I really did try hard to raise my children to be socially skilled, and in that I was pretty successful. It is sort of a miracle that they are so very successful, as I am not -- my father did not like people around the house, so we never had to learn how to listen to or charm visitors. Anyway, my adult children are much more socially skilled than I and part of their skill lies in the fact that they like people and enjoy being with them. Another part of their skill lies in the fact that they are not selfish or self-centered and they work to let others know they are important. In other words, they let other people talk and they are good listeners. Where I might have failed, however, was in failing to teach some non-skeptical acceptance of pronouncements (i.e., mine). If I say something they think is stupid, they let me know one way or another -- even if (especially if) I am only saying it to try to maneuver their behavior in a certain direction. I also might have created some problems when I gave them adult knowledge at young ages. I had inherited this fascination with knowledge from generations of my ancestors and I passed it on. Some of the things I taught them have proved to be helpful -- mathematics (e.g., algebra, prime numbers), languages, cooking, the Greek myths, plants and animals of the Andes, coast and rainforest, and prehistoric cultures of Ecuador and Colombia. However, sometimes knowledge can be problematic. Their knowledge often did not fit comfortably with widely held practices. I had learned vast amounts of odd bits of knowledge, but as I never talked, never having social skills, no one ever found out (and that applies to the present time). One evening I found my young daughter in the front yard of our Ecuadorian home, kneeling in the moonlight. I asked her what she was doing. She, in what made sense, probably, in the prehistoric Ecuador that we had studied, said she was praying to the god of the moon. That practice/belief was not something, however, that probably went over well in show-and-tell at the Deutsche Schule, where Catholicism and Luteranism were widely accepted -- especially in the 1-4 grades. My only major regret, as she thankfully was not thrown out of the school, is that I did not ask, or else I do not remember, what she was talking to the God of the Moon about, what changes she might have wanted to bring about. Another time she wrote a book on reproduction that was pretty darn graphic. She may have had a bit too much book knowledge in what I now think may have been way too soon, and in a place where such knowledge in a young child would have been a bit shocking. Again, she was never thrown out of that school. When they were born I had no Dr. Spock. I remember coming home from the hospital and thinking, with some desperation, what do I do with this baby? I had never truly even babysat for an infant. Certainly I had never given them a bath (did they need them, I wondered), or had to deal with colic or a baby who never slept (and still does not sleep) or who vomited when she was moved from breast milk to bottle milk. The only book I had was on primate mothers and their babies and from that book I was able to draw lessons (no, not on sex education) on demand feeding, on holding babies much of the time and keeping them near you, on closely monitoring their development. While mothering in humans is or can be culturally complex, there might be some simple lessons to seem to work well in caring for infants. They did learn they were loved, unconditionally. They, in turn, love unconditionally. My daughter, in particular, has always been generous and accepting. She sees people, not in terms of their possessions or SES status, but in terms of who they are in their hearts (yes, I know that is a metaphor). She did notice that they had less than she did and generally from the time she was quite small gave away her toys to try to bring into equal number the relative quantity of possessions.

Election Time: The best of times, the worst of times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities