Game nights

Instead of those languid summer days we had in Provence the past few summers or that I seem to remember from my own childhood, I've had an exceptionally full June and July.  My teaching schedule is much lighter and my kids are out of school, but those same kids seem to have more activities than ever, plus we had a French exchange student for a few weeks.  So, the food and organizational demands on this household have been much greater than ever before.  That said, over the past weekends, we haven't done anything too much out of the ordinary for a summer spent in the U.S.: some swimming, some shopping, some fishing, a summer solstice festival day in town, a World Cup and birthday party, a day trip to Mt. Rainier, and a 4th of July weekend on Hood Canal.  From our visitor's perspective, several of the activities were probably no different from the ones he and his family would participate in at home, such as the various summer festivals and day trips.

The big difference though is in the weekday activities this summer, especially the scheduled kids' activities that persist year-round in the U.S. In France, music lessons and sports trainings are on hiatus for the summer so the weekdays are much, much quieter.  Being inner city dwellers the past few summers in France, our only real recreational options on foot during the day were to the neighborhood pools or parks, which weren't that attractive, to be honest.  There wasn't much to do at the parks in the broiling heat, and the pool area wasn't even properly shaded.  (This summer, that same pool in Aix is closed for renovations, which I really find to be strange timing!  See my blogger friend's post on this at Aixcentric.com.)   Here in the U.S., we easily fill each summer weekday and evening with sports camps, trainings, music lessons, games and competitions.  Just this week, I've already driven a carpool to soccer camp, am attending two evening swim meets, and am sending a child off to a five day national soccer tournament in North Carolina. I am hoping to fit in a water aerobics class or two for myself, make some raspberry jam, and get to the grocery store again, before I collapse on the weekend!

Apparently, our U.S. style summer did not overwhelm our exchange student like I thought it might; his father reported that his son arrived home to Marseille this past weekend radiant and 'very pleased' by his visit to the U.S.  I think that our activity level here in the U.S. does appeal to many: we just don't sit still much around here. (I've commented earlier on my quieter and more reflective life in France: En famille Oct.2013, Un été en Provence Aug. 2013 )  Even unscheduled activities seem to be more engaging or involved here: musical jam sessions between the boys (our guest brought his saxophone, one of my sons plays piano and guitar) became recording sessions and mini jazz concerts for the rest of us, casual fishing off a dock became a game of how many can you catch, the lighting of an enormous pile of safe and sane fireworks (the only kind I buy) morphed into a late night teen campfire circle, and the pile of board games in our basement led to a few game nights à la façon Américaine.  The fireworks and the game nights were especially novel to our guest because such fireworks are interdict in France and playing board games en famille is just not a common activity.  Both ended up being great ways for our guest to practice English and for us to share how we spend our time here, in this family, in this community, in this society.  And that is what a cultural exchange is all about.

In the boat

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown (2013) is currently getting a great deal of attention in the Pacific NW.  The book was mentioned in the local Seattle paper before the opening of boating season this spring, a local university where I teach has just selected it as its common book for next year's incoming freshmen (see http://www.onlinefast.org/wwutoday/news/the-boys-in-the-boat-selected-as-western-reads-book-for-2014-15 ), and not too many months ago, I caught a mention of the book on a Facebook post by a brother-in-law who was a Husky varsity crew alumnus himself.  Brown frames the story around the life of a young man of very modest means who goes off to the University of Washington in the early 1930's to study engineering and becomes a member of the collegiate rowing team.  The broader story is about the importance of teamwork and perseverance and how underdogs do sometimes win (a favorite American theme).  Along the way, we learn about the sport of rowing and a little bit about the craftsmanship of wooden boatbuilding, and while the writing is a bit heavy on hyperbole and foreshadowing (the Nazi specter looms large as do impending dust storms, cold spells, and heat waves), Brown shapes and paces the story well, enhancing it with details of the broader socioeconomic and political context.  For me, the best part though is the endnotes which are offered in an abridged version in the book and more completely online.  Brown's transparency is refreshing and satisfying as he explains the sources of his accounts and statements and even how he contrived some of the obviously undocumented quotes.  Some might quibble that he was brazenly filling in too many gaps but I would say he was telling a story based upon his interpretation of the sources available to him (and he wasn't lazy in digging for sources).

It is the sources that Brown had available to him that really caught my eye.  The interviews, and especially the journal and logbook entries, printed photos, and personal handwritten letters that the author relied upon made me realize how increasingly rare those latter archival sources are, and make me wonder how our different modes of recording the ephemeral events of our lives today will color future stories and accounts of lives lived, victories won, or events experienced.  For example, my children have never written the kinds of letters or had penpals like I did, or experienced the regular bliss of receiving a letter in the mailbox (many of my letter-writing Finnish cousins and penpals, and my Swedish and Danish ones,are still part of my life, if in smaller ways than when I was younger).  They have never waited for photo prints to be made or thumbed through packets of them fresh from the photo processing shop.  They do not have boxes of old letters, in the handwriting of grandparents, younger siblings, from a romantic partner, or half-filled old grade school diaries, piles of printed photographs--loose and in albums.  I'm not imagining that any of those in the boxes in my attic and the files in my office will ever be of value to anyone except me and I am sure most will likely end up being thrown out someday.  I am grateful though that my spouse's grandfather's precious letters home during World War II were lovingly saved by his wife and later collected and archived by his eldest daughter so that we can all have a small understanding and the physical touch of how the war was experienced by a family member and how it likely colored his life.  Similarly, if those UW crew men in Brown's book hadn't kept journals and written letters in the first place, and if their sisters, girlfriends, grown children hadn't saved these, and if the logbook of the crew coach hadn't survived, we would not have the rich story that Brown tells us.  I wonder how authors will fashion and tell the stories that my kids and their kids will read years from now.  What will the documented sources of these stories look like and feel like?

Saving everything, especially today when many of us have so much, threatens to overwhelm us in clutter and garbage.  It is satisfying to reduce, to de-clutter, to clean out, but some of the 'documentation' that reminds me of the story of my life and of my world I just won't part with; I'll leave that decision to my descendants! They'll have to decide if my huge email inbox, my yearly wall calendars, my tattered photo albums, or even the posts of this little journal-y blog are archive-worthy.  Others are already making similar decisions about loved ones' materials on social media sites and on laptop hard drives.  In the meantime, I will record here, for posterity or for the garbage can, that my family had a magnificent in-the-boat experience once too, last year, when our German cousins arranged for us to take a one-day, 32 km paddling trip together down the Ardèche river in southern France.  While our less than harmonious paddling and some mild rapids resulted in a few out-of-the-boat instances and there was no gold medal at the end of our trip, the eye-catching nudist beach along the way, the very mad rush among hundreds(!) of other canoeists to make it to the endpoint in time for the last bus, and the eventual reward of a bottle of French champagne all made this an epic experience in our lives.  And I'm very glad I saved some documentation of it.

In the blink of an eye

While our attention is fading even as the story is incomplete, the loss of the Malaysian jetliner and the people on board now has some very clear sociological ramifications for the rest of us.  Similarly, so too do natural disasters, such as the mudslide that buried part of the small community of Oso in my home state of Washington a few weeks ago ("Oso, Washington, 'forever changed' by deadly mudslide, by Jonathan J. Cooper and Lisa Baumann, March 29, 2014, Huffington Post), or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that is the subject of Sonali Deraniyagala's haunting memoir Wave (here's Teju Cole's review in the New Yorker, "A Better Quality of Agony, March 28, 2013). What am I talking about? It is the sudden disappearance of social roles that is especially relevant now.

Social roles, or social statuses as some refer to them, are the positions we occupy in society.  In my Sociology of Family course I lay mine out very clearly when I tell my students that I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a college professor, an immigrant, a woman.  These reveal my family status, my work status, my ethnoracial or immigrant status, and my gender status.  We all have social roles along these lines, some of which are more prominent than others. The ones that stand out as our central ones are called master statuses.  For example, in some societies, one's racial status figures as a master status, even if for the person himself his social roles as father, coworker, husband feel more important than his social identity of black man. Many of us no doubt have had the experience of seeing someone whom we identify so closely with his or her master status that we are tripped up when we see this person in a different social setting or playing a different social role: ever see your grade school teacher at the grocery store shopping for her family?  As children, it was hard for us to imagine a teacher as a mother and wife buying milk and bread for her family.
 

Femme [woman], 1953, by Le Corbusier

Social roles also evolve throughout our lifetimes; obviously at one point I was not a mother or wife, but a daughter and student.  Some people cycle through many social roles and some are even able to reinvent new ones relatively late in life.  (This weekend's New York Times presented a captivating joint interview of Nancy Pelosi, the current U.S. Senate Minority Leader, and comedienne Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  Pelosi tells us that she started her congressional career at age 46, after 3 of her children had gone off to college.  Now that's inspiring!  See Power Lunch, Times Two, by Philip Galanes, April 4, 2014)  Eventually, our social roles have to be replaced, when we age out of them, or when we die.  New mothers give birth to new sons and daughters, new business majors become marketing managers, new immigrants replace earlier ones. That's the normative pattern, and this all usually happens with some kind of transition, where we have time to adjust to new roles. Illnesses, injuries, graduations, job offers, retirement parties, moving plans all ease us into the new situations where we or others shed old roles and take on new ones.  However, suddenly the unexpected can happen.  Natural disasters or man-made ones may dramatically and irreversibly erase social roles, sometimes almost in the blink of an eye.  Two sons and a husband are swallowed up by a giant ocean wave, a town librarian is caught and buried in a mudslide, a co-worker and someone's daughter inexplicably disappears forever on an airplane.  These people's disappearances alter the social environment in which they were a part.  Not only do they and their social roles disappear suddenly but so do the ones of the people connected to them.   That's what struck me when I read Deraniyagala's recounting of her tsunami experience and its aftermath, where she had to make sense of her altered social role.  She was effectively no longer a mother or a wife even though she had been just a little while before.  The relatives,  friends, and colleagues of the people on the lost airplane or under many feet of mud are now similarly disoriented.  As living members of human society, we expect to have at least a little time to ease in and out of social roles so that we can adjust cognitively, socially and emotionally. While this is surely not much consolation to those suffering the profound losses of their loved ones and of their own social roles, sociologically speaking, we do know that life goes on, because human society depends on it.  Sooner or later, the newly vacant social roles will be filled again.

Spanish hours

[Spoiler alert: This is not a hoax blog post despite the date. :0]

Our server was a little slow to take our lunch orders yesterday and then to inquire about coffee after our meal, and I found myself irritated until I remembered that I had had the opposite problem a few weeks ago when I went out for dinner with my spouse.  After our time in France, we've become accustomed to longer and later restaurant meals and on a recent Saturday, we wanted to enjoy a full late-night dinner in downtown Seattle after attending a performance of the Seattle Symphony (photo below).  We'd always had problems finding good restaurants in Seattle that would serve full meals until midnight even before our French sojourn, but I was delighted to find a Spanish-themed restaurant (Aragona on Union Street) which recently was nominated for a foodie award (see this article by Britt Thorson in Seattle Refined/KOMO News, Feb. 20, 2014) and which conveniently approximates Spanish dining hours (Spaniards seem to eat even later than the French).  We made a reservation for 10:15 pm and were happy to find the restaurant still well-occupied by Seattleites, even if we were definitely the last ones to order dessert, a lovely flan.  Unfortunately, we had to rush through that last bit because our meal was stretching dangerously close to the time that the parking garage where we had left our car was closing.  It was very disappointing to have our evening curtailed, with the added pressure of paying a sizeable monetary penalty if we missed the midnight garage closure.  This was something we never had to worry about in Aix en Provence; the numerous parking garages circling the city never closed (except for the fermeture exceptionnelle for maintenance once in a very great while).   On the other hand, the shops closed in Aix sometimes in the middle of the day, just like they do in Spain.

The different cultural concepts of time have been well-documented in all kinds of literature.  Recently, a New York Times article reported on some revisited ideas in Spain of adapting to more northerly business hours (see "Spain, land of 10 p.m. dinners, asks if it's time to reset clock" by Tim Yardley, The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2014).  As the article reaffirms, time is clearly a cultural construct, and changing how time is used alters all kinds of cultural meanings and expressions.  That famous siesta in the middle of the afternoon for example continues to be a ritual for many Spaniards, and we thought it made a lot of sense because during the hot Aixois summers we ourselves were forced indoors into our darkened apartment to get through the hottest hours.  But that was possible because I worked at home.  My spouse on the other hand sat in an office all day, like many working adults in Spain and France do, so he didn't and they don't have the option to take such a significant snooze in the afternoon.  Workdays also start early enough these days and continue long into the early evenings that serving dinner to families at 10 pm creates problems in the mornings.  In many ways, parts of southern Europe have been tied to these traditional conceptions of time much longer than I expected, but they can change, because the social and cultural conditions change and warrant other adaptations.  Our family is a case in point; now, in the U.S., we still eat late, even on the weeknights, where 8 pm is a regular dining hour.  We enjoy this custom brought from Europe, but we also eat late because long commutes and evening activities make a 6 pm dinner difficult.  Dining at 10 pm though is something we save for the weekends because even that is a bit of a stretch for our family. (And that's no April fools' joke.)