594. My Brilliant Mum

                       Mum, reading (painting by Dad)

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and mine was on my mind all day. Although it has now been more than six years since she passed away, I still have not been able to sit with my memories of her and write anything that does her justice. In the evening I pulled out two manila folders of her writing, mostly essays she wrote when she was taking courses toward her B.A. at Harvard Extension School—while working at a full-time day job, mind you. What I found in them was humbling. 



I hadn’t always realized how seriously Mum took her learning—from independent reading, courses, lectures—and retirement made no difference to that seriousness. For a few years she was a member of a reading group in which the participants took it in turns to choose the book of the month. When it was Mum’s turn she took copious notes, read interviews with the author and on the historical setting, pored over critical essays on the book, and anxiously prepared—no, over-prepared—an introductory presentation. Invariably she chose an author her group were unlikely to be familiar with—Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie were two that I remember—and felt that it was her responsibility to help the group understand and appreciate their work. But she was invariably disappointed. She would come home telling me that the host had been more interested in showing off her best china tea set than in discussing the book or that several people hadn’t even finished reading it.

academic snobbery

Mum’s other disappointments with the book group came from the fact that many of the participants were academics or had advanced degrees and would discuss the text at hand using obscure academic jargon that effectively excluded and humiliated her, who was wonderfully well-read and worldly wise, but not a literary scholar. Eventually the combination of the lack of seriousness and the academic snobbery led her to quit the group altogether.

Besides her participation in the book group Mum volunteered as an ESL teacher to wives of international graduate students, volunteered as an aide in an ESL after-school program, was an active member of a group called the Third Age, and took several Learning in Retirement courses taught by retired college professors that were as rigorous as any college course. I regret now that I was so preoccupied with my own work that I didn’t take the time to appreciate hers, thereby reproducing the behavior in others that hurt her the most.

Every Which Way – Maurice Bilk PPRBS. To Remember the evacuation of millions of British children separated from their families during WWII (Photo: Tim Ellis)

As a brilliant girl from a working-class background, Mum was in love with learning and with life. She aced the eleven-plus exam and won a scholarship to grammar school, but her secondary school experience was badly disrupted by the Second World War when she and her school, Parliament Hill School, were evacuated out of London and she had to live with a series of foster families who were neglectful at best. After school she went out to work and while she went out dancing and to the movies with her best girlfriend, she also furthered her education with night classes.

There was no opportunity for Mum to further her formal studies in Greece and India while we were growing up, but she continued to teach English to children—in India, to Dalit children who lived on the outskirts of the campus—and to learn languages herself. It was only when my sister was in college and I at work that Mum started taking night classes again, two every semester until she earned first her Associate’s and then her Bachelor’s degree. Looking now at the piles of term papers she wrote over the years, I am overwhelmed. How has it taken me so long to read them?

Here are some of the titles: 


• Control: A Classless Condition
• The Evolution of Discipline in Early Childhood: Development and Social Policy 

• Summerhill: For and Against
• Depression: Classification, Etiology and Treatment—A Brief Overview
• Caste and Hinduism: Dominant Themes and Modal Personality

Knowing Mum, the topics above make perfect sense. She had always been an advocate for loving, child-centered models of education that fostered creativity. With her working-class background and strong sense of justice, she had always been interested in the effects of class and caste in society. And working as she did for a psychiatrist who had taken a leading role in studying treatments for depression and schizophrenia, she was interested in how treatments for depression had evolved, developing drugs that both held considerable promise and had serious limitations.

But what humbled me the most were these two papers:

• The Politics of Nuclear Power and Our Health

Mum wrote this for a course on The Sociology of Medicine with Elliott Krause (author of Power and Illness: The Political Sociology of Health and Medical Care) in January 1988, when, at 23, I was passionately involved in the anti-nuclear power movement. Clearly, Mum, who was always supportive of my pursuits even as she worried about my future, had set out to study the nuclear industry for herself. Just flipping through the sections of the paper I can see that she investigated the nuclear fuel cycle, corporate investments in uranium, studies on the health effects of radiation, attitudes of the medical profession toward diagnostic radiation and nuclear power, and political interventions. Wow. If only I had listened to her more, actually talked with her, rather than just holding forth, talking at her. She could have taught me a thing or three.

• The Role that China Played in Changing the East India Company’s Relationship with India

It was only relatively recently, through reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015) and his non-fictional Smoke and Ashes (2024), that I became acquainted with the Opium Wars and what drove them. And here was Mum, back in 1986, before I even started my graduate studies, taking a course on India Under the British with the eminent historian of South Asia David Washbrook and writing a paper on the causes and effects of the opium trade.

Mum was so intelligent, passionate about learning, socially committed. And yet, as a mother, she built me up. Listened to me patiently, even as I talked incessantly. Was full of admiration for my work, my intellect. Said nothing about her own. I still find slips of paper in books she borrowed from me or read because I had recommended them, with her own thoughts on them. Did we sit down and discuss them afterwards? Probably not, because when I went to Mum and Dad’s house, she would insist that I put my feet up and relax while she simultaneously brought me tea, played with Baby Nikhil, and prepared dinner.

Oh, how I long to listen to her now! All I have is her papers. But I will read them with deep gratitude and remember my brilliant mum.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

Reflections on the 2024 A-to-Z Challenge: The World is Always With Us

In April 2024 I participated for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this time was the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

Well, I got through it, but by the skin of my teeth. As usual, I hadn’t written my posts in advance, so it was a daily scramble, and although each one simmered in my head all day I never seemed to really get down to writing until late at night when there were no other distractions. One would think that now that I have retired it would be easy to keep up, but it seems I was more efficient when working, even in the cruellest month of the Spring semester. Meanwhile, some of my fellow-bloggers had written all their entries in advance and set them to auto-post through the month. Respect!

My theme—The World is Always With Us—is not inherently a heavy one, but what with the weight of all the weapons and wars, I felt burdened by it at times, though I did try to introduce variety over the month, with posts on music, books, food, languages, and occasional flashes of levity (not to mention potholes). Sometimes I felt that my teacherly self was looking for an outlet in retirement, making me lecture my readers rather than simply telling an engaging story (as my blog’s title, Tell Me Another, proposes to do).

First I’ll list the month’s entries with hyperlinks to the posts, and then list and comment briefly on the blogs I visited the most, and the bloggers who visited mine.

The World is Always With Us
A is for Apple
Books: A World Within
A Cosmopolitan Perspective
D is for Diaspora

E is for Empathy
F is for Food
Global Literacy
Human Rights
Invasive? It Depends
J is for Jingoism
K is for Kinship
Languages
Music
Nationalisms
Opium wars, then and now
P is for Potholes
Queequeg
R is for Reading
S is for Spices
T is for Time Zones
Universities
V is for Visibility
W is for Weapons
X is for X Factor
Y is for Yiddish
Zaporizhzhia and Za’atar

I decided at the start to visit and comment on the posts of the bloggers who visited and commented on mine, and by and large that’s what I did, although there was a little time to surf the list on Sundays and read a few more. Half of them were new to me this year, and the other half I follow whenever they participate in the Challenge. Together, they ran the gamut of subject matter, genre, and voice. Thanks to:

Alice in Bloggingland
The Curry Apple Orchard
The English Explorer
Finding Eliza
How Would You Know
Lynnelives
Milepebbles

The Multicolored Diary
Nikki’s Confetti Life
The Witchy Storyteller

I was inspired and humbled by your energy, creativity, and generosity.

A number of personal friends and blogger-friends who weren’t participating in the A-to-Z Challenge also visited, Liked, commented, and shared: Anna, Barbara, Carolyn, Cynthia L, Cynthia H, Hayat, Margaret, Norah, Quirky Chris, Sartaz, Shailja (who shared and highlighted a quote every day), Sharon, and Shoba. Dear Sartaz and Andrew went several steps further, proofreading and pointing out language that needed attention. Love and heartfelt thanks to you all!

Finally, thank you to the organizers of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge for this labor of love. It is so much fun, and always energizes me, despite the inevitable (for me, at least) burning of the midnight oil.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

593. Zaporizhzhia and Za’atar

For the month of April I have been participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

     (Reuters file photo)

You do know that ionizing radiation knows no national boundaries, right? All nuclear facilities, even if they are civilian power plants, release radiation into the air and water. All of them have incidents in which workers are contaminated. All of them require water and electricity to cool the radioactive waste that they generate. All of them are at risk for a nuclear meltdown as in Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three-Mile Island. And all of them are vulnerable to a missile strike from the air, in which case they could turn a conventional attack into a nuclear disaster (shattering the illusion, by the way, that “Atoms for Peace” are a different animal from atomic weapons). This is why the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station is keeping International Atomic Energy Agency officials awake at night and should be matter of  grave cause for concern for us all.

If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war on between Russia and Ukraine, a proxy war for the United States since without massive U.S. military support, Ukraine has no hope of prevailing. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, the largest nuclear power plant  in Europe and one of the ten largest in the world, has been caught in the crossfire, with the Russians occupying it in March 2022 and three drone attacks striking the complex in early April 2024. In between, shelling and a fire have damaged various party of the facility, including a nuclear waste storage area, and power outages have threatened the ability of the cooling system to operate. Even though all the units are currently shut down, the station still requires a constant water and power supply “to cool the reactors and prevent a potentially catastrophic meltdown” (Murphy, Faulconbridge & Murphy).

* * * * * * * * * *

Forgive me. I had to get that out of my system. Now to turn from the nuclear Z to a nourishing one: Za’atar.

      Origanum syriacum, a highly valued food spice (Davidbena)

Za’atar is the name given to a family of culinary herbs and a spice mix that is beloved in Palestine and across the Arab world. The family of herbs includes different varieties of wild thyme, oregano, and wild marjoram, and za’atar the spice mix includes one or more of these, along with roasted sesame seeds, sumac, and salt. Za’atar has a variety of uses, as a seasoning, a coating for frying or baking, or, with olive oil, a dip. It has a distinctive tangy taste that is extremely addictive–or, as my cousin would say, “more-ish”—meaning, you can’t stop eating it once you start.

For Palestinians displaced from their homes or homelands, za-atar is the very taste of home. Sadly, Palestinians living in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza, even face a conflict over za’atar. Since 1977 the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture has declared wild za’atar a protected plant and strictly regulates its harvesting, thereby making the gathering of za’atar a politicized food practice, criminalizing a food that is so meaningful to Palestinians. I would imagine that these restrictions only serve to intensify the longing for this cultural comfort food.

I have chosen za’atar to cap my month of A-to-Z posts on the world—the world that is always with us, and that we cannot do without—because of how and by whom I was introduced to it.

Just last month a group of us were celebrating a successful two-month campaign for our town council to pass a resolution in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. We had worked around the clock engaging in simultaneous education and outreach to our town councilors and to our fellow-townspeople, and in return had been met with an outpouring of support. Of course there were those who disagreed with us, and we had had many conversations and email exchanges with different individuals and constituencies. In the process we made new friends across three generations and, we hope, will continue to build community in our town in preparation for whatever challenges may lie ahead.

People came to the celebration gathering bearing foods of all kinds. One of our new Palestinian friends brought a big box of  Palestinian medjool dates, and another brought a generous batch of homemade manakeesh/mana’eesh za’atar, naan-like bread topped with za’atar spice mix and olive oil, then warmed in the oven—heavenly! Andrew and I were instant converts and Andrew immediately started researching how to make our own, using homegrown thyme and wild sumac. A couple of days later he did find dried sumac in a local Turkish grocery store, so perhaps we won’t need to wait long before we can make our own.

The za’atar didn’t just give us an excuse to break bread together. It gave us a chance to share something that was meaningful to our Palestinian neighbors and to fall in love with it ourselves.

I chose the ever-presence of the world as my theme for this month of daily blogging because so many of the skeptics we encountered in our work for the ceasefire resolution said that it was not appropriate for the town council to take up an international issue that has no bearing locally. Faced with billions of our tax dollars going to fund the genocide of a people and a rapidly escalating war, that argument never ceased to confound me, and I continued to make the case for the issue’s relevance and urgency in as many different ways as I could. Still, because nativism, isolationalism, and xenophobia appear to be on the rise, not just in the United States but worldwide, I decided to make the broader case this month—for continuing to hold the world in our hearts and our minds as we engage with our neighbors over local issues. In my view, we have nothing to lose and the world to gain.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents