Letters From Home

Several years ago, when I was working at the library, I was browsing the stacks looking for something to read and happened upon Faye Kellerman’s book The Ritual Bath. The jacket blurb looked interesting, so I checked it out.

And then, of course, I had to go find all the other books in the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series and read them, too, in chronological order. Needless to say, I was hooked.

The books embody a lot of my literary favorites–interesting, real characters who develop and grow over time, intriguing stories, and, of course, excellent writing. The fact that Rina, the heroine, is a devoutly religious Orthodox Jew just added an extra bit of literary spice to the story. I’d read Harry Kemelman’s “Rabbi” series of books, and had begun to understand a bit about Orthodox Judaism (OK, Rabbi Small was officially a Conservative rabbi, but he and his family were Orthodox). Or at least as much as an interested heathen could understand.

Interestingly enough, though, when I have recommended the Kellerman books to friends, whether they like the series or not seems to depend more on their religion than anything else. Almost invariably, the more evangelical-Christian the friend, the less they like the books. And the comments boil down to the fact that they find the religion in the books too obtrusive.

And yet, if the protagonists had been evangelical Christians and every religious element was so familiar as to fade into the background like the sound of a ticking clock, I doubt my friends would have thought of the books as “religious” at all.

We all tend to let the familiar slide into the background noise without much notice. I grew up in a segregated Southern city where the “colored entrance” and segregated balcony in the movie theater was just the way things were. That didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all until after we’d long since moved away. So I’m well aware of how this works.

But still… why should the inclusion of religious elements make religious people uneasy? Isn’t it, as they so often tell me, all the same God?

I wonder.

And now I’m reading Faye Kellerman’s latest book, The Burnt House, and enjoying every minute, and feeling sorry for my friends who are missing out on these books.

Edited to add: In the end, though, I was disappointed in the book overall. The elements that make a Decker / Lazarus story unique were just kind of haphazardly used as filler. The story was good, the writing was good, the proofreading sucked big time. If Kellerman had started out with this book I suspect it would have been a tough sell.

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My current book is Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest by Gerard Degroot. The subtitle, I think, should really be A Cynical Luddite Curmudgeon Looks at the Space Race.

I’m among the first children of the Fifties, and we grew up with the wonders of the “space race.” The people in our neighborhood, adults and children alike, gathered out in the street to watch Echo fly over. We saw the very first satellite broadcast from Europe (although I was royally irked that it interrupted a perfectly good rerun of “Wagon Train”). We read the Life magazine stories about the astronauts, and when Americans went into space, if someone’s parents had an extra TV they could spare for the day (not a common thing in those days) then our school classes came to a halt while we darkened the room and watched the launch, and sometimes the splashdown. (No TV available for Alan Shepard’s flight when I was in the fifth grade, but we listened to it on a transistor radio in class.)

Of course, it wasn’t all wine and roses. My father, a combat veteran of WWII, had absolutely no use for Wernher von Braun, and every time his name was mentioned, Dad would sneer “That Nazi.” Girls were told flat-out that they couldn’t be astronauts, and Valentina Tereshkova’s flight was airily dismissed as nothing more than a publicity stunt. (Well, it was, but that wasn’t the point.) Astronauts died in plane crashes, and of course there was the horrendous fire in Apollo 1.

But the idea of going to the Moon was magical, somehow, even if women were excluded and not much really came of it and most people don’t remember much about the Moon landings nowadays.

Degroot’s unwavering criticism of the whole affair proves quite soundly that even if the individual elements of an argument are true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the argument itself is valid. He points out that the whole “space race” was built on a tissue of lies and disinformation (true) and that Russian technology wasn’t anything like the propagandists told us it was (true) and that even Kennedy, who issued the challenge to go to the moon “before this decade is out” wasn’t really that much of a fan of NASA (who knows; we’re not mind readers and JFK is long gone). He sides firmly with the people who felt that the billions of dollars spent getting a few men to the Moon ought to have been spent making lasting changes here on Earth (possibly true, but given the limited success of all the various Earth programs into which billions have been poured over the years…)

In short, he says, we wasted our money and we wasted our time. Wernher von Braun was an SS used car salesman, the directors of NASA were glad-handing idiots who knew how to work a crowd, and all the emphasis on “science and technology” really didn’t get us anywhere. Most of the inventions credited to the “space race” were actually products of the pre-NASA years, our focus on putting people in space made things needlessly complicated and costly, and we should have been trumpeting our achievements in areas of space other than the launching and retrieving of humans into the cosmos.

All true. But I don’t happen to think that we wasted our time or money. The journey to the moon did give us some common ground as a nation, in a time when all sorts of other world events were fracturing American society and driving wedges between parent and child, neighbor and neighbor, city and city, state and state. We needed something to spur our collective imagination. We needed to believe that we were indeed taking one small step on a much larger journey.

My own commentary: It shouldn’t have taken 20 years for American women to follow Valentina Tereshkova into space, but that mistake was a product of the Fifties mindset. The women who applied for the Mercury program did better than the men on the tests. It was only Eisenhower’s insistence that the astronauts be test pilots that screwed women out of any chance of equal standing. But that was the Fifties mindset. Eisenhower was born in 1890 and shaped by his upbringing and his military service. He wouldn’t have seen a woman as his equal if she’d run him over with a Jeep. It took 20 years to get an American woman into space because that’s how long it took for American space jockeys to grudgingly acknowledge that women could maybe actually do it. Sally Ride was a child of the Fifties too (in fact, she’s about six months younger than me). I’m sure she was told she couldn’t be an astronaut. I’m glad she didn’t listen.

Degroot’s argument comes across as a longwinded case of sour grapes.

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A long time ago, I started making a list of things I wanted to do when I retired.

Didn’t expect to retire as early as I did. But then again, that gives me just that much more time to catch up on my list.

I wanted to grow my hair long again, since I think older women with long hair look good. And I’m no longer taking the medications that made my hair fall out, so that was two good reasons to quit going to the haircut place. It’s long enough to tie up with a scrunchie now, and while I haven’t come to a decision about whether it’s going to be OK long or not, I’m amused to think that the last time it was this long, scrunchies hadn’t been invented yet.

Another item on my list was “Take the shop classes they wouldn’t let you take because you’re a girl.” In those bad old pre-Title IX days, it was not only permitted but common to have classes that were strictly segregated by gender. While it made sense for what passed for “sex ed” in those days (tell the girls about menstruation and tell the boys about sperm) it most assuredly did NOT make sense when it came to assigning girls to home-ec classes only and boys to shop classes only. (Don’t get me started on sports; we’ll be here all day.)

I really wanted to take shop. My dad was not the kind of dad who Fixed Things. He didn’t have tools and he didn’t have a workshop and he didn’t putter around in the garage. He had a study, and he sat and read books in it. And when something went flooie around the house, he had to call someone else to come fix it. I liked fixing things. I liked building kits and reading about science and technology. And I would have been in heaven in shop class. But I was a girl.

So, now that nobody can tell me what I can’t do (other than perhaps invade the men’s room, and who would want to do that in the first place) I have started taking “shop” classes, starting with welding. I’ve now completed classes in oxy/acetylene and arc welding, neither of which is going to be particularly practical in my non-school hours, and I learned a little about MIG welding but there wasn’t time to finish that unit. So, this semester, I’m taking an “independent study” class to learn MIG.

Which, should I choose to do so, can be done at home with rented equipment. Once I learn how. I’m determined to learn how.

On my way home from class today, I got to musing about other things that have changed radically in schools since I went there. (Besides the business of the teacher leading us in the Lord’s Prayer every morning first thing.) When I was in school everyone had to by golly sit still and pay attention in class, all day long. (I was a bad kid. I had opinions and I was smarter than the teacher and I knew a lot of stuff and I talked. I’m the only person I know of who had to stay after school on the last day of school.) Nowadays, when kids are expected to sit still in class and behave, oh dearie me, it’s unfair to the boys, who don’t learn well when they have to sit still. (There goes how many hundreds of years of “sit still or I’ll smack you a good one” out the window?)

Truth to tell, I think that’s just backlash against the people who have insisted, for the last 40 years or so, that by golly girls ought to get an equal shake in school. Now, even being expected to sit still and pay attention is “girl oriented teaching” and therefore unfair.

You know what? Boo freakin’ hoo. It’s no longer legal to tell girls they can’t do things because they’re girls. Girls can’t be relegated to mediocre intramural sports or told they can’t take gymnastics (as happened in the second high school I went to) or kept out of shop classes and forced to take home-ec. (Equally, boys can’t be told they aren’t allowed in the home-ec classes nor discouraged from taking typing–keyboarding–or forced to take shop classes if they are not so inclined.)

My daughter took metal shop in junior high and my son took cooking. I cheered them both on with enthusiasm. They were doing the things their dad and I weren’t allowed to do when we were their age. That’s progress, no matter how many “conservatives” try to shout back the tide.

Once I’m done with the welding classes, I think I’ll take machine shop.

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You’d think that eyeglasses would be the last thing one would want to order through the mail. Up till today I was pretty much of that opinion myself. But my eyeglass prescription had changed considerably over the last year in response to radical changes in the medications I was taking, so I definitely needed new glasses.

But there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to buy them at the moment, especially since we’d just paid for two pairs of glasses for F’zer (which he needed just as much as I did, probably more so because he wears glasses all the time and I don’t). I remembered an article on the Lifehacker web site about online eyeglass merchants and looked that up and browsed through it for recommendations.

It seemed that a company called Optical4Less got the best reviews. So I checked out their web site, and the ordering process was very straightforward. I prefer rimless glasses and they had a much bigger selection of lens sizes and shapes than any retail eyeglass store I’ve ever seen.

I was a bit unsure when I saw that the company was located in Hong Kong. But then again, this being a worldwide economy and outsource-loving country, I reasoned, who knows where any glasses you get from a store actually are coming from, unless you’re paying the super premium LensCrafters price to have them fabricated on site? So I decided to go ahead. I must admit I used my Amex card to pay for the purchase Just In Case.

I needn’t have worried. My glasses arrived today (with the “nice used Hong Kong stamps” promised by the web site) and they are absolutely perfect in every way. In fact, I can even see my computer screen clearly through prescription lenses for the very first time.

Ordering eyeglasses online might not be for everyone, but I’m here to say it worked for me.

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