Baby Brother Research Articles

Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting: Gender and Social Roles

ABSTRACT: Anita Desai’s tenth novel, Fasting, Feasting deals with themes of deprivation, abundance and being trapped in society's claims. It also deals with male and female roles in two completely different cultures, Indian and American cultures. The contrast in the novel can be understood from the novel’s title. The pressures and expectations placed on the different characters in the novel show the contrast in the social roles men and women are expected to fulfill, both in India and in the United States. While men are expected to be hard working, academic, and successful, the social value of women is dependent on their submissiveness, domestic abilities, beauty and child bearing. Aruna and Uma are raised, educated, and groomed only with marriage in mind. When the multiple attempts of MamaPapa to arrange a marriage for Uma fail, it becomes Uma’s job to take care of her baby brother, Arun, and later her aging parents. Mama’s identity is tied in with her role as the wife of an important man, and she seldom disagrees with him. Anamika meets the social expectations of female submission—yet, abused to death, Anamika experiences the ultimate loss of freedom that threatens all women who are forced to fulfill the feminine ideal. Dr. Dutt and Mira-masi both represent women who, independent of family and men, defy female social roles. Men also lose their free will and individual expression to the social roles they must fill. American society as portrayed in the novel also places gendered expectations onto its members, particularly in regards to male and female beauty. Mrs. Patton, like her daughter Melanie, is burdened by American ideals of female perfection and beauty, which are obsessed with dangerous degrees of thinness and over-tanning. Mr. Patton and Rod similarly fulfill the traditional Macho American stereotype of athleticism and hard work. Like Papa, Mr. Patton assumes passive control over the members of his household. Mrs. Patton, like Mama, appears to have no other identity beyond wife and mother.

Golden Boy

Golden Boy Lily Meyer (bio) The tomato sat in a bowl of its own on the counter. "Look at him," my dad crowed. "Golden Boy." Golden Boy was fat and streaky, with rich orange veins running down his red sides. His stem gave off the faint, bitter smell of sun-cooked dirt. He had no wormholes, no soft spots, not one pucker or bruise. The chipmunks hadn't touched him. He was misshapen, but most heirlooms are. "Nice tomato," I said. "Nice?" Dad scooped Golden Boy from the bowl, cradling him to his chest. My dad's knuckles were swollen with arthritis. When I last saw him, eighteen months ago, his joints had recently started aching. Now his whole body seemed stooped. "Naomi thinks you're nice," he told the tomato. "Not perfect. Not blue-ribbon quality. Nice." "Blue ribbon?" I asked, dropping my backpack on the spotless, sandless kitchen floor. The marble countertop gleamed. Copper pots sparkled over the range. I smelled bleach and lemons, and I wondered who did the cleaning. Surely my father hadn't learned, at sixty-eight, to dust and scrub. [End Page 219] He lifted his chin. "What's wrong with a blue ribbon?" "Nothing." I kept my voice light. "Are you entering an ag show?" The answer, I knew, was no, though my father could clean up at the Truro Fair. He gardens with the zeal he once reserved for finance. In addition to heirloom tomatoes—Striped Caverns, Black Russians, Great Whites—he grows zucchini, pattypan squash, and both Japanese and Italian eggplants. He has blackberries and blueberries, which he protects from marauding birds with reflective tape and netting, and a brambly patch of raspberries that stay sour and greenish until the end of July. He has a peach tree and a stunted Braeburn apple that was here when he bought the house in 2001. He grows the Simon & Garfunkel herbs, plus basil, chives, cilantro, and some ailing lemongrass. All this, within fifty feet of the front door. The property extends further, but my father, these days, does not. He stroked Golden Boy, looking hurt. Out the window, a whale-watching boat cut a neat line across Cape Cod Bay, and I felt a brief and total longing to be on it. To be anywhere but my father's gigantic beach house, once my favorite place on Earth. In penance, I said, "It's a perfect tomato." "Thank you." "Do we get to eat it?" "Your brother brought a beautiful burrata from the city. I was thinking caprese for lunch." My brother was on the back deck, snoring gently. A water glass sweated next to his lounger. His legs were profoundly tan. Rather than wake him, I leaned on the railing and compared the view to the one I remembered. In five years, not much had changed. The bay rolled and glittered before me. Seabirds hunted overhead, and squirrels and chipmunks rustled in the scrub pines. The neighbors' wind chimes rang in the distance. The breeze carried all the right beach smells: hot driftwood, dried seaweed, dead fish. [End Page 220] I heard Caleb stirring. "Naomi?" As I turned, he clambered upright. "Nome! You came!" "You asked me to." He wrapped his arms around me, then picked me up—my giant baby brother—to whirl me in the air. "I did." He set me down, grinning, and I relaxed into his side. Already I felt less sorry to be here. Under even the worst circumstances, time with Caleb was a treat. I reached up to ruffle the remains of his Wall Street-short curls. Four years in banking had stripped him of scruffiness, though he retained the white goal-collision scar on his forehead and the spray of blackheads on the bridge of his nose. The sun beamed down on his white smile. At twenty-six, he was thoroughly handsome. Jewish-looking, even more than Dad or me. "How was the trip?" he asked. "Fine. Easy." I was lying, but not completely. The travel itself—a three-hour flight from Kansas City, then a two-hour drive down the arm of Cape Cod—had been smooth. Fast, even, for a summer Saturday. I...

That’s My Sweater! by Jessika von Innerebner

Reviewed by: That’s My Sweater! by Jessika von Innerebner Natalie Berglind Von Innerebner, Jessika That’s My Sweater!; written and illus. by Jessika von Innerebner. Dial, 2022 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593461945 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593461952 $10.99 Reviewed from digital copies R 3-6 yrs It was inevitable that Olivia would outgrow her favorite sweater, but she’s nonetheless horrified when she sees it on her baby brother. She’s struck with a severe bout of jealousy and sets out to do what any rational jealous person would do: soil the sweater and then steal it from the washing machine before it can be returned to her little brother. Then, however, she sees a picture in the hallway of her older brother wearing the same sweater when he was younger. Big bro assures her that he went through a similar situation, but now he has a hoodie with a smiling banana on a skateboard he likes better. . . until Mom gifts it to Olivia, of course, starting the cycle over. This picture book is a playful take on sibling jealousy and the metaphorical and literal growing pains that come from needing to let go of things that have outgrown their use, particularly if they are of better use to someone else. von Innerebner’s cheerful digital art utilizes a palette of cool teals that emphasizes the reds of the sweater and the siblings’ hair on every page, with some backgrounds turning red to efficiently portray Olivia’s rage. Even kids who aren’t strong readers [End Page 102] will be able to tell Olivia’s feeling from her expressiveness, whether she’s pouting in jealousy or subtly gloating to her older brother. Big siblings having a hard time with a hand-me-down-sweater-esque struggle may benefit from Olivia’s sweater journey. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

THE CULTURE OF INFANT CARE BY TRAINER BIRTH ATTENDANT IN DAMPIT, MALANG

This study was conducted to describe the culture of infant care by TBA in Dampit District Malang Regency. The research design uses qualitative research design with case study type. Data collection techniques used interviews, observation, documentation and focus group discussions. Informant consist of TBA, midwife and baby family. The sampling technique used is purposive sampling. Validity test and criteria used include source triangulation and method triangulation. After that the data is analyzed by using thematic analysis technique and content analysis. The results showed that the period of infant care performed by the TBA was carried out since the infant was taken home from midwife to the age of 36 days. If the umbilical cord has not been taken a care of every morning and evening. People still believe that the placenta is a baby brother so that the burial should be done well according to the culture of the community. Baby massage is done from newborn to 36 days with the procedure according to the culture is society. Bathing the baby is done by the midwife when the new baby comes home from the midwife except the infant who has not received permission to be bathed from the health worker. There are bathed morning and evening but there is also bathed in the morning only. Cord care is performed twice a day. In the treatment there are with bethadin, alcohol, dry gauze and there are still smeared with betel leaf and salt. Shaved babies performed by TBA when he was over 5 days, after shaved smeared with katuk leaves. Since the role of TBA in the community is still considerable, the guidance by health workers must be done.
 Keywords : Infant care , Trainer Birth Attendant

Darmok on the Ocean, and: Kailash, When It Rises, and: Exile Dossier

Darmok on the Ocean, and: Kailash, When It Rises, and: Exile Dossier Nicholas Samaras (bio) Darmok on the Ocean My bearded grandfather is a gesture of no life here, says wade into this horizonand keep looking far above salt. My bearded father is this raft who pushes me off the worldand hangs on, breathing. My seaweed father is blue and white froth churning. We paid everything for this refuge.Our bodies white-streaked, adrift with wet clothing in summer. Papou's beard said there is no exileif the world is together. No exile if tan earth connects. Borders are only people manning gates, languageinside out. My mother is this ocean I sputter, stirring in this blue quenching we can't drink. The misplaced horizon:my grandfather's angel hair, my mother's veil, my baby brother with the souls of fish traveling. We aresmall hands. Small lives to arrive. [End Page 85] Kailash, When It Rises The white froth of sea surfkills with its rising. Any water is an oceanif it's deep enough to drown a soul. We were helpless helpers on an island and there were refugee bodies in the blue water—floatinghyphens of inarticulation—their small faces equally blue. We couldn't leave them.We pulled their dead weight by their arms to the pebbled shore—they were that close. We lifted them into our smallest caiques,the lapping tide still rising,the numbers of their bodies still rising. I had to be there, helping and not helping.I held my breathat the wet magnitude. I cradled the dead baby's body from her mother's arms.I held her small body until it dried and turned into wind. [End Page 86] Exile Dossier What country are you from? The country of Other, making us citizens of nowhere, who are everywhere yet never marked on any census, we who are stereotyped, even the best chameleon of us still undefined, shading the map's edges. What languages do you speak? I speak with your own accent. I mimic my way to acceptance. I can say "friend" in ten languages. I say, yes, sir, for the office and the files. I say, hey, man, for the street. What occupations have you held? I was born a very small child. On an emerald island, I was thatched. On Patmos, I was origin in apocalypse. Then, I became the ocean, the rolling sickness of motion, the blue expanse of movement. After that, I became a tradesman of air, transparent, not acknowledged, barely felt except when a cyclone, the stirring into frenzy. What occupations have you held? You don't have enough paper. In Turkey, I translated. In Kosovo, I picked grapes for a living. In communist Knin, I was stoned for walking down the street with a priest. In an unnamed rail station, I rode a train's freight boxcar into Beograd, pressed with fifty other bodies—not missing the irony of that. In a necklace of islands, I became earth who slept on earth. There were other countries after that, connected and disconnected, in which I wandered until I could find sleep or occupation. If you are to be recalled … Recalled? Only remembering frees me. The passages through. The houses that became houses. The arms of my father that became home. If you are to be recalled, who do you have to sponsor you? Who said I want to stay, even after years here? Who said I ever became [End Page 87] you? I only became indistinguishable from you. I only became myself on the inside and, yes, I contain multitudes: countries, states, the succession of sixteen schools in twelve years. The litanies of addresses. I am here for the time being, prisoner until I move again. Ocean, air, earth. Only remembering frees me. Only commemoration understands. [End Page 88] Nicholas Samaras Nicholas Samaras is the author of Hands of the Saddlemaker (Yale University Press) and American Psalm, World Psalm (Ashland Poetry Press). He has lived through ten countries and thirteen states, and writes from a place of permanent exile. Currently, he is completing a new manuscript on exile, displacement, and...

Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism 1976–2009 by Neil Gabbler

Reviewed by: Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism 1976–2009 by Neil Gabbler Ronald Franco, C.S.P. Gabbler, Neil. Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism 1976–2009. New York: Crown, 2022. 1258 pages. Hardcover. $45.00. ISBN 9780593238622. At the time of his death from brain cancer at age 77 in 2009, Senator Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy, the last of the fabled Kennedy brothers, had served in the United States Senate for 47 years. By then he was widely regarded as a senatorial star, someone much more committed to the Senate as an institution and more effective as a legislator than either of his two older brothers had been during their comparably brief terms in the Senate. His name had become associated with major landmark legislation, including the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ("perhaps the single most nation-changing measure of the era"), and he was recognized as the leading advocate for universal health care and as one of the greatest advocates for liberal causes in American politics. The paradoxical product of wealth, privilege, and entitlement, Ted Kennedy became one of his era's most admirable liberal figures. None of that was inevitable. Nor would it have likely been predicted when, at the constitutionally minimum age of 30, Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962, a position for which he was at the time widely seen as completely unqualified. Then, he was just President John F. Kennedy's baby brother, and his senatorial adventure was simply seen as one more example of the unbridled ambition of an arrogant, ambitious, [End Page 217] overly rich, and overly privileged Kennedy dynasty. ("Never expect any appreciation from my boys," Joe Kennedy once told Tip O'Neill. "These kids have had so much done for them by other people that they just assume it's coming to them.") How a career that began so inauspiciously in 1962 became something so surprisingly effective and unexpectedly admirable is the story which journalist and author Neal Gabler tells in a comprehensive two-part biography. His first volume, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour 1932–1975, was published two years ago. Now Gabler has completed the story of the most influential of the Kennedy brothers with a lengthy sequel, Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism 1976–2009. The previous book prefigured an ambitiously detailed and comprehensive personal and political biography, and this second volume does not disappoint. For most Americans (at least those above a certain age), the basic outline of Ted Kennedy's long life is familiar, as is so much of the triumph and tragedy associated with the Kennedys as a problematic late 20th-century substitute for an authentic American royal family. Gabler retells the familiar story through the lens of Edward Kennedy's marginal status within the family itself-the youngest child, from whom little was expected in comparison with his star-quality brothers, but who unlike them developed precisely those empathetic personal qualities which enabled him to connect naturally and effectively with people. In the end those qualities made him a better and more effective politician than his higher stature brothers. Indeed, Gabler calls "Teddy, the most empathetic of the Kennedys, in part because he was the most disrespected of the Kennedys." Famously, family patriarch Joe Kennedy had big plans for his sons. But (Gabler argues) "there was no morality in those plans, no civic mission or public good." This too was part of the legacy Senator Kennedy would struggle to transcend. Gabler's previously took the reader through the familiar territory of the more positive influence of his maternal grandfather Honey Fitz and Ted's initiation into the family business of politics (and the family hobby of womanizing). "The Kennedys had been the product of Joe and Rose—of his sense of muscular competition and stoicism and her sense of aesthetics and decorum." But Ted was also "a Fitzgerald, like his grandfather, more a hardy, affable mess of a man." With the Kennedys, this family saga is inescapable. But the book also examines the wider picture of the changing times against which Kennedy's senate...

Grave Stele of Girl with Doves: A Beloved Child

Grave Stele of Girl with Doves: A Beloved Child HELAINE L. SMITH There is, in a sunlit, quiet corner of one of the Greek galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, perhaps its loveliest Parian marble: a grave stele,1 just under 3-feet tall, of a little girl holding two pet doves (Fig. 1). My attention was first drawn to her by Claireve Grandjouan, for years the honored Department Chair of the Hunter Classics Department. And ever since, when at the museum alone or with a friend, I’ve looked at this piece, reliably there except for a brief sojourn in 2016 at the Getty. Back now, it sits again in rooms with other stelae of lesser beauty, some of which depict children holding flowers or warriors holding oil flasks2 —objects that signify, rather than arion 29.3 winter 2022 Grave Stele of Girl with Doves. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Fletcher Fund 1927. 86 grave stele of girl with doves: a beloved child reveal, the life of the deceased. This stele, though, is full of life and beauty, and makes one want to discover, insofar as possible, what makes it so moving. Of the other stelae, many conform to a stylized pattern. Carved in higher relief than the child, and more coarsely, the dead figures are seated on chairs, with mourners standing behind or to the side and grasping in their right hands the right hand of the deceased in a gesture of farewell. Despite the handshake, the dead appear motionless in body and mind: they look off into space rather than to figures present in the same plane. A few stelae retain their pediments—the little girl with doves does not—and the extant pediments have corner Sphinxes3 and a center Siren with spread wings and the ritualized hand placement signifying grief, one on the heart, the other on the head. Family groups are common, but the little girl with doves stands alone. And children, when they are present on stelae, are smaller in size than the adults but have adult body proportions. The stele of the little girl defies every one of these conventions. Its excellence lies in what makes anything a masterpiece— compositional balance and purity, the relationship between parts, the way, specifically, the soft, rounded curves of the body and the vertical folds of the garment complement each other, the way the straight lines themselves are modified by diamond-shaped diagonals, the masterful creation of light surface and dark shadow, with its splendid illusion of depth, and the quietness that shadow and open space together impart. Details of hair, fingertips and toes are exquisitely incised, the shape of the child’s body beneath the drapery quietly molded, with the naturalness of the pose defining a specific moment that is also a passage to eternity. And there is something more—details that speak directly to us through the centuries to reveal how beloved this child was to the family commissioning the stele. The presentation of beloved children is, in fact, a recurring feature in ancient hymn, epic, and drama.4 When Athena Helaine L. Smith 87 brushes aside the arrow meant for Menelaus, she does so as gently as a mother might brush a fly from the face of her sleeping child (Hom. Il. 4.130-131). There is instance after lovely instance of the indulgent parent. When Nausicaa tells her “papa dear” that she must take on the task of household laundry, he immediately understands what she really has in mind and, without saying what he knows, gives her a fine wagon and mules (Hom. Od. 6.66-70). When tiny Artemis perches on her father’s knee and asks for gift after gift, Zeus smiles and grants her all she asks and more (Callim. Hymn 3.440 ). When Hector lived, he would, Andromache says, place Astyanax on his knee at feasts and feed him “only marrow and the rich flesh of sheep” (Hom. Il. 22.500-501). Older children care as lovingly for younger ones. When “Doso” ceases nursing Demophoon, his four sisters rush to his side to cradle, bathe and soothe their baby brother (Hom. Hymn Dem. 284-291). The...

Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse by Dorothy Burroughes, and: The Magic Herb by Dorothy Burroughes

Reviewed by: Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse by Dorothy Burroughes, and: The Magic Herb by Dorothy Burroughes Jan Susina (bio) Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse. By Dorothy Burroughes, edited by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2021. The Magic Herb. By Dorothy Burroughes, edited by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2021. The most recent reprints in Jack Zipes's Fabulous Excavated Tales series are two books written and illustrated by Dorothy Burroughes. Popular during the 1930s and 1940s, Burroughes is a British children's author who is rarely mentioned in the histories of children's literature but is still held in high regard as a print maker and poster artist. Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, Burroughes's first major success as a commercial artist was designing posters in 1920 for the London Underground that encouraged visitors to the London Zoo in Regent's Park. Drawn in the style of Japanese woodcuts, her image of Langur monkeys became popular with the public. Her second zoo poster, known as "the monkey poster," became the most requested poster in the history of the London Underground and is reprinted in both volumes along with her striking print of "The Black Panther." In the 1930s and 1940s, Burroughes was considered one of the leading British animal artists, along with Harry Rountree and Cecil Aldin. Many of her twenty children's books, like her better-known posters and prints, focus on animals and animal rights. Burroughes established her reputation as an animal artist with her prints and posters often featuring animals that she sketched at the Regent's Park Zoo and was awarded a Zoological Society Fellowship for her animal artwork. Yet she expressed mixed feelings about zoos and restricting animals in cages. In addition to illustrating informational books on animals such as Queer Beasts at the Zoo (1927) and Queer Birds at the Zoo (1927), Burroughes also wrote children's stories featuring anthropomorphized creatures that address social issues and emphasize the need to treat animals with respect and kindness. While Burroughes uses watercolor illustrations interspersed with linocuts in her children's books, her stories are longer and more complicated than those by Beatrix Potter and are intended for older readers. Her chummy and social world of animals more closely resembles that of Kenneth Grahame in [End Page 445] The Wind in the Willows, without the humorous escapades of Mr. Toad that A.A. Milne admired. The Magic Herb shows a bit of Lewis Carroll influence. Three badgers go on a quest for the Magic Herb to aid their seriously ill baby brother. To obtain the mysterious plant, they must journey to the Magic Isle where the white plant is guarded by the Dodo and the Unicorn. Burroughes draws the Dodo so he resembles John Tenniel's illustration of the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Dodo, who initially appears rather fierce, is just "a little embittered by being misunderstood" (19). He is moved by the unselfish nature of the badgers' quest. As the Unicorn explains to the badgers, he and the Dodo are tasked with the responsibility of preventing the life-restoring plant from falling into the wrong hands, such as "pompous scientists and people who-want-towrite-to-the-papers" about discovery of this rare species. The selfless nature of the badgers' quest is reminiscence of Gluck's journey in John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River. The badgers succeed on their impossible journey, liberate the Dodo and the Unicorn from their long-term duties as protectors of the Magic Herb, and restore their younger brother to health, all a result of their selflessness. Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse is an updated version of Aesop's "Country Mouse and City Mouse." Teddy is an elegant mouse who wears a smart gray coat with clean white collars. He accompanies his human family when they vacate London for the country for the duration of the War. Burroughes uses animal figures to comfort younger readers who were moved from the cities to escape Nazi bombing during World War II. Teddy is befriended by the Brown Mouse family who introduce him to the rural world of cows, pigs...

First Writing Since

First Writing Since

Guest Editorial: That Was Then, This Is Now

This is not my first JPT editorial. In fact, it is more than 16 years since that was published - sufficiently long ago that I initially put my invitation to write this piece down to an error. When it became clear that was not the case, I wondered what I should use this opportunity to say. I had entirely forgotten what I had written about in February 2004. Reading that editorial again was slightly uncomfortable, and I found myself wincing at parts. Setting that discomfort aside, when I thought about when the piece was written, as much as what I had said, I was struck by the parallels and contrasts with the world that we live in today. That insight led me to test what I believe to be important for the oil and gas industry of tomorrow. Facewhat? Compared to 2004 I am, broadly speaking, much the same; perhaps a little wiser. I still have a keen interest in (my words), or pointless obsession with (other people’s words), fonts, text editors, pre-1980s programming languages, and units of weights and measures. I could add more to this list, but I don’t want to come across as too nerdy. While I have remained constant, at least in spirit, some things were profoundly different at the start of 2004. US Oil Production Had Been in a Long Period of Decline. During 2003 the US produced around 5.6 million B/D of crude oil, including lease condensates. Production had been declining steadily from its peak in the mid-1980s. In my editorial I wrung my hands at the slow pace of uptake of methods to improve well productivity and drive down well costs. As far as the US was concerned, I needn’t have worried: a productivity revolution was underway that would profoundly affect not only the shape of the US oil industry, but the supply/demand balance of the entire world. The factory drilling of highly stimulated horizontal wells took US crude production from 5 million B/D in 2008 to more than 12 million B/D by the end of last year. Facebook Did Not Exist. Facebook was launched in February 2004. Gmail was announced in April the same year. Twitter was not “a thing” until 2006. In a world where something has become so pervasive, it is hard to imagine that the term “social media” had no meaning for most people in 2004. Today, social media is deeply entrenched in our working practices: it is central to the way that companies communicate with their employees and with the public; it provides the means by which we advertise and apply for jobs; people use WhatsApp groups to collaborate on projects because it is better than the tools provided by their employers. The impact upon our personal lives is perhaps even more dramatic. Although the positive influences of being hyperconnected should not be underestimated - a point I’ll come back to later - cyber-bullying was no real cause for concern in 2004, nor was the impact of social media on major political events. SARS-CoV Did Not Have a Number. By the end of 2003, the SARS epidemic had been reduced to a few sporadic outbreaks. The coronavirus genome that caused the disease had earlier been classified as SARS-CoV. Today it is known as SARS-CoV-1 and its baby brother, CoV-2, is currently wreaking havoc across the world. At a time when the oil and gas industry was already wrestling with oversupply, COVID-19 has managed to destroy demand by an unprecedented level, and the oil and gas industry has been plunged into another downturn. I hear people using phrases like “the coronavirus fog is lifting,” but I’m not so sure - I think we have just adapted rather quickly to working in the fog.

President Kennedy's Adrenals and My Brother's Death

In the 1960s, as we would drive on highway 70 through the western suburbs of Kansas City, my mother, Irene, would start crying and my dad would become silent. There was a reason why my parents rarely went this route. About 2 decades earlier they had desperately raced on this road to the Kansas University Medical Center when my baby brother Jay took his last breath. Instead of receiving treatment, an autopsy was performed. My parents were told that Jay had died of bacterial meningitis.

From When the World Stopped Touching

from When the World Stopped Touching Luisa Muradyan (bio) and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (bio) April 14, 2020 Dear Julia, I won’t start with a joke this timebut I do think about a storymy mother tells when she was on a fieldtrip to the beach and she sees her fatheron a boat with a beautiful womanwith hair darker than the Black Sea andit’s funny because my grandmother dyedher hair blonde and I still can’t finda way to translate the Russian idiomabout having a dick full of fishbut the water only reaching your knees.I often hear “the world is your oyster”and I say, yes I know what it is liketo have beauty ripped out of me.My blue baby carried away from mein the fog of the delivery room.My son says he’s “cool as a cucumber”and I think about the bag of them,no longer crisp, slimy, and forgottenweighed down at the bottomof the vegetable drawer.Julia, why is the vegetable drawerso often a pit of death?My son pokes at his salad during dinnerand asks where babies come from?And I am relieved we spend dinnertalking about creation, instead of destruction.Like every Jew from Odessa, I know more anecdotesthan holy stories and I carry this shame and this laughterinto each high Holiday. On Passover, my son asks [End Page 85] to see the picture of baby Moses going down the riverand he points to his baby brother and says bath tub?My father’s father escaped Turkey during the Armenian genocideand married a Holocaust survivor and I thinkabout what their first dates must have been like.Did they share their trauma by candle light? Did they talkabout the weather? How when the sun beat down on the bodiesleft in the streets, one of them looked like his mothereven though that was impossible,Julia, it couldn’t be possible. [End Page 86] April 14, 2020 Dear Luisa, My son wants to know whyhe can't have puzik obnimashkiwithout his pajamas on, whyI won’t allow him to pressmorning naked into my bellyanymore. Luisa, do you still letyour sons touch every partof you? I know this isn’tsomething I’m allowed to ask.Something we’re taughtnot to talk about. In the middleof our empty park, Big echo,he screams, I love you everyone.Everyone, do you hear me? And Idon’t have any answers for him.Already, he is longing for a loveI cannot give. I love you,hovers in the air the wayDedushaka proposedthree times before Babushkagave in. It’s not about love, she says,that goes away, if it was ever there.Respect, she repeats, Remains.It’s what we hold on to. She refusesto retire, these weeks beforeher 79th birthday, confinedat home scare hermore than the virus, so shestill goes into the office,I’m very careful, and hides [End Page 87] her morning coughwhen video chatting,confesses, she's neverenjoyed being touched.Have you ever askedyour parents about theirsex life, Luisa? Grandparents?We were taught so littleabout non-platonic touch.My mother does like to recallhow when I was a year, sleepingin a crib beside their bed,I woke and stared and asked,What are you doing? Andto this day, Luisa,she hasn’t really answered. [End Page 88] May 5, 2020 Dear Luisa, My Babushka turned 79 last week and we celebratedeach in our own home, faces in one screen, drinkingand singing. My little cousin played "The Star SpangledBanner" on her trumpet and I played something in Yiddishon my guitar and my uncle made a joke about his daughter'smusic being patriotic, of the present, and mine beingof war and loss, always fear and the past.Then yesterday, pra-Babushka would have been108 and I pulled out pictures of our last New Year'sin Ukraine. She...

Without Pity

Without Pity Stephanie C. Trott (bio) Back then it seemed that snow came with the shift from autumn to winter, that after the leaves broke free from their branches, something else needed to fall from the sky. We lived on the coast then, down a thin stretch of land that jutted out from town and away toward the sea. My father built the house on Calumet Road with his pension money from the war. There were three bedrooms, all occupied, and a deck that stood freely at the back. From there you could see the boats as they made their way past Butler Flats, could greet them as they returned with islands in their wake, and watch the neon-lit billboard of Paul Revere as he rode stationary in the sky. It was late in the evening two weeks after Thanksgiving when the first snow fell. Dad was out fishing on Georges Bank, and I was in bed wondering if the sleet looked the same against his boat’s pilothouse windows as it did against the one in my bedroom. My father was a highliner, one of the best fishermen around, and he never spent more than a few days at home. As the oldest son, it was my job to watch over Mom, my baby brother, Jack, and the animals we kept. Being twelve meant one more year to being a man, and men had responsibilities. That night Mom boiled dinner and sent us to bed; the snow set her to worrying and she preferred to sleep in the living room armchair, should my father come back early in the storm. While she gave Jack a bath, I took the radio meant only for checking the weather report, and when it was quiet I smothered the songs of Dion and Elvis and Fats Domino under my pillow. Eventually the static became too much and I switched over to the fishing channels in search of my father’s voice, lost in the air among my idols. My window faced the street and was often on the receiving end of rock salt kicked up from the plow, so I thought little of the sound of pebbles licking the glass. I rolled over and wrapped the blankets tighter over my [End Page 127] head so Mom wouldn’t hear the radio, and again the sound came at the window, this time louder and with more intention. Clicking the radio off, I wondered if it was my father. Dad forgot his keys sometimes, mostly after a trip to the bar, and I’d always wake up to let him in when he knocked at my window. He knew where the spare key lay in wait, hidden on the post behind the goose feed in the garage, but was usually too drunk to find it without waking up Mom. I tugged the curtains apart and saw not the face of my father but that of my classmate Bobby, who held a pair of hockey skates and an open can of Crisco. He smiled. I waved back, pulled the curtains closed, and got out of bed to join him outside. We had been waiting for the weather to freeze and last week it finally had, taking with it three inches of Deacon’s Pond. I padded down to the kitchen and placed the radio gently on the table, careful not to wake my mother in the next room. Down the stairs to the garage where we kept our slickers, socks, and skates, all of which lived in a box of Dad’s old fishing clothes. The garage was cold and smelled of gasoline and the grain we used to feed the animals. I picked a few dried pieces of corn off the bottom of my foot, jammed it into the wool socks my grandmother had made for my birthday, placed the key inside my glove, and stepped outside. “Jeez, Hatch, what took you so long?” Bobby stood at the end of the driveway, arms akimbo. He smiled and whistled through the space between his two front teeth, a high-pitched whir that echoed in the dry night air. “Had to dig around for my clothes...

To See the Veins: My Mississippi Pollinator Garden

To See the Veins:My Mississippi Pollinator Garden Aimee Nezhukumatathil (bio) Before we were married, a man named Dustin would drive four hours from Ohio to western New York to visit me. He smiled and laughed so easy. He dug holes in my yard to plant lilies on his days off. I pointed, he dug. We were long distance, so to spend any time digging in the garden was luxury, and such a generous thing to do for a woman he'd started dating just a few months ago. I didn't know about native gardens, or about pollinator gardens, then. I had just purchased a house by myself. I'd rescued a mini dachshund and named her Villanelle. I'd bought a lawn mower. Summer days when I had the windows open, I could hear my nosy neighbors gather on the sidewalk in front of my house and worry about "the Hindoo" all alone, doing yardwork by herself. The space between my eyebrows scrunched up like a golden raisin. I'm Methodist. When our now thirteen-year-old was two, he loved to tromp in between the Asiatic lilies Dustin had planted years before, outside what became our first home. We called our son our garden gnome, because he would dig with his toy trowel and pretend he was helping us plant crocus to naturalize all over our lawn. He flung little mounds of sod and dirt over his shoulder and into small piles. It looked like a mole had started to ravage our lawn but got distracted. And he did get distracted: we all did. A baby brother joined him in 2010, and now they scurry and jump and climb and run into the woods, and I'm grateful to have moved to Oxford, Mississippi—a place where they can romp outdoors the way their parents did when they were growing up. Here in Mississippi, Dustin and I made and remake and revise our pollinator garden, which we've filled with plants native to this region. Native plants require much less watering, attract songbirds and butterflies, and improve air quality too. Before we began this garden, I didn't fully realize how easy it was to attract dazzling emerald hummingbirds and other pollinators with just a few plants. Once I learned that even the humble bumblebee is a keystone species—an animal upon [End Page 104] which other animals depend—it was a no-brainer to try and help them succeed in our garden. In revision, we surprise ourselves with wins and losses. When we moved here four years ago, we traced out the garden in the largest corner of our backyard. Our local Audubon center's annual plant sale provided us with a number of starter milkweeds and a gorgeous bee balm that promised to thrive. I write this now at the end of October, during a pandemic. We wear masks to browse the selection of pumpkins at Chicory, our local market—an errand that takes on more importance now since my sons won't be trick-or-treating this year. The last of the chartreuse chrysalises have cracked open along our fence line, and the monarchs are grown and have flown south for the winter, but our sons still check around the garden to see if any monarch caterpillars munch on the remaining bits of vermillion butterfly weed. Here in Mississippi no one asks where I am really from, like they do just about everywhere else. They let me select red peppers and popsicles in peace at our farmer's market every Tuesday. Here in Mississippi I want to know the names of everything I plant: aster, wax mallow, the difference between bee balm and bee blossom. I see a direct correlation between people who think nothing of making fun of a brown woman's name (see: the video of Senator David Perdue making fun of Senator Kamala Harris's name; see: 80 percent of the people who first meet me). Knowing names correctly is everything; it's a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. Maybe if people knew that pipevine swallowtail butterflies nibble swamp milkweed leaves, they wouldn't be so...

Lift by Minh Lê

Reviewed by: Lift by Minh Lê Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Lê, Minh Lift; illus. by Dan Santat. Little, 2020 [56p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-368-03692-4 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-368-06174-2 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-7 yrs Pushing the elevator button to take her family up to or down from their city apartment is a serious job, and young Iris approaches it as such. She’s horrified, then, when her toddler brother hits the button one day, earning applause from her parents and taking her place as the button pusher. When she sees a maintenance man toss out a malfunctioning button from another elevator, she grabs it, tapes it to her bedroom wall, and uses it to transport herself to wild, magical worlds. Pigtailed Iris narrates with minimal text, so it’s really Santat’s art, in this followup from the creative partnership behind Drawn Together (BCCB 6/18), that pulls the storytelling weight, and the comics-styled panels easily carry viewers along. Perspective and composition also play a big part in conveying emotion here: tight closeups on Iris’ face express her fury; larger panels emphasizing her diminutive little figure denote her lack of agency in the whole situation; and full bleed spreads of the magical lands she visits give pause, inviting audiences into the whimsy of the tale. Visual cues indicate some serious sibling jealousy—baby brother has clearly and without permission taken her favorite toy—but the story itself makes a kid-appealing metaphor about leaving the familiarities of baby and toddlerhood behind for new, exciting adventures. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Two Poems

Two Poems Janet Heller (bio) Family Reunions Lisa lights the candlesand says a prayer for all of us,cousins and in-laws,grownups and newborns,Christians and Jews. As we dig into the buffet,John and Jean suggest a moment of silenceto think about those who are far from Wisconsinand can't share this Thanksgiving meal,especially my mom and Uncle Bob, the twins. The room fills with the ghosts and smells of holidays past:Aunt Ann's brunches with omelets and savory eggs,homemade cranberry bread and muffins;the turkey dinners, the rib roast dinners,the frosted cakes and cookies and soufflés;Mom lighting the candles,Uncle Bob leading the Passover service,a little kid asking the Four Questionsor stumbling over hard words in the Haggadah,Nannie feeling too cold or asking for the missing butter,a cousin announcing an engagement. In the fall, the boys had football scrimmages,Will and Ross and Paul and Joe and John and Jeff.Nancy and Jean wanted to playand fought the gender biaswithout much success. [End Page 62] Uncle Bob always told jokes,and Mom laughed for the next hour.He said he was a gentleman from the startbecause Mom was the first-born twin.How many morons does it take to make popcorn?Answer: Four—one to hold the pot and three to shake the stove.Uncle Bob claimed that he had considered investing fundsin a brand-new business: The Ted Kennedy Driving School. Sometimes Pegi combined ketchupwith peanut butter and vegetables,and the rest of us sampled her inventions.We tried a different way to eat cake,leaving the frosting for last. Joe would open the door for the prophet Elijahduring our Seder, but my cousin pretended to welcomehis favorite Green Bay Packer, Elijah Pitts. At every reunion, Dad auctioned off banana slices,Will tried to tell the joke about a man named Bowels,and Mom saved her fancy place-cards for next year. Jeff and I compare notes,realizing that we alone,the youngest and the oldest kids,lack a first cousin our age and gender. I imagine all of us together in Julyfor the twins' sixty-fifth birthday,a vast horde of three generationsno longer fitting around one table.I hope it won't rain—Somehow it always used to pourwhen the whole family came to Elkhart Lake. Now I watch five-year-old Brandon playWith his first cousin Jason,sharing a toy airplane.Then Jason refuses to leaveuntil Brandon's baby brother Zachstops crying. [End Page 63] My heart fills with lovefor this new generation of cousins.I hope they will always be as closeas we adults feel,growing up in twinned families. Synagogue Rummage Sale People bring dozens of bags and boxesstuffed with clothes, pots, glasses, jewelry,linens, suitcases, birdfeeders, books,toys, games, furniture, washing machines,bicycles, exercise equipment, and candlesticks. We women sort everything,gently fold towels and sheets and slacks,and carry items to the proper place.The social hall of the synagoguebegins to resemble a department store. When I finish unloading five boxes,Rod hauls down five more.I worry that this task will never end,that I will spend the rest of my lifeat this labor, like Sisyphus. The piles of clothes get higher and higher.We put baskets, magazines, rugs, a punch bowl setunderneath the full tables. I dispatch the wisest volunteerswith colored stickersto price unique merchandise. As I stoop to rearrange some books,the local lecherpinches my torso.I feel like hitting him in the groinwith The Joy of Cooking. The day before the sale,I dream that someone robs the synagogue, [End Page 64] stealing our money and vandalizing our treasures.I awake and race to the building,relieved to find everything safe. During the sale, we greet customers,answer their questions,pick up dropped clothes,prevent children from grabbing jewelryor breaking dishes,carry heavy items for senior citizens. Exhausted after a week of set-up and sale,I finally get a good night's sleep.Vivian phones the next...

Yale Will Not Save You

Yale Will Not Save You Esmé Weijun Wang (bio) The moment I received my acceptance letter from Yale University was one of the happiest of my life. I stood at the bottom of my driveway, where two tin mailboxes nestled against one another, and found a large envelope waiting inside. Large envelopes from publications were a bad sign; they almost always bore my own handwriting, and usually held a rejected manuscript and a perfunctory note. But a big envelope from a university — an envelope with instructions, with welcome, with a full-color look-book — that was news. I stood at the mailboxes, shrieking. I was not the type of girl to shriek, but I was seventeen, and I had gotten into Yale. I was to be in Jonathan Edwards College, Class of 2005. ________ I was an overachieving child, the daughter of twentysomething Taiwanese immigrants who came to Michigan and then California with their baby girl. My parents were broke. They applied for food [End Page 18] stamps; they told one another that someday they'd be rich enough to eat at Pizza Hut any time they wanted. Eventually we moved for the sake of a different school district, and while raising me and my baby brother in a largely white small town, my parents told me that school was all-important and that I should always do my best. In elementary school, I assigned myself essays to write while on vacation. In fifth grade, I wrote a two-hundred-page novel about a kidnapped girl who becomes a cat. Soon my parents were both working in tech jobs at the height of the boom in Silicon Valley, and were no longer broke. They never spoke the words "American dream," but that was what their lives signified, and so in middle school I chose to take a 7:30 a.m. class in C++ programming, and I wrote a short story that my English teacher went on to teach even four years after that. In high school, when I told my mother that I was thinking of suicide, she suggested that we kill ourselves together, which I didn't fully recognize as the bizarre response it was until I told the story again and again over the following decades of my life. I won a gold medal at the Physics Olympics, was a California Arts Scholar, and crossed the stage at graduation with a GPA that belied the hundreds of self-inflicted scars lurking beneath my nylon gown. I chose to go east for college because I wanted to get away from the chaos — the accusatory fights, the sobbing — that occurred inside our home too often to take note of. ________ I dated someone briefly at the end of my senior year of high school who broke up with me because I was undiagnosed and frightening. Before he ended our relationship he invited me to a poolside barbecue. He wore girls' jeans. We stood around the glassy pool at his apartment complex and his mother asked me what I was doing after graduation. [End Page 19] "I'm going to Yale," I said. She did a double take. "Good for you," she said. Even back then my instability was clear to most. ________ "I went to Yale" is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I'm not worthless. ________ Yale is the third-oldest university in the country, after Harvard, which is the oldest, and the College of William & Mary, which was established in 1693. Yale used to be called the Collegiate School, but was renamed for Elihu Yale after a succession of gifts from the English merchant and philanthropist, including books, exotic textiles, and a portrait of George I. These generous donations, the sale of which helped to fund the construction of Yale College in New Haven, were vigorously encouraged by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who also vigorously encouraged the Salem witch trials. In troubled Salem, babbling and odd movements could signify witchcraft. The bewitched Goodwin family children, he said, "would bark at one another like Dogs, and again purr like so many Cats." We all know what happened to the witches. ________ I was diagnosed with bipolar...

Over the Moon by Natalie Lloyd

Reviewed by: Over the Moon by Natalie Lloyd Wesley Jacques Lloyd, Natalie Over the Moon. Scholastic, 2019 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-11849-0 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-11850-6 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-6 Twelve-year-old Mallie Ramble wasn’t even alive yet when the Dust snuffed out the stars and brought monsters and gloom to Coal Top. Stories are still told of the time of light, when Forgotten Mountain was still Bright Mountain and craftspeople were able to weave starlight into cloth, but now men labor in the mines from a young age and women work as servants. Despite Mallie’s finding a job cleaning for a local family that mocks her prosthetic arm, Mallie and her family are on the verge of losing everything if her baby brother doesn’t go down into the mines like their father. Luckily an opportunity presents itself for “riches untold,” if only Mallie can master riding a Starbird (flying horse) and retrieve gold dust from mountaintops for the charismatic and well-dressed Mortimer Good—a name so on-the-nose it’s no surprise he turns out to be no good at all. This is unsophisticated fantasy but an unadorned lesson of youthful hope, and Lloyd writes with evocative directness. By the end, Mallie leads an army of young people in a battle to bring back the light, a fairly straightforward metaphor that could offer appeal to young readers just beginning to stretch their own fantasy wings. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Woodpecker's Song: A Sister Remembers Charles Bowden

Woodpecker's SongA Sister Remembers Charles Bowden Peg Bowden (bio) My earliest memory of my younger brother, Chuck, was watching him roll in the snow in the dead of winter on the family farm outside of Chicago. When he was two years old, Richard III, our black-and-white Australian sheep dog, affectionately known as "Richard the Turd," would lick Chuckie's snotty little nose and face, and my baby brother would tumble off his American Flyer sled, into a snowbank, shrieking with laughter. He didn't mind the cold wetness of the snow or the dog slathering his face with doggy licks. He didn't mind the sizzling heat of summer, either. In fact, he loved the extremes. From babyhood on, Chuckie liked the acute physicality of nature, and the exertion and sweat of extreme exercise. And, over time, his physical energy fused with the cerebral, as he vigorously pursued his passions in the offbeat, intellectual corners of his own peculiar universe. There were three of us: big brother George, myself in the middle, and baby Chuckie. When Chuck was three years old, our family moved from the farm to Chicago, settling into an Irish Catholic, Anglo neighborhood where Dad had bought a two-story apartment building. Upstairs lived a family with a feisty little boy the same age as Chuck. Within a week that little Irish kid had beat the crap out of my brother. The kid's father, a big burly fellow who had a taste for Irish whiskey, had taught his son to fight, but Chuckie didn't have a clue about this brawling behavior. I clearly remember my mother being quite distressed about this, and Dad taking Chuck out into the backyard, doing his best to teach him some defensive maneuvers (and a few offensive moves as well). Dad was not a fighter. His idea of parenting was on a more passive, rational level, sitting at the kitchen table, and not skirmishing with a three-year-old on the backyard lawn. [End Page 55] Click for larger view View full resolution The Bowden kids: Peggy, George, and Chuckie, Chicago, Illinois, about 1952. (Courtesy Peg Bowden.) But somehow it worked. Chuckie and Willie (the feisty Irish kid) were soon squabbling and punching each other regularly, and ultimately they turned out to be the best of friends. Chuck learned to hold his own in our South Side Chicago neighborhood. [End Page 56] Our parents believed that a swat on the behind, now and then, was the only way to raise a civilized child. Even though Chuck knew he would get a spanking if he destroyed his shoes and pants in a mud puddle, he did it anyway. My mother would say, "If there is a puddle between here and the end of the block, Chuck will find it and come home muddy." Spankings were always delivered by our mother's hand. (Dad, a man who drank daily with gusto, was afraid that he would lose control.) There was an air of defiance in Chuck when it came to the conventions of family life. It was a quiet defiance. He didn't talk about it, and rarely cried out when he was spanked. He just pushed the limits and paid for it, again and again. The kid was a bit of a masochist. George and I felt somewhat guilty about Chuck getting the brunt of the corporal punishment, but we shrugged, rolled our eyes, and decided that our kid brother set himself up for it. Chuck's shenanigans were done with a half-smile and a dose of attitude. He was the family clown, the cut-up, the one who broke the rules, and there was no negotiation about rules in our house. Things were pretty black and white. Our parents ruled by fear and love. The style was authoritarian and we didn't dare cross the line in the sand. Except for Chuck. He leaped across that line with glee. Family vacations were long car trips to the Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, and the Iowa farms where our relatives raised corn and soybeans. One Christmas break we drove from Chicago to Monterrey, Mexico. Dad was enamored...

Roly Poly by Mem Fox

Reviewed by: Roly Poly by Mem Fox Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Fox, Mem Roly Poly; illus. by Jane Dyer; photographs by Jeanne Birdsall. Beach Lane/Simon, 2019 40p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-4556-6 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-4557-3 $10.99 R 4-7 yrs Roly Poly the polar bear is none too pleased when a baby brother shows up unannounced: "I never asked for a little brother and I don't want one now." Of course, little brother Monty toddles around after Roly Poly everywhere, stealing Roly Poly's hard-won fish, grabbing Roly Poly's precious walrus tooth, and just generally being a nuisance. He's such a nuisance, in fact, that when the ice cracks and Monty is stranded on a drifting iceberg, Roly Poly hesitates, but he does finally jump into the icy seas to save him. While baby bro's transition into toddlerhood feels a little rushed, this is a genuinely funny and compassionate affirmation to big brothers and sisters that yes, sometimes a baby sib is an undeniable pain in the rear. Mom's reaction to Roly Poly's insistence that he really has no desire for Monty's presence ("I know. … But we think you will adore him") is the height of adult obliviousness, and it will likely feel familiar to any kid who's only grudgingly welcomed a new addition to the family. Photographs of the posed three-dimensional polar bear figurines, handmade by needle felting, are surprisingly emotive, both in Roly Poly's disdain and his folks' excitement, and the miniature scenes are sure to delight fans of dollhouses and their ilk with their teeny tiny versions of ice skates, a telescope, fishing poles, and even a family "portrait." With a bit of sass and a whole lot of warmth, this will make even the most reluctant older child chuckle. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois