The Burrow

Fixing the men who thought being 7th in line for a gang rape would be fun is something best left to others.  I cannot imagine their home lives, the parenting they received, the friends they chose.  There's a lack of decency there that I can't remember being around, anywhere, any time.   I've been scrutinizing my past.  I'm wondering if there were signs I overlooked, signals I missed.  Was the neighborhood's naughty boy  reacting to his closeted older brother or his cold and forbidding parents?  What did he grow up to be? The houses on our street were built all at once and inhabited all at once by young families with small children.  We grew up together, playing across our front and back yards, waiting at the bus stop, sledding down the steepest driveway (ours).  Within that group there was no bullying, no feuding, no harassment... or was it there and I just didn't notice? I'd never been warned to look.  My parents protected us from ...

There's talk about prestige, sexual citizenship, and personal responsibility.  The poor girl was lured.... except Annie Savoy would dispute that. I did not get lured. I accept full responsibility for my actions. YARNmemes Mothers of boys are freaking out.  Lawyers are warning that there is no basis for a criminal suit, despite Letitia James's investigatory powers.   And I am deciding to ignore the controversy and immerse myself in the memories, some of which I share below. There was once a pumpkin atop this spire on the undergraduate library in the middle of campus. No one knows how it got there. Walking down these stairs takes you to the Suspension Bridge. The top of Libe Slope, with a viewing platform atop the underground piece of the library. Dorms and a student center at the bottom of Libe Slope. Really old dorms next door. And mostly, there's this. There are chimes in the tower, and they ease you into evening. This is what I'll be remembering, regardless of what...

I used to really love Cornell.   I did volunteer alumni interviews for 40+ years; my name is on a plaque somewhere.  TBG and I donated a landscape installation alongside a well traveled path; our names are on a bench there, too.  I've been on Alumni Boards and College advisories and been president of our local alumni club.   We've donated every year since graduation; Cornell is mentioned in our will.  At least it has been up until now. First, there were internal machinations within the Colleges that drew my attention and ire.  I protested and supported the student protesters and wrote letters/emails which received boilerplate, anodyne responses.  Then, the administration complied instead of fighting the bullying, sending control over $60 million to the Felon in Charge.   That's when we stopped sending them money.  I didn't stop telling every entity asking for my dollars why they were being denied.  There was a say-nothing ...

At least, for the moment, my tank is empty.  I've had my fill of shouting at the wind. I've been angry and anguished and articulate on the phone and in the ether.  I've enlisted others in the fight and reached out to long lost friends who might be eager to raise their voices alongside mine. I've gone upstream as far as I can.  I've been through my address book.  I refined my written response and my talking points until I had to stop because they no longer made sense. I went to sleep upset and I woke up the same way.  I have very little hope.  The issue requires some reading (an article or the whole Report) and writing (which could be cut-and-paste) and putting your name out there on an issue that is bound to be contentious, if not down-right hostile.  As usual, I acted before I thought about the ramifications of my screed.  Though edited for clarity and tightness, the current version is just as furious as its predecessors.  I'm stil...

I've been attending the Cornell Club of Southern Arizona's Holiday Party for more than a decade.  No matter where we hold it, it's exactly the same.   The men are wearing Cornell ties and pins and polo shirts.  The women sport shiny red things - on their feet, on their bodies, dangling from their ears.  We always have name tags, even though, by this point, we should all recognize one another.  After all, we've been doing the same thing for more years than most of the children playing tag around the edges of the adult conversation have been alive.   Some years there are more of us, some years there are fewer, but I can always count on seeing the fascinating members of the Classes of 1954 and 1963 and 1990.  They each have a story to tell, and this is the place for reminiscences.  " Of course I'd like to know what my alma mater felt like right after WWII"  is not merely polite conversation.  I was listening long before they stoppe...

The Alumni Admissions Ambassadors Network recommended that Accepted Students be received. Therefore, the banner was hung on Saturday. I would show you a picture of the red and white balloons against the bluest of blue skies,  but the prickers on the palo verde trees destroyed them before I returned with my camera. One of the students thought they were the remnants of a party the night before, but they were part of the decor for her Reception. She Who Must Be Obeyed thought that something at home would be nicer than meeting in a restaurant.  Since the restaurant I wanted to use couldn't accommodate us on a Saturday, I agreed with her and turned to Breugger's and my pantry for bagels and lox.  Happily, I have a lot of red and white serving pieces and doilies and such. Leftovers have been keeping me happy ever since. It was a lovely party, with an edge just beneath the surface. These kids did not know what to do. They were the lucky ones, in th...

Being a junior in high school is hard work.  PSAT... AP courses... driving a car... so much on the cusp of adulthood yet firmly rooted in childhood, too.  I had a chance to be up close and personal with those living through it last night. I represented Cornell at the Tucson Unified School District's College Night.  For $200, paid through the generosity of the Cornell Club of Southern Arizona, I was given a table, two chairs, a pen and a bottle of water.  The University provided name tags, flyers filled with information, and colorful bookmarks and postcards with contact information on both sides.  There was no list for interested students to complete, no envelope to collect resumes.  In fact, the University made a specific request that we not accept personal information.  We were to direct the students to the Admissions Office's website, where they could input their own deets. I love it when a cost saving measure fits neatly into the actor's lifesty...

The Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, that is.  Once again Alex, alumna and zoo volunteer, was able to host the Cornell Club of Southern Arizona at a behind the scenes tour of our nationally accredited animal park. That national accreditation associates the zoo with other exemplary facilities with whom they share best practises and experts and expertise and elephants. Apparently, accredited zoos do not purchase animals.  Instead, the zoos trade among themselves, as Reid Park did with the San Diego Zoo regarding some elephants.  There was quite the kerfuffle here in Tucson regarding the breaking up of an established herd; the papers were full of how dare they 's and it's just so awfully sad 's but the people with the credentials seemed to think it was an appropriate move and I chose to believe them.  Certainly the elephants that we saw looked as if they were having  a fine time in their new home. Our group was the first to get a behind the sc...

Scope and scale mean different things in different parts of the country.  Growing up on Long Island, the ocean was grand and went on forever, flat for as far as I could see.  Yet it was curiously intimate as well, with gentle sloshing waves covering my toes at sunset or giant breakers pushing me ahead of themselves rushing headlong toward shore.  (In yet another Who Knew ? moment, it wasn't until I moved to California that I discovered that my childhood pastime had a name and a culture all its own..... bodysurfing).  The skyscrapers  in Manhattan did touch the sky, and Daddooooo made sure I knew the history (real or imagined; he talked and I believed) and the height and the controversy behind each one.  A New Yorker's New Yorker, he never tired of standing at a street corner, head flung back, hat held on with one hand while the other gesticulated, directing my embarrassed but willing eye toward an outcropping or an antenna or a tree-lined b...

TBG and I may be the only people on the planet who don't know any of the characters, plot lines or questions (there are questions??) surrounding Lost . Somehow, I'm okay with that. The cultural zeitgeist will just have to trundle along without me.

I was on tv last night. Went to a high school college fair representing my alma mater and was interviewed by the local weekend anchor. Making an Ivy League education affordable without burdening the graduate with debt is an easy pitch to make, and I must admit that I was pretty enthusiastic. Got home, feeling lousy, watched The Biggest Loser and bawled like a baby, crawled into bed and then shot up from under the covers - we'd never watched the recording TBG had set up. Damn if they didn't lead with our brochure and start and finish the talking heads piece with my badly-in-need-of-a-haircut self waxing eloquent about the fabulous financial aid opportunities which really do abound, at least at the only school I was talking about. And then we went back to bed. And I got to thinking about how blase I was about the whole experience. The interviewer was unknown to me, so it wasn't as if I were in the presence of Walter Cronkite. That I would have remembered. But my thoughts on ...

I've had it. As G'ma would say, "It's enough already". The whining has to stop. Yes, times are tough for new graduates. Yes, only 20% of those who applied for jobs this year will be working after their commencement exercises are safely enshrined on Facebook , if my alumni magazine is to be believed. Yes, we're in a recession and society is in a mess and Americans are dying in wars on foreign soil and gee whiz it sounds a lot like when I was a new college graduate in 1973. And when I finished grad school in 1975. Prospects were dim, and there were a lot of us looking into them. The Peace Corps would've been an option were I not committed to a man who hated to travel. Besides, making money was, all of a sudden, not such an unpalatable objective. Not lots and lots of money necessarily (though that turned out to be pretty nice, too) but enough money to pay the bills with some left over to save and some to spend. The American Dream. And it felt just out of re...

Does the situation in the Middle East seem to get stranger and stranger with every passing day? Elections look like they'll be won by "the good guys" and then suddenly that candidate is under house arrest and the in's are still in. "Poor people in the countryside" apparently tipped the election away from the more educated city-dwellers making such a splash on Western televisions. All those green scarves and young faces were not enough to change the political climate. Haven't heard much from the Grand Ayatollah, though. Since he's the man who's ultimately in charge, it seems fair to say that Iran's political landscape has changed its haircut but not by much. Instead of a perm and a new color, Iran got a shampoo and a blow-dry. Netanyahu says he's all in favor of a two state resolution to the Palestinian/Israel conflict, so long as the two states don't undermine his political influence at the moment. The Palestinians who are despe...

Like your favorite pair of slippers, which make an accommodation for every bent toe and sore heel and feel perfect as soon as you think about them, seeing old friends again has a very special texture. You know what needs massaging and what needs attention and can take a deep breath and know that it will be understood immediately. A look, a raised eyebrow, a glance is all it takes. You agree about the past and it doesn't seem that far away, even if 30-some years have gone by. Just sitting on a ledge behind the fraternity house brings the sound of Ruler typing his last paper - after the graduation ceremony - from his room overlooking the deck. TBG's big brother in a black fishnet V-neck top, blue jeans shorts, black socks and wing tips - Joe College, he thought - is coming up the steps just as he did years ago to celebrate with classmates now far-flung, dead, divorced but with us in that moment. The years slipped away. We were 20 again, and the world was our oyster. No aneur...