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To Raze A Village

The Modernization Of A Thousand-Year-Old Culture

Ladakh is a high-altitude desert on the Tibetan Plateau in northernmost India. To all outward appearances, it is a wild and inhospitable place. In summer the land is parched and dry; in winter it is frozen solid by fierce, unrelenting cold.

Reading Between The Lines

How Compulsory Schooling Has Failed Us

Modern schooling is a kind of religion. Its goal is most certainly not to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and thinking, although sometimes learning happens because teachers — and even administrators — don’t realize the kind of enterprise in which they are engaged. But this does not happen too often.

Our Days

After my father died in 1973, my grandmother put newspaper over all the first-floor windows at night. Sometimes I wonder if she was more afraid of looking out than of someone looking in. She’d wait until after the six o’clock news to do the chore.

Mumsie

She loathed weakness for the simple reason that it prevented one from seizing life’s opportunities. In her case, opportunity consisted of being born with a hundred thousand megawatts of pure drive and determination, and a father who pegged her early along as one of the Divine: a daddy who let her drive a car when she was twelve; a daddy who gave her a twenty-two-room mansion on Riverside Avenue for a wedding present; a daddy who adored her beyond all reason.

This Thing About Goodness

“I’m sorry,” I say, finally, and she nods. Neither of us cries. My own two aborted pregnancies come to mind. It was never the right time to bring a child into this world; it was too much responsibility. But Linda has done it, and done it badly, done the unforgivable — damaged her own child. How could you? I think. But then, what mother doesn’t? The only other choices are do it perfectly, or don’t do it at all. And how can you make any choice when you’re not in control of your own life? How can you deal with this awesome female power to create new life among the garbage and broken glass of old mistakes?

Lion

For fifteen years I hadn’t seen a mountain lion, and then I’d dreamed of a big cat and seen one within a six-week period. The synchronicity brought my inner and outer worlds together with such force it left me tingling for hours. All day long, I turned over and over in my mind the image of the cat, the memory of my dream, and the resonance between the two. I felt certain that this mountain lion had come to make real the image in the dream, to bring the symbol to life.

Huckleberry Summer

All day long we would pick, seeing places we would never have seen had our mission not drawn us out of our daily routines. We filled cottage-cheese containers and old ice-cream buckets and coffee cans, and we poured them into the bigger containers in the back of the red 1965 Volkswagen that we’d all crammed into for the trip. We drank water straight from cold streams. We ate berries by the handful. We studied squirrels and chipmunks. We ran across deer.

Going For The Gold

I had to go to India to get my gold. By “my gold” I mean only a few pieces of jewelry — about as much as I might wear to a big party. I had bought it for a song in Arabia twenty-five years ago. Was it worth the price of a trip to India? I had no idea.

On Regret

Of all the things Greenfeld said, the word that resonates most when I ponder the question of regret is kittenness. “It’s hard when they lose their kittenness,” he said.

My New Car

After lunch, R. asked me to give him a ride. We walked across the street to my car. When he saw my beat-up station wagon, he looked at me quizzically. I thought things were going well, he said.