let the games begin

I just registered for a competition.  The odds are slim. I have no Chosen People in my family tree.  The last competition I entered was half a decade ago. There are four weeks before the deadline.

Good people of the competition, I throw my entry fee into your seed money pot.

resolutions

From “It Seems To Me” by Eleanor Roosevelt

On education:

If education hasn’t given you enough understanding so that you can get on with people around you and appreciate their quality and perhaps help them through your opportunities to more opportunities of their own, so that their interests may coincide with yours, then I am afraid your education has done you more harm than good.

Education is not entirely a question of what you learn in school or college. It is largely a question of the opportunities you have to talk with intelligent people and to become acquainted with as many facets of life as possible.

On marriage:

No one loves two people in exactly the same way, but one may love two people equally and yet differently. And if you love one person very much you will love another person perhaps even more because you have learned how to love and what love can mean.

On self-help:

But I learned many years ago that worry which did not lead to being able to do something was useless. The best way to alleviate worry is to do all you can.

On adversity:

As children grow older, they often realize themselves that their home had nothing to do with the unhappiness that may come to them. Perhaps you brought them unhappiness by the effort to prepare them for life. All parents, I think, feel that they haven’t always been wise and that they are in some way responsible if their children suffer later on because of traits of character which might have been obliterated while they were young. The only way I think that parents can meet this is to accept the fact that no human being is all-wise; no human being always lives up to the best that he is capable of, all the time. Failures come to all people. It is sad if they affect those whom we love, but all we can do is to be very humble and, as we gain wisdom, try to help all those who suffer and show our children where we made our mistakes.

On history:

Christ, Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha and Plato. Any list of this kind is of necessity very poor, because I have not defined “greatness”. Greatness lies in many different fields, but these are the men who spiritually have led us in the past and probably shaped much of the thinking of the world.

She thinks the five greatest American presidents are:

Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and my own husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What a special woman.

Beauty Business

When we first moved in, Mom wanted to hang a poster-sized picture of herself in the livingroom. We eventually persuaded her to put it in her bedroom, where it wouldn’t be the first picture guests saw when they walked through the front entrance. Some people have portraits of their forefathers hanging on the walls. The Buddhists keep pictures of their ancestors for yearly symbolic offerings of paper money and food. We have a picture of our maternal grandma, who passed away alittle more than ten years ago. The picture was taken the first and last time my brothers and I ever met Grandma.

Mom’s picture was taken in a professional, mostly women-run, studio during the summer we visited her hometown. Almost all the members, from the make-up artists, the lighting assistants, to the wardrobe people fluttered around Mom, murmuring and complimenting the shape of her face and the lids of her eyes. Then there was the photographer’s intense focus, shot after shot. I imagine that’s the power that lies behind Annie Leibovitz’s portraits. Unlike a caricaturist who exaggerates salient features for public ridicule, Leibovitz uses her techniques to reveal the essence of someone: Whoopi’s overturned frog pose in a tub full of milk, Meryl Streep’s elastic face covered in cold cream, Christy Turlington in a venetian red yoga suit, the straps sliding off her smooth shoulders. No one else would fit in those poses. There is discomfort, for example, in seeing minor celebrities posing as Marilyn Monroe. Each photograph is an illuminating profile. My mom glowed under the studio’s attentions.

We tease Mom about the portrait from time to time. I don’t think she believes she’s particularly beautiful in that photograph, despite all the fawning. She has more flattering pictures taken at earlier points in her life. There is a photo of her in the living room of  her childhood home. In that picture, she looks like a young Cleopatra, dark and regal, eyes and lips deeply stained. There are only hints of that young woman in the picture of the older woman. Mom has the same cheekbones and shape of eyes, but her features are much softer now and lived-in. The colors have faded. The manner is understanding. Though she appreciates strangers’ compliments from time to time, she would, in all practicality, prefer the people buttering her up to be her own children. She’d tremble with joy if we continually gushed over her cooking and her constant reminders. Simply, the photograph is a memento from the summer we visited our motherland. The family she grew up with met the family she raised, which at that time was a 19-year endeavor.