Didn’t your mother teach you anything?

Eighteen years ago this summer, I was waiting for my first-born to arrive. Now, I am sending him off to college, hoping I have taught him something in the interim.

The summer he was born was a hot one, one of the hottest ever, made hotter still by my maternal hormones. I worked in the city and there was a chapel near my office, on Park Avenue and 61st Street, to which I would retreat occasionally to pray for the well-being of my unborn son. It was cool and quiet inside, a welcome contrast to the steamy hub-bub on the street.

In true New York fashion, a panhandler once interrupted my silent communion with an entreaty for alms. Incensed, I berated his poor manners. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” I raged, already thinking like one.

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Keep your eyes and ears open as you stroll through the forests and farmlands of the Upper Delaware, and you soon become aware of the many different forms of life that combine to make this region so attractive. An ecosystem’s health is measured, in part, by assessing its biodiversity, or how many different species the ecosystem supports and how they interact. The more biodiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely that it will be able to handle a variety of environmental stresses. Ecosystems dominated by a small number of species, on the other hand, lack the flexibility and resilience needed to survive and flourish and can be severely impacted by a single adverse event.

I believe that political systems work much the same way. The more points of view expressed within the political process, and the more productively they interact, the better. I’ve coined a term for this, “ideodiversity.”

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Progression

Sass wakes me at 5:45 a.m. with her insistent feline strategies—mewing, flicking items off the bedside table and walking across my back. The fan is still running at the end of one of the hottest days and nights of summer, this season that has begun its slow fade as fall creeps subtly forward.

I rise, perform the morning coffee ritual and get to reading, sifting for a spark to ignite my writing. If it doesn’t happen here, I will encounter it along the trails I’ll take through these days passing so swiftly.

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Gifted pianists give joy to the infirm

HARRIS, NY – To hear them play is to be transported into rapture, to forget one’s trials and to marvel at their gift. So it was with rapt silence and attention that the patients at the Skilled Nursing Unit (SNU) at Catskill Regional Medical Center listened to six young pianists perform on August 20 as part of the Outreach Program of the 2005 Shandelee Music Festival.

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