TORONTO (October 27, 2007) -- Brent Bozell wrote a column today about the new trend in movies (trendlet, so far, really) pointing out that movies in which *Choice* means that a person who has at least two options chooses something Hollywood dislikes; in this case, that women choose to have their babies rather than abort them.  It is my argument that this whole Choice thing is part of the Woodstock Nation Constititution and now that people born in the 1960s are reaching Senior Citizen Age (and I as one of them can say that without being accused of being Hateful), the majority of us who had plain-spoken parents and did not participate in the whole nightmare are speaking up to bring back the true definition of Choice.

It started of course with the whole false premise that Men and Women Are The Same.  Men could walk around half-naked without consequences -- equality demanded that women do the same.  Except that it turned out women could NOT walk around half naked without consequences.  A man with a bare chest wandered Woodstock unmolested; a bare-chested woman was likely to be raped, or at the least was seen as what grandma called a Popsie and we in the Catholic Girls High called the Community Punch Board.  Girls who dressed in fishnet stockings and go-go boots and skirts that they could not sit down in were in the same uncomfortable position when it came to perception by men.  The day came when women looked at what Fashionists decreed that Women Would Wear and said *Not me, brother; I am going back to buying Classics that are comfortable and will look good next year too, and keeping them.*  Left with stores full of rubbish, the fashion industry slowly started coming around and true choice became available in womens fashion.  (We are making less progress in changing fashion for little girls, but indications are that this will soon change as well.)

Likewise the idea that women and men could both equally find them, f*** them and forget them proved wrong.  Birth control was not The Answer; no matter what we were told, sometimes it just plain fails, and when it does, the number of pregnancies is not equally distributed between men and women.  The only thing that men seemed to be left with, by and large, was the urge to convince the mother of his child to dispose of it.

Just like the other trends trying to promulgate the fiction that Men and Women Are The Same, women stood up first and began to decide to keep and rear their babies regardless of what their insensitive *mates* happened to think.  But the thing that changed the trend at last was that the men who, it turned out, felt equally that the babies they helped create were not just inconvenient clumps of tissue that would ruin their lives if not quickly excised and forgotten, began to step up.  If you will notice the one thing all these movies had in common, this is what it was: The Men Stepped Up.

Naturally this is anathema to the Woodstock Nation, especially when it is their children and grandchildren who are embracing the idea that in order to have true choice, you need more than one option -- and that just like Sister Mary Bernadette and our Daddies taught us, popularity is not happiness after you get out of high school.  There are many times when choosing the unpopular road separates men and women from the Herd; and the new trend in movies is showing that it is more important to do right and be happy than to be an unhappy marcher in the Woodstock Herd.

The truth is that only about 5% of the Boomers ever belonged to the Woodstock Nation, and maybe another 10% were on the fringes of it; the majority of our generation who were the first and to that point only members of our families to even graduate from high school, much less go to university, were hard working people who kept, and until recently keep, the wheels turning without any notice from the Media World.  And it is our kids who are bringing forward the idea that when Men stop being Little Boys and step up to the plate, sometimes they can influence women to make an unpopular choice and choose that life will continue.

But it is not the women who have to learn this lesson; most women know that they have a choice already.  It is the men who step up and offer their strong right arm and their support that, in all the movies Mr. Bozell pointed out, turn the tide and encourage the women to step out of the Herd and choose another direction. 

I have five great-nieces and great-nephews so far, and there is no sign that any of my nieces and nephews long for the days of the Woodstock Nation Herd.  (My boys are another story -- one has declared he does not want children; the other is too busy trying to invent Time Travel to pay any attention to girls).  I think this is down to the men at last taking up Adulthood.  I hope it catches on outside the movies among the descendants of the Woodstock Nation.

Toronto (October 26, 2007) -- This is a week of birthdays in our family.  Youngest sister turns 50 tomorrow; next sister turns 55 on Sunday.   Oldest boy turned 25 yesterday.  October was a busy month, slightly ahead of February, where two of us were born.  My foster sis was born in May and she and I will both turn 60 next year.

I have to admit that there were plenty of times as I was growing up that I wished I were an only child; and even after I grew up I always thought Little Orphan Annie didn't know how lucky she was.  But as I grew older, I began to realize that having lots of sisters was not some special curse God had sent to me because He thought I deserved a lesson of some kind. 

The easy lessons as it turned out were voiced best in a book called The Secret Garden, where a woman with 14 children says that although the world is round like an orange, the smart kiddie will soon realize that the whole orange does not belong to anybody, and if she doesn't learn to negotiate and to move quickly, all she will get is orange peelings.  Sharing a room with a sister who cannot be convinced to pick up her belongings even if you pile them all on her bed (she would just crawl under them to sleep) was frustrating, but it also taught me that there are limits to what you can get another person to do.  Another lesson I learned early was to figure out what I did well and volunteer to do that, rather than hang back hoping to be overlooked and getting some dirty job that was left over.

Five girls in a three bedroom house also learned that moving out of that house as soon as we were old enough or graduated from high school was Job One -- and that the sister who was itching to take over our space would make darned sure we did not boomerang back in.  Yes, we were welcome home during our university days, but our bed would be a folding cot in what used to be our bedroom.  So the thing to do was to prepare for the day when we'd be on our own, and count on it being a permanent arrangement.

Finally, having all those sisters meant that we learned first hand what rearing children was all about.  I brought up my youngest sister, although I was fourteen at the time, because Mama was working full time as soon as Sis started kindergarten.  I was the one who was responsible for seeing that the kids got home, changed into play clothes and put the school clothes away properly, had their snack and did their homework or chores.  (Okay, I was the one who had to keep an eye on the clock so that when "Where The Action Is!" was over, everybody jumped to her task and the fifteen minutes until Mama drove in would be used to best effect.)  I broke up the fights and quickly learned both the Mom Voice and the Mom Look, which later I found worked equally well on overly frisky boys and, when I started doing waitress work at weddings, on overly familiar men.

We also learned to pack very fast and get in the car and sit in our assigned space, because Daddy would come home at supper time on Thursday night and say "Pack the car, Clarice, we are going to ..." wherever he had heard there was a stock car race that weekend.  I can pack a suitcase for a three day weekend in about fifteen minutes flat.  I could probably evacuate my house with all my most precious possessions in just about that much time too.  Once I went to New Zealand for three weeks with one suitcase.  I know girls who cannot go to the mall with one suitcase.

Freshman year in college was when I discovered the value of growing up in a household filled with sisters.  My roommate had been brought up virtually as an only child -- her only sister was some 18 years older than she -- and she could not do anything for herself, from putting sheets on a bed to sharing her space with someone else.  She learned quickly, I do have to say that.  But my astonishment at someone who had reached the age of 18 without learning to make a hospital corner was probably a shock to her.

I brought up the boys when I was in my thirties and the younger women who were trying and failing to negotiate with their kids wondered why mine were so well behaved.  One asked me once how I "got" my son to wear a suit and tie to church.  I told her that I laid it out and told him to put it on.  That was the way Mama "got" us dressed in record time for school and church and anything else.  Having learned young a way that worked, I was not about to change it for any of the new fads that came and went with no good effect on the kids.  And my younger sisters pretty much agreed although a few of them tried the new ways first.  The most permissive sister resolved never to spank her children until the day her son ignored her and ran into the intersection ahead of her.  "Before I knew what I was doing," she said, "I had him back on the sidewalk and was whacking his behind!"  The whacking did him no harm; today he is an MBA with a wife and two children (and counting).

So to those who believe that in today's world children are a liability or an expensive hobby, and you can't afford mor than one, I urge you to reconsider.  Junior and Susie are not going to live in a world of One.  The sooner they learn that the whole orange does not belong to them, and the younger they are when they learn to compromise, to work as a team, and to understand that there are some things that won't change -- and they learn the Mom Voice -- the happier they, and you, will be.

Oh, and make them share bedrooms.  Not only is this a good way to promote family closeness, it is also a way to for one to keep an eye on the other one, and to make sure that neither of them cherish any idea of moving back in once they leave.

Children are a blessing.  Not only to you, but to the world. 

TORONTO (October 17, 2007) -- The Big Move has been done.  Mama and Daddy are in the North!

You have heard the old saying that war is 95% waiting around followed by 5% sheer terror.  Moving your elderly parents is something like that too.  I spent 4 days at Road Atlanta, covering three of the most exciting races I have seen this year, meeting up with old friends, celebrating the 10th anniversary of Petit Le Mans and interviewing an old friend and a new one, then riding away on the Greyhound to start the final week of preparation for the Big Move.  My sisters had prepared the ground well and most of the heavy lifting had been done.  But tryying to convince Mama that she did not either need her complete kitchen up til the day we packed the truck, for only one example, was a job that took most of the week.  We packed in the mornings, had lunch, and rested from our labours in the afternoon to keep Daddy company -- and I coped with the stack of papers that had to do with changing addresses, changing utilities, choosing a phone company and prodding the final pieces of the puzzle into place.  Daddy cannot deal with modern methods of telephone trees, voice mail and people from Bangalore; when dealing with the power company I ran into a Canadian woman (I would swear she was) who had no imagination and could not move past the fact that 50-5 could possibly be an error in transcription and why not check 505? All she kept saying was “I am not finding it,” until finally I hung up in exasperation and called the apartments, unconvered the error, called back, and fortunately got a canny man from New York City who had it all set up in 5 minutes.  Daddy had been hanging up in exasperation for two weeks.  And no wonder.  But by Thursday we had everything settled, including their new telephone number.  We went to Wal-Mart to pick up more boxes and last minute stuff and every three steps we met another friend of theirs who wanted to say goodbye.

Friday night the rest of the moving crew arrived, including the truck and trailer.  Two of my sisters took over the final packing, much to Mamas dismay -- she wanted to move slowly but the time was up for that.  At 8:00 a.m. we were all on our feet and the truck was backed up to the door; my aunties handyman arrived to help with the big stuff, and the boys flexed their muscles, and both the boxes and the quips began to fly.  Mama was amazed that Zack, Steven and Natalie worked together as a team with tireless jokes, quips, dance moves and general Animaniacs behaviour not standing in the way of their toting and lifting and moving.  Daddy went across the lawn for a morning of football watching with two of his friends, and the constant parade of neighbours to say goodbye proved that Mama and Daddy had more friends than all of us put together.  By noon -- 2 hours ahead of schedule -- the truck was gone, and only one love seat had to be left behind, which was remarkable as Mama had decided that she was going to take a lot more stuff than she said when we got the truck!  We ate some lunch, received with gratitude the offer of Auntie to send her maid to clean out the refrigerator and scrub out the bathrooms and kitchen after we were gone (and of our cousin to put the door back on the refrigerator after it fell on me), and decamped to the hotel for baths, naps, clean clothes and football games.  Sis the Nurse arrived about 5:30 and after settling in we all walked over to the Cracker Barrel for a final dinner together, filled with quips, jokes, dumb songs from our teenage years, and general merriment.  The next day it was off to the airport, which with the help of Nurse to look after Daddy while I took Mama to check in, went smoothly.  The wheel chair corral was located and Daddy put under the care of a savvy man from New York City who took us all through the security for handicapped people (and forebode to comment that we were all clearly out of our minds) and up to the gate in plenty of time.  Then sis and the folks got on the plane, and I went off to my own gate to read, say my Rosary, and head home.

There was only one fumble at the goal line: the sister who was to arrange for the unloaders had told them any old time they wanted to show up was fine, and the sister in the truck had said she wanted them there at 9:00 a.m.  Two hours of hysteria had ensued, including the obligatory slap in the face to the childless truck drivers that they were oafs for putting their own schedule ahead of that of people with children, but a compromise was worked out eventually.  The people without children showed up at 10:00 and had the truck unloaded by 1:30, and the people with children started phoning in at 1:30 to say they might be able to come over now...

But the stuff is in the apartment and the parents will be staying with Sis while they get it in shape to move in.  And my work here is done.

It is impossible to detail the smooth running of this war -- some battles were very hard fought but everyone did his or her job, carried the ball, made the tackles, scored the touchdowns, and kept moving forward with good humour all the way.  We started July 31st and we finished October 15th. 

Got any wars to fight?  Call the five Warrior Princesses.  Then get out of our way!

Mama and Daddy are safe with us now and we are all glad the hard part is done.

OCTOBER 3, 2007 --   This week those of us old enough to remember the beginning of the Space Race are quietly celebrating something todays college students do not even know ever happened.  Fifty years ago on Friday, Sputnik (Russian for *Fellow Traveller*) was launched into space, beating the American efforts which routinely blew up on the launch pad in full view of the world.  The little beep of the basketball sized satellite was not only first goal to the Russkies, it was a wake up call to the students of America to get their math and science skills in order and catch up with the world.

I remember going outside at our beach house (later it was swallowed by Hurricane Frederick) at night and standing with the family and a lot of other beach house tenants to watch both Sputnik and Vanguard pass by overhead. That was when people still looked up when planes flew over, not with dread but with interest. I had wanted to be an astronaut until I was told in Grade 5 that Girls could not be anything; I had a Sears Roebuck Planetarium that projected space onto my bedroom walls and ceiling, and I had books by Willey Ley and Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and I dreamed of piloting the shuttle between the great wheeling Chesley Bonesell space station and the chunky, clunky interplanetary liners that orbited just beyond, and looking down upon the wheeling green place below. I was in a bar in Italy when Apollo 12 landed on the Moon, and we Americans happily shared the experience with everyone else -- it was Mankind (still an acceptable word) that hit that golf ball and drove that little Lunar Lander up there.

Unfortunately America lost her nerve in the Sixties, when the only thing that mattered was sex, drugs, bad music and tearing things down, and if anybody ever goes back to the Moon, it will be Richard Branson or the Chinese. I took my kids to see Apollo 13 when it came out and they did not even know it had really happened just that way. The average college student has no idea that anybody has ever walked on the moon.  In another generation, the college students will not even recognize the Moon.  They will be scrambling in the dirt for scraps from the government table and trying to find new ways to degrade one another, I suppose.

Only a cynic would point out, I suppose, that if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, giving LBJ the impetus to ram his Legacy through, we probably never would have left the gravitational field of the Earth.  Looking up at Sputnik coursing through the skies fifty years ago, I little knew what that siren song meant to the world.  Think about this, too.  Your kids with their iPods jammed in their ears and cranked up so high that they cannot hear a train whistle behind them would have missed the whole thing.