With all the advances in our country towards full and equal partnership between women and men, I look around me and see that we still seem to be obsessed by gender. Like race, we have generally agreed as a society that gender should have no institutionally sanctioned role in education, politics and work (though most would admit that with both race and gender we still have a ways to go). So while we are striving to remove gender as a defining factor in how we interact with each other in society, we still seem to caught up in promoting, even fetishizing, differences between women and men, at the expense of the full flowering of the human potential in each of us.

As a parent who has watched his two kids, one male and one female, grow up among their peers, I have witnessed much of that adult obsession with gender focused on children, and youth culture. Sure… part of a kid’s developmental process is to gender identify. But from my experience as a kid, and later experience watching other kids, most of that developmental process has nothing to do with whether you are a boy or a girl. Being “all boy” or “daddy’s girl” are adult inventions, romanticizing to point of fetishizing gender identification. The reality seems to be that most kids quickly and easily gender identify and don’t need all these vicarious expectations and other baggage heaped upon them. (more…)

In Islam, according to Wikipedia, “The primary characteristic of the Devil, besides hubris, is that he has no power other than the power to cast evil suggestions into the heart of men and women.” The Islamic Devil is a trickster who uses smoke and mirrors to confuse you as to what is really important. Though I do not believe in deities, good or evil, I think this version of the Devil is a useful metaphor and archetype, certainly more right on than the Christian version, which is profoundly malevolent and has the power to control souls, even against their will, if they are not determined and skilled in their resistance.

As I plunge into this stream of thought and attempt to capture some of it in this written piece I have to acknowledge all the complexities, connotations and resulting imprecision of language, particularly written language in the case of this piece, that revolves around words that might mean one thing when we write (actually in my case type) them with an initial capital rather than lower-case letter. But that said, the complexities, connotations and imprecision reflect the richness of our common experience and our ongoing struggle to fully grapple with it. (more…)

In 1977 and 1978, as a young adult now living on my own in my hometown of Ann Arbor (my mom and dad had remarried each other and she had moved down to Ohio to live with him), I was somehow able to live almost completely in the moment, aided by the transcending joy I found walking from place to place in town. After twenty plus years of navigating these streets on foot, by bicycle or by car, I knew them so well I could head out towards my destination of the moment, let my mind totally drift with any thought so at times I barely knew exactly where I was but still managed to get where I was going, experiencing the joys of all four full seasons and continuing my exploration of the magical side to life. (more…)

Reading Ray Bradbury’s book paved the way for my own encounter with, and embrace of, the magical side of life, while still not believing in god. I think I read the book over forty years ago in junior high English class, and I can hardly recall any of the details of the story, but no book I’ve read has had more impact on my life. It’s one of those cases where you encounter an idea that does not seem to impact you immediately, but seeds a thought in your mind that maybe comes to fruition at some later time, when that idea addresses a new need.

I think as a child I lived in a world of constant magic, creativity and imagination, so acknowledging a magical side of life was not an issue… there was just life and it was what it was… and for me that included being magical. Now looking back, I acknowledge the context of circumstances, the privilege of being a white male growing up in a progressive, middle-class community in America. I also acknowledge the proactive effort of my parents to raise me “outside the box” and dedicate time and money (given their modest means) to create an enriched environment for me to bloom within and explore life’s enchantment. (more…)

In 1965, when I was ten and my brother seven, our mom and dad got divorced, our mom getting custody of my brother and I, and my dad allowed the standard visitations of the non-custodial parent. Our mom continued to make us meals (particularly lunch and dinner, we fixed our own cold cereal for breakfast) for a couple more years, but after that she went through a difficult period of depression and health issues and I recall, more and more, that I had to make my own meals.

Being 1965, this is way before the day of such specialty stores as “Trader Joe’s” that offer a wide variety of previously prepared and packaged meals for one or two. Basically we had whatever was available at a standard grocery store of the day, in our case either the locally owned “Food & Drug” or the bigger chain “A & P”. So during this very difficult period for her, when she spent much of the time in her bedroom, in her forays to the store she started bringing home a lot of these prepared foods, rather than the uncooked chicken, pork chops, or potatoes that used to be featured in her grocery list. (more…)

For the first three years after our mom and dad divorced our dad continued to live in Ann Arbor. Though he was no longer in the house he made the effort to be very much a part of our lives, taking us to the Food & Drug lunch counter for school day lunches and having us spend the classic divorce two weekends a month with him. He was not just going through the motions of the non-custodial parent, he really enjoyed having us with him and it gave him and he always thought up fun things for us to do together.

His first place was on Henry Street, just off State Street a mile south of the University of Michigan campus and a half mile east of the stadium. He lived with two UofM graduate students in a three bedroom apartment. Being near the stadium and basketball arena and the whole University athletic complex there were plenty of practice fields close by where we could play baseball, football or basketball together. (more…)

As I have said elsewhere, my dad instilled in me that at its best, “life is an adventure”. No where is this paradigm more in play than when you are traveling, when you are likely to be…

1. Having to make decisions about what is most important to bring and not to bring
2. Seeing things you have not seen before
3. Sleeping in strange new places
4. Meeting new people
5. Making more decisions than you normally would

With the wrong mindset, travel can be cast as an arduous logistical chore, long dull hours strapped into a seat, or the discomfort of unfamiliar food, people or circumstances. But when travelling is cast in the light of adventure, I think it is a particularly great experience for kids. If life is a journey, then a trip to somewhere else is a microcosm of life’s journey, a metaphorical education on how to lead one’s life. (more…)

At about age eight, when I had pretty much mastered riding my bicycle, my mom and dad let me go out on my own on that bicycle, as long as I headed home when the street lights came on, which was either in the late afternoon or the early evening depending on what time of year it was. My parents judged the town to be pretty safe, and me to be a smart, verbal kid who knew his way around this larger neighborhood and was basically cautious enough to not do anything foolish.

With downtown Ann Arbor a little more than a mile away, there were a lot of places within easy bicycle distance of my house. Bach school (my elementary school, pronounced ‘bah’), the public library and my favorite toy, hobby and dime stores and most of my friends were all within a couple miles of our house on Prescott Street. They all were no more than a ten to fifteen minute bike ride for a kid like me. The routes took me mainly down residential streets lined with big maple trees. (more…)

At age four, before I went to regular school, my parents sent me to “Play School”, which may sound like an oxymoron to some. Actually the place was called “The Children’s Play School”, and it was founded (in 1935) and run by Margaret Grace Dow Towsley, a feminist, a University of Michigan graduate, and woman of wealth who was deeply committed to issues of child development. She was a founding member of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. In the 1940s she led the effort to gender-integrate the Ann Arbor chapter of the YMCA, one of only two chapters in the country to accept males and females at the time. In the 1950s she served two terms on the Ann Arbor City Council. In founding her “Play School”, Towsley was acting on her belief that play was critical to child development, self-confidence and a sense of worth.

Towsley may well have been inspired by Maria Montessori, the famous Italian scientist, feminist and humanistic educator, who said that, “Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.” Montessori demonstrated in her schools (and packaged in her “method” that is used today in thousands of schools around the world) that children learn best in an enriched child-centered environment where they can explore, touch and learn at their own direction. This should be an environment without tests or grades, which retard learning and self-esteem by introducing a negative and debilitating competition. (more…)

Our son Eric turned 23 in January and is no longer covered under my partner Sally’s family health insurance, which continues to cover her, our 20-year-old daughter Emma and me. Eric is still wrapped up in that classic, compelling, entrepreneurial American struggle to make a small business successful, now 18 months into that effort with the outcome still in doubt due in large part to launching the business just half a year before our current severe recession took full hold. As is often the case when one launches a business, Eric is taking little or no money out of it to pay himself, and is therefore living on a shoestring, which now includes living without any sort of health care coverage. (more…)