Author Archives: Maggie the Pirate

Stages

I guess I was about 41 or 42 when I was reintroduced to Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development and realized that I had moved into the stage he called generativity, or the care of others and the betterment of society. This stage runs from roughly ages 35 to 55 or 65. Get it wrong at this stage, he said, and we can become self-absorbed and stagnate.

I’m at the brink now of moving into the final stage. My choices, Erikson felt, for this upcoming period in my life are to be fulfilled, content, and comfortably detached from the hurly-burly of “getting there,” or to be despairing of missed opportunities, fearful of death, and dogmatic in the view that my path and my opinions were the only right ones.

While I’m not overjoyed at the prospect of the likely physical and intellectual challenges that I may face in the future, I’m feeling pretty good about my progress through the stages so far, and (mostly) eager about the possibilities as I wrap it up.

Mystery Parties

Sheila and I are getting ready to host another mystery dinner party. This one is set in the present day, in the Amazon River basin in Brazil. The crime this time – they are always non-violent – is butterfly poaching. Our excellent friends will be portraying American and Brazilian travel guides, a movie star, the star’s publicity director, a publishing tycoon and her secretary, and the World’s Oldest Living Lesbian Couple.

I started writing these dinner party plays in 2010. My original inspiration was a phrase that came to me during the twilight time of fading wakefulness: “Dee Hurley-Burtt Catches deVerm.” I knew I had to do something with that and in the morning I scratched out a plot and some characters for Catnapped!, the tale of the theft of Lady Agatha Charmondelay-FeatherstoneHaugh’s cat, Princess Sticky Wicket, during a country house party at Lady Agatha’s estate in Wapping-on-Bottom, Sussex, in 1932. I gave the characters stage directions, sketchy scripts, and back-stories and they took it from there.

That first evening was a great success, with much laughter and wit. I wrote more plays and we gave more parties. Over the past couple of years, our friends have identified a manuscript thief in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains in 1954; captured the spy in a Hoboken, NJ aircraft factory in 1943; figured out who was the embezzler at a corporate retreat on the moon in 2112; sorted through the red herrings to learn who really owned the railroad-right-of-way in a California gold mining camp in 1852; and deduced who was the communist spy and who was the CIA agent while shipwrecked in the Dry Tortugas in 1952. Embedded in each evening is an activity for the cast beyond solving the mystery – or, in the case of the villain – avoiding detection: they recite or sing, tell stories, or play charades and other games. For the upcoming play, Mariposa!, they will each tell a ghost story.

If you have any suggestions for future plots and locales, I’d love to hear them. If you are interested in putting on one of the plays with your friends, let me know that, too.

Circumstantial Version

There will be a moment, every now and then, when I look up and wonder how I got to where I am. One day I’m washing dishes and looking out the kitchen window at the eucalyptus tree in the front yard of my house in Morro Bay and considering the steps – and possible missteps – that got me there. Another day there is a brightening behind my eyes and a quietening of my heart and I’m on the field in the football stadium at Cal Poly, having made it to my college graduation at age 43. It’s almost as if I awake into the moment, into my life. These are Talking Heads moments: “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

I experience these awakenings with a frisson of tension and awe, and I spend a little time thinking about other paths I could have taken and the other people I could have been.

The woman I know myself as might be just a circumstantial version. Could I have been a never-divorced wife, the mother of twins, an entrepreneur, author, almost anything I wanted to be? Would I have been “me” if I had a different life?

I rather like these moments of dislocation, these little fractures in the apparent intentionality of my life. I’m humbled by the notion that I actually experience the world through experiences, opinions, decisions that owe as much to accident as to purpose. I have known people who had a plan and followed it and that’s admirable for them, but it wasn’t my way.

I certainly don’t regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it, but I do wonder sometimes just exactly how did I get here?

What’s a Socialist?

Excerpts from a NY Times article (June 30, 2012) by Steven Erlanger 

What’s a Socialist?

And what does it mean to be a Socialist these days, anyway?

Not very much. Certainly nothing radical. In a sense, socialism was an ideology of the industrialized 19th century, a democratic Marxism, and it succeeded, even in (shh!) the United States. Socialism meant the emancipation of the working class and its transformation into the middle class; it championed social justice and a progressive tax system, and in that sense has largely done its job. As the industrialized working class gets smaller and smaller, socialism seems to have less and less to say.

Center-right parties have embraced or absorbed many of the ideas of socialism: trade unions, generous welfare benefits, some form of nationalized health care, even restrictions on carbon emissions. The right argues that it can manage all these programs more efficiently than the left, and some want to shrink them, but only on the fringes is there talk of actually dismantling the welfare state.

“As an ideologically based movement, socialism is no longer vital,” says Joschka Fischer, who began his career on the far left and remains a prominent spokesman for the [German] Green Party. “Today it’s a combination of democracy, rule of law and the welfare state, and I’d say a vast majority of Europeans defend this — the British Tories can’t touch the National Health Service without being beheaded.”

Even in the United States, Mr. Fischer says, “you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don’t want to admit it — you don’t allow people to die on the street.”

So why the prospect of “European socialism” is so frightening to some Americans puzzles Europeans, a mystery as deep as the American obsession with abortion or affection for the death penalty.


R&D 100 Awards

One of my assignments at Sandia National Laboratories for the last five years has been to manage our submission of write-ups and videos of Sandia’s superb technologies to R&D Magazine for their annual “R&D 100 Awards,” often called the Oscars of Innovation. This year Sandia submitted 8 candidate nominations and won 4 awards. Not bad considering that there are only 100 winners in total from around the world. You can read about the winning technologies and see the videos at Sandia’s news site.

Retirement Planning

I’ve been making my living with words for many years. I’ve also written as a volunteer for various non-profit groups, and for my own pleasure and that of my friends. I’m approaching retirement now (108 weeks, and I count them down every Monday!) and thinking about what I’m going to do when I have slept in and read as many mysteries as I can stand. Writing seems like an obvious choice and I’m sure I’ll work on my version of the (choose one) gritty novel/YA coming-of-age/police procedural/tender love story that all professional non-fiction writers plan to do “someday.” But … just in case that doesn’t work out, I’m taking classes in private investigation and brushing up on my flower arranging skills!

 

 

The Lasting Legacy of the Courts

In 1992 I argued with a good friend – a Republican – that the worst outcome of re-electing George Bush (the only one we knew about at the time) would be the effect on the Supreme Court. More conservative judges, more decisions that negatively impacted our lives as women, as lesbians, as private (as opposed to corporate) citizens. I was overly aggressive in my argument; accusing Republicans of having selfish, monetary motives when opposing social welfare and cultural programs, such as Head Start, Medicaid, the National Endowment of the Arts, etc. I finally noticed that my friend was backing up, waving her hands in front of me, saying, “Whoa, whoa!” We will still say we are friends, but I don’t think we’ve had a meaningful conversation in twenty years.
I believe that the strongest lasting impact of a presidency is the construction of the national judiciary – both the Supreme Court and other Federal courts. SCOTUS in 2012 can give a win to Citizens United over real citizens by refusing to reconsider that ruling, but then uphold the Affordable Care Act, making me think that additional reasonable decisions could come out of the 2013 session.
My conversations with friends in this election year are going to be more moderate in delivery than those I had in 1992, but my argument is going to be the same: a President is going to be around for 4 or 8 years, but the Justices and Judges can serve for decades.

Pioneering Spirit?

Can you say you still have a pioneering spirit if everywhere you go, you’ve been before? I spent the first 30 years breaking new ground and the next 30 following familiar paths, revisiting known pleasures. The itchy, restive wanderlust hasn’t diminished, but the courage to leave the marked trail has. I stand in the West in the Spring, looking East – but down the Interstate now, not the two-lane.