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Love your neighbor wrong.

Love your neighbor as yourself -- one of the two great commandments -- has sometimes been taken to imply "You cannot love your neighbor unless you first love yourself."  Let's take a look at that idea and see where it goes.

Suppose we start by rejecting a wholly superficial reading of that statement, one that would have you grabbing the goods to yourself and making sure you are satisfied and comfortable before turning to help others at all. 

Suppose we also set aside, as territory already well explored, the "airplane oxygen mask" analogy.  You know it:  it argues that you are justified in meeting your own basic needs before turning your attention to others, on the unselfish grounds that lack of those needs can make you useless to serve.  (Territory well explored or not, I wonder if this gives us a useful definition of which needs are "basic.")

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Here's the thing:  it's a commandment and, as far as I can tell, plainly enough stated that most translations come out essentially the same.  Love your neighbor as [you love] yourself.  

C. S. Lewis (in Mere Christianity) pointed out succinctly the first step: 

[w]e might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

and, remembering that "neighbor" includes "enemies," went on to decide that "loving yourself" doesn't mean thinking yourself a good person, and it doesn't mean appreciating what you have done.  In another comment (from a Q & A session) Lewis implied that we love ourselves by always wanting what's good for ourselves, and said: "Love is... a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."

He's not wrong.  I think he probably implies (by saying "as far as it can be obtained") that loving means, also, trying to act in a way that works for and not against that good.  This is a great way to (theoretically) understand how to use "love your neighbor as yourself" to understand the answer to the question "how shall I love my neighbor?"

What we're up against is:  And what about people who don't love themselves, or know how to love themselves?  Where do they start?

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Remaining in the domain of smug theory, my first impulse is to point out that "love your neighbor as yourself" is the second great commandment, and so we should expect any incompleteness or difficulties in it to be resolved by the first one.  Which is, you might remember, to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.  Presumably if we manage to obey the first great commandment, we'll grok precisely how the second one makes sense.  And presumably (says the smug theorist), this really implies something more like "perhaps what Jesus said means you can't love your neighbor before you love yourself; but if so, it's just as likely that you can't love yourself before you love God.   So get your priorities in order.   If love of self must precede love of neighbor, surely love of God precedes love of self."

I mean, it sounds right (says I, the smug theorist).

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But does one precede another in a time series?  I think not.  It's tempting to say "Well, once I've mastered loving God, I'll be able to master loving myself correctly, and then I can turn to loving my neighbor."  Except that we know that "loving God" is not a master-able skill in this world.  You're not going to figure it all out.  What you can do--what I think we're commanded to--is the hard work of trying to get better and better at it your whole life long.   So do that!

And... knowing that you'll never have "mastered" loving God... you know that you cannot wait until mastery to start trying to love yourself correctly, with clear eyes. 

Lewis gave a prescriptive definition of love.  If you love yourself correctly, you have a steady wish for your own ultimate good (and, I expect, it means also you act as far as you can to secure it).   But of course I can do this incorrectly.  Perhaps I don't really understand what my ultimate good is.  Perhaps I don't understand what actions will actually secure my good.  Perhaps I think I am helping myself when I actually am hurting myself.  

(And many people might say:  perhaps I don't actually love myself at all; I deserve no ultimate good; when I see myself, I see a hated enemy; and "love your neighbor as yourself" is nonsense, or a prescription for lashing out.)

What about that?  If I love myself wrong, should I even try to love my neighbor?  I'm bound to make mistakes.  That's maybe not too big a deal when we're talking about wishing someone's good, but sooner or later I will have to do something for them.  Will I screw up?  

Often I try to give myself something that I think is good for me and it turns out not to be good for me (in the long run) at all.  I train myself or punish myself with suffering, and to my surprise it doesn't always make me stronger or better, but sometimes crushes and weakens me.  I indulge myself or nurture myself with comforts, and it doesn't always nourish me or heal me, but sometimes increases my demands and makes me soft.  I miss the mark all the time.  If I love my neighbor as myself, when I haven't figured out how to love myself correctly, won't I make those same mistakes?

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Presumably, yes.

The smug theorist is forced to conclude that if one cannot love God correctly, one cannot love oneself correctly, and therefore cannot love others correctly.  Since we never can love God perfectly, we'll never do the other two things correctly.

But we can try to get better and better at it.

And that means... practice.

The first commandment is:  Love God with everything you have.   I understand that as telling me to do the hard work, every day, of getting better and better at loving God---wanting what God wants.  Loving truth.  Loving justice.  Loving mercy.  Loving creation.  Loving everything God created---including myself.

The second commandment is:  Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Present tense:  right now.   However I love myself---however imperfectly---however I try to give myself what is really good for me, whether it be something that brings pleasure or suffering---that's the model I'm to look to, in the moment.

(Caveat:  It's an analogy, right?  Our ultimate good is always the same end, but the means by which it may be secured may differ.  This is a tricky bit, and comes down to seeing my neighbor as a unique human being of equal worth to myself.)

I think we're basically being commanded to make stupid mistakes if necessary, but to continually try to be less stupid.   

If I act, I am going to love my neighbor wrong.  I'm being told to do it anyway, with the understanding I have about what's true about me, and what's good for me.  And understanding (from knowing and loving God) that part of what's true about me is my uniqueness, meaning that what's good for me (here and now)---the means that help me secure my end--- is not actually identical with what's good for my neighbor.  So, while modeling my love of my neighbor on my wanting-what's-ultimately-good-for-myself, I have to think outside the what's-good-for-me box a bit.  Something I'll never be able to do perfectly, even if I were able to want perfectly what's ultimately good for myself.  Which I'm not.

But what it sounds like I'm being told is to do it anyway, today, as blundery as I might be.   And to do the work every day to understand my errors and correct them, within and without.

 

Hot takes and small talk.

I read too much news, and not enough books.  Is it just that?  Is that the source of the writer's block?

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I don't know if there are any well-established "reasons" why it's so terribly difficult to sit down and dash off blog posts these days. 

It seems to be multifactorial, but not --- not --- because of a lack of time. I am pretty sure I get as much time sitting down, not attending to anything in particular, as I ever have. Maybe I should do another time study just to be sure.  But what it feels like to me is that I passed some threshold where, when I get a chance to sit down, all I want to do is take something in. 

I won't say that it's entirely passive.  I have thoughts.  I have reactions.  But... I don't desire to share them, at least not enough to do the work.

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What's going on here?  It could be a good sign, or it could be a bad one.

Is it humility?  Have I decided that the world doesn't need my fresh takes on the latest thing that has come over the transom?  Well, it would be nice to think so, and (perhaps for that reason) I'll say it might be part of it.   

This is true:  The last few years of revelations in civic and organizational politics have demolished a number of my assumptions.  Along with that, a very real awareness of how easy it is to be very wrong and (this is the tricky bit) nevertheless to think I am correct, or at least that I have a useful or interesting point of view that I ought to share.  I've done a lot more listening and reading, withholding judgment.   And the kinds of things I have been drawn to are less often the breathless takes and the analyses leading to a point, the kind of things that invite refutation and alignment.  More often they are personal recountings.    This happened to me, and this is how it affected me.   I have lost my taste for criticizing and analyzing these things.  Or at least, for putting them out into the world. 

 So much of the hot takes out there are worthless pap.   I am not employed to produce them honestly, so what do I gain from adding to the endless stream?   Don't I have something more productive to do?   

And the answer is nearly always yes.

I think this is true:  I don't want to write things anymore, even by accident, that aren't centering people as persons.   I used to think that all that was necessary was to step back and be perfectly reasonable, or at least as reasonable as possible, because right reason is never opposed to personalism.   

That's not wrong!  But:

(1) I'm not always right; and 

(2) right reason may omit truth about persons, without ever making false statements; and

(3) this omission is a kind of error that makes false pictures.

 

I don't intend to be wrong.  I don't intend to omit significant truths from my analysis.  But I'm less interested in centering my intent.  I'm more interested in the effects of my words.  And I've become less tolerant of error, more perfectionist.  To put it bluntly, I don't want to hurt people.  (Not don't want to hurt people's feelings.  Don't want to hurt people.  There's a difference.)

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That's the scrap that might be a bit of humility, borne of realizing how easy it is to be wrong about things.

There's a scrap that's pride too:  I have a strong aversion to being wrong these days.

One of the ways I figure things out is by writing them down, and often I've done this on the blog.  It's led to some lively conversations over the years, with back-and-forth between me and some of my favorite commentators, a number of which have become real friends.  I used to do this relatively freely and with an understanding that I might write something that turned out to be woefully boneheaded, but I was willing to do it because I wanted to put things out there to be tested for boneheadedness.

I mean, I can still figure things out by writing them privately, sending emails to myself or (still my favorite) clearing out space in a coffeeshop and putting pen to paper for hours in a journal, then later going back and assembling it into some sort of logical order.  It still works pretty well.  But it lacks quality control:  it lacks the sounding board of putting it out there where smart people who disagree with me, and care enough to explain why, might find it.  

Here is the easy, non-humility-based reason that I might say out loud in order to sound good:

Well, it's not fear of the smart and caring people that's made me unwilling to hit the 'publish' button.  It's all those other people. 

 Do I want to go viral?  Nope. 

Would it be okay if I went viral and suffered because I put out thoughts that were really true and really needed defending?  Ye-es....

  But am I actually sure that what I write will in fact be true enough, beautiful enough, or useful enough that it would be worth it?   

Actually... no.

There is, however, a strong possibility that I simply don't want to be wrong, and it no longer seems worth it (especially given that, truly, people jump on wrongness rather quickly these days) to throw out things that might be wrong on purpose, just so I could possibly make them better.

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One of the frustrations I have about leaving the academy in my very early stages, as much as I don't miss the stress and the politics, is that I am no longer in touch with serious work, critical work, slow work.  Mark will remind me that academic science, being made by human beings, throws up a great deal of weeds and tangles, in the form of literally bad (not just disappointing) results and even more damaging, in the form of perverse incentives.  These make the good fruit hard to come by.  

But that's nothing compared to the selection of articles that appear in the newspaper or come across one's social media feed.  I'm just completely tired of that being so often the way that information (or at least words) about research comes into my view.  I used to kind of like digging into those various news articles, tracking down the references, and finding out if they were really bunk or if there is anything to them, but I've lost my taste for even that.  It feels like a waste of time:  that it's better not to look at all.

A better source for feeding my interest in news about what's going on in the research world has been to follow individual researchers on Twitter.  It's a narrower feed; but it's a better-quality, curated one.  And---interestingly enough---it rarely makes me want to pound out reactions.  Instead, because I'm aware that I don't have special expertise and am following them because I am legitimately interested in what they are writing, I... listen and learn?  And sometimes ask questions.

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There's a real downside to this discrimination, and I shouldn't have been surprised to find that it's plaguing me, because it's part of a very old theme in my life.  

Issuing instant reactions to the latest passing Moment, as intellectually frustrating as it might be, now has social utility.

I have real friends (intelligent ones!  fun ones!  people whose takes I am interested in!) who have real conversations, online, sparked by news items diverted from the stream and shared in their own little tributaries.  If I disentangle myself from the stream, I miss out on those conversations.  The conversations are not always very deep, although they can be (it's a sampling frequency issue).  If I decide that the nuggets are too few and far between to make it worth dipping into the rushing stream of takes, then (for good or bad) I miss out on the nuggets.

And (this is crucial) even if the nuggets are not worth the effort... I would also be saying that the relationships are not worth the effort.

(here's the part that all this yammering has brought me to, which I literally did not realize until this very moment as a result of putting out all the verbiage above)

Hot takes are the small talk of intellectuals on social media.

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I do not like regular small talk in real life.  

I was embarrassingly old and educated before I came to an intellectual understanding of the purpose it serves and realized that I needed to make use of it as a tool.

It's where you start, for reasons of common humanity (maybe not ALL of humanity, but of a large enough majority that it's essentially everyone you run into in most organizations and societies).

Without it, you often cannot get at the deeper stuff, even if it seems like you should be able to.

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Do I need to come to a new understanding of the Hot Take?

Maybe.  Maybe I do.

Harvard and MIT, and more Italian food.

Thursday Mark suggested Cambridge, so we hopped on the T and headed to Harvard, aiming for the museum of natural history.

Let me just say:  for not being enormously big, the Harvard natural history museum is fantastic.  I could have spent a very long time there.  (But, you know.  Children.  And also the parts that I wanted to see the most were not the ones the little ones wanted to see.  So I made do.)

I have been to the London museum of natural history, and that one is pretty exciting in part because there are very famous specimens on display (Archaeopteryx! Darwin’s finches!  Mary Anning’s collection!  A dodo!) and this one has only a few such items and is much smaller.   And I have seen a vast quantity of very cool paleontological specimens at the museum in Utah.   But I never got the sense that having been to London and Utah had spoiled me for this one.  It is a sparkling collection, both literally and figuratively.  Just, well, perfectly curated.  

We spent most of our time in here, for obvious reasons.

I wish that I could have returned with my two older kids, both of whom are focusing on biology this upcoming school year, and encouraged them to make a careful study of two particular exhibits.  The glass models of botanical specimens, for my daughter who is about to study botany and also appreciates art.   And the entire section devoted to the evolutionary tree (including more hominin fossils than I have ever seen in one place), for my son who’s about to spend a year on evolutionary biology.  I just skimmed through it, but it’s a super exhibit.

Lots and lots of taxidermied animals, three big whale skeletons, and a stellar rock room.  Honestly, this is at the top of my list for returning someday and spending the time I would like to spend.  

I rewarded the little ones for their patience by buying them gift shop items:  the Box of Polished Rocks for the 9yo, the Two Plastic Pteranodons for the 5yo.  

On our way off campus we stopped at the Putnam Gallery, a tiny room which has some historical scientific instruments.  This was kind of fun, but for this one I really was spoiled by London.  When you’ve seen Joule’s own calorimeter and the clockworks that solved the longitude problem, what’s a few sextants?

On the other hand, the cyclotron console was kind of cool, if only because they preserved the little notes and comic strips taped up on the wall and the carryout menus tacked to the corkboard.

We had lunch at Legal Seafoods.  I finally got my bowl of chowder, and a superior crab cake.  There is lobster on the kids’ menu, but the younguns wanted macaroni and cheese and hot dogs.

 And then we walked allllllll the way on Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, passing another Legal Seafoods on the way.  We stopped at the small MIT museum, where there were only a few things to see, and then headed back with very tired children.

  Mark and I went out later for another Italian dinner, including cannoli.  Something I didn’t anticipate as much as I should have:  how pleasurable it is to dine in a city that has a legitimate “little Italy.”  

I went with cod puttanesca this time, trying to hit the perfect fusion of New England and Italian food.  No pasta: cod on a bed of ethereal mashed potatoes, with the sauce deconstructed:  thin tomato sauce, olives scattered about, anchovies draped over.  Cod and potatoes go together like nothing else, and the light application of the strongly flavored elements of  the sauce made it just about perfect.

 Wine: Primitivo.

I generally think I am pretty good at picking wine to go with dinner, and this evening I applied a bit of critical thinking to the matter to decide if I am right about this.

I concluded:  there’s this very nice feature of matching wine with dinner on your own.   It requires three ingredients.  If:

(1)  you are disposed to think highly of your own skill; and

(2) you have at least a very basic level of competence, i.e., you have a general sense of what will go with red and white, sweet and dry; or you are capable of googling discreetly at the table; and

(3) the restaurant has already done most of the work by having a well curated wine list; 

then you will harness the power of cognitive bias to enjoy your own wine pairings and feel good about yourself while you have a delicious dinner.  

So, I basically can’t go wrong in the North End.  QED.

More Boston.

We have to pack and leave in a few hours, so: highlights.

Wednesday.  Fancy macarons and pastries at a coffee shop on Newbury Street:

Boston Common and Public Garden:

That was a long walk, which we capped off by another longish one back to the North End for Italian food (dinner for lunch, as Mark put it).   Another thing we have learned about sightseeing with small people is that it pays to have a large and somewhat lengthy lunch for a good break in the sightseeing day, and then the afternoon siesta.

We ordered a very pasta and meat-heavy lunch.  I am not sure why we didn’t mix it up a little with some salad.  Likely because everybody wanted something different when it came to the pasta and pizza.   Gnocchi, rigatoni with sausage, arancini, sausage-and-red-onion pizza, meatballs.  The arancini were really wonderful.  I am at a loss to understand why they cannot be had on restaurant menus wherever there is both risotto and deep-frying.

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Later, the 9yo wanted someone to take him to the Bunker Hill monument which is not far from where we are staying, so I dragged myself out of my nap and we went up together.  It was the hottest day of our week, and the place was not crowded.

It’s a bit of a hike on the hilly streets of Charlestown, and then when you get there you can climb 294 stairs to the top.

Just as at most of the museums, I could have spent a lot longer at this one than the child accompanying me had patience for.  It is a tiny one, but has a nice big diorama with an audible narration that illuminates different parts of the battlefield and different groups of teeny soldiers as it recounts the tale.  There are also loads of then-and-now maps.  I am endlessly fascinated by trying to see,  in the paper maps of my youth and the zoom-and-swipe roadmaps on my phone, the vestiges of the past:  the Roman castra in a tiny gridded square of streets in an Italian town, the bridges across the Thames.

Our own city is not very old as a city and likes to demolish old buildings anyway; but I am told that some of the odd-angled roads date back to old, old footpaths between river and lakes, older than the arrival of the men the streets are named for.  That is a history worth knowing more about.

Anyway:  Boston has a longer history as a paved place than the Twin Cities, although the hills have been made low and much land made out of fill in the harbor, and it is fun to pick out recognizable features.  The old maps show a forked road along the Charlestown Neck that used to connect this little peninsula to the mainland; there is still a big forked road following what looks like the same path, although the neck has thickened, and you can use it on the map to find landmarks.  The very top of the real Bunker Hill, for instance (I can’t be the only one who, in elementary school, stored away factoids about the famous parts of the battle being on Breed’s Hill, right?).  There is a church there, and a cemetery, and for that reason it didn’t get carved up like the rest of Charlestown.   Little things like that.

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I went shopping and bought vegetables and made dinner in the apartment, a coconut red curry soup with spirally wheat noodles and tofu and a bit of shrimp and lots of crisp vegetables on top.  So everyone got to rest, and eat food that was the exact opposite of the heavy Italian lunch.  And I got to make the food myself, something that I need to do every few days, it seems, even on vacation.

Two museum days (II).

A brief continuation from the last post...

Tuesday we headed down to the U. S. S. Constitution, where we had to show ID and go through a metal detector before boarding Old Ironsides.   Melanie had promised that seeing the ship would be “a treat,” and it was.

Navy sailors in checked shirts answered the kids’ questions—how do you fire the guns?  how far can they shoot?    They answer in the first person:  we load them like so, when we looked out through the gunports we could see the British sailors looking back at us, our sides are made of white oak with live oak planking sandwiched between.  

More questions.  What are the  pilings for, a few meters  out in the water?  (The 5yo hoped the pilings were for target practice.) 

It’s really a lovely ship to tour.   Our family had toured the Cutty Sark in London and a big replica ship at the Genoa maritime museum, and this had a similar feel to it, with the added excitement of being a Real Ship Really Afloat And Sometimes They Take It Out For A Spin.

 

Docked nearby is the U. S. S. Cassin Young, a destroyer.  “The metal ship,” the 5yo called it.  Also a good ship to explore, and I think the smaller children were equally impressed.

We got a number of questions answered by a couple of men in USS Cassin Young caps who were painting (until one of the little boys started hopping from foot to foot and we had to leave to find the closest restroom).

Hobart mixer in the galley.  Troy, OH!

After the restrooms we went to the museum, which was sizable and really very well designed for families.  There was a daily-life-of-sailors exhibit with a mock mast that children could climb upon to “shorten the sail,” and a little wind-tunnel tank with a model boat whose square sails you could turn to show how the sails can be “taken aback” to change direction (but not tack).   Two of our kids spent a good long time with an electronic design-your-wooden-warship game.  I was pleased with an elegant little demonstration where you could raise up three metal ball bearings and then magnetically drop them onto samples of three different woods, including the Georgia live oak.   The live oak is so hard, the ball bearing bounces back from it about three times as high as from the others.  There are also blocks of wood you can heft, to feel its density.

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The exhibit underlines that the people, mostly enslaved, who harvested the live oak had a nasty, difficult job to do under terrible conditions.   

Mark and I at least could have spent a lot longer at these two museums, but the younger children were getting hungry and hot.  So it was down to the ferry, and across to lunch (tavern-type restaurant with sandwiches and mac-and-cheese) and then the New England Aquarium.

Schooling!

Okay, so the best aquarium we’ve ever seen is the one in Genoa.  This one is much more compact but still pretty great.  Highlights for the little people:  the really big turtle in the Great Ocean Tank, the octopus tentacled against the glass, and the two touch tanks.  Some tiny moon jellies in an illuminated tube held by a docent, so you could see them up close.   (I love the sea jellies myself.)  Oh, and we watched penguins for a good long while.  The 9yo was very excited and amused to witness one pooping in the water.

I let the 5yo drag us all over the aquarium at will, which meant we backtracked and wound up on the wrong level a lot, as I squinted at the map in the low light.   He was really happy, though.  This kid loves  fish and sharks and rays.  I am always charmed by the monomania of a small child who has a passion.  Really, I went to the aquarium so I could see the 5yo at the aquarium.

On the way back:  some time playing in the playground.   I have come to believe that playground time is crucial to traveling with littles.  They remember it.

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That evening we gave the kids frozen pizzas and took the bus into the North End for an Italian dinner date.  Which was an occasion to reminisce about being in Italy for real.  Inside the restaurant, with wine and a huge pile of burrata and carciofi and proscuitto and arugula “appetizer” ... it did not feel very different.  Buona sera.

Also my favorite, linguine alla vongole.  This seemed like the place to order it.

We finished with espresso for me and limoncello for Mark and a walk back to Charlestown.  Really lovely.

Two museum days. (I)

On Monday, Labor Day, we headed for the Boston Museum of Science.  I had been there at the 9yo’s age and fondly remembered the giant van de Graaff generators and the lightning show, which to my delight is still running.

This is on the same peninsula with where we are staying in Charlestown, so we walked there.  There is a long viaduct to cross, which took us over a lot of railroad tracks and an exciting construction site.

The Boston Museum of Science is a good-sized museum with a lot of well-designed exhibits.  I think the  designers of the permanent exhibits here have done a better job, on the whole, than the ones at the Science Museum of Minnesota.  They seem to invite kids to sit down and interact for a longer time, rather than running around whamming buttons.

Among the many imaginary jobs I fantasize about having is “science museum exhibit designer.”  I would like to study what sorts of features encourage different sorts of people to spend more time with the material.  

As it is I am only left with a visitor’s impressions, not data, and of course the problem is that I am a particular sort of person, and probably an oddball of a visitor myself.

One example of the kind of thing I think about in science museums:   It seems to me that a linear design that nudges you to pass by things one at a time (deciding at each location on the path whether to stay longer or move on) is better for deep engagement than the sort of exhibit where a big open room has many freestanding stations scattered about.  But maybe the big open room works better when sixty field-trip children descend on it at once.  This museum had a mix of both, though, and they both worked pretty well.  I must say it is a lot easier to go with Mark than if it is just me.

One thing that surprised me:  a number of exhibits involved animated models that in my opinion worked extremely well.  There was a hands-on flow-of-a-river exhibit tucked away in a corner.  From a distance I saw the 9yo playing with it, moving blocks around in the river, and thought, “Oh, it’s like the river model in the Mill City Museum at home, where you build structures in a channel of moving water and see how the flow changes.”  But when I got closer I realized that the river was animated via projection from the ceiling, and switching out the blocks triggered a change in the story the animations were telling.  So—an interactive animation with a lot of physicality.  It didn’t teach the same thing as a flowing water channel wet lab, but it did what it did very well.

 

Another pleasant surprise was that my 5yo, unlike all his siblings at that age, was relatively uninterested in running around whamming buttons to see if anything would happen in less than two seconds.  He wanted to sit down and work his way through things, and spend lots of time on a single exhibit.   Such as working through a lovely little interactive where you get to touch and examine an animal skull, and then (by pressing buttons that let you make binary choices) decide which of three animals the skull came from.  Was it predator or prey?  Have a varied diet or a monotonous one?  Did it have a strong bite or a weak one?

He sat there, with me and later his sister, reading the questions to him, and went through all six skulls.

Another thing he got totally absorbed in was a game where you select from a bin three different malaria-mitigation measures for a population of at-risk individuals, constrained by a rudimentary budget, and find out how well the combination worked based on how many animated mosquitos disappear from the screen.  We had to entice him away.

As promised, we made it to the lightning show.  I was delighted, once inside the Theater of Electricity, to discover that the whole room was essentially unchanged from when I visited in the eighties.  The leaping aluminum disk, pinging into the air and clattering back down every few minutes as museum visitors charged the electromagnet and released it, I had forgotten but remembered as soon as I heard it again.  There is a decidedly old-school exhibit on the history of mathematics tucked into the back:  it has not changed either.  I remember the model of the Mobius strip, a little mechanized arrow clicking along on a track, traversing the whole thing to demonstrate its one-sidedness.   Lots of text and pictures.  Nobody would make this exhibit today.  But I remember it with fondness.

And of course there is the world’s largest van de Graaff generator.  I walked around it, running my hands over the smooth wooden railing, and felt the same as I did at age eight when it towered above me, because of course it still does.  

And my 9yo loved the show, so there’s that.

Later, after a long rest in the apartment, we ventured out in the pouring rain to a pizza restaurant at the other end of Charlestown.  It had a stellar beer and wine list and great food.   We split a few pizzas and salads, and I drank a sour named after a banh mi sandwich and then discovered a Ligurian rosé on the menu, which I never ever ever see, so I had to have that, and it was awesome.

The little guy was still tired, and didn’t have much appetite.  He needed his sister’s hat and a napkin cape to stay warm, and later ate cereal in the apartment.   Hurray for a kitchen.

 

Boston!

I have been wanting to take a family trip to some city—any interesting city!—in the U.S. for some time now.  For a while I thought we might lug the kids to D.C., and then Mark’s parents decided to take them there (and to Gettysburg and Colonial Williamsburg) a year or so ago.  I didn’t really feel ready to tackle NYC, and I have been to Chicago myself enough times (and really it is close enough to drive for a long weekend).  

What is reasonably educational, big but not too big, and features people I know from the internet?  Boston, of course.

Seriously, you can walk this entire area, which contains plenty to do for a week.

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Mark insisted that I do all the planning of Things to Do, but he agreed to deal with the airplane tickets and rental home, for which I am grateful.  As for the former, that’s fairly straightforward: direct from MSP to Logan, many choices.  As for the latter, he says that back when we planned the trip he was only able to locate two places in the price range he was happy with, one near Fenway Park and one in Charlestown; he reserved the Charlestown one with plenty of time left to cancel and told me that if I could find something I liked better I was welcome to switch.  

I was not motivated to do that work, and now that we’re here I am perfectly happy with what he found.  It is an airy and open row house, a couple of blocks from a transit station (which he did on purpose) and across the street from a grocery store (which he did not do on purpose but I am glad about).   It faces a busy street, but as I suspect that you pay a premium for being able to see Charlestown’s charming brick and painted clapboard houses through your windows, I do not mind.  Everything is crisp and white, with sunny abstract paintings on fringed canvas stapled to the walls, and the utilitarian loveliness of a comfortable home that has no personal possessions in it whatsoever.

I like staying in hotels when I am alone, but when traveling with a family for more than a day or two, nothing beats having a kitchen and enough room to spread out.  Besides, I rather like the fantasy of becoming a citizen for a couple of days, having a neighborhood to call one’s own and explore.  And if you are going to become a citizen of Boston for a couple of days, historic Charlestown will certainly do.   

Saturday, after a long travel day of taxi van-airplane-airport shuttle-“the T”-walking, we found our apartment, ate a very late lunch at a local chain restaurant, bought groceries, and rested.  I wandered around Charlestown a bit, without going up towards the monument, peeking in closed coffee shops and reading the menus in the windows of restaurants, and went back out twice to buy first wine and then bottles of seltzer.  The kids ate quesadillas and cereal for dinner and collapsed early.

Sunday I had exactly two plans:  go to Mass and then take the Red Line all the way to the end to meet People from the Internet....

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Mass first, I will be brief.  We went to the eight o’clock at St. Mary-St. Catherine in Charlestown, in the old St. Mary’s church.  The building is lovely, a Gothic exterior and a wedding-cake of statuary and wood inside.  My 9yo studied the windows and the carvings with wide eyes.  I did too, especially the series of Marian windows on pewsitter’s right and the carved angels in the ceiling.  I poked Mark and told him to look up.  “They’re like ship’s figureheads!” he said.  

I typically don’t take photos inside churches unless there are no worshippers present, but you can see photos and read about the building on the parish website.  Very much worth looking at.

Mass was concelebrated by two visiting clergy, one of whom was being welcomed to the rectory just that week and would be doing graduate work at Boston College.   The new priest was introduced as being from south India; my guess is that the main celebrant is Nigerian.  He introduced himself as a missionary priest.  He gave a good, organized homily, with many references from Scripture, on the topic of humility as resting on the “two arms” of truthfulness and generosity.  Music: Gloria not sung, piano accompaniment, Gather-type hymns from the annual missalette.  Attendance:  few families at 8; the 10:30 is advertised as the “family mass.”  It was a warm and welcoming environment, with plenty for the  younger kids to look at, and a fantastic pew like a box that trapped the 5yo inside!

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After Mass and breakfast in the apartment we headed for the T station, and an hour or so later were picked up in a big white van by.... Melanie Bettinelli of The Wine-Dark Sea!  

Domenico Bettinelli’s blog Bettnet was one of the first blogs I ever read way back when the blogosphere was taking off and the universe of Catholic blogs seemed smaller and friendlier.  Since then Melanie and I have interacted a lot more—hers has always been one of my favorites, and the rise of Facebook has allowed for those smaller but more frequent interactions, less like long thoughtful letters and more like an ongoing conversation.   I am pleased to report that coming into the Bettinelli’s house with my own boisterous family was one of those great experiences of feeling like you already have known each other IRL for years.  The younger kids flailed at each other with toy weapons and the older kids sat or stood in the kitchen and talked with the adults about tech and camping and saints and books.  We came before lunch and we left right before the kids’ bedtime, stuffed full of Melanie’s quiche and Dom’s fajitas and some really good craft beer, and I could have stayed for hours more.  

The best way to make friends is to spend, like, eight to ten years not meeting them in person.  I swear.