Cold Spaghetti

This is a wonderful video clip from the fantastic PBS series “Unnatural Causes… is inequality making us sick?” One of the episodes, “Becoming American” was screened last night at the Ashe Cultural Center. I was one of the panelists that took questions about health inequalities at a community forum last night after the screening.

The website for the series is an incredible resource for anyone interested in income, race, immigration, housing, and the myriad of issues that influence our health. In particular, I liked the suggestions to how individuals can make strides in their own communities toward improving health. As a country, we showed we are ready for change… here are some suggestions on how we can start in our own backyards.

Research has shown that health is more than healthcare, behaviors, and genes—that the social
conditions in which we are born, live and work actually get under the skin as surely as germs
and viruses do. What can we do to help reframe the nation’s debate over health and to address
the root causes of our devastating socio-economic and racial health inequities?

Here are a few ideas you can use to get started and encourage others to become
involved in working towards health equity:

• Identify and connect people interested in the root causes of health inequities.
• Organize a “brown bag” screening to discuss how social conditions—where we
are born, live, work and play—impact health.
• Form a committee to identify assets, programs, or initiatives within your
organization where you can use the series to educate, organize or advocate for
health equity.
• Screen and discuss the series with PTAs, book clubs, neighborhood associations,
churches, tenants groups, racial justice groups, and trade unions.
• Identify three existing struggles in your community that can improve health equity,
e.g., land use, a living wage, paid sick leave, affordable housing mandates, toxic
clean-ups, lead paint removal, etc. How can you become a partner?
• Conduct an audit of health threats and health promoters in your neighborhood.
• Identify and build strategic partnerships with community-based organizations and
organizations in other sectors; link health outcomes to housing, education,
employment, political power and other arenas.
• Form a community-wide health equity coalition.
• Ask your public health department to conduct a Health Impact Assessment (HIA)
on proposed development projects and government initiatives and ordinances.
• Provide local media with facts and resources so they can incorporate a health
equity lens in their reporting; help them identify a message point person to provide
quotes, analysis and additional information.
• Broaden the discussion: look for opportunities to submit op ed articles, letters to
the editor, call in to radio talk shows, and form discussion groups.
• Organize a policy forum to brief officials in government agencies about the social
determinants of health inequities.

Paul came with me to the event last night (he was impressed that I managed to only use the phrase ‘epidemiologic assumption’ once) and regretted not having a video camera there. That can only mean that at some point in the evening, I picked my nose or something.

In lieu of my comments from last night, I’m listing a few of my thoughts based on the screening, the questions panelists were asked, and my comments…

— We should be very concerned about the mental health of the Latino youth in New Orleans. Statistically, their risks of mental illness far outweighs any other group in the city — and the risk factors we know to trigger illness in this group exist for them here in spades.

— What can we do, as a community, to create public, multiracial spaces?

— How can we advocate for better city transportation?

— What can be done to attract health researchers back to New Orleans?

All of these things are on the radars of the many community activists and organizations that are working to rebuild a better community here… but as anyone who works in community organizing and nonprofits understands, the strides made are more likely baby steps.  Can massive overhauling really occur?

Here is one community project that I think is great example of a fantastic step: The Hollygrove Market.  We have not been able to pick up the weekend box, but just knowing it is there for us and available in a neighborhood where food markets are scarce, makes me feel that maybe it is possible to create a healthy city in the midst of poverty and destruction?

h/t: Kate Harding

UPDATE: Stacy, you rock! YOU TOTALLY NAILED IT! Who can resist that catchy beat?

The clip being shown, as I understand it, is on immigration and the health of immigrants. I’m speaking here tonight about my research if anyone has an unnatural interest.

unnatural-causes-flyer

SCREENING OF THE PBS SERIES
UNNATURAL CAUSES
AND COMMUNITY DISCUSSION
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2008
6 PM – 9 PM
ASHE CULTURAL ARTS CENTER
(1712 ORETHA CASTLE HALEY BOULEVARD)
Light refreshments will be served
UNNATURAL CAUSES is a documentary series that explores the
root causes of health and illness including economic and racial
inequality, the wages and benefits we’re paid, the neighborhoods
we live in, the schools we attend and the social conditions in
which we are born, live and work.
Please join us for a 30 minute screening followed by
a community discussion

My PapPap Charlie was the only child of a rough, Swedish woman. He was well into his forties, unmarried, and childless when he met my divorced Grandma in their jobs at the Department of Commerce. He was quiet, having suffered great abuses as a POW during the Korean War, and whether due to this trauma or his peculiar personality, was incredibly socially awkward. He loved classical music almost as much as he adored my vivacious, life-of-the party Grandma, who seemed to be the light that saved him from his Charlie Brown-like days and thrust him into the wild world of our family. He died of a massive heart attack when I was 10, but my Grandma tells me that before he died, I won his heart.

Oblivious to the awkwardness he had with children, I embraced him with the all assumed adoration of a grandchild. I followed him around, chattering through the sounds of gentle classical music, invading his space when he went to be alone in his basement retreat. Years later, Grandma Betty would tell me that these were the highlights of his life. That he would sit perfectly still and simply listen, puffing away on his cigar, terrified of doing or saying anything that might offend and cause me to leave. He was in awe of me with absolutely no idea of what to do or say, so he simply sat and took in all my chatter and energy with patience and surprise.

Later, when Grandma Betty and I became roommates during my high school days, she filled these stories with more intimate ones about their marriage. Describing how he made her feel and the things that made their relationship special. My favorite antic dotes were the ones that showed Charlie’s softer side, the jokes that made my Grandma laugh. He had a dry humor with a curmudgeon twist, and like my own husband, made jokes from words.

For example, a historical time or place, to Charlie, was an** “hysterical” time or place. Gettysburg, or the Fourth of July, or the Declaration of Independence were all “hysterical” parts of U.S. History. He described the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia, the place where my Grandmother chose to have me, her first grandchild, baptized, as “a hysterical church.”

So when I approached the polls this morning and entered my vote, PapPap Charlie was foremost in my mind. I could not shake the thought of how hysterical the moment was, that I was casting a hysterical ballot on a hysterical day, a day that will go down in hysterics. I think about telling my grandchildren about what it was like to participate in the election of 2008, of getting to vote for the first Black President of our country. About how good it felt, as if our country and indeed, the world, was at a turning point and suddenly the winds were picking up to bring us back to a place of safety and honor. I wonder if they will be awed to think that I was a part of such a hysterical day.

—-

* Just in case someone wonder about the grammar here, I looked it up. Using ‘an’ before a word starting with the letter ‘h’ is reserved for when the word has a silent h sound… ‘an honor’, versus ‘a horse’.

** Okay, I know the rule. But really, doesn’t “an” just sound better??

—-

UPDATE: It seems my parents found the new blog. I know because they’ve called me several times a day over the past two days to dump on me offer rewrites for my posts. (Hi, Mom!)

My Grandma Betty was known to weave a few tails… and as the first grandchild and one who lived with her for a solid year to finish high school and then again off and on while I worked in the area after college… I was the one who heard her stories. Charlie worked a desk job in the Navy and never was a POW — these were Grandma’s embellishments. The whole thing is very Grandma Betty. I wonder if she wanted to jazz up his past for her own enjoyment, or to simply make a dull story more interesting, or if it was her way of making him seem more memorable to me. She knew early on that if anyone was going to keep our family stories alive, it would be me; Grandma was aware of the need to leave a verbal legacy through me.

So Grandma made up information about Charlie’s past. Really, I think it’s sweet. A testiment to how much she cared for him, that years after his death she would weave danger and mystery into the gentle, quiet, and reserved man she loved. So Charlie wasn’t a POW, he didn’t become ill in Korea (the story was that he contracted some type of illness and was denied medical attention while a POW), and had job with a Navy supplies department. That’s one story. The other one is of an ordinary man who was loved so much by a vivacious woman who saw him as her hero. That’s the story I like best.

While in Pittsburgh last weekend, we (Paul, me, the kids, and my Dad) visited the fantastic Carnegie Science Center. The Center is one of the nicest of it’s kind that I’ve ever seen, with wonderful science exhibits, an incredible under 5 play space with clever kid-sized machines, and a WWII submarine in the river. My Dad was a submarine guy in the Navy, so this was a must-see stop on our Museum tour.

So it was interesting to visit this submarine with my Dad. (A note: the structure on the top of the hull is the sail… it’s much bigger than one would think.)

My Dad sacrificed quite a bit to work with subs. As the story goes, Dad graduated from the Naval Academy an okay student and was sent to Pensacola for flight school, where he was at the top of his class. But he wanted to go to sub school, so he applied to the Navy’s school for sub training, in Groton, Connecticut. He didn’t get in. A year went by and he applied again. He didn’t get in. At this point, his superior officer brought him in and said that the fact that their star pupil was repeatedly applying for sub school was making their flight program — in itself a top program — look bad. He delivered a warning: if my Dad were to apply again for sub school and not be accepted, they’d have to kick him out, sending him to surface duty in Hawaii (to the undesirable post no one wanted.) I was born about a year later in Pearl Harbor, which explains what happened on his third try.

So while Dad completed his long tours at sea, leaving my Mom alone with me as an infant on an island in the middle of the Pacific thousands of miles from everyone she’d ever known, he continued to dream of subs. He figured he needed more education, so he managed to get accepted (after two tries, if I remember right) to a Master’s program the Navy had with M.I.T. We moved to Boston, where my brother was born, and where Dad studied Ocean and Mechanical Engineering in between playing Candyland games with me. After three years in the program, we moved to South Carolina, where he had more surface duty and repair work. Finally, a few years into his Charleston service, he was accepted to the program in Groton. I remember visiting him at school… the drive up from South Carolina, swimming in a New England lake (it was cold and gross) and going to see Ghostbusters at a movie theatre. Once he came back from sub training, he did repairs on nuclear subs of all kinds and often went out to sea with them to monitor the repairs. Being at sea then was very different from now, with internet and phones and more detailed systems of family communications. When I was a kid and Dad was at sea, there was no contact, no information. I remember asking about where he was, wondering why we couldn’t call him or send letters. It was puzzling and we missed him. I knew that he was under the ocean, but the thought was too strange to really understand. Honestly, I did not think that it had much of an impact on me until the Kursk sank in 2000; when I had nightmares about my Dad for more than a week. I realized then that his being under the water in a silent, heavy, capsule had a great impact on me, lighting fears that I never knew I had.

So with all that history, I was excited about getting to see the sub with him. I guess I thought it might let me get a vision of what the majesty of submarining meant for him, this thing he worked so hard to be a part of — the life he led when he was not with us. A military family is a family that understands sacrifice; it’s what we do everyday. I thought maybe I’d get an idea of what that sacrifice was all about.

We entered in the front of the sub, into the torpedo room. A volunteer from the Center was there to answer questions; he had served on nuclear submarines, he told us through a very heavy Russian accent.

“Really?” my Dad said, “I served on many nucs, myself. Which ship did you serve?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

My Dad looked at us with a goofy grin. He’s good with a game.

“Okay, which class?”

“No, I cannot tell you.”

“Wait,” says my Dad, “which SIDE?”

“Zee other one,” Mr. Retired Russian Submariner says. My Dad jovially answers, “Yeah, I thought so. I recognized your voice. Heard you over the radio. We always knew where you were.”

He’s joking, it’s his way of being nice and it is. Paul asks the Russian guy a thoughtful question, which he also evades, and I sort of drown out the sound. It hits me that all those days and weeks and months at sea were much more serious than I really had ever considered. It was during the Cold War. They were out listening and monitoring as War Games. My Dad is an engineer, he fixes anything that runs on water — things I had never connected with images of conflict, despite the purposes of the machines he occupied. The human weight of it, the risks, the threats, and how it fits into my love of peace… these are bigger pieces I’ve not really let myself ponder. I’d always thought of my Dad as an engineer more than a sailor, machine geek more than soldier. I wonder, is that how he saw himself, too?

Covering the walls of the torpedo room and every available space otherwise, are large cans of ketchup, relish, and chili sauce. Bright and happy cans lining shelves above huge torpedoes. Everything in a submarine is back to back on a line between what you need to stay alive and what could kill you. Even the smell of diesel, what my Dad called ‘the smell of a submarine,’ is a constant reminder of the metal at work around you. The taste of the air was like taking in a piece of the machine with every breath. I got the sense that if you were down there long enough, you would breath in so much of her that you would be forever locked in her service. Like a first love you can’t forget.

The tiny sub packed in three movies for it’s sailors to watch in the mess deck (the kitchen). They hoped to meet up with another sub to trade movies when in port… otherwise, they were back at sea with the same picks. When they grew tired of the repetition, they played the reels silently and made up alternative words (the inspiration for Science Mystery Theatre 2000). Living quarters consist of a bunk with storage under the mattress for the crew, with closet-like spaciousness for the commanding officer. My Dad is over 6 feet tall and thick with muscle; there is no where on a submarine where he comes close to fitting. I watched him struggle through the doorways and tried to imagine a hurried fleet of men rushing through during an emergency maneuver. I couldn’t.

Still, he walked through that ship like a kid in a candy store. Pouring over the thousands of dials, reading the diagrams that framed the walls. I admit, the engineering of it all is astounding. But the physical experience? The heat, the steam, the sweat — all of the discomforts that were so obviously part of the experience of the men who served — if these were on his mind he didn’t share it. He seemed generally enthralled with how it all worked, how it provided the foundation for the vessels he would later repair and deploy upon.

The tour gave me even more appreciation for those who go into military service, who rise to the occasion to do things that I could not bear to think about, let alone do. And an increased wonder for my Dad, this mysterious guy who worked for years for the opportunity to be a part of the most physically uncomfortable and psychologically terrifying calls to duty that I can imagine.

Maybe she would have caught on earlier if she could see France from her house?

I haven’t been privvy to many calls between heads of state and potential heads of other states… but even if you forgave her missing the incorrect names of various Canadian officials, wouldn’t you start to get suspicious when the conversation decends into wife hotness, porn tapes, and dead animals?

Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to make Will’s spider costume. Because Will may have been cool with the whole spider-thing, but Kate has absolutely no interest in her Little Miss Moffett bonnet. Will, on the other hand, was thrilled to pose with it.

Is that a seriously nice bonnet or what? And for $8. You can get one made in any fabric you can think of from here. Sheesh, makes me want to wear a bonnet, too.

Maybe next year?

2008_10_10-katesingsfreirejacques (mp3)

This is very typical dinner conversation in our household. Kate chatters on and on about something, Will sweetly pipes up and does exactly what we ask of Kate, Kate tries her best to do the same (sounding like she’s providing back-up for Ozzy Osbourne), and then forgets what she is doing and starts talking about climbing mountains and eating monkeys.

Our Dynamic Duo. A little blurry, but you’ll get the idea…

Do you know what the room of a 4- and 2- year old looks like after a morning searching for costumes to wear to school? It’s not pretty.

But we pulled it off. Thankfully, I’d picked up some sale items over the past few years… including a cowgirl hat and cowgirl boots. Both of these were purchased on outings when Paul was not around to glare disapprovingly. I am using this as an example of my Good Shopping Skills, which have now proven themselves to be Very Valuable in a pinch.

Along with a horse-y shirt, Kate became a cowgirl! We worked on “Yee-haw!” all morning. At 9:30, we joined her at school for a little Halloween party.

She was quick to find many good uses for her cowgirl hat. “Daddy? What do you mean I can’t have a pony?!”

Then they had a puppet show. Kate walked herself upstairs and sat in the front row, without thinking twice about her parents, stuck in the back with the babies (they were a little freaked out by the intense cheese brought by the puppet man.) Luck for him, Kate LOVES cheese. All kinds. She ate it all up and especially liked the guy’s cat, Dinah. (His ghost was named Blythe. Chuckle, chuckle.)

She just took it all in, wild horsewoman that she is.

And seriously, it took honest effort.

She didn’t even notice us leave after the performance. She is SO OVER us!

Then, at 2, we visited Will’s BATMAN’s school. He was cruisin’ the play-yard in his Batmobile.

Inside, the kids’ artwork decorated the cafeteria. That face in the center is the work of Batman, himself.

Then, the Kindergarten put on a Maori-inspired song and dance, wearing Maori-inspired skirts that they made. (Their study of Australia has branched out to New Zealand.)

We figured Will did pretty well with the words and movements, considering he’d missed three days of school recently for our trip north.

His favorite part was “aou, aou, aou, aou-aou-aou!”

After their performance, guess who was waiting? Yup, same guy from the morning. His shtick went great with the older crowd, though. And when he needed a BAT, guess who got called up?

See that handsome guy in the background? He recorded it all. A prince among men, I tell ya.

Thanks to Paul’s recording prowess, here’s an incredibly reduced-quality video of the Maori-song and dance. My favorite part is when Will hitches up his pants about 50 seconds in. AOU!

“Mommy, I love you sweeter than the sweetest bullfrog ever kissed.”