Cooperators and defectors

Today in Harvard Square I watched a pretty young woman run the usual gauntlet of charity fundraisers with clipboards lining the sidewalk. One engaged her, but she made her way down the sidewalk apologizing.

Moments later, a second fundraiser veered toward her, pen in hand. "Hi! Do you have a minute to be a superhero today?"
She smiled nervously. "Sorry, I've got to catch a bus!"
I thought he would give up, but he followed her, asking, "Wait, how old are you?"
"I'm 24," she said, striding faster. "Sorry, I've really got to go."

I wanted to shout after her, You don't owe that guy anything. Sharing a sidewalk with him does not mean you have to engage in his sales pitch, and it certainly doesn't mean you have to tell him your age.

The thing is, I love the idea of friendlier cities. Boston is not a warm and welcoming place, and I try to change that. I ask lost-looking people if they need directions. I hold doors for people. A few days ago when a woman on the street told me, "That's a great hat!" it made my day.

But there are interactions that take instead of giving. The men who follow you when you're not inviting further contact, who ask you personal questions - I have to remind myself that I don't have to talk to them. I don't owe them conversation or smiles or spare change. Sometimes they get angry at my silence, but that's further reason to not interact with them.

In game theory, the classic prisoner's dilemma sets up incentives so that both participants are better off if they cooperate, but if one person cooperates and the other defects, the defector wins big and the cooperator loses big.

In Ecuador, I was walking down a street in a small town. As I approached an auto shop I saw the mechanic leaning against the garage, and at first I decided to do the distant-stare method of not interacting with strange men. Then I reproached myself: after all, it was a small and friendly town where I'd seen neighbors greet each other cordially. When I reached critical proximity, I gave him a nod and a "Buenos tardes" at exactly the same moment as he wolf-whistled. I had just cooperated with a defector.

I hope he was as embarrassed as I was, but I doubt it.

Parent rights at what cost?

Recently, I've read two memoirs by adults who wished they had been taken away from their parents. One was Jeanette Wall's The Glass Castle, and I'm currently reading Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress.

Walls describes a childhood with two charming intellectual parents who just didn't prioritize things like groceries or heating fuel. At one point the child welfare people came to investigate, but Walls was able to head them off, terrified that she will be separated not from from her parents, but from her siblings.

Scholinski spent much of her adolescence in psychiatric hospitals for oppositional defiant disorder, which both she and the hospitals chalked up to her chaotic and affectionless family life. She describes her feelings upon being hospitalized:

"I didn't let on but part of me kind of wanted to go. Any place had to feel safer than home. Over the summer my father had sat on me, his knees on my shoulders, and poked me in the chest while I tried furiously to kick him, to get him off so I could breathe . . . I guess if I felt anything riding up the elevator to the third floor if Michael Reese, it was a stab of hope."

I realize these are extreme cases, but I wonder how many such cases are out there.

The social workers and judges who make these decision have two responsibilities. First, they must protect the health and safety of the child. Second, they must try to keep families intact. Those things don't always combine well.

I've heard parents say their children were taken away for no good reason. (Of course, they're free to say they weren't abusing or neglecting their kids, and if the Department of Children and Families has evidence to the contrary, they're not allowed to release it to the public.) And yes, I know there have been abuses of the system, especially against Native American families. Probably there still are incompetent or biased social workers taking kids away from families who could have cared for them if they had been properly referred for housing assistance, food stamps, etc. And yes, there is a shortage of those resources that may make the difference between being able to care for your kids and not.

But I've also heard social workers say they think the system is too permissive, that birth families are sometimes given too many chances, that children are moved from foster care back to the home too many times before parental rights are terminated. By the time the kids have spent a few years bouncing between homes, they're too old to be easily adoptable and have endured too many disrupted attachments.

Parents have a legal right to their children, unless they really screw up. Children need families, and in most cases their original parents are the best people to raise them. But in the cases where that's not true, I'm not so keen on protecting parental rights at the expense of the children.

I wonder what an outcome-based rather than rights-based approach to this would look like.

Children seldom say they want to be separated from their parents at the time, because children cling to the only supports they know. But once they're grown? I'd love to see a study that asks adults:

Did your parents lose custody of you?
1) No, and it was the right decision
2) No, but I wish they had
3) Yes, and it was the right decision
4) Yes, but I wish they hadn't

I don't know what results we would get, but it would be a good tool for knowing if our policy is tipping too much in one direction or another.

Bossy

Yesterday I was at the art museum and heard the strident voice of an old woman as she teetered up to a guard. "Now, you have some kind of chapel, don't you? Where is that?" she asked. She didn't add "young man," but she might have. He directed her to the chapel.

There's a certain air I notice in older women from privileged backgrounds. They command others without any seeming doubt in their minds about whether they will be obeyed. Of course, you see this attitude in men too, but I expect to see it in men. I think about all the people who didn't grow up with that sense of entitlement - the poor, the poorly educated, the disenfranchised. The people who have usually been bossed, not bossy. It makes me sad for the people who couldn't assume anyone would listen to them.

But I also love these old women. I love that they're not worried about charming anybody or asking permission. They simply expect to get their way. I love that they grew up in a pre-Second-Wave world and came out with dignity intact. A lot of them probably went to women's colleges, which I think are excellent for fostering that kind of confidence.

I was reminded of my great-grandmother, who informed her minister that the church would not be cutting down that oak in front, no matter how many limbs it had lost, because she had always taken her children under that tree to spank them when they were bad in church, just as her mother had spanked her under that tree. And the minister was wise enough to wait until after her death to have the oak removed.

Fortunately, I don't think it's a zero-sum game. You can be assertive without stepping on other people. I hope all our girls will grow into self-assured old women.

The three graces

Today I went to the Lowell Folk Festival.  At many of the performances, people got up to dance. A lot of little kids did the jumping-around thing that kids do, which was fun to watch. But in front at the stage with the Irish band, there were three girls who had something special.



None of them looked trained, but they were exceptionally graceful. They had that freedom of movement that comes when you have an impression of what trained dancers look like, but you've never had actual steps drilled into you.

My first instinct was to go over to their parents and say, "They've got talent!  Maybe they'll want to study Irish dance or ballet!"



But part of me quailed at the idea of formalizing their leaps and twirls.  I thought of long hours at the studio, auditions, stage fright, eating disorders, bleeding feet.

I watched, in love with their beauty.  They were so free, so confident in their own bodies.  Their grace was uninhibited by any fear of looking foolish.  How can we, as adults, recapture that?



I got up and joined them.  Some other women with bad tans and obvious Irish dance training appeared.  Soon there were lots of us, skidding on the dance floor that was slippery from rain.  We sprang and twirled, slipping, laughing, falling down.



As the band was packing up, I approached two of the girls.  "I had so much fun watching you dance," I told them. "Keep having fun."

Video of these dancers and more from the festival.

Two perfect summer foods

Fresh Pea Soup
Summer soups should not be too cooked. This one isn't.

Chop up an onion and sauté it in butter. Add some broth and some frozen peas. When the peas are thawed, purée it all. You can let it simmer a bit, but it really just needs to be heated through, not cooked. Salt and pepper.

I like it with sour cream, but it doesn't really need it.



Pavlovas
Light and airy, named for the ballet dancer. This is the summer birthday dessert of choice in my family.

Make meringue (I used this recipe). Shape it into nests and bake it. You can make one big Pavlova that looks more like a cake, but they kind of shatter when you cut them, so a big one is harder to serve.



Fill the nests with whipped cream and fruit.

These have no flour, so you can feed them to gluten-free people. They would also be a more interesting Passover dessert than plain meringues.



Thanks to Moira Flanagan for feeding me my first Pavlova.

People like us

Today a relative told us about the double jogging stroller another mom had given her. It has built-in iPod speakers. We laughed at the extravagance. But in her wealthy exurb neighborhood, this is the kind of thing lots of people own.

It made me think about who we know. I thought about B. Morrison's memoir Innocent, which describes her years as a welfare mother in a poorer neighborhood of Massachusetts. She writes of how disheartening it was to know only other people without resources, people struggling to improve their lives, people who had given up the struggle.

We tend to know people like ourselves. People with double jogging strollers with iPod speakers know other such people, and welfare mothers know other welfare mothers. When we help only our peers, rich people stay rich and poor ones stay poor.