Month: December 2013

46664: Mandela

Seeing black and white people in front of Nelson Mandela’s house celebrating his life would have been unimaginable a quarter century ago.

Random thoughts about the passing of Nelson Mandela:

The forgiveness he showed to his oppressors was the epitome of Christian compassion; don’t know if I would have been so fair, or so shrewd.

I realize that my information about Mandela is at least slightly blurred by the portrayal of him by Morgan Freeman in the movie Invictus. I am assuming the scene is true, because it seems consistent with the man’s actions in real life: Mandela becomes president. Most of the whites working in the government are expecting that they will be fired, or I suppose, worse. But as he assures various staffers that he wants them to stay to ensure competent continuity, he surprises the white people and irritates some of the blacks, particularly the members of his party, the African National Congress, who were expecting the spoils.

Earlier, it showed that he learned Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor, in prison, in order to learn the Afrikaners, which in fact, he did. But he later used that knowledge to make peace, not retribution.

I was watching the news coverage last night, naturally, and seeing black and white people in front of his house celebrating his life would have been unimaginable a quarter-century ago. Many of those people there were too young to remember him being released from prison in 1990, or even his presidency, which ended in June 1999. Yet they realized his import.

Someone on the news compared Madiba -the clan name by which he was known – with George Washington, and I think that is apt. He was the father of an integrated South Africa, and he knew when to retire. Yet, it was those last 14 years, when he became an icon, that burnished our memory of him.

There was a white female reporter, I think on CBS, who was asked how the country was coping, and she admitted that, as a South African, she too was feeling a tremendous loss as well.

I loved the little dance he did when he was happy.

He became an attorney to fight injustice; see, not ALL lawyers are so bad.

Cousins

That “once removed” stuff involves people of different generation. Donald and Robert, my mother’s cousins, are my first cousins once removed, for instance.

As I have noted, my parents were both only children, so my sisters and I had no direct aunts or uncles, and no first cousins. But we do have cousins. And a whole lot of them were under one roof on Thanksgiving night.

When people try to describe cousins, they tend to talk about the siblings, but I find it easier to understand a generation earlier.

DIRECT ANCESTORS
Edward Yates and Lillian Archer, married in the 1880s

THEIR CHILDREN
They had five children, one of whom did in infancy. For this purpose, I’ll mention only two:
Gertrude Yates married Clarence Williams.
Ernie Yates married Charlotte Berman

THE FIRST COUSINS
Gertrude had one daughter, Trudy Williams
Ernie had four children, Raymond, Frances, Donald, and Robert
As Edward and Lillian’s grandchildren, Trudy is first cousins with Ernie’s four. She’s a decade to the day older than Raymond, but they are the closest thing to siblings she had.

THE SECOND COUSINS
Trudy married Les Green and had three children, Roger, Leslie, and Marcia.
Frances married Jimmy Beal and had two daughters, Anne and Lisa. (Donald and Robert also had kids.)
As Edward and Lillian’s great-grandchildren, the Green kids are second cousins to the Beal girls. The Greens are also about ten years older than the Beals but considered them their closest relatives outside their nuclear family.

THE THIRD COUSINS
Roger married Carol and had one daughter, Lydia.
Leslie married Eric and had one daughter, Rebecca, who married Rico.
(Marcia also has a daughter, Alexandria.)
Anne married Brahm and had three daughters.
As Les and Trudy’s grandchildren, Lydia and Rebecca are first cousins, though 25 years apart.
As Edward and Lillian’s great-great-grandchildren, Anne’s daughters are third cousins with both Rebecca and Lydia.

That “once removed” stuff involves people of different generations. Donald and Robert, my mother’s first cousins, are my first cousins once removed, for instance.

And all of the people noted in italics were at Anne’s house outside New York City for Thanksgiving dinner last month, three generations of descendants of Lillian and Edward, along with a couple of spouses, not to mention some friends as well. Someone at the table, just before the meal, said that we individually may think of our immediate families as small – I know I do – but we really have a large family when we look at things differently.

NO-vember

I had an already scheduled appointment with my allergist, who said I likely had bronchitis.

Folks are often wondering where the time goes. I know where November went; I felt lousy for most of it. And the Daughter did too.

I remember reading that you can’t get sick merely by getting one’s feet wet. But it was a rainy Halloween night when I was wearing my sneakers and landed in a deep puddle. The very next day, I sat at my desk in the afternoon and felt so crummy I thought I was hallucinating.

Did nothing that weekend; didn’t go to church, couldn’t even read e-mail, and stayed home from work on Monday. But never really felt great after that.

I had an already scheduled appointment with my allergist a week and a half later, who said I likely had bronchitis. The breathing apparatus I got helped somewhat.

I missed three Thursday choir rehearsals in a row because I could not sing; I tried it out. Feeling about 90% now.

Meanwhile, the Daughter had various nasal/throat stuff, which had her coughing in the middle of the night, less so in the daytime. But she was tired, had a persistent sore throat. Additionally, she was stressing about math at school. I missed at least three days of work tending to her, and I unintentionally blew off meeting our intern candidate at work, who I had agreed to talk with, twice.

I felt behind all month. Planning a trip to NYC for Thanksgiving, I was rushing to find a hotel at the last minute; everything was hurried. My wife suggested I make a list; a list of all the undone items would have just made it too real.

Thanksgiving itself was great, though. More on that if/when I get a chance.

December will, ideally, be better. All I have to do is ALL OF MY CHRISTMAS SHOPPING. And special church music, starting this Friday.

Because I tend to work ahead, you may not have noticed the lack of blogging. Expect some shorter posts at the end of the month.

U is for University at Albany

Since I graduated, the university has become even larger.

The University at Albany, my library school alma mater, has undergone tremendous changes in its nearly 170 years. It started as a Normal School. It became a charter member of the State University of New York (SUNY) when the system began in 1948, and the school expanded its mission beyond teacher education to a broader liberal arts university in the 1960s.

The campus on the border of the city of Albany proper has an ever-expanding uptown facility, built, I’ve discovered, on the former site of the Albany Country Club. When I went to graduate school in the School of Public Administration back in 1979, my classes were all in the uptown campus, a large and sprawling locale with bad signage. That campus was a location for the 1981 movie Rollover, a truly terrible film with Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda, because of its “resemblance to modern Middle Eastern architecture.”

When I went to library school in 1990, however, I attended the older, and the more civilized, downtown campus, which was right-sized for me with only a half dozen academic buildings. I did have to trek occasionally uptown, but buses shuttle between the two campuses regularly.

Since I graduated, the university has become even larger, with more buildings on the uptown campus. An east campus, in neighboring Rensselaer County, was developed by purchasing a former pharmaceutical company complex, which focuses on biotechnology. Possibly most notably, there is the ironically massive College of Nanotechnology, which has literally altered the landscape of Washington Avenue Extension. Recently, the nanotech has been spun off into its own school, despite the opposition of former UAlbany president Karen Hitchcock, whose opinion on this issue I share.

Some of the many famous alumni of the university have included Harvey Milk (1951), the openly gay former San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated in 1978; authors Joseph E. Persico (1952), biographer of Edward R. Murrow, Nelson Rockefeller, William Casey; and Gregory Maguire (1976), author of Wicked; and actors Edward Burns, Harold Gould (1947), Steve Guttenberg, and D. B. Woodside (1991).


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

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