Mama Says

For the second time this week, Plain Dealer columnist Sam Fulwood has come out fulminating against Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell’s proposal to install red-light cameras.

Tuesday’s column amounted to “I bet the cameras won’t improve safety, installing them as a source of revenue makes the city look pathetic, and besides, I don’t want to get even more tickets!”

In today’s column, he expresses some remorse for having betrayed his real motivation for opposing the cameras, and interjects a threat about how the private companies installing and monitoring the cameras will rig them to maximize their profit.

Well, I’m against that part, at least.

But I’m also pretty disappointed that someone in Fulwood’s position gives such short shrift to the actual danger imposed by the increasing tendency of Cleveland drivers to all but ignore traffic signals.

How many times have you driven under a light as it turned yellow, only to see five cars behind you follow you through? Stopping at red lights is increasingly viewed as optional. Fulwood dismisses the safety aspects associated with red-light cameras by saying that some critics claim they don’t help.

But since he decided to spend two entire columns on this subject, why not use at least one of them to scold the bad guys? And by bad guys, I do not mean the city administrators who thought maybe they could kill two birds with one stone. I mean the bad guys and gals for whom saving themselves thirty seconds by running a red light is more important than the possibility of running down a pedestrian or slamming into a car passing legally in front of them on the green.

Maybe improving traffic safety wasn’t first on the list of reasons for considering this plan. Maybe other cities have encountered glitches when introducing the cameras, making it essential that Cleveland officials do plenty of research before buying. Maybe generous people who lend their cars to red-light-running friends will get burned when they receive tickets in the mail.

None of these “maybes” suggests a compelling reason not to try it.

Your two children are home from school and are getting tired of having only themselves for company. It’s too cold to play outside, your spouse has chosen to use his rare day off to go off to the Detroit Auto Show, and your butt has apparently bonded to the leather surface to the living room couch. And you finished your last good book on Saturday night.

So you turn to Classic Reader. This is one of several sources of electronic texts which have followed in the footsteps of the great Project Gutenberg, an ongoing effort to make classic literature texts easily and widely available in an electronic format. Classic Reader is somewhat easier to use and to search than the texts that come straight out of PG.

At Classic Reader, you discover a number of delectable Edith Nesbit stories. Nesbit, you conclude, is just the thing to share with your kids at this stage. After all, your older child is impatiently cooling his heels waiting for the new Harry Potter book to arrive this summer. J. K. Rowling has said that she was much influenced by Nesbit; maybe your child would like to see why. And the younger child has just hauled back out Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew for a re-reading. In the first chapter, it refers to the Bastables digging for treasure in the Lewisham Road. Instead of trying to explain the allusion, why not actually read her The Story of the Treasure Seekers? Especially if you can manage it without ever leaving the cozy spot beside the gas log?

In the very first chapter, you run into a serious issue. Absolutely central to the story line of Treasure Seekers is the notion that the six protagonist children are desperate to restore the fortunes of the ancient house of Bastable, and they manage to do so in any number of clever ways. For the story to be any fun at all, it’s imperative that you get a grasp on the concept of British currency of the late 19th century.

Also, the young narrator of the story has a habit of dropping references to people, places, and events from literature, history and the current events of his day. Many of his references are obscure even to you, an old English major from way back. You could simply follow the time-honored custom of making up answers to your children’s requests for clarification. But why spend the mental energy on invention when it is now relatively easy to annotate any text on the fly?

Let’s begin with that money question. You are reading along in the second chapter of Treasure Seekers when the Bastables experience their first success. While digging out Albert-next-door, whom they’ve accidentally buried alive, they come across two shiny new half crowns. They seem very excited. How come?

To find out, first you need the quick and dirty on all those mysterious names for English money. What’s a “bob”? Is it more than a “quid”? Or the same as a “guinea”? So you google the terms “sovereign guinea shilling” and - see here! - you find yourself a reasonably authoritative-looking site that defines terms for English weights and measures.

This is all well and good as far as it goes, but simply knowing that a half crown is worth two shillings and six pence is not especially helpful to someone who is still having trouble with quarters and dimes.

The first thing you need to do to relate the value of the half crown to money the kids can understand is to account for the change in the value of the money since the time the book was written. To do this, you’ll need to visit the web home of the wonderful Economic History Services. In the easy-to-use conversion tool, you enter the date of the book’s publication (1899), the value of the money the Bastables found (this will be a total value of 4 shillings, 12 pence because there were two half crowns), and the closest available year to now, which is 2002. Then click on “Calculate Relative Value.” Since the children are mostly interested in the cash because they want to spend it on stuff, you refer to the retail price index to get an idea of the buying power of two half crowns. You discover that in today’s terms, it would equal approximately 17 pounds and 20 pence.

Of course, that’s still not good enough for American children. But to translate the British pounds to American dollars is even easier. Just go over to Yahoo and key 17.20 into the converter there.

Will your children believe that the kindly but not exactly wealthy Albert-next-door’s-uncle would have been generous enough to have accidentally-on-purpose dropped the sum of $32.42 into the hole where his nephew had been buried alive, just because he liked the enterprise and the imagination of the neighbor children, and was amused by this treasure-seeking game?

You are all deeply suspicious about this. No one you know has ever intentionally dropped even a twenty dollar bill to be picked up and spent by neighbor children, no matter how pleasingly precocious they might be. So you construct a quick spreadsheet on which to record all the children’s income and expenditures as the story progresses, to see if they seem to line up.

Meanwhile, there’s the matter of all these other Victorian references, to people like General Gordon and events like the death of Nelson and “kiss me, Hardy.” What’s all that about? Your kids feel like they’re being left out of an inside joke.

As of a few weeks ago, this type of question is best dealt with at Answers.com. Although I am very fond of Google, this “New Standard in Reference” is much better suited for filling in gaps in your knowledge without interrupting the flow of the story you’re reading. You can even get quick, easy access to images of your subject. You children are back in the loop.

Even with this continuous back-and-forth among reference sites, both of your children remain so enthusiastic about this funny story - which they can now explicate like old pros - that you finish ten chapters in a single afternoon, only breaking to dispatch the youngsters to make cups of tea and slices of buttered toast. By the end of the day, you are all smarter people, with richer vocabularies and rudimentary knowledge of economics as a bonus. But, on the down side, your butt is all pins-and-needles from having never left the couch.

When my husband, John, and I decided to have children, one of the parts I looked forward to the most was reading out loud to them. My own childhood had been shaped by the books that I was introduced to by grade school teachers and our local librarian. When my son Ned was three months old, I read P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins to him, lest he accidentally see the movie before reading the book. And — oh, what luck — both children were beautifully receptive to anything I chose to read aloud to them. Until.

We had traipsed happily through Mary Norton’s Borrowers series, and all of The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as the Winnie-the-Pooh books and pretty nearly all of Beatrix Potter. But for some reason that was never clear, they flatly rejected The Wind in the Willows, even though I would try offering it in little tidbits at exactly appropriate times. How can a child refuse to hear the story of Mole and Rat’s boating picnic when they themselves are eating a picnic by the side of the beautiful Cuyahoga River?

When they then also panicked and hid during the very first suspenseful chapter of The Hobbit, I began to get desperate. If they didn’t delight in my favorite children’s books anymore, surely we were standing on the threshold of surly adolescence! And them only 6 and 8!

Which is when — I am not ashamed to say it — we resorted to bribery. And this is how our year-old family tradition of the Jellybean Story began.

Beginning with the rejected Hobbit, I started offering them a single jellybean for every page of the book they would permit me to read aloud to them.

Okay, so at first it did strike me as sort of pathetic — even disturbingly controlling — of me. Why not let them simply choose their own books? The answer is that of course I did let them choose their own books. Before I was their mother, I was a public librarian, after all. They selected and inhaled books by the boxful every single week. But still. How could my offspring not like The Hobbit?

Fortunately, the good people at Jelly Belly brought them around.

Since we began this method for our bedtime story, we’ve shared some great and challenging things. We read Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth just before Christmas so that they could follow Wayne Turney’s stage adaptation when we went to see it at Actors Summit in Hudson. As a result, I suspect they grasped more of the nuances than many adults in the audience. We’ve read old chestnuts like the Little House books and some beautiful but less-often read stuff like T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. And we’ve recently finished a very interesting project — comparing the original 1922 text of Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle with the recent text edited by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack. We had a terrific family conversation about why Lofting’s original conclusion to the fourth chapter of part three, although admittedly hilarious, might be off-putting to some modern readers. Look! We’ve bred little English majors after all! Bliss!

During all of this, we’ve had some help from some very useful sources. There was Jelly Belly itself, of course. We’ve experimented with substitute products, but when you’re dealing with book after book, with 200 or 300 pages each, you really do need 50 different flavors, even if Wild Blackberry does taste exactly like bath soap, and Mango has been nicknamed “Cleaning Fluid” by our family. If you accidentally pop either of these (or the even more odious Garlic) into your mouth without looking, you automatically get to pick a better-tasting “chaser.” But many other flavors are just superb, such as Pink Grapefruit, Plum, and the divine Juicy Pear. Besides the variety, the small size of the jellybeans means we’re not sending the kids to bed with a head-splitting sugar buzz.

Our source for the jellybeans has also been a great discovery. Our first bags of beans from the grocery store tended to have far too many banana, coconut, and other less-desirable (to Fratus readers, at least) flavors. So we went looking for somewhere to buy preferred flavors in bulk. B.A.Sweeties on Brookpark Road was a dream come true. All 50 flavors! By the bucket full! Plus about a million kinds of candy we never saw before. Plus it’s a family-owned business since 1950. All good.

But the best add-on to our read-aloud experience has been the laptop computer with wireless Internet access. Back in my library school days, there was a lot of talk about whether electronic books would ever become more popular than hard copies. General consensus among fiction lovers at the time was no. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll talk about how our family is already enjoying the many ways in which connectivity enhances and improves the experience of story-reading, and how it may be even be preparing our kids to be stronger, better informed, more critical readers.

In today’s Plain Dealer, New York Times columnist David Brooks takes on the subject of declining fertility among women over 40 (registration required). The problem Brooks presents is that more women are finding themselves mourning their childlessness because they spent their youth getting educated and launching a career instead of having babies. One solution, Brooks suggests, is for society — or even government — to make it easier for women to “sequence” their lives so that the child-bearing happens sooner, and the career-building later.

On the surface, I could not be in more agreement with Brooks on this. Not everyone has the skill or the desire to raise children. It’s hard on individuals and hard on society when people who have both qualities never find themselves in a position to apply them.

I can also identify with the situation he describes of a mother considering re-entering the workforce, but finding that in the years during which she has raised her children, her priorities and interests have shifted away from the field in which she received her training.

The fundamental flaw I find in Brooks’ analysis is that it ignores a number of compelling arguments in favor for putting off having children. While he sees an advantage to a woman’s waiting until 35, “now that she knows herself better,” to pursue a graduate degree, he neglects to acknowledge that waiting until we know ourselves better would also help many of us avoid unwise marriages, which might result in fewer children experiencing the trauma of divorce.

Brooks also fails to give a nod to the many benefits that accrue to children born to more mature parents. Of the truly top-notch mothers I know, perhaps one in ten had their babies before their mid-twenties. By “top-notch,” I mean “relaxed, confident, knowledgeable and attentive.” A much larger percentage of the great moms I know were 35 or older when they gave birth. True, children born to women at that age are at statistically higher risk of certain birth defects - an issue not to be taken lightly. But neither should we dismiss the enriching effects of being raised by a mother who has had a lot of life experiences.

Were Brooks merely arguing that women ought to find support for choosing to start a family before starting a career, I would agree. But the end of his column reveals that this is not merely about helping individual women follow the path that suits them best. Rather, Brooks warns that “we don’t have enough young people to support our old people.”

When making child-bearing decisions about whether, when, and how many, it’s reasonable to consider who will care for the parents as they age, but it’s unwise to make that a deciding factor. As adults, we parents are obliged to look to and plan for our own future security, just as childless adults do, and not gamble on our children’s willingness and ability to take care of it for us. Similarly, while the future of Social Security is vital to our country’s ongoing stability, simply encouraging a larger population won’t fix what’s broken there.

The more compelling reason to support “a diversity of sequence options” (for men as well as women) is that people are happier when their lives flow in the way that seems to suit them best at each stage. To bring about a change like this will require not just tweaking policies regarding tuition, child care, and flexible leave, but also - and this is far more difficult - fundamentally altering our society’s definition of what constitutes a successful, productive adult.

Every year, I have the same resolution: “I will regularly write friendly letters to distant friends and relatives.” Every year, I forget that there’s a critical codicil to that statement, namely, “…and upon writing the letters, I will stamp, address, and mail them.”

A few years back, I tried sending New Year’s cards to everyone who had remembered not only to write but also to mail us a Christmas card before the holiday had come and gone. But I found that each card began with an excuse, an apology, or a rationalization for my tardiness in sending holiday greetings. “Dear friend: Have a dreary New Year. Love, Laura.” So I scrapped them.

In an effort to improve my timeliness (and also to practice thriftiness!), the next year I purchased Christmas cards during the January sales, then pre-addressed and stamped the envelopes. By the time I remembered having bought them and figured out where I’d put them for safe keeping until December, the postage rate had increased and many friends and relations had moved.

So here we are in the middle of January again, considering whether it wouldn’t be a very nice idea to make sending Valentines our family tradition instead.

But this is the year that both my husband, John, and I will turn 40, and already we have coined a slogan for the year. It begins, “You would think that by the time you turn 40….” and its ending is a variation on a theme, depending on the topic under discussion. For example, you would think that by the time you turn 40…your home would no longer be furnished with stuff from your dorm room. Or…you would have discovered a flattering haircut. Or…you would have come to terms with the matter of Christmas cards. And so on.

It’s sort of a self-critical little slogan, granted, but in the aftermath of the Self Esteem movement, I suspect we can all do with a little constructive self-criticism.

So, since I’m almost 40 and I’ve never routinely mailed Christmas cards on time, nor even complied in any meaningful way with my perennial resolution to regularly write friendly letters to distant friends and relatives, I now conclude that I’m unlikely ever to do so.

However, something I have managed to do before, at this URL, is to regularly post snippets of information about life in Cleveland, Ohio, interwoven with the occasional tidbit about my family’s own experience here. My original motivation in publishing the old “Mama Says” newsletter was both to share discoveries, news and concerns with our community and to keep a durable record for my two children of what growing up in Cleveland at the turn of the century is all about. Although I abandoned the “Mama Says” project a year ago, I notice that the site continues to get a good number of hits. Some of those hits, I expect, are from the very people who are so often in my family’s thoughts, and to whom the aforementioned friendly letters ought to have been mailed.

Assuming that’s the case, I’ve decided to use this site to begin an informal blog. I hope it will be a supplement to, and not a substitute for, writing real letters. But since by the time you turn 40, you should be able to set realistic goals, I’m not going to make any promises.