Angel on the Frightful Night

(The angel herself wrote the title above.) Happy Halloween. In keeping with my blog policy we don't show Sarah's face on the blog, except when she was a baby, for her privacy and safety, but you see her at left as a trick-or-treating angel, out there among the witches and such. Our family and friends have previously been invited to join our secure sites at Flickr (for stills) and YouTube for videos, where you'll get the full record, but few have. The invitation is open.

For the second year in a row, Sarah was an angel, though perhaps I should note that this is a halloween costume, and not always a description of her behavior. Tonight, she insisted that we keep trick-or-treating until her plastic pumpkin (yes, it's a pink, not an orange, pumpkin) was full. We hit the local streets, mostly people who know her and think she's darling. The angel outfit no doubt helped add to the image.

Earlier in the day both Tam and I were able to take time off work to see her school's halloween parade. Pics of that are on the Flickr and YouTube sites. When I went to pick her up at school, she was still in her angel costume, on the monkey bars on the school playground. (Sorry, since I wasn't expecting this, I didn't have a camera with me.) Having visions of the costume being destroyed before trick-or-treating I tried to get her home quickly.

Real conversation:

Me: What did you do in your class halloween party?

Sarah: We had relay races.

Me: Relay races?

Sarah: Yes, we wrapped up Adam as a mummy. Four people were mummies.

Me: Mummies?

Sarah: Yes. We wrapped them in toilet paper. Good thing it hadn't been used.

Yes, obviously, though I'm still far from clear what they did during their halloween party.

While trick-or-treating, as I noted earlier, she announced she wanted to fill the pumpkin to the brim. It wasn't quite to the brim, but as this photo shows, it was a pretty good haul of loot.

Oh, yes, if you wonder where I've been, it's been the Middle East Institute's 61st Annual Conference. That link already has the audio and will eventually have transcripts and stuff if you're really interested. Banquet Monday, conference all day Tuesday, my Board meets tomorrow. Craziest week of the year for me,and this year halloween was right in the middle.

Some Follow-ups

Okay, I should add a few comments to the last post. I don't think Sarah asked if I knew how to make a nuclear weapon because all the other kids are bringing them to school, and my honest answer was not just "no". I said that I understood the general principles of building a nuclear weapon but had neither the engineering skills, the machine shop or the fissionable materials to do so. And, [any homeland security folks reading this please note] I clearly noted, I had no desire to have one. (Well, no more than the next guy who gets cut off in traffic.) I didn't say it in those words exactly, but then Sarah has often said to me, "Dad, when I ask you a question, I want a short answer." Therefore I did not discuss the pros and cons of an implosion weapon versus a gun-type weapon (Fat Man vs. Little Boy, Nagasaki vs. Hiroshima) or the differences between highly enriched uranium, plutonium, and various thermonuclear and other enhanced options. Okay? Department of Homeland Security, I am not teaching my seven year old to build a nuclear weapon. I don't know how. Okay? And even if Sarah builds one, she won't be allowed to take it to school. Not even for Show and Tell day.

On my posting on my Mom's death, several relatives commented kindly when I e-mailed them the post, but nobody has yet commented at the site. I guess none of my relatives know how to post to a blog. Okay.

Sarah is going to be doing her first communion next spring, and I have a photo of my Mom at her first communion, and several of me at mine, and maybe we'll post these as the time approaches. I want to give her a sense of continuity through time.

That's it for now. I'm trying to race to keep up.

Has second grade changed a lot since my day?

Asked by Sarah, at Mount Vernon, in a very public place:

"Dad, do you know how to make a nuclear weapon?"

Umm, no?

Mount Vernon for Harvest Days

"George Washington", originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

Harvest Days today at Mount Vernon; Sarah enjoyed the pioneer farm stuff. Fairly decent George impersonator shown in the picture.

Sarah spent quite a long time petting two ponies; she also watched avidly as a group played 18th century instruments and as volunteers demonstrated the making and spinning of flax. Though she will insist when asked (by me) that she finds history boring, she's in fact getting more and more interested. She also watched the end of the presentation by the impersonator shown above. (Tam asked if he would run in 2008.)

The time spent with the ponies suggests we're moving into horse-loving age, I guess. My digestive tract was acting up so I wasn't enjoying things as much as Sarah was. It was the first visit in a while that she didn't spend most of in the kid's activity room doing hands-on archaeology. We have been annual members at Mount Vernon which saves a lot of money, and it's close enough to allow us to get down there fairly often. There was also a hay maze which she talked about as we looked for it but was disappointed in (not enough bales high, so she could see to solve it: no real puzzle). The animals and activities she liked; there were also wagon rides we didn't take, river cruises at a discount (she's still in her "remember the Titanic" mode about boats, unfortunately, despite there being remarkably few icebergs in the Potomac this time of year).

Unfinished Business

Okay, I'm not posting often. I said I'd post more about my Mom, about our anniversary, about Sarah's second grade experiences, about turning 60. Except for the latter (I've decided to do a Jack Benny and scale back to 39) (Daddy, who was Jack Benny? None of my friends' parents' know either?), I actually will do so soon. We're two weeks out from my job's big annual conference, I'm behind on bills, taxes, and probably breathing, and so I'll get to it when I get to it.

Remembering my Mother, I

My mother, Sarah Agnes Jones Dunn, died 41 years ago today on October 9, 1966. I was only 19. She was only 54, six years younger than I am now. If she had lived, she'd now be 95.

Those four sentences provide the major facts. I could write a book about my mother. I may someday. In fact, I think over the days to come I'll try to blog a bit about her, and what her death meant to my life. Maybe not tonight -- it's late, I'm tired -- but I wanted to note something on the day itself.

Her name was Sarah Agnes. She always said she preferred Sarah to Agnes, joking that "in movies and on TV, Agnes is usually the name of the mule." But her family -- everybody, sisters, brothers, even my Dad -- always called her Agnes or Ag. (I think she disliked Ag even more than Agnes.) Once, when I was in high school and she was starting to look for a job to help out financially now that I was old enough to be on my own during the day, I answered the phone and someone asked for Sarah Dunn and I told them they had the wrong number. My mother was furious; she feared it was a possible job offer. I was innocently ignorant: I knew somehow that her name was Sarah Agnes but I'd never heard her called that.

I hope she's aware of the fact that my daughter is named Sarah, not Agnes. Just as Sarah is named for her grandmother, my mother was almost certainly named for her grandmother, Sarah Fitzpatrick Cleary, shown in the second photo here. If you look at the two photos, this one and the one above (I'm the kid if you haven't figured that out yet), I think you'll see a clear family resemblance in the eyes, eybrows, nose, and facial structure.

It was traumatic, of course, to lose my mother when I was 19; it seems impossible that it can have been 41 years. But it also gave me an early lesson in the uncertainties and foul balls life can throw at you. My Dad lived another 10 years after that, but by the time I was in my late 20s I was without my parents, an orphan at 28. Not alone in the world: I had and still have valued relatives, aunts and uncles then, cousins now. I owe them a great deal. If my Aunt Kathleen Landis had not left me a comfortable bequest, the Chinese adoption would not have been affordable.

Sarah Grace Dunn has an interesting pedigree, even if not a genetic one. The Sarah Fitzpatrick Cleary on the right was born in Ireland (either Leix or Tipperary, there are conflicting reports); Sarah Agnes Jones Dunn was born in Galena, Kansas, and my Sarah was born in Changde, Hunan, but they alternate generations by passing down the name. Her middle name, Grace, comes from Tam's great aunt, a powerful figure in her family apparently. I'll let her tell that story. I'll tell more of my Mom's in coming days.

Miss you, Mama, even now. More later.

An October Update

If anyone is actually reading this, even occasionally, it will be fairly obvious that I haven't been very active as a blogger. And Tam barely posts at all. Consider it a result of our jobs, an overwhelming backlog of other stuff to do (including clean house) Sarah's demands, etc. etc. I keep planning to come back and reflect more on my 60th birthday, or Tam and my 14th wedding anniversary, or Sarah's early weeks in the second grade. But E-mail unanswered, bills unpaid, and just being more TIRED than I used to be, tend to deter spending time at the keyboard.

At one point we thought we'd visit Tam's dad in Colorado Springs this fall. Now that looks more likely in the spring, but he and his friend/companion Marge are planning to visit us again at Christmas. There just isn't enough time to get things done.

Same with the blog. My biweekly newsletter, which began in 1989, went into hiatus earlier this year and needs to be brought back, this time in an electronic incarnations. But I still have much to do to bring that incarnation about.. The information revolution makes it easier to deliver information quickly, but also makes the infrastructure more difficult to put in place.

I've also been helping a neighbor get computer literate for his kids. It's a reminder that while half of the country is on Facebook or Myspace, the other half is still trying to figure out how to get online, or how to boot their computer.

I'm not the only person with a blog (I have two actually, the other being The Estimate's blog) who never has time to post. Forgive me and stay tuned.

14th Wedding Anniversary

I haven't written much lately because of the press of other duties, but today (or really yesterday as I'm posting after midnight) was our 14th wedding anniversary. I had known Tam for a decade before we got married, and our original marriage date was the year before, but finally, on October 2, 1993, we did it. It's too late to post a lot about it now, but Tam has expressed a desire to record some of her memories and I'll probably do the same, in coming days.

Anyway we went out to eat at Clyde's. Sarah had been balking a bit but liked it in the end. More to come, I hope.

Comments, RSS Feeds

It's possible that nobody's reading this blog, though some of my relatives have told me they have checked it out. One aspect of blogging that some of you may not be familiar with is the ability to comment on a posting, to tell me how brilliant I am or (hypothetically of course) to disagree with me. Until now I've had "moderated" comments, which means I have to look at it before it appears online. Not a single comment yet. So I'm dropping the moderated part. If some spam computer gets this address it may fill the comments with spam, and I'll have to rethink whether to moderate or not. But for now, all you need to do is click on "comments" at the bottom of the posting, write what you want, and it will appear. It's one way to turn this into a conversation.

Some of you may be familiar with RSS feeds, which lets you tell a program (your browser may have the capability, Google offers it, etc.) to post headlines of new postings on your favorite blogs. Thus you can learn if I've posted anything new without actually going to the blog (new postings on your favorite blogs can all appear on one page if you like), and get a teaser headline at least. Yea, even this humble blog can do an RSS feed: just go down to the bottom of the page where it says "Subscribe to Posts (Atom)" [which is not, I'll admit, intuitively clear in its purpose] and click on it. You'll need to have some kind of RSS reader but I think most browsers can do it now (I know Firefox can) as well as various things free from Google and Yahoo.

A Fine Young Lady

I want to praise my daughter. I complain about her enough, whenever she's bad, or won't listen, or runs wild. So when she does something great I want to praise her.

One of my oldest friends, Chris Eccel, whom I've known since 1977 in Cairo, is passing through town. He's just back from Damascus, is retiring from the Foreign Service, and after heading home to Wyoming and Utah he's moving to Hawaii. Along with another old Cairo hand, Mike Albin, long the Library of Congress' man for the Middle East book-buying trade, we met at a Vietnamese restaurant (Minh's: my first time, highly recommended) in Arlington. We couldn't get a baby-sitter so Sarah came along.

She behaved perfectly. Read her books, ate her dinner (brought from home, except she ordered dessert there), didn't interrupt but talked to the grownups when they talked to her.

Not only did Chris and Mike compliment her, but a stranger from the next table came over to remark on how well-behaved she was.

Daddy's real proud of his big girl tonight.

The Israeli raid

This blog is for family, not for our business stuff. But some folks might find my comments on the recent Israeli raid in Syria of interest. It also gives you the link to my Estimate blog.

Once again, a busy week

As is often the case I just can't blog during the week. This was the next to last week before the Autumn issue of The Middle East Journal goes to press, and by the time I get home I'm tired and ready to read, rather than write. Now that it's Friday there's a window of opportunity. Hopefully the weekend will generate something worth writing about. Stay tuned.

Besides, what do you expect from a geezer past 60?

The Big Six O: Let's Drop Churchill's Name

Okay, I'm 60 today. Tonight's going to be a quiet one at home; it's a school night. We went out for a nice Thai meal last night.

My thought for the day: Winston Churchill turned 60 in 1934. He was a has-been, a political outcast. So 60's hardly the end. Not that I expect to be called upon to save civilization, exactly. But there's still a lot to be done.

On the other hand, besides that saving Western Civilization thing, Churchill was a great writer and speaker and able to consume incredible quantities of brandy while smoking cigars constantly and, predictably, it killed him by the time he was in his mid-90s. You sort of have to admire that. Not emulate it: most of us wouldn't last so long.

It is said that when Roosevelt and Churchill were preparing to meet Ibn Saud on the Suez Canal in Egypt, Ibn Saud sent word that his religion forbade there to be any smoking or drinking in his presence, and Churchill allegedly replied along the lines that his religion required him to drink brandy and smoke cigars throughout the day and at every meal. For all my own personal respect for Muslim mores when in a Muslim environment, I really like that story nonetheless.

Churchill was, of course, politically incorrect in many ways (Gandhi was "a half-naked fakir" and "I did not become His Majesty's Chief Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire") but when it came to the back-to-the-wall moment, he had what was needed. And then, after he'd saved Britain and the war was won, he was repudiated at the polls, and democrat that he was ("the worst form of government except for all the others"), he went home. Not that he then happily supported Attlee ("a modest man with much to be modest about") or anything.

Anyone who cut their history-of-World War II-teeth on Churchill's memoirs, by the way, needs to read David Reynolds' In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, possibly the best book I've ever seen about how a major work of (history? memoir? self-creation?) was written. The Amazon link is for the hardover but the paper is apparently due out in November. A good read, and an illuminating one.

Churchill never wrote history quite like anybody else did. It was either memoir (even his multi-volume The World Crisis about World War I was a memoir encased in a narrative of the rest of the war) or a personal story (his Marlborough was, like his biography of his father, about an ancestor and hardly objective. It's still the best book on the subject. Even the juvenile stuff is well written. (I first read The River War, about the Sudan campaign and Omdurman, in high school, but even then was impressed with the prose.) And of course, he deliberately did not call The Second World War "A History of the Second World War" because it was his own view, the second world war as seen by Winnie. (And, by the way, he made "The Second World War" canonical even though we Yanks may still say "World War II"more often.) UPDATE: Someone might object, I suppose, that his History of the English-Speaking Peoples is not a personal history. But if you'll note that Australians, Canadians, and (especially) Indians and Nigerians and other darker English-speaking peoples don't get much space, I think it is pretty clear that in Winston's view, the whole history of the English-speaking peoples was aimed at producing Great Britain and the United States, and perhaps someday culminating in a British Prime Minister with an American mother ... (This last comment was added Sept. 28.)

Okay, enough. Churchill was a 19th century man in so many ways, particularly in his imperial views and his comfortable use of "the English race" and even (what...?) "the American race"; his History of the English Speaking Peoples slights India, the most populous English-speaking nation then and now. But I'm still glad we (all of us English speaking peoples, and the rest as well) had him when we needed him.

Reflections on Turning 60. SIXTY?

Monday I turn 60. How did that happen? Isn't 60 supposed to be old? Oh, sure, I don't feel 20 anymore. (Thank God.) But sixty? Bear in mind my mother died at 56, my father at 65, so the genes aren't all that reassuring, though except for fairly typical stuff for an overweight guy (high cholesterol, high blood pressure, both controlled by medication), I don't have any major health challenges.

Oh, I know, calendars are artificial. In the Muslim calendar (354-day years) I'd be nearly 62. The Chinese consider you one on the day you're born, I'm told. The Babylonians counted by twelves. And the Biblical threescore years and ten was a long time ago in a pre-medical society. Other rationalizations are welcome in the comments section. And while my parents didn't live to ripe old ages, some of their siblings/cousins etc. did, so there may be some good recessive genes in there somewhere.

I am, however, turning 60 on a Monday. That is never a good omen. It's a Monday.

I'm posting the first version of this Friday night, but intend to add to it over the weekend. So watch this space.

Sunday, September 16. It's been two days so perhaps I should have made this a separate post. But it's on the same subject. Sixty years old is one of those landmarks that is, as I noted earlier, mostly numerical. I married at 46, became a father at 53, so everything has been a little behind schedule for me. My cousin Linda, only about three weeks older than I, is a grandmother several times over, with a grandson older than my daughter. Further complicating the family tree is the fact that Linda's mother, Dorothy Hendricks, was a daughter of the eldest of 12 kids in a big Irish family and my mother was the youngest. Dorothy's older sister, Mildred, was born before my Mom, yet my Mom was her aunt,because of the 25 years between her father and my Mom in the same group of siblings. [And in the first version I posted I got this backwards myself. It confuses everybody.] Dorothy was six years younger than my Mom (who was her aunt), but only that, and their kids were born almost at the same time in 1947. We aren't the only weird genealogy tree of course, but it's hard to explain sometimes. Sarah's cousin Daniel, who's a few months older than she, and his sisters, who are younger, is actually (doing this in my head, anyway) Sarah's second cousin, twice removed.

Back to me, the newly created geezer. As I noted, my parents died close to this age. But I also listen to my doctors, and even (sometimes) take their advice. On both sides of my family the men who died young generally died of heart attacks, and heart disease is more treatable than ever in this country. Still, I have the problems: high cholesterol and high blood pressure, though I'm treated for both.

Sixty as a Landmark. I suppose 60 is also one of those "benchmark" moments in your life, though I'm not sure that most of the benchmarks have been that great for me. I turned 18 literally two or three days before leaving for college in September 1965, and one of the key things I had to do (emphasis on the "had") was register for the draft. My draft card stayed with me (you weren't allowed to leave home without it basically) till the draft ended, but even then I think we had to keep them for years until, finally, it was discarded, unwept, unhonored, and unsung. (But also, please note, unburnt.) If you have no idea what I'm talking about, say a brief prayer of thanks and move on.

I have no memory of my 20th birthday in 1967; at that age (especially then, when you couldn't vote till 21), the 21st was more important. The memories are vague but I think I had the 21st birthday at home before returning to school, but am uncertain.

I turned 25 in Cairo. I think I went out to a good restaurant with flatmates and other friends, but the memories are vague.

I also turned 30 overseas, this time in London, en route to Cairo. I think I celebrated alone in some good restaurant (I was staying in a friend's flat off Kensington High Street, but the friend was in Scotland or Spain or some other place) and possibly one or more pubs. Probably one or more pubs. Almost certainly one or more pubs. Which may be why the memories are vague.

I would have turned 35 in 1982 and have no idea what I did. I'd have been in Washington, but can't place it in context right now, though it was half my threescore years and ten. I turned 40 in 1987, and went out with a large group of friends to a local Greek place.. That I do remember.

Tam and I tried to remember my turning 50; we'd have been married and it would have been 1997, but like much of our memory as you get closer to what we might call the Parenthood Horizon, the memories start to fade. (Possibly we took a trip somewhere.) 55 is totally unmemorable because Sarah was two and a half and all consciousness was dissolved into parenthood.

I'm sure these won't be my last reflections on turning 60. Stay tuned.

Where I've Been (Partly)

If anybody's reading this (still not clear to me), one reason I've been so quiet is I've been working on getting my newsletter, The Estimate, back up in a new electronic form after a months-long hiatus. I've got a now-active blog going on, and am trying to get a mailing ready. More when I can come up for air.