Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Loving and Leaving


Forty five of us gathered for the Grand Occasion in Gloucester, Massachusetts this weekend...the 80th birthday of my Aunt Ann Macdonald. Ann is my mother's younger sister, by some 21 months. Here they are at Ann's First Communion (1937?). I asked Ann why she was looking askance at her big sister Kay in this photo.

"I think I was mad she was given money by the relatives, and it wasn't her day!"

We all shared plenty of memories over the 40 some hours, marked by laughter and tears. We toasted Ann, and then, Ali (Elliot's lovely wife)who is five months pregnant, and just beginning her journey of family-making. Throughout the joyous festivities, lurking in the distance, was our collective awareness that the time to say good bye was approaching.

Of course, that is the tailside of the Love Coin...the farewell. I've spent plenty of time with it this summer. Meeting up with my parents and then leaving. Basking in the sunny reunion of Girl Scout troop 249 and then leaving. My dear Bangalore friend Sujata with us for a few days, then leaving.

Selfishly, I only want to flip heads on the Love Coin...I want to stay with those I love, no good byes. But life has taken us on our own journeys, in different directions. When I read this short Rilke poem, it helped take the sting out of my most recent good byes.

This is guilt, if anything is guilt:
not to multiply a loved one's freedom
by all the freedom we can find in ourselves.
We have , in loving, only this one task:
to let each other go. For holding on
is easy for us, nothing we need learn.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Saturday, August 14, 2010

My Aunt Hannah Died Yesterday

Hannah G. Kaiser, teacher and diplomat's wife, dies at 97

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 14, 2010

Hannah G. Kaiser, 97, a diplomat's wife who taught adults and schoolchildren during her husband's assignments in Europe and Africa and as a young woman escaped a pass made by celebrated portraitist Augustus John, died Aug. 13 at her home in Washington. She had complications from lung ailments.

Mrs. Kaiser's pedigree was New England Protestant; she was a direct descendant of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony in what became Massachusetts.

In 1939, she married Philip M. Kaiser, a classmate at the University of Wisconsin who had been born in New York to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who had fled from imperial Russia. They met in a class on capitalism and socialism.

Mrs. Kaiser graduated from Wisconsin in 1935 and two years later was accepted into the first class of a Radcliffe College program intended to train women as personnel managers for government and commercial jobs.

In 1938, she traveled to England and worked for the Labor Party's youth organization raising money and clothes for victims of Spain's fascist government.

In addition to asking ministers of Parliament for their financial support, she was asked to solicit money from London's artistic community. She said this resulted in a brief and uncomfortable meeting in the studio of Augustus John, who complained about the rich but "homely" matrons he was used to painting.

"I'd much rather paint you," he said, before directing her to remove her clothing. "I got a little bit worried by that, and I got out of there with my virginity intact," she later recalled, "but I wasn't sure for a few minutes."

After her marriage, Mrs. Kaiser was a social worker in Washington, received a teaching certificate from American University and was president of the Bannockburn Cooperative Nursery School in Bethesda before settling into a career as a Foreign Service spouse.

In the early 1960s, she taught English in Senegal, where her husband was ambassador. A few years later, when her husband was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in London, Mrs. Kaiser led an effort involving the city's diplomatic corps that raised money for charities including Save the Children. When they stayed in London in the 1970s as private citizens, she taught English to elementary age children from deprived backgrounds.

Under President Jimmy Carter, Philip Kaiser was tapped as ambassador to Hungary and then Austria, and Mrs. Kaiser worked with the embassy's staff to welcome guests. After returning to Washington in 1981, Mrs. Kaiser taught part-time at the Lab School, a private school for learning-disabled children.

She cited as one of her favorite achievements the successful match she made between the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which owned a set of rare Stradivarius instruments, and the world-renowned Tak?cs String Quartet of Budapest. She helped foster an arrangement for the quartet to use the instruments on loan.

Hannah Elizabeth Greeley was born Aug. 3, 1913, in Simsbury, Conn., in the home of her great-uncle George P. McLean, a Republican governor of and U.S. senator from Connecticut. She was raised in Madison, Wis., where her father was a medical doctor. Her husband died in 2007. Survivors include their three sons, Robert G. Kaiser, an associate editor of The Washington Post, of the District, David Kaiser, a Naval War College professor, of Jamestown, R.I., and journalist and author Charles Kaiser of New York; a brother; four grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

In a 1987 interview with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Mrs. Kaiser spoke of her time overseas as a joyous experience, especially when it came to the latitude she was given in redecorating the ambassadorial residences. She was also candid about her disappointment that President Ronald Reagan replaced her husband in Vienna with "a chain store grocery owner from California."

"That type of appointment is really resented by the embassy staff," she said. "They know that that person may be rich and maybe generous at entertaining, but the substantive part of the job will not be done well."

Sunday, August 8, 2010

To Be A Moral Force in the World

MY UNSWERVING SUPPORT OF SISTER JOAN CHITTISTER AND HER WORK IS A PRECIOUS PART OF MY LIFE. I am reprinting her essay here today, as it serves as a beautiful reminder for all of us; let us not be persuaded by our weaknesses, but empowered by our strengths. Love to all on this beautiful day, Bethany

To Be A Moral Force in the World
There are three obstacles to our personal development that would make us a moral force in the world.

First, fear of loss of status has done more to chill character than history will ever know. We do not curry favor with kings by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. We do not gain promotions by countering the beloved viewpoints of the chair of the board or the bishop of the diocese. We do not figure in the neighborhood barbecues if we embarrass the Pentagon employees in the gathering by a public commitment to demilitarization. It is hard time, this choice of destiny between public conscience and social acceptability. Then we tell ourselves that nothing is to be gained by upsetting people. And sure enough, nothing is.

Second, personal comfort is a factor, too, in the decision to let other people bear responsibility for the tenor of our times. It takes a great deal of effort to turn my attention beyond the confines of where I work and where I live and what my children do. It lies in registering interest in something beyond my small, small world and perhaps taking part in group discussions or lectures. It requires turning my mind to substance beyond sitcoms and the sports channel and the local weekly. It means not allowing myself to go brain-dead before the age of forty. But these things that cost comfort are exactly the things that will, ultimately, make life better for my work and my children.

Third, fear of criticism is no small part, surely, of this unwillingness to be born into the world for which I have been born. To differ from the mainstream of humanity, to take a position that is not popular tests the tenor of the best debaters, the strongest thinkers, the most skilled of speakers. To do that at the family table or in the office takes the utmost in courage, the ultimate in love, the keenest communication skills. And who of us have them?

The process of human discourse is a risky one. Other people speak more clearly or convincingly than we do. Other people have better academic backgrounds than we do. Other people have authority and robes and buttons and titles that we do not now and ever will have, and to confront those things takes nerve of a special gauge. I may lose. I may make a perfect fool out of myself. But everybody has to be perfect about something. What else can be more worth it than giving the gift of the perfect question in a world uncomfortable with the answers but too frightened or too complacent or too ambitious to raise these doubts again?

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Unions and Reunions


We reunited with dear Sujata in Connecticut on Saturday. She had flown from Bangalore, India, to Seattle, where she spent time with her son and daughter in law, who are expecting a babe in September. Then, onto Hartford to see friends...including me, where I joined up with her at my son and his wife's home. I'm giving a pat on the head (or feet?) of their first babe, our expected Christmas delivery.

What a blissful time for us all....connected by one reason, and celebrating that reason...LOVE.

This is my summer of reunions. Girl Scouts, High School, Sujata. And later this month, the international reunion of Sivananda Yoga Teachers in Quebec (http://www.sivananda.org/) and then, a big family festival in Massachusetts, celebrating my Auntie's 80th birthday. Again, a summer fueled by the power of LOVE.