Sociological moment

Recently Jeff and I went to my cousin's very posh wedding on Cape Cod. At the rehearsal dinner, the main course was whole lobsters, antennae and all. Most of us didn't have a clue how to get at the food inside the shell. The bride stood up to demonstrate, holding her lobster tail aloft.

"You grab it like this - and you crack it like this - and then you pull the meat out."

So we poor bumpkins were educated in the haute cuisine of Cape Cod. But of course, lobster is only posh food because we think it is. If we went to a wedding in some other culture and saw the bride cracking crustaceans open with her bare hands, we'd think they were barbarians!

Two reactions

Last week I finished up work at Oxfam to start social work school. I met with HR to wrap things up, including the contributions they made to my 401(k). When I was first hired, I explained to an incredulous HR worker that I didn't want to take the money, but she said that was impossible. (I also tried refusing a salary, but that was even more impossible.) So when I met with HR last week, I mentioned how frustrating it was that I was forced to take money that I would rather Oxfam keep. The woman looked at me cooly and said, "Oh. Are you independently wealthy?"

It's the thing I think my coworkers have been wondering all along. They all have access to the database records stating that Jeff and I gave Oxfam about $40,000 last year, more than my annual salary. Two people living on less than one salary? Surely we had some advantage they didn't?

Well, other than having a husband who majored in computer science, no. I sputtered, "We're normal people with normal salaries. We just think it's really important to help people." I'm so frustrated when people believe giving a lot of your income is something only other people - rich people - can do.

So that was the nonprofit. Meanwhile, Jeff had gotten a job offer and was trying to negotiate a higher salary at the technology company where he works. The vice president of his department finally asked, "Why is the pay raise so important to you?" Jeff explained that we want to give as much money as we can. In the end he not only got the raise, but help from the vice president in getting it in forms that made sense (cash now rather than retirement savings which we can't give away for decades). The vice president also said he would consider giving more himself.

So there you have it. The worker at the relief and development nonprofit assumes people give away money only if they have a huge surplus. The worker at the technology company questions the need for more money and totally accepts the idea that you wouldn't want to hoard everything for yourself. Go figure.

The latest news

What's the role of gossip? Fun? Destructive? A way for society to control people, for good or ill?

I recently spent a week at the folk dance camp for grownups where Jeff and I used to work. Jeff couldn't go, so I went alone. Now I'm back, after spending a week with our friends, and I wonder how much news to share.

It's a small community with tons of shifting relationships. Some of the news is quite benign, I think - who sat out late on the dock with whom, etc. But I wonder if I'm doing wrong to relay stories about people. Jewish law gets quite detailed about "evil speech" or lashon hara - it's forbidden to speak ill of other people except in very specific circumstances (e.g. if someone's going into a business deal with a person you know is a fraud.) But I've never seen a small community where everyone minds their own business.

I wonder how gossip interacts with marriage. A major reason I wanted to get married is that I wanted a structure supporting the relationship. I believe my life will be better in the long term if I stay with Jeff, even if there are periods when it's not fun. That's why I want society holding me to my promise. We could have just vowed fidelity to each other privately, but it further solidifies the vow when you say it in front of your family and friends and you wear a ring on your hand that means you're off limits to other people. Knowing that other people expect me to keep my promise makes it easier to keep.

So what happens when you watch someone who was apparently married two months ago, but who comes to camp minus his wedding ring and spends the week cuddling with someone who's not his wife? In a way, it's their own business, and I don't know the whole story. Maybe his wife left him, or they're in an open relationship and his ring just happened to fall down a drain.

But marriage is not just your business. If you want a relationship to dissolve easily and with no fuss, marriage is not your best option. You know people will whisper if you're visibly slipping, and shame is a powerful motivator. When you make your vow public, don't you invite your community to help you keep it?

Normal

People love to believe there's something edgy about raising your own food, cutting your own hair, baking bread, etc. Just insert "DIY" in front of anything your grandma did, and it's suddenly hip. Or maybe it's "radical homemaking" or "urban homesteading".

We've gone full cycle. Take line-drying clothes. Seventy years ago, it's what everyone did. But once people could buy dryers, many of them were thrilled that they didn't have to use a clothesline anymore. (At least in the US, where energy prices are cheap. In Europe, it's a different story.) Line-drying was something most people avoided if they could. But now line-drying is not just cheap, it's "green". Which it always was - there just wasn't always a word for it. Fifty years ago, nobody was making documentaries about clotheslines.

As with any cultural change, this isn't happening everywhere all at once. There are plenty of people who like their dryers, wonder bread, and iceberg lettuce very much. Why should they do everything themselves when they don't have to? My mother is one of these people. She learned all the Depression-era skills from her mother - she knows how to bake, can, garden, cut hair, etc. But she doesn't want to, and she can afford not to.

This week my friend Elisangela came to my apartment for the first time. She moved here from Brazil ten years ago, and I was a little afraid of what she would think. Mostly of the fact that I'm keeping livestock in my kitchen. I can imagine her wondering, "Why would you do this when you can buy jumbo eggs for 99 cents a dozen?"

When Elisangela walked in, she made a beeline for the quail pen. "They're chickens?" she asked. "Quail," I said. "My grandmother raised quail," she said. "She would never kill them because they made a special call when a stranger was coming near the house. They know."

And that was that. To her this wasn't urban homesteading or DIY poultry farming. It was just that thing her grandmother did back in the village. I felt totally, blessedly normal.

The secret garden

Remember this? It's the lot behind the post office that I adopted last year.



This is the garden now:






It's not Eden, but it's nicer than it was.

Magic

Yesterday I woke to hear the sound I had been waiting for. It sounded like someone shutting a tiny, squeaky door hinge. I knew it could only mean one thing: my quail had hatched.

For years I've wanted to keep poultry. I corresponded with the Medford animal control guy to no avail. I dreamed of the day we could move to somewhere with a yard to keep chickens in. And last month I learned a critical fact: you can keep quail indoors. They're small and quiet, and they're prolific layers.

So I ordered eighteen eggs - you really can get anything on the internet. Jeff built me an incubator, and for seventeen days I anxiously monitored the temperature and turned the eggs. I read up on quail maladies like spraddle-leg and pasty-butt (assuring Jeff that neither were contagious to humans).

I didn't entirely believe it was going to work. For one thing, our homemade incubator varied wildly in temperature. Maybe the eggs had already been baked into oblivion during shipping. Maybe the humidity was wrong, or the temperature had spiked too high. Anyway, it seemed improbable that these little rock-looking things were going to turn into animals that would breathe and run around.

That's why it was so magical at 4 am when I heard the first peeps. It was like Santa Claus had come. I knelt at the incubator and saw the four damp babies inside the incubator. They looked exhausted. Sometimes they'd get up and stagger around the incubator, but mostly they flopped down in awkward positions - on top of each other, on top of the unhatched eggs. I considered what they'd just been through: in order to be born, each chick had to break through a calcium wall. With its face. And then it was able to get up and begin walking on its siblings.

If you've never hung out with a newborn creature, I recommend it. Any way you look at it, new life is amazing. A hen in Indiana laid an egg that would go through the mail to me, develop with the aid of a lightbulb but without food or water, and three weeks later become another quail. I knew the facts, but seeing it happen is a completely different experience. Also, baby birds and mammals are designed to be attractive. Their survival depends on adults wanting to take care of them, so being cute helps them survive.



For reference, that's a juice bottle lid. The chicks are about two inches long.