Coming Up For Air

When the woman who introduced you to Green Eggs and Ham asks if you ever laugh, that's a pointed question. Perhaps sharpened by the technologically efficient brevity of a text inquiry, that was the question with which my mom confronted me yesterday. Like Hermione in the Harry Potter series, my recourse when confronting anything is to go to the library.  That's what she and I always do. I've found it safe to filter the outside world through the C. S. Lewis section of my mental book reserve, and he offered me a retreat from the question at hand. In Mere Christianity , he cautioned against evaluating people against some scale for outward happiness that we imagine to be objective. People are different, he says. People's experiences are different. The woman of whom we wonder, "Does she ever laugh?" might have become a lot more free at expressing joy over the last year. She may, in fact, more deliberately focus on whatever is good, whatever is lovely,...

I didn't realize a blue shirt could mean so much. This is the status symbol employees of the fast food chain receive when they are promoted and are now distinct from the red shirts around them. For the son of a friend of mine who hasn't found particular validation as a student or athlete, the blue shirt was especially gratifying. His dad says the accompanying raise didn't matter nearly as much as the blue shirt others could see. For the adolescent venturing out into the working world much like where he will find himself for the next few decades, the harbinger of the blue shirt is altogether good. Too much of a good thing, or too much worth assigned to a good thing, is not. With much more work behind us than my friend's commendable son, how many of us are still looking for the blue shirt, or the next blue shirt, to designate us for separate praise from our working peers? Is the blue shirt, or its more expensive equivalent, an accompanying RESULT of work done heartily ...

“Comparisons are odious.” Here, humorist Oscar Wilde is uncharacteristically blunt. I didn’t expect to be prodded by him, nor that his warning be delivered and confirmed in a bit of light reading on the second 25 years of the Star Trek phenomenon. By such diverse fuel, though, are the warp engines of my transformation engaged. As Star Trek: The Next Generation has unexpectedly provided the eerily timeless décor of my mental furniture, rearranging its assumptions is thought-provoking. What if James Avery who later played Uncle Phil on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air robustly filled the role of Geordie in place of the tentative, maturing grace that LeVar Burton brought to the role? It could have happened. What if Wesley, the show’s much-maligned boy prodigy, was a girl named Leslie? It could have happened. What if producers insisted on   my initial, adolescent reaction that Patrick Stewart was too old to take the captain’s chair from James T. Kirk?  Patrick Stewart, who w...

I could hear her poise across a large, family-style restaurant table and through the surrounding din. Her composure made a particular impression projected from a 14-year-old kid. Madison, not her real name, held forth on the differences between her structured biological family and the freewheeling style of her best friend's family surrounding her now. "How can you not have a bedtime?! How can you be allowed to use your devices whenever you want, even take them to bed?!"  I've come to appreciate the less structured family that she was comparing her to own more and more as I've spent time with them. Even so, it was hard to argue with the results Madison presented as Exhibit A in favor of more strict, more culturally Christian parenting. Then she continued with the clarity a few minutes' hearing taught me to expect. This is a direct quote, not an abridged summary sharpened to make a point: "All my parents' rules have taught me is how to be a really good...

I love a good behind-the-scenes story, and the first volume of The 50 Year Mission was just that for a Star Trek fan. In it, the reader got to see the convergence of actor and character as Leonard Nimoy developed Spock's famous, "Live long and prosper" Vulcan greeting directly from Nimoy's heritage in Judaism. Nimoy defended Spock from caricature and settled into identification with the iconic creation with his famously evolving pair of autobiographies, from I Am Not Spock to I am Spock . As much as actor and character merged, the book relates that Nimoy once broke down emotionally on set during a relatively ordinary writer's meeting. Even for one who embodied Spock's logic so professionally and so convincingly, human emotion had to go somewhere. The members of the 4077 on M*A*S*H understood this as well. Veteran Army nurse Margaret Houlihan remains coolly professional while reconstructing boys mangled by combat. Even her periodic acerbic bluster seems und...