Counting down to the World Cup

Very cool that the Bishops in South Africa have blessed the football stadiums, initiated an educational campaign about human trafficking, drafted a special World Cup prayer (and no, there are no petitions in it for the home team) and and set up this web site: www.churchontheball.com.

World Cup fever is everywhere.

Tomorrow, folks.

Church on the Ball from CatholicStudio on Vimeo.

Philly Moms: Horse latitudes, doldrums and dark matter

Horse latitudes, doldrums and dark matter

Original post to Philadelphia Moms Blog.

My daughter plots weather patterns.

No, she doesn't want to grow up to be a meteorologist. It's part of her honors science class, and, throughout this past first year of high school for her, the class has prompted some very interesting changes at home. We've had to watch everything on TV that has to do with volcanic eruptions. And in a freakish sort of coincidence, the earthquake in Chile took place just around the time her class was studying tectonic plates - so she was able to add scientific snippets of information to each newscast in which the disaster figured.

Although the class is not her absolute favorite (that passionate honor is reserved for her history class - but that's a subject for a different post) it is the class that has generated the richest - and perhaps most varied - vein of conversation for us as a family.

My husband is pretty knowledgeable about natural history, so he can hold his own in many of the conversations engendered by the earth and space science curriculum.

Me, not so much.

Take the recent shift into astronomy. During one of our conversations I had to resort to trolling for stray bits of memory from years ago, when I was a reporter.

"Astrology is the mother of astronomy," I say to my daughter during one of our dinnertime conversations. "At least, that's what one of the astronomers at Colgate University said when I interviewed him for an article."

I see my daughter's eyes light up. "You interviewed an astronomer?"

I nod. This is good. It'll do something to amend my status as the goofy, dweeby parent. "And I got to check out the observatory while I was at it."

Even better. Respect. I think I see it flash across her face.

"What else did he say?"

"That stars are given identifying numbers now instead of names out of Classical mythology."

Okay, but a little too soft - I read this in her expression. She expects me to know about mythology.

I dredge, dredge, dredge my aging memory banks.

"And I misidentified the nebula he spoke about." I admit this after I realize it's the only other thing I remember about the article I had written. Of course, you always remember what you get wrong.

Still, my daughter is feeling generous. She gives me one more chance in the conversation to impress her. "What nebula?"

R-i-i-ght.

I'm not sure why some of us are hard-wired the way we are. Give me literature and poetry and I can find my way around the twistiest constructs. But math? I'm hopeless. And obviously I don't fare much better with the sciences.

I remember many years ago discussing this lack with a professor of mathematics at Colgate.

"But math, at its highest levels, is poetry," he said to me, unwilling to accept the insurmountable wall I had built between the field he loved and the one that held my heart. I mumbled something about never having even glimpsed that level, and left it at that.

But I look at my daughter and understand that she has bridged that wall. Or that it never existed for her. Like a true interdisciplinarian, I think she's able to hear music and poetry in math and science - and vice versa.

So, for her sake, I try to do the same.

When the conversation turns to weather patterns I key into the stories and poetry of the words: horse latitudes describe a subtropical region where winds are so variable that, reputedly, those aboard historical sailing vessels shoved their horses overboard in a desperate attempt get going again. Or the doldrums, a place of meteorological and vernacular calm, actually somewhere near the equator. It works for astronomy too. I'm pretty sure you can turn dark matter - that matter which can't be detected except by the gravitational pull it exerts - into a whole literary subgenre.

Sigh. No matter how hard I try I still won't be able to help her with chemistry or physics homework when she takes those courses - especially if she continues on the honors track. But when we look through that telescope she's been bugging me to get her, I think I can come up with some good stories.

Maybe I'll even chose a word or two from science.

Behind the camera

I received an e-mail yesterday from longtime Catholic Standard & Times freelance photographer Joanna Lightner letting me know that she is gravely ill. Like Joanna herself, the e-mail was filled with the kind of grace I rarely evince but always recognize. And while the news saddened me greatly, it also brought to mind the words I spoke at my own mother's memorial: how the loved ones of artists are luckier than most - because the artist lives on in the art she created during her lifetime.

So it will be with Joanna.

Her images have been part of the Catholic Standard & Times much longer than my six years at the paper. She has probably photographed thousands of events at hundreds of venues. Those of my readers who are part of the Philadelphia Archdiocese have probably seen her snapping pix at the Cathedral and churches around the five counties - a tidy, slender figure with a mass of blond curls and the kind of dangly, artsy earrings I covet.

Since Joanna has always worked for us as a freelancer, I haven't had the opportunity to spend tons of time with her - but she's always been one of my favorites (yes, managing editors have favorites). I usually schedule her to cover the annual Hispanic Heritage and Migration Week Masses because she doesn't mind diving into the fray and capturing the energy and pageantry that gets lost if you stand back and set yourself apart from what you are shooting. I seem to remember her telling me that she didn't start out as a photographer, but discovered her passion for that artform later in life. Maybe that's why the distance and reserve aren't there; maybe that's why I schedule her for the events that are nearest and dearest to my own heart.

Joanna's photos are here, too, accompanying some of my blog posts. (If you type Joanna's name into the Lijit search tool on the right nav bar you will bring up each post that has an image or two of hers to accompany it.)

Much as I try to be a stoic, I'm just not. It's hard for me to lose anyone I care about, and I care about Joanna. But the friends and colleagues of photographers are luckier than most - the images captured by their unique eyes, their unique hearts, will live on and on.

Philly Moms: Let that geek flag fly

Let that geek flag fly

Original post to Philadelphia Moms Blog

So let me just say, upfront, that until fairly recently I didn’t know I was a geek.

It took reading Junot Diaz’s profane but moving Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, to understand that I am. I got almost every single literary, genre fiction and pop culture reference his geeky Latino protagonist makes during the course of the novel. I got them in two languages, even.

Uh oh.

Even more recent confirmation: I arranged and rearranged, imposed on friends and brazened to leave early on the evening our newspaper goes to press, all to go listen to Irish poet Seamus Heaney give a reading at Villanova. I was commenting on the turnout for the reading – a good number of the audience were students – when the professor friend sitting beside me leaned over.

“You do know they’re all required to be here, don’t you?”

You mean those students didn’t think it was the coolest thing ever to have the opportunity to hear a Nobel-winner read poetry in the most sonorous and mellifluous of Hibernian accents?

I think I discerned pity in my friend’s eyes. His wife’s eyes too.

Uh oh.

My younger brother can’t believe that this is a new revelation.

“How many times have you read the Lord of the Rings?” he asks pointedly.

He’s not being unkind – he’s also read the trilogy multiple times and can fit a quote or two into almost any conversation given half a chance.

“Face it,” he says with finality, “we’re the definition of geeky.”

This worries me. Sure, my younger brother can feel at ease saying he’s a geek – his beautiful wife is, after all, a diehard Star Trek fan. I wonder whether the fact that my daughter’s been to a manga-anime convention (and reads manga even when she's not at conventions) counts against her cool quotient and places her close to, if not in, the geek camp. If so, we can only blame the two X chromosomes she got from me, because my husband hasn’t a geeky bone in his body.

Being the geek that I am, the minute I admit I must be one, I go look up the history of the word. Turns out it has only recently taken on its obsessive enthusiast of mathematics/technology/intellectual/pop-culture meaning. It was originally used to refer to carnival sideshow performers who bit the heads off animals. Which, I guess, would make Ozzy Osborne a geek.

I’m thinking about all this (obsessing, as is the geeky wont) and eventually post something about it on my Facebook page.

One of my newspaper columnists posts in response: “We talk math at the dinner table.” Geek solidarity. This is followed by several posts (on her own Facebook page) about repeated viewings of the new Star Trek movie.

And I marvel that this woman I’ve admired since I’ve known her – a chemistry professor at one of the seven sisters; an accomplished writer of columns and blogs and scientific papers; the capable and sensible mother of teens, and a woman of profound spiritual understanding – is also a geek. And perfectly comfortable with it.

Hmmm.

My daughter, it turns out, isn’t all that worried about geekiness either. “If that’s what you want to call it,” is what she seems to say when she shrugs my concerns away. For her it is just who we are. What we love. We fangirl over poetry and science fiction. Or the Ignatian Examen and Gaussian functions. Or comic books and elves with impossibly perfect hair. So?

This is why you need friends and kids. To let you know the flag you’ve been flying for years is just fine.

Exactly. The. Way. It. Is.