... to Leave a Home Better than I Found It

I'm pretty good with the social conventions that keep polite society functioning and healthy, so I was surprised when, at thirty-seven years old, I learned an old rule of etiquette that I hadn't heard before.  After a play - date for our young children was over, a new mom friend playfully began picking up toys and straightening up the clutter we had generated, chirping, "Always leave a place better than you found it!" I remember stashing that away as a handy rule to teach my kids when they were a little older. So succinct, so clear, so reasonable and considerate. I like it. Another friend takes this common adage (well, common to everyone except me!) one step further, applying it to people as well as places:  leave a companion better than you found her, physically and/or metaphysically. Leave her more comfortable, more content, cheerier, wiser. Such a lovely rule to live by!

This rule popped into my head three weeks ago as I stood in the shower of my home of twenty - one years for the last time, preparing for a big day of moving to another house far, far away.  As I washed the sweat and dust, gathered from packing, off my aching arms and legs, I admired the newly tiled walls and floor of the bathroom. I love that new shower, vaguely reminiscent of a grotto, and all of the renovations we made to our house in an effort to make it more attractive to people looking to buy. Our efforts were not in vain; the first prospective buyers to come see our house wanted to buy it immediately and are now the new owners. We weren't surprised. We were leaving this home far better than we had found it two decades earlier. 

Ceramic tile now graces the floors once covered with faded and peeling vinyl; a vinyl shower surround yielded to more ceramic tile and granite shelves. 

 

Stunning granite anchors new kitchen cabinets and stainless steel appliances.

If you tilt your head to the right, you will see a donkey on the top step riser. My husband hand-picked each piece of wood for its distinctive grain pattern.

Sand-colored carpet suggests a little hint of the beach in our landlocked neighborhood, and creamy-hued walls softly brighten every room. Our newly renovated house certainly looks better than when we found it.

But it is better in other ways as well. 

Better for having sheltered two boys from birth through their teenage years.

Better for hearing bedtime stories night after night as we settled down to sleep.

Better for the hundreds of pots of tomato sauce that simmered on the stove all day long.

Better for the excitement of twenty-one Christmas mornings. 

 Better for lighting the way through the countless hours my husband spent writing his book.

Better for school projects, arts and craft days, chalk drawings on the driveway, afternoons raking tons of leaves, mornings shoveling tons of snow, first and last days of school. 

Better for absorbing the magnificent drumming of my young son.

Better for the first of many Italian Mamas' lunches.

Better for the college essays conceived and written with brute intellectual force and revised for elegance and grace.

Better for the newlyweds' initials carved in the fresh cement of a newly poured chimney top.

Yes, indeed, we have left our home better than we found it. 

...to Remember Romance

My husband would not ever be mistaken for a starry-eyed romantic. Before earning two degrees in electrical engineering, he was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and served as a Special Forces operative. He used to joke that he could kill a man with a blade of grass. Cary Grant he is not. But I had fallen in love with this man because beneath the surface, all was not what it seemed.

Shortly after we were first married and had moved into our first home together, we hired contractors to rebuild our creosote - infused chimney. Think burnt wood left to rot and ferment. It was stinky, dangerously noxious, and needed to go long before we began building a family. This highly contentious topic had spawned tensions with the previous home-owners, incited arguments with insurance agents, and inspired conversations that included dismissive comments from chimney cleaners about the unavailability of "micro-scrubbers." It was not an auspicious beginning to our first home ownership. We finally despaired of saving the chimney by merely cleaning it and resolved to having it replaced.

Weeks later when our brand new chimney stood tall next to our house, my husband climbed onto the roof to inspect the job from above. Satisfied we had a stable, plumb, and creosote-free chimney, he rushed into the house, suddenly grabbed my arm, and pulled me outdoors.

"What are we doing?" I demanded.

"You'll see."

As we neared the only handy access to the roof, I dug in and stomped more like a petulant child than a new wife.

"I don't wanna go to the roof!"

"Come on. You'll be fine." And he helped me onto a low-slung roof access next to the deck.

Hunching down, I breathlessly tried a more rational approach and explained that I didn't need to see the new chimney; I was sure it was fine. Reluctantly climbing higher, I tried for sympathy and reminded him of my fear of heights. Reminding me that he was a paratrooper and clearly not afraid of heights, he pulled me onto the second story rooftop.

Now I was starting to get annoyed. I could observe the new chimney very well, thank you, with my feet planted safely on the ground. I trusted his assessment and frankly didn't care what it looked like from above, certainly not enough to risk life and limb climbing to the apex of my house, stooped over, wobbling in the knees, and teetering with vertigo!

And then I saw it:  the wet cement on top of the chimney and the little stick he had picked up before he had grabbed me. How could I be mad at him? So there we stood, clinging to each other on top of our first home, carving our initials in the cement before it dried. There those initials will remain until the house or the chimney crumbles to the ground.

AGP + GAB 

 

The Italian Mama thought about this little bit of newlywed romance the night before we moved out of this "starter home" that we had lived in for twenty-one years. Oddly, this memory didn't make me sad or wistful. Thinking about that sunny afternoon so many years ago, when I yielded to my husband's confident grasp, made me excited to begin a new journey, in a new state, in a new home where we will also leave our mark.

...to Crave Pi

I made pie today. Lots of people did, but while I was planning my pie, I spent a lot of time thinking about pi and the time in my life when I actually relied on the famous ratio to help me solve problems. Finding the area of a circle, calculating angles in radians, and designing crop circles - these are not the kind of problems that one encounters as a middle-aged English instructor. After college, I closed the math books and never looked back again. Until today, 3.14.15.

When I was in elementary school I thought of myself as a scientist and imagined that I would be a ballet dancer who just happened to know a lot about physics. Such are the dreams of young girls. As is typical for young women, once puberty hit, these ambitious dreams were replaced with more realistic goals, and my inclination towards math and science was replaced with more right- brain functions:  language arts, writing, literary analysis. And even though math did not come naturally to me, I found some degree of success in upper level math courses in high school. Of course, most of the credit goes to Sister Regina Maureen, who, apparently, could teach a rock the law of cosines, since I did very well in trigonometry and pre-calculus. It is shocking to me to write this historical fact, which brings me to my point.

         Thinking about pi and the hours spent solving equations, I find myself on 3.14.15 longing for some math. The

                simple elegance of following a prescribed proce-

dure, methodically, step by step, working 
yourself closer to a solution until
 finally, you solve for x. The 

great thing? You can go

     back and check to make  
sure you got the right

     answer by plugging  
x back into

  the original

        equation.       

      Whaaaaaat???!!!

Where in my life at the current moment is there such a clear path to a solution and such reassurance that you have found the right solution?  No where. I am currently in the process of deciding what my next career move should be when my family relocates to a place far, far from home; deciding whether to buy or rent a home in said remote and, as yet, undetermined place; helping Son 1 decide where to go to college; shepherding Son 2 through the tumultuous high school years. The list goes on. Primarily I spend the bulk of my professional life making judgment calls about student writing with rubrics that many would say are "subjective," teaching lessons that ask students to make rhetorical and stylistic choices for which there are few objective rules, and all the time wondering if anyone is listening. In writing classes, the students may or may not "get" the technique, strategy, or organizational pattern I'm teaching, but they can still write something that they might even think is good. Not so in a math class. If you don't "get it," you can't find the solution, and you fail. No judgments. No equivocation. No need to justify to a disgruntled student the red X  next to an incorrect equation. It's just wrong. No math teacher would ever write in the margins of a test, "I sense you lost your focus on the original problem," a comment that I often write in the margins of my students' essays. "I sense that you lost track of your thesis and strayed into a different topic." Happens all the time. Not so in a math class. So clear. So unequivocal. So impervious to second guessing. How lovely!

All of this uncertainty, and ambiguity, and potential for equivocation has made the Italian Mama long for pi.

...to Know Mulan Could Teach the Marines a Thing or Two

Not the Italian Mama

 

 

 

Remember when shoulder pads dominated women's clothing back in 1980s? My entire business wardrobe in the years after college included shoulder pads in every suit, blouse, and dress that I wore to my first job in a midtown Manhattan advertising agency. And I was surrounded by colleagues dressed in the same "power suits." The decade that saw the largest increase in women's participation in the workforce heralded a new, retro style that echoed the style of the 1940s and was ubiquitous. Women's haircuts got shorter and more angular, and women's clothing concealed feminine curves behind straight, boxy lines that mimicked the silhouettes of men.  Androgyny was in, and the female form was out.

As in the '40s, the 1980s saw record numbers of women in the workforce trying to compete and do business with businessmen. The fashion trends reflected the desire of women to blend into the men's world, to gain an equal footing on foreign terrain, and to break past the secretarial pool into the corner office.

Now that we have 26 women CEOs in the Fortune 500, have had several women serve as Secretary of State, and for the first time have 100 women in Congress, the paradigm has changed. Women are more openly embracing their femininity and beginning to define their roles in the workforce on their own terms. Libby Sartain, director of HR at Yahoo!, Inc. explains  

 

“So much of what it takes to be a leader has been historically defined by men. And while I was determined to be a leader, the last thing in the world I was going to do was to try to be like a man so that I could be taken seriously.”

Like women trying to break into the testosterone-infused corporate world, women in the military are seeking higher paying roles and greater opportunity for advancement in a very male-dominated arena. While women have been officially allowed in combat roles for about two years now, the Army and the Marine Corps still have a large number of specialties from which women are barred. But the military has always been on the leading edge of social change because it recruits from all walks of life and, as an arm of the government, sets standards that reflect the political ideals espoused by its civilian leaders. As a result, the US Marine Corps is spending the next year analyzing the current training standards to answer the question if women are fit for combat roles in the Marines. Along the way, the brass hopes to discover if the current training standards are appropriate for men or women. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey has said that perhaps the current standards need to be updated for current combat situations.

“If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?”

The Italian Mama recommends that, as the Marines consider this question, they take a night off, pop up some popcorn and settle in to watch Mulan. Their night at the movies would reveal to them another way they could shift a paradigm and update their standards to include characteristics that women naturally excel in. In Disney's recreation of the ancient Chinese legend of Mulan, our heroine succeeds not because she acts like the men she is training with but precisely because she acts like a woman. Her success in training and in the final showdown results from her agility, quick thinking, and innovative problem solving that employs her female charms rather than disguises them. With new standards in the military, a woman soldier could succeed not so much by trying to act like the guys but by acting like a good soldier, which can and should include criteria that are generally associated with women.

But what can women bring to the battlefield? Hmmm, let's see. Studies show that women executives battling for a business edge exceed their male counterparts in risk taking and demonstrate more creative problem-solving skills because they are not bound by conventions created by men. We can extrapolate that women on the battlefield would act similarly. Social scientists and anyone who knows women can agree that most women surpass their male counterparts in communication skills, agility, multitasking, cleanliness, empathy, and consensus building. Surely these are skills that would serve Marines well in any of the various roles required of them. In these areas, men should be working hard to emulate women. If the Marines were to update their training standards to include such characteristics, more women would qualify for combat roles, and the military would benefit from the enormous contributions women can make to fraught combat situations. A role model for all of society, the Marines could redefine how to be successful in all aspects of society which might finally recognize that women bring unique skills to the executive suite, the drafting table, the writer's studio, the research lab, and the director's chair as well as the battlefield.