary gatherings of the universe been just right.

Easter moves every year to the Sunday that falls just beyond the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox, or first day of spring, is March 20. Themes of rebirth and resurrection dominate celebrations this time of year.

I am not a Catholic. But, I was lucky enough to be raised one, so the best of Catholicism stays with me. The religion began losing credibility for me when I learned, as a little girl, that I could never be a priest—because I was a girl. And it wasn’t just me—not one single woman in the entire world could ever be a Catholic priest.

I tried, over the years, to forgive Catholicism for continuing to believe in its regal patriarchy. But it wasn’t just the patriarchy that bugged me. It was an arcane system of rules and sacramental process and expected behaviors that I could never live up to. I didn’t even come close. Not even if I went to Mass every day and confession every week would my failures and ineptitude and attitude ever reach worthiness. I was, in that religion—as a woman—never to be good enough. I was expected to make confessions to men. Men who weren’t supposed to have sex, get married, or father children.

Then, I went to Italy. I went to Rome. I went to the Vatican. Never in my life had I come upon such a shameless display of wealth, ruled over and carefully hoarded by a cult of men, living as the holiest of the holy. I could not take my eyes off the opulence, the excess, the treasures, and the uncommon wealth of a religion devoted to a common man, Jesus Christ.

The Vatican is an astonishing place to visit. But it should be a museum to something that once was.

Nevertheless, as a fallen Catholic, I did know how to behave in the Vatican and in St. Peter’s Basilica. So I slipped behind oppressive velvet curtains to find hidden chapels where priests were performing Mass in Latin using my favorite religious theatrics: Incense. Chanting. Heads bowed deeply into chests. Nuns lined up in the first pews in front of the altars.

The devotional fervor in these chapels suppressed my punk attitude. I prayed. I cried. I lit votives. No matter where I travel, I visit churches and light votives.

Afterwards, in the bars or over dinner or strolling through the Eternal City with my true love, (who was once an altar boy), I returned to my habits of questioning religious authority and history.

The truth is Catholicism stays with me and since today is Ash Wednesday, I stop to think of expected behaviors—like fasting and the prayerful observances of the Lenten season that might draw me closer to the teachings of Jesus Christ and deepen my quest to be a decent human being.

I think of the vernal equinox and Easter. I think of patterns and symbols embedded into my heart’s memories by Catholicism. I think of the catalyst this year’s Easter Moon could be—because it will align with the Sun and Earth and become eclipsed in the shadow of Earth—the shortest total eclipse of the Moon in the 21st century. I think of using all of these signs and symbols and celestial and religious phenomena to give me an excuse to have a grand fast leading up to a grand feast for Easter and my birthday.

I happened to look up the actual date when Jesus Christ was killed. No one knows for sure, but several experts claim he was killed AD 33, Friday, April 3rd, and, if you believe the stories, his resurrection was AD 33, Sunday, April 5th.

Sometimes I believe the stories of the resurrection. Most of the time I don’t.

But every year, I stop to think about it all over again.

I received a brochure from the Higgins School of Humanities at Clark University. Dialogue Symposium Spring 2015: The Work of Play. (A series of lectures, concerts, exhibitions, events.)

From the brochure: “This semester, our dialogue symposium asks where and on what terms play thrives in our achievement and results-oriented society. We will consider free play and games, cooperation and competition, sports and technology. How does play provide space for fantasy, diversion, and escape? When does it challenge the status quo and when does it re-inscribe existing hierarchies? Whether we view play as a biological imperative, a site of community, a civil right, a way to discover beauty, or a passport to cross national boundaries, there can be little doubt that the work of play is serious business.”

From Amy Richter, the Director of the Higgins School of Humanities: “Americans seem to be playing less and less, as increases in leisure time are offset by new technologies that keep us tethered to work. Equally troubling, our culture’s insistent drive for results has placed outcome over process, completion over exploration, winning over learning or enjoying the game. Still we know play matters…So let’s play.”

The brochure, which I was excited to receive, outlines an impressive schedule of experts, professionals, and scholars engaging in various forms of dialogue about how “play inspires creativity, builds communities, reveals and challenges boundaries”, and how play is an “effective practice, and, as such, may offer new insights into larger concerns.” (Intellectual, social, and emotional development.)

I browsed through the brochure, read descriptions of lectures and events, and made note of the presenters. I read the most prominently featured quotations–regarding play–by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johan Huizinga, Vladimir Nabokov, Sol LeWitt, and G. Stanley Hall (who was the first president of Clark University).

And then I started grumbling. A symposium about play, without any presenters who are children? The kinds of children who are nothing but children? Nor any presenters who are mothers and fathers? The kinds of mothers and fathers who are nothing but mothers and fathers?

And no prominently featured quotes by women? The kinds of women who have led the charge to just play since the first baby was born?

We all started out as babies. 

The heart beats. The lungs fill up. Hunger. Sleep. Cuddle. Play.

*****

I learned about play by being a kid, and I revisited those wonderlands and fighting rings when I had my own children. Some people are afraid to do this.

Try it.

Hand a baby to someone.

If the person freezes and says: “What am I supposed to do?”

Answer: “Play.”

If the person says, “What? How? Why?”

You could engage in a dialogue. What is play, how do you do it, and why do you have to do it? And what if you do it wrong?

You could consult books about play–written by experts–with hypothetical groupings by age, accompanied with suggested age-appropriate activities, age-defined expectations, life-long benefits.

You could also consult a quote by Nabokov about how everything good in life is play, and how what the baby might be feeling is the same essence of play that possesses someone like a juggler, who tosses from hand to hand in an unbroken sparkling parabola…the planets of the universe.

You could consult the Internet: “How to play with a baby.”

You could watch an instructional video.

But by the time you do any one of the above suggestions, the baby is reaching through the air with an unwieldy arm and has clutched someone’s nose. Cute little finger-nailed claws, (that need a good trim), dig in. Land lobster! The baby head butts Nose Person, opens his or her little rosebud mouth–wide–and slimes that strange object, a nose. The baby spits up.

Keep playing, like this:

The baby wants to hear, over and over and over and over and over again: words that rhyme, to the rhythm of pages that turn, to the shine of pictures that glow. The baby wants to play Bouncy Horse on a knee or fly through the air atop hands stretched to their limit. The baby wants to play Let’s Make Funny Noises. The baby wants to play Let’s Eat Every Toy and Try a Few Bugs, Too. The baby wants to play Let’s Unfold all the Laundry. And Unroll all the Toilet Paper. The baby wants to play Let’s Pour Whatever is in the Sippy Cup into the Potty. And follow that up with Let’s Try to Scoop It All Back Out of the Potty. The baby wants to play Let’s Rewire the House. The baby wants to play Let’s Stay Up All Night. The baby wants to play Let’s Fill Up the Bathtub and See What Floats in There. When you turn your back, the baby dumps the unrolled pile of toilet paper into the bathtub. The baby wants to play with food. The baby wants to play with glitter and glue and Let’s Run with Tomahawks. The baby wants to play with lipstick and high heels and toothpaste, combed through hair and squeezed into ears. The baby wants to play I Can Do It Myself! (Chop wood, mow the lawn, run the snowblower, drive the car.) The baby wants to play No! No! No! and Now! Now! Now!

The baby LOVES to play Why? Why? Why?

Do we study play, because we aren’t sure how worthwhile it is? And if the experts determine play is worthwhile, are we trying to establish standards for how much of it we should have and after we do that, do we begin to create the need to acquire play in dosages? We have already done this. We have commodified play. Vacation resorts make sure to sell a full schedule of scheduled play activities for children. (You go on vacation, and buy play. “But we work. We don’t have time to play.” Yet not even when we go on vacation with our children, do we have time to play with them.) Schools hire playground experts to coach children on how to play on the playground.

Children don’t even get to choose what they want to play anymore.

Pharmaceutical corporations are designing Play Pills. The ones shaped like baseballs, make you play baseball so much, you become a superstar. The ones shaped like footballs, same. The ones shaped like hockey pucks, same. The ones shaped like guitar picks make you play the guitar so much, you become a rockstar. The ones shaped like ivy leaves make you wear Brooks Brothers and Vineyard Vines so much, you become a member of the Ivy League.

You can custom order Play Pills.

*****

When I sent my daughter to preschool, I searched for a place where she could play. I found Marilyn Dorey at Doe Rey Me–a preschool she ran from her home and gardens. I soon became an apprentice to Marilyn and worked with her on Wednesday mornings when I got to play in the kitchen with the children. I remember the first day I dropped my daughter off for school and she started to cry. Marilyn said, “Stay here and play until she stops crying.” I was so relieved. So was my daughter.

Marilyn had a quote, hanging in her school:

I tried to teach my child with books. He gave me only puzzled looks.

I tried to teacher my child with words. They passed him by often unheard.

Despairingly, I turned aside. “How shall I teach this child?” I cried.

Into my hand he put the key.

“Come,” he said, “play with me.”

******

The work of play is the work of being in love and having fun. Enjoying life.

If you put it all together, it’s the work most children, mothers and fathers do 24/7.

LOVE, PLAY, LIVE.

For some, it comes naturally–though most of us, at some point in our lives, consult the books and the experts. But then we discover that the experts never studied kids like ours. And we become specialized experts–in charge of our own little free spirits.

Many of us, more importantly, are beginning to wonder about where?  Where does anyone go to find the freedom to just play without everything being arranged, categorized, scheduled, controlled, and judged?

Where do we go to be free?

When freedom is taken away, little by little, and memories of just playing are removed from the gene pool, it will be a challenge to get it back. Even if you study play, and encourage grown ups to honor it and engage in it and try it out, if there is no memory of genuine childhood play, there is no trigger to the heart.

The art of play–like the art of love–comes from deep inside the heart.

And when we are born,

the heart–our own special, once-in-a-lifetime heart–

Is already beating

And it has a sound all its own.

******

Playing in the gypsy camps.

Devastate me! I have found an alluring distraction. The timing is just right because I have all weekend to sink, to bob about like a fool, and to find my way back to shore before Monday stares me down. I’ll stumble around like a zombie with my heart shredded, my wings might get washed away, and my will shall become salted and peppered.

It will be worth all the indulgent romance, though.

I’ll let wave after wave of wow wash over me.

The honor of inspiring my impending escape, goes to Eleanor Roosevelt, whose My Day columns flashed before me on the computer screen when I was looking for something else. The columns are there for all of us to peruse–a rudimentary sort of blog, back in the day.

What tugged at my weekend “to-do” list and carried it away into the rubbish pile, was something Eleanor shared about Willa Cather in one of her My Day columns. I, too, am fond of Willa Cather.

Eleanor wrote about reading Cather’s latest collection of literary essays and how she liked best of all the chapter on Katherine Mansfield–an essay she called a gem. So I found the essay from Cather’s Not Under Forty, bright and easy on the Internet, and I read it.

Game over.

I have been to Eleanor’s Val-Kill in Hyde Park, New York. Oh to sit in the parlors and on the porches with her, reading together and hearing what she has to say! I can pretend-hear what she has to say by reading through her My Day columns. They are truly a peak into the heart of a steadfast woman. She writes not only of grave situations throughout the world, but also about an outfit she likes or about having her hair done while fashionable women prance all around in front of the mirrors or about meeting high school students or returning the girl scout salute to America’s best and brightest.

I went in search of entries that might have been penned from her camp at Campobello Island which is all the way down east on the coast of Maine and just over the border in Canada. I have also been there. Magnificent. (Both the camp and the fact that I have been there.)  I found such a funny column. She writes of the journey through Maine and of a tragedy at arrival in Campobello–she had forgotten all about a two-month-old puppy tied to the back of one of the trucks, for hours. She writes that she returned from the theater to the puppy’s sad wails! Thankfully, all ended well–the puppy was fed and put to bed. Perhaps Mitt Romney can relate.

*****

Here follows a picture of Eleanor’s Val-Kill. Her own fort. I am a great believer in women having their own fort. They should also lean in and lean out and think like a man and demand that men think like women and fight the fight for equality on every necessary front. But to be a woman warrior, you have to read, write, and have your own fort. Even Eleanor Roosevelt makes the remark in one of her columns that she had long had her love for writing and public speaking before her husband became president–she also said that she would stand back from herself and assess who she was. Was she being an individual or was she being what everyone else expected her to be?

Your fort, your expectations. I am always good to myself in my forts. They are pleasant and happy places. I sage-smudge them, I screen visitors.

Sometimes, a fort might only be a chair placed securely into a river on a warm day where you can sit all by yourself. For a long time, that was one of my forts. I had children and there was a river in Vermont that saved me by beckoning my children to float down it on floaty toys. The kids would walk just under a mile or so up the river, and then come floating over boulders and fallen trees right past me. This activity kept them out of my fort for a good stretch of time. They were very young! And someone might have stolen them or the river might have swallowed them up. I was always very happy when their churned up bodies came into view at about the same time I heard their laughter rise above the music of the river.

Eleanor’s fort Val-Kill:

*****

The My Day column I read, written by Eleanor Roosevelt on April 20, 1937, has caused me to create a list of short stories by Katherine Mansfield I hope to read. In my dreams, I will camp out with Eleanor at Val-Kill, reading all weekend, talking over cups of tea.

I agree with her about Willa Cather’s essay on Katherine Mansfield. Totally OMG.

Some days, I grab my copy of Julia Child’s My Life in France and carry it around with me, the way a child carries a blankey or a beloved stuffed animal. Certain passages, which have been marked since the first time I read the book many years ago, speak to me over and over again, still. I have taken cooking classes in Italy and France; I have studied garden design with designers from England; I’ve enjoyed an endless stream of course work with American professors and teachers. But when I’m alone in my home or studio, experimenting and failing, wondering what I’m doing or why–Julia laughs with me. Even she was ignored and disregarded. Even she felt insecure and unfulfilled. Best of all, even she loved the world and her husband–rapturously.

I remember a journey to Normandy, France. We had arrived from Paris, exhausted. Our luggage had been lost, and our attempts to find our way out of the city and onto a roadway toward Normandy had been disastrous. Desperate, we tossed our son and his rudimentary high-school French into a bar with orders to get help. It worked. Finally, we landed at our French-style B&B, well past midnight. After settling the kids into their bedrooms, we asked Francoise, our host, if by any chance there was somewhere to get something to eat. We probably should have gone to bed, but we were in France! And we were in love! And our children were safe and sound.

Francoise said to drive down the road, count past two villages, and at the third village, there might be a small restaurant still open. We traveled out into the dark, unfamiliar land and were so surprised to find that, indeed, there were three villages to count. At the third one–a tiny, lighted restaurant awaited. Never in my life have I tasted such savory escargot.

Julia Child called France her spiritual homeland. I read her writings and though they are not what one might call literary masterpieces, who could ever care? She writes from the heart, and to the heart, with passion. She uses accessible language. Here follows a random collage of Julia’s writings from My Life in France–one of my favorite storybooks on the art of living. 

*****

“I knew I didn’t want to be a standard housewife, or a corporate woman, but I wasn’t sure what I DID want to be.”

“In preparation for living with a new husband, I’d decided I better learn how to cook. Before our wedding, I took a bride-to-be’s cooking course from two Englishwomen in Los Angeles, who taught me to make things like pancakes. But the first meal I ever cooked for Paul was a bit more ambitious: brains simmered in red wine! I’m not quite sure why I picked that particular dish, other than that it sounded exotic and would be a fun way to impress my new husband. The results were, alas, messy to look at and not very good to eat. In fact, the dinner was a disaster. Deep down, I was annoyed with myself, and I grew more determined than ever to learn how to cook well.”

“France was a misty abstraction for me, a land I had long imagined but had no real sense of. I had reason to be suspicious of it. In Pasadena, California, where I was raised, the idea of France was that of a nation of icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures and the men dandies who twirled their mustaches, pinched girls, and schemed against American rubes. I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian.”

“Our ship entered Le Havre Harbor slowly. We could see giant cranes, piles of brick, bombed-out empty spaces left over from the war….We went ashore….The Norman countryside struck me…each little town had a distinct character, though many were still scarred from the war…hundreds of bicycles…old men driving horses-and-buggies…little boys wearing wooden shoes…fields intensely cultivated…Oh, la belle France–without knowing it, I was already falling in love!”

“The Guide Michelin directed us to Restaurant La Couronne, in Rouen, which had been built in 1345 in a medieval quarter-timbered house. I wondered if I looked chic enough, or if I would be able to communicate, and that the waiters would look down their long Gallic noses at us Yankee tourists…It was warm inside…Neither humble nor luxurious…The other customers were all French and I noticed that they were treated with exactly the same courtesy as we were….I heard businessmen speaking with waiters…I asked Paul what they were saying…He said, ‘The waiter is telling them about the chicken. How it was raised, how it will be cooked, which wines go best with it.’ Wine? I said. At lunch? Paul explained to me that in France, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner.”

“November, 1949, marked our one-year anniversary in Paris…I was bothered by my lack of emotional and intellectual development. I was not as quick and confident and verbally adept as I aspired to be….When we got into discussions about the global economy, I got my foot in my backside and ended up feeling confused and defensive. My positions on important questions–Is the Marshall Plan effectively reviving France? Should there be a European Union? Will socialism take hold in Britain? were revealed to be emotions masquerading as ideas. This would not do!”

“Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which caused me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, “scientific” thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”

“Of course, I made many boo-boos. At first this broke my heart, but then I came to understand that learning how to fix one’s mistakes, or live with them, was an important part of becoming a cook. I was beginning to feel la cuisine bourgeoise in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”

“When I wasn’t at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on how to make mayonnaise, for instance, and although no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating….the mayo suddenly became a terrible struggle…it wouldn’t behave…I finally got the upper hand by studying each step from the beginning and writing it all down. By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history. I made so much mayonnaise that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet. What a shame. But in this way I had finally discovered a foolproof recipe, which was a glory!”

“I proudly typed it up and sent it off to friends and family in the States, and asked them to test it and send me their comments. ALL I RECEIVED IN RESPONSE WAS A YAWNING SILENCE. Hm! I had a great many things to say about sauces as well, but if no one cared to hear my insights, then what was the use of throwing perfectly good bernaise and gribiche down a well?”

“I was miffed, but not deterred. Onward I plunged.”

“And so began the Great French Bread Experiment, one of the most difficult, elaborate, frustrating, and satisfying challenges I have ever undertaken…It would eventually take us two years and something like 284 pounds of flour to try out all the home-style recipes for French bread we could find…I didn’t care if anyone else was interested…I was simply fascinated by bread and was determined to learn how to bake it for myself. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.”

*****

And here is a picture of Julia, from the book, having a smoke:

Alone at home for a long weekend with nothing but dreadful chores to complete, I received a text message from a nephew.

Hey Aunt Theresa. I’m in your area today, and I thought I’d see if you were around.

A nice surprise! I texted him back and said I was in the basement painting stairs. I typed BORING as part of my text and asked where he was and what his plans were. He said he’d been visiting colleges, visiting a friend, and now that the day was coming to a close, he was looking for his car—which had disappeared under a fresh coating of snow. As soon as he found his car, he planned to come over.

I had tried to make the job of painting the basement stairs more fun for myself by using leftover paint in the bright colors of sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, but it wasn’t fun at all. Basements are dreary and I am not a subterranean dweller. We have never “finished off” our basement. I can only think of a few underground excursions I like: Wine caves. And—Kartchner Caverns—south of Tucson. (An astonishing underground world.) So I was happy to have the distraction of a traveler in search of pleasant company.

The painting of the basement stairs came about because I didn’t want to look at the plywood anymore. Of course, I thought it would be easy to slap a few coats of paint over the stairs and call it a day, but there were nail holes to fill and other preparations to make in the confines of a stairwell that closed in on me as I worked, becoming a hotbox of paint and spackle fumes in vaporous blends of dank, basement-y, hits with no mind-altering benefits.

When my nephew arrived, he breezed in and told me, with all his heart, how much he loved my house. He said it was a cool place. I have a do-it-yourself kind of house and most of the projects were fun. That’s what shines through.

We went out for sushi. Then we watched free-style skiing competitions. Then I asked him to show me Minecraft.

Then I set him up in a guest room—(the room that used to be my son’s room, but is now painted with sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, a tribute to his birth close to Halloween)—and my nephew looked out the window and said, with all his heart, how much he loved my gardens. Even buried under the snow he loved them! It grew my heart to know that memories of my gardens were a cherished part of his developing soul.

The next morning, I made a grand New England breakfast for the two of us—waffles with real maple syrup, eggs, homemade hash browns, coffee, orange juice, toast with jam my daughter and I made during the summer.

We sat in the dining room, bright with morning light reflected on snow in the gardens outside the window. We talked about the finishing up of high school and the moving on to college.

My nephew was home schooled until he went to private high school for his last couple of years. He wanted ideas for what to do at his graduation because he had the option of participating in the ceremony with a performance of some kind.

He considered that he might like to write a poem for the occasion. I told him to consult his mother, (my sister), for guidance on the recitation. She is not only an accomplished writer and reader, but she is talented at the lost art and pleasures of reciting and performing all forms of literature.

I often refer to the dining room where my nephew and I were sitting together, as the family chapel. It’s a room adorned with my collection of churchy tchotchkes and cherubs painted on the walls with peace doves, and madonnas with babies, and rosaries, and blessed oils, crucifixes, hearts, candles, wine. It was in this very chapel that I found myself, on that Sunday morning with my nephew, listening to him recall that as a boy, he had memorized poetry. I watched his eyes drift away into the soul of his childhood and then, he began to recite from memory Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death–He kindly stopped for me–The Carriage held but just Ourselves–And Immortality.

What a prayer his recitation was—a prayer to the joy of remembrance and performance art and the power of the written word. To listen to my nephew in the setting of my chapel was a blessing all my own, and one that enchanted me. I told him how terrified I used to become trying to memorize literature and trying to prepare myself to recite it when I was a school girl. Listening to him, I was sorry I had never found pleasure in recitation and memorization.

It has become a lost art–the memorization, recitation, and the listening to the sound of literature. Some cultures so revered the spoken word and the powers of storytelling, that they never invented a written language. Indeed, the Egyptian gods feared the creation and use of writing might soften the soulful exercise of keeping the mind and the heart so closely linked—these personal and protected caves where we store our most original memories and unrealized dreams. And yet here we are—at a time in history, standing on a precipice where we are tossing over the cliff the acts of physically writing, and the practices of reading, to the rhythms of turned pages, scribbled marginalia, and tasted pages.

It was, at last, time for my nephew to drive home. I bid him a fond farewell, then glared at the stairs that needed a few more coats of paint. I wasn’t motivated to move back and forth with the brush while squatting and twisting my crickety legs and arms and shoulders inside that corridor of unimportant passages.

So of course you know what I did! The morning’s church service in my chapel, with my special and unexpected guest, had set my soul on fire. There, in a bookshelf in my chapel, (filled with collections of verse and poetry, both adult and childhood styles), I found a book another sister had given me seventeen years ago. The book is called Committed to Memory and it is edited by John Hollander as part of an advisory committee comprised of several rock-star poets weighing in on the “100 best poems to memorize.” I had asked for the book at a time when my mind raced with obsessions over personal grief and I wanted to try putting something else inside my head.

After finding the book, I couldn’t wait to get back to the task of painting. I still had several hours of work before me, but now, when the job was completed, I would have a poem recited from memory, too. And cheerful stairs.

No one was home. I began memorizing by reading, then speaking out loud. Up and down the stairs I went. Painting to the left. Painting to the right. Stopping to think. Being careful not to smear sunflower yellow-orange paint on the book. Every stair became a little stage, every cobweb a theater curtain, and every basement ghost, my silent audience. 

I chose to memorize Snow-Flakes, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because I like snow and the poem seemed short and simple with a supportive rhyming scheme. But as I painted and practiced and tried to remember the order of the words, the poem started to fill me up with its sad meanings. The pace of my work responded.

And what was my chore now? Was I painting? Was I memorizing a poem? Was I performing? Or was I gone, taking an excursion into the soul of another human being?

Upon completion of my work, upon standing on the bright, sunflowery-orange-yellow of every stair’s surface, I thought that the next thing I would like to do is paint snowflakes here and there on the stairs, too. When I have more time.

The easily distracted apprentice inside of me never knows, whether I am working, or making art. Every distraction is an opportunity.

That’s what shines through.

The mid-winter doldrums, drabby-crabbies, and grumpy frumpies have you all dressed up in bulky sweaters and chewed-up mittens.

You look in the mirror and say, I look like a catfish. 

You pull out your whiskers and throw back a shot of Emergen-C.

You eat a bag of chocolate chips.

You chase the shot of Emergen-C with the last servings of motor oil out in the garage.

There’s more snow coming and you’re primed, pumped, and psyched to blow it out of the driveway, heave it off the deck, and fling it from all the walkways leading to your ice castle.

You are belting out Let it Go, but your soul is frozen. The snow isn’t white, it’s a slush pile of stone-cold gray and steely blue.

You just want to go away and turn your frown upside down. You are desiring Happiness-is-a-Warm-Puppy kind of happiness. Please-Don’t-Make-Me-Read-Subtitles kind of relaxation. I-Really-Can’t-Deal-With-Anymore-Violence-and-Dark-Existence kind of escape.

Go to New York City and view Matisse: The Cut-Outs at MoMA. The show is big color, juicy fruits, humorous and happy, with a bright finish. You only need your eyes and your heart to enjoy the show. You can let your brain keep taking a long winter’s nap.

February 6th, 7th, and 8th–is the last chance to see the show and MoMA will be open 24-7. Become a member so you don’t need a timed ticket, then go see the show over and over again all night long. If you bring a friend or friends, they get in for $5.00 with your membership. See the show when you first arrive in the city. Go to dinner. Discuss. Go see the show again. Go have a drink. Go see the show again, late at night before you go to sleep. Get up early, go see the show first thing in the morning. If you did all of that, you would only be a fraction as obsessive as Matisse was with his scissors and paper. Take notes, draw pictures. Try to remember all the color combinations. Watch the movie about how they restored The Swimming Pool. Wrap your head around that kind of obsessive devotion. Go have a drink. Make plans to cut out pictures, pin them to your walls, and wear pajamas and large hats while you are at work.

Don’t worry about what people say about why you do it, what it all means, or how history is affecting you.

Let it go. Let your frozen soul spiral out of control.

Here’s Henri’s version of Oceania, The Sky–A work of art that blossomed from one scrap of paper pinned over a stain on his wall:

After I saw Henri’s wall art, I found window art, by Jack Frost, in a cabin in the woods in Vermont. Inspired, I thought about making a cut-out composition for my walls at home. Maybe I’d call it: Winter Sky, Chilled to the Bone, Stiff-Feathered Flight. Drilling that down, maybe I’ll elevate my work with an even better name, Heaveania, The Cold Dance.

There’s my coping mechanism–The Cold Dance–I’ll keep it up all winter, while finding doses of warm happiness and dreaming about hot color combinations.