Legacy of Roberto Clemente

In Spanish, Clemente means merciful. Roberto Clemente lived up to his name.

In the same way that Americans of a certain age will say to each other, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Baseball fans will ask one another, “Where were you when you heard that Roberto Clemente died?”

Roberto Clemente was that important--to Pittsburgh and to baseball, and to the world of sports and beyond.
As we end this year, one that has seen money and drugs foul the world of baseball, we can remember a ball player who allowed us to see athletes as honorable. The word “hero” is often misused—especially in sports--but the true meaning is “one who gives his life to help others”, and that is what Clemente did on December 31, 1972, thirty-five years ago tonight.
Clemente is remembered as one of the best arms in baseball. Many believe he was the greatest right-fielder ever, shining in the outfield, tracking down every ball in range often making spectacular leaping and diving catches. And then there was that throw—all the catcher had to do was stand there.

Known as “The Great One”, Clemente’s lifetime batting average was .317. He earned four National League batting championships, twelve Gold Glove awards, and was National League MVP in 1966 and World Series MVP in 1971. He was the first Latin American player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. In addition to his hard work on the field Clemente worked between games and in the off season helping the poor and visiting sick children in every major league city. He did none of it for media attention.

Bob Prince, colorful announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, used to sing out, “Arriba!” when Clemente came up to bat. In Spanish arriba means “get going” or “get there” and Clemente could get there. December 31, 1972 he was going to Nicaragua to ensure that the relief supplies he gathered would reach the starving victims.

The qualities mentioned by those who played with Clemente or who saw him play are: Pride, fury, grace and always dignity. The poet, Enrique Zorilla, wrote: “What burned in the cheeks of Roberto Clemente was the fire of dignity”.

On September 30, 1972 Clemente drove a double off Met pitcher Jon Matlack for his 3,000 career hit. Three months later, on New Year’s Eve, his life ended when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. There were no survivors.

Even if you care nothing for baseball, or even if you are a Yankee fan who still cringes at the mention of 1960, you can borrow from Clemente’s legacy as you consider your New Year’s resolutions. Roberto Clemente often said, “Any time you have the opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t do it, you are wasting your time on this earth.”
Roberto Clemente died that night in a plane crash en route to Nicaragua bringing relief supplies to victims of an earthquake. He was 38 years old. No time wasted.

In Defense of Late Shopping

This is one of my favorite days of the year. This afternoon I’ll be heading out to start my Christmas shopping. For a long time I was ashamed to admit that I began holiday preparations with just seven days to go, but the truth is this is my favorite part of the holidays.
When I do let it leak that I’m just starting my shopping there is always some very superior person happy to share that she was all done in July. Well goody, goody, but what fun is that? Nor need you tell me about those gifts you bought on sale last February. You saved how much money doing that? Well goody for you, but saving money is not the spirit of the season.
No, I did not procrastinate. I well know the advice about how to make Christmas shopping easier. But there are some things that don’t get better just by being easier. I’ve read many of those How to Get Organized books, but I’ve also lived through enough tragedy to know that organizing one’s life is an illusion.
I grant you that there may be a moment this week when I will envy those who had their gifts wrapped in July. But that’s kind of like having a good report from the dentist isn’t it? All very wholesome but where’s the fun?
And don’t even get me started on the people who buy their gifts online. How much holiday spirit does it take to point and click? Yes you meet the technical requirement of gift given, but where’s the spirit? Why not just hand everyone on your list a twenty-dollar bill, and say, “Hey, have a go at it”.
I also hate that suggestion that you should have a stash of generic gifts in your closet just in case someone surprises you with a gift and you were not prepared to reciprocate. Think how mean that is. Someone is just about to feel big and generous by surprising you with a gift and you cut them off at the knees with a retaliatory box of bath salts. It’s the cruelest one-upmanship.
Those of us who begin our shopping this week may be enjoying the real spirit of Christmas. We get to watch humanity test itself and see kindness and patience and grace enacted –or honored in the breach--in toy stores and next to the stack of 30% off cashmere turtlenecks.
We also know that the worst characters to run into at the mall now are the, “I was done in August” people who just learned they need one more thing and have to come out and play with the rest of us. They are usually the ones cutting in line or sighing heavily and making lots of eye contact wanting others to share their misery.
No, we who shop now are engaging in holiday ritual much closer to the original: It’s cold out , traffic is as slow as a lane of donkeys, and we get to watch the young family with a triple stroller searching the mall for a changing area. It makes you want to drop to your knees and pray.
Yes, shopping in July could make Christmas nice and tidy. But real life is anything but that. Consider the story of the Holy Family: There was no advance planning; Mary was days away from delivery when they went on a road trip, and she had to give birth in a barn. Not exactly tidy and neat.
The crux of that first Christmas story is that sometimes in the midst of mess and confusion and fear, angels show up and miracles happen.
But in order to experience that you have to be willing to join the fray and put yourself where humans happen to be. Relationships with people are like casinos: You must be present to win.
So this week I’ll be where humanity is. I’m heading out to the mall, bundled up, grinning and bracing myself for encounters with my fellow man. I’ll be trekking in from the outerloop of the parking lot, looking for a few gifts and the real spirit of Christmas.

Anti-Thinking Thanksgiving

We are entering a week that features equal portions of gratitude and uncomfortable dinner conversations. For many Thanksgiving is a mixed bag; we count our blessings and defend our beliefs. Good manners dictate no talk of politics or religion but these days there’s little else. As we say grace some of us will add a silent prayer, “Please God, do not let Uncle Bart start in on Reagan as our greatest president.”

But if we can pay attention through dessert we’ll notice something that should trouble us even more. Increasingly there is a conversational disconnect that goes like this: When asked, “What do you think about such-and-such?” Many people will reply, “Did you see that report on TV last night?” Their response, instead of sharing their own thinking, offers up a source of information. You might imagine this is the unique province of far-right talk radio fans, but no, it’s just as likely to come from followers of NPR and John Stewart.

This loss of genuine thinking shows up in all parts of our lives. In business we’ve traded Peter Drucker’s long discourses on the nuances of management for the abbreviated ideas of The Apprentice. As consumers we’ve substituted marketing for self-examination, letting researchers figure us out, and advertisers tell us what to want.

Did we get tired, or did we just get lazy? Or are we afraid to think?
That may seem an odd question at a time when the new buzzword is “human capital”, but we’re conflicted about being thinkers. We have a history of disdaining intellectuals and preferring the not-so-smart to the smarty-pants. We rely on lots of information rather than on the messiness of thinking, mulling, reconsidering and being confused which are at the heart of a genuine intellectual process. We have a kind of perverse national pride in anti-intellectualism. Even our President’s pretense at being just an ordinary guy—one who went to Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School--is intended to put Americans at ease. And it does.

Thinking takes practice and we are out of shape. But it’s a dangerous time to have weak intellectual muscles. Our current global challenges exist at the intersection of economics, environment, religion and history. The solutions aren’t simple and they’re not technological. However as we face these complex issues we’re moving further from the disciplines that teach people how to think. What we need now is very old school, and that is the Liberal Arts.
I know, I know, the accusation that liberal arts are not practical has some truth, but there is important history in that charge of impracticality.

The ancient Romans had slaves from all over the world. Some of their slaves, like the Greeks, were bright and the Romans controlled them by limiting their education. Romans allowed slaves to be educated in math and engineering so they could build things, and in the arts so they could entertain, but only Roman citizens—free people—could study history, rhetoric or philosophy. It was understood that people who studied these artes liberals would learn to think and so they were the exclusive privilege of the liberi, the free men.
Thinking is hard work. It involves being comfortable with not knowing and that flies in the face of punditry and dinner table debates. But if we want to truly understand what we read on the front page, or be able to sort through both NPR and Rush Limbaugh we have to practice on tough material –literature and philosophy--which might temporarily confuse, but ultimately will reward us.

We may joke that the mantra of the liberal arts major is: “Do you want fries with that?” But the deeper question, when we find ourselves shrinking from difficult ideas, might instead be: “Do you want freedom with that?”

That is somehting to chew on with the turkey and stuffing this week

Day of the Dead

Today I am celebrating Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. This isn’t a holiday I grew up with, but one I’ve borrowed from the Southwest and Mexico. It’s become one of my favorite holidays because it’s a good counterpart to Halloween. Except for the candy, October 31st doesn’t leave much for grownups. Being scared of goblins lost its sway when I got old enough to lose people that I loved. I’m not spooked by the idea of ghosts now; in fact, I’d welcome a visit from some of them.

That’s what Day of the Dead is about. There is a belief that on this day the veil separating this world and the next is thinner and so it’s a time we can be closer to those who have died.
Day of the Dead has rituals to help us remember our loved ones. We can visit in our imagination or feel their presence. We can use prayer or conversation or begin by looking at old photos. The Mexican tradition that I use includes making an ofrenda, or altar, something as simple as putting photos and candles on the coffee table. We also have chocolate as a symbol of the sweet and bitter separation from those we love.

A ritual is a way of ordering life. Whether hearing Mass or saying Kaddish, small ceremonies help us to sort and reframe. When someone dies the relationship doesn’t stop, it’s renegotiated, literally re-conceived.

This isn’t a very American idea. Culturally our preferences are for efficiency and effectiveness; even with grief we use words like closure and process.

I remember my frustration when I was grieving and well-intentioned friends suggested I was taking too long and quoted Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The simple version of her theory lists stages: Denial--Bargaining--Anger--Depression, and Acceptance. But this list implies that a person can move from point A to point B and be done. It makes grief seem like an emotional Monopoly game where you go around the board, collect points and get to a distinct and certain end. This false notion of linearity is apparent when we hear people speak of someone who is grieving, “Oh, she missed the anger stage”, or “He hasn’t reached acceptance yet.”

I always thought that “losing a loved one” was a euphemism used by those who were afraid to say the word dead. But after losing my brother Larry I know that lost is the perfect word to describe the feeling following a death.
Though he died several years ago my feeling about my brother is that I have misplaced him; It’s that sensation of knowing that my book or my glasses are around here somewhere…if I could just remember where I left him. It’s a sense of something just out of reach, still here, but also gone.

This is why we can be so hard on the grieving, and why we want them to go through those stages and be done. We love things that are sealed and settled. But death and grief, for all their seeming finality, are not as final as we would like.
So tonight I’ll make cocoa and light candles; we will look at pictures and tell stories and we’ll laugh.

The root of the word grieve is heavy. We carry our dead as a cherished burden. Death ends a life but not a relationship. Who would want to close the door on that?

Building a Cognitive Life Raft

Outside help. Yes, still, after 20-plus years in recovery I take advantage of what is euphemistically referred to as “outside help”. It is therapy and now, the full continuum of alternative care: acupuncture, Reiki, energy healing, groups, retreats, spiritual direction. The 12 steps may be a core but—since some are sicker than others, and yes since I’m still impatient and a perfectionist—I take all the help—and all forms—that I can get.

But the reading. Self-help reading sometimes takes a beating in AA. But I’m ever grateful for self-help books because that’s how I got here. Robin Norwood’s “Women Who Love Too Much” pointed me to AA, OA, ACOA and Al-Anon. Since then I have read across the genre. Recently the new memoir lit has intersected self-help and I have loved books like “Here If you Need Me” and “Eat. Pray. Love.” A smart woman learns from her mistakes; a wise woman learns from other people’s mistakes. So give me books and all your stories: what you did and what happened.

Building a Cognitive Life Raft: I learned that phrase a long time ago and I love it. A cognitive life raft. When I thought that I was wasting time reading self-help or psychology books I really was building a layer to help me thru the sea of pain that would accompany the next change. We’re supposed to “feel our feelings” and “do the grief work”...yes I have done it all and it works: pound those pillows and scream, break the tennis racket on the couch, write the letters that never get mailed. Buy yourself a Teddy Bear and a doll and re-parent yourself for years. But I also found that I needed to lay down a theoretical base, to build a cognitive structure to support all that, so psychology books and self-help built a raft for me to ride the river of emotional healing.

I still do this. I’m struggling now because I need to change a relationship. I’m sad and scared. I write about it and I talk about it and in the car I play Brandi Carlisle and Bonnie Raitt and I cry, but I also read about abandonment and cognitive schema’s (Thank you Oprah) and I read Robin Norwood again…lay an intellectual foundation, build my cognitive life raft…then bring it: the pain that inevitably accompanies growth.

Labor Day is New Year's Day

The new year has never entered with champagne and icy roads, nor begun in silver lame and silly hats. Though you may have spent many a January saying new years words, you know as well as I that the real new year begins now, as it always has, the day after Labor Day. It does not matter that it is hot outside or that you are still putting on shorts when you come home from work. The new year begins as it did for 12 critical years. It begins with back to school.

And it does not matter how long it has been since you went to school, or if you have kids of your own going off to school. You know in your bones that the new year begins now. And how could it not? For 12 most important years you went off on that first Tuesday in September to try out the new identity you had forged over the summer. Was your look changed this year? Had you let your hair grow long? Or cut it short? Would they recognize you right away? Would everyone sense the new sophistication gained at summer camp in New Jersey, or two weeks visiting your sister in L.A.? Yeah, you were that same old kid when you left on the last day of school in June, but every year in the fall there was a new you and it debuted the day after Labor Day.

Every September you promised yourself you'd be more popular, more friendly, more outgoing. Or you promised you'd play around less, make new friends, hang out with the good kids.

If it was a year of changing schools then there was more newness and more opportunity to be a new you. That was the beauty of the beginning of September. Every single year you could return from summer and try out a new identity. You could be a scholar this year after a past as the class clown. Or you could be the friendly one after years as the grind and curve setter. The opportunity to redo your image came every year the day after Labor Day. And it still does.

January is not the right time for New Years resolutions. How could it be? You've been too busy with the holidays and it's cold and yucky out, and you are broke from gift giving. How are you really going to create a new body or mind or personality in the middle of all that?

September is the time to not only promise yourself a new exercise program, but to start it. It's still light after work and it's not cold in the morning. You really can go exercise. September is the time to start a diet that will stick. You are coming off a summer of fresh foods, and you are not bloated by 30 days of holiday treats and booze. As for a new look; who can afford one in January? You've worn your name off all your plastic just trying to get through the holidays.
No, the new look and image you have been promising yourself comes in September just as it did when you were a kid. Remember how it worked in Junior High? You decided to wear a tie and tweed because that summer you discovered poetry (or an older girl who liked poets). Or you promised yourself that you would wash and set your hair in a smooth flip every morning to look like those girls in the magazines.

In September you could try out in public all those looks you had been practicing in the mirror behind your bedroom door.

So what if the good intentions only lasted a few weeks. Some part of it always stuck, some part of the new you was the real you and real change and that's how you moved on.

And you still can. The chnages happen in September. Buy some new sox and a red plaid shirt. This is the time to be kinder, nicer, smarter, to listen more, eat less and to hang out with the good kids. The trees remind us how it's done; try some new colors, shed the old layers. It's September. Happy New Year!

Back to School Shopping

This is a big week for the shopping mall. Whether we’re sending a kid back to school or just responding to our own internal clock, fall shopping is now. Throughout the stores today we’ll complain about prices, and we’ll commiserate about what kids insist they, “have to have”, but the odds are good that adults will also want a new shirt or sweater this time of year.

The pull to shop is powerful; it’s that New Year’s feeling that’s built into us from years of preparing for school, but there is also a strong push that comes from advertising. The August issues of women’s magazines insist that “brown is the new black”, and “low waists are out”. It’s easy enough to take shots at the fashion industry, imagining the marketing wizards who pull our strings to make us shop, and we can sigh that we are slaves to materialism who base our identities on what we wear. Yes, all of that is true. But it’s not new.

The truth is that we’re all wearing costumes all the time, and what we wear is a form of communication. So if we’re going to cover our nakedness and communicate we may as well have some fun.

I didn’t always feel this way. For years I bought into the idea that virtue was to be found in the equivalent of wearing sackcloth and ashes. I hid my love of clothes and felt ashamed when I bought the fall fashion magazines. I believed it was politically incorrect to know the names of designers as well as I knew poets. But that changed.

I remembered why clothes became important: What I recall from 7th grade, in addition to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, was my obsession with another girl’s shoes. My parents allowed only one pair of new school shoes: nice, neutral penny loafers. But that fall I sat near a girl whose shoes matched her clothes. For weeks I stared at her feet and the navy kidskin flats trimmed with bright green piping. The many shoes that tumble out of my closet today are futile attempts to fill-- in the present--a hole that exists in the past.

But there is another factor: I stopped believing there is only one way to be a feminist, and I decided it’s not politically incorrect to love clothes. Although fashion is commerce and marketing it’s also art. After all, color, shape, line and texture are the ingredients that sculptors work with too. Clothes are a form of self-expression and communication, and even stylistically, freedom of speech. Feminists for Fashion? Sign me up.

But where do we draw the line? How do we balance the role of clothing in our own culture against the fact that, “I have nothing to wear” is an actual truth in other parts of the world? How do we shop and dress consciously? How do we find the middle ground?
Is there a way to manage desire so that it inspires our creativity and doesn’t shame us—or young women who are naturally enjoying this part of life? I believe there is an emotional center in which we can enjoy clothes and not be dominated by them.

The answer is discernment, that seemingly religious word. It means stilling the internal voices—our own and the ones piped in from ads-- and making conscious decisions about what we buy and why. It would be a great gift to young shoppers and we can practice with them too.

Our time here is brief; there’s more than enough pain to go around; we don’t need to grit our teeth or dress in grim determination just to get through life. So go shop, celebrate with something new, and enjoy what you wear.