Journal

Courtesy of a friend of the foreman at the construction site, we now have some very neat aerial photography of Sawyer Hill Cohousing. I highlighted our house with a red oval in all three pictures (click on the pictures for full size versions):

What’s next after the Hyannis Half? My body turns to dough if I don’t exercise and indeed exercise hard. In fact, just taking it easy for the last week after the half-marathon made me feel all sluggish and yucky. I know I should probably visualize “thin” and go on a diet — but that just doesn’t work for me. And I need a goal to make me stick to a routine, but luckily I seem to have found my drug. So, what’s next is the Cohasset 10K Road Race by the Sea on April 6. My realistic goal is to run the 10K at my recent half marathon pace (9:36 min per mile = 59:39 for the 10K), my “reach for it” goal is to finish under 57:17, which is the time predicted by a cool predictive calculator I found. To assemble a training program for the next five weeks I used the Smart Coach program from Runners World. Onwards!

I have a mission for the rest of this year now. Today, I broke my half-marathon personal best (set last October) by running the 13.1 miles in 2 hours 5 minutes 38 seconds. I managed this even though I struggled mightily the last two miles. So, now my mission is to break 2 hours.

BTW, it was an absolutely gorgeous day in Hyannis. The route goes by yacht harbors and other beautiful parts of the Cape Cod coast. Brilliant.

That was the way it looked on Wed (2/20). As of yesterday, the entire roof is framed.

Our “housing project” a.k.a. Mosaic Commons Cohousing a.k.a. Sawyer Hill Eco-Village is proceeding apace. We just secured a full construction loan for actually building the community. Our general contractor, JJ Welch, has actually already been working full steam ahead for months. The first homes are fully framed and ours looks like this:

We’re expecting that we’ll be moving in some time in the fall of this year. Yikes! This means deciding what to do with our condo in Cambridge prontissimo. Should we sell, should we rent it out? And in either case, there’s plenty of fixing up to do.

This morning, I took Emma to a soccer refereeing course in Westborough. After dropping her off, I drove to Berlin and did 3 turns on a 3 mile loop around our future home. Notice how it says “Sawyer HILL”? To which I have this to say: NO SHIT! This was supposed to be an easy slow-paced nine mile run. Instead, it was a serious hill workout. Once we actually live there, I expect to quickly be in awesome shape because of all the hill running.

The site was buzzing with construction activity even at 8am on a Saturday morning. The beeping of heavy equipment backing up can be heard for miles. Our closest neighbors must be getting batty.

And yes, this means I am in training again: weather and flu permitting, I will be running the Hyannis Half-Marathon in two weeks.

I have been running for many years as my main form of exercise (since I can’t play soccer every day, which is what I used to do growing up). A couple of times I have trained for an actual race, only to suffer some injury or other along the way. This time, I managed to make it all the way through three months of training, and yesterday was the big day: I ran the BAA Boston Half-Marathon. It was a great day for running (after a few hot days, it cooled down just in time). My goal was to run the 13.1 miles in 2:30 hours for a pace of about 11:30 minutes per mile. That’s about the speed I ran in training. My longest run in training was 10 miles, but the wisdom is that the race day adrenaline will ensure that the remainder of the distance is achievable.

The experience far exceeded my expectations. It was a lot of fun to run the course along Boston’s riverway parkland, up into the Franklin Park Zoo (hi to the giraffes), and back. Running with 3,600 people sure does make a big difference compared to solitary runs along the Charles River. I ran at a speed that I truly did not know I could sustain for such a long time. I finished the run in 2:08:34 for a pace of 9:49 minutes per mile, placing in 2,670th place.

[The professionals, who we at the back of the pack got to see whizzing past on their way back to the finish when we were still on our way out to the half way point, ran about twice as fast.]

This was so much fun and so satisfying that I’m surely going to do it again.

Front page news in Europe while we were in Germany: an unbelievable goal by Barcelona’s wunderkind Lionel Messi in a Spanish cup game vs. Getafe, running through the entire opposing defense, 13 seconds of possession, 13 touches of the ball in all — very much a carbon copy of Maradonna’s classic world cup goal vs. England. The video keeps being taken down from YouTube upon complaint from some copyright holder or other. But a search usually picks up a new copy. Try it.

Mosaic Commons Cohousing is a group that formed out of discussions among a number of families with children at the Sudbury Valley School in late 1999. We were hoping to build a cohousing community where there would be enough SVS children living as neighbors so that they wouldn’t feel as out of place in their neighborhood as they sometimes do when they live far away from other SVS households. But apart from that, we were most attracted to the other aspects of cohousing: the image of an old-fashioned neighborhood where everyone has their private home but there are many opportunities for neighborly socializing, where the kids play freely with each other without the need for adult supervision and protection, where cars do not interfere with the life of the people.

As it turned out, it was exceedingly difficult to find an appropriate site for our neighborhood in the western suburbs, close enough to SVS for a reasonable commute. The zoning laws of the towns out here are designed for large houses on large plots and generally do not allow the kind of clustered neighborhood we were planning to build. We went through many possible sites, several times we thought we had found the right spot, only to be thwarted by technical problems with the site or NIMBY opposition from abutters. In the mean time, our group evolved to include families with other educational philosophies, singles, and older couples whose kids had flown the coop.

Two years ago, we were approached by another cohousing group, Camelot Cohousing, who in turn had been approached by the conservation agency The Sudbury Valley Trustees, who in turn had been approached by the Selectmen of the Town of Berlin, MA. There was a large parcel that used be a tree nursery that was coming up for sale. The town had the right of first refusal on the parcel and did not want a typical subdivision that would turn all that very attractive land into asphalt driveways and large houses. The Sudbury Valley Trustees convinced the selectmen that cohousing was a great solution. As part of the arrangement, the project would fall under the state’s 40B housing law, which would ensure that 25% of the units built would be “affordable” under state guidelines. The selectmen agreed to the plan. Camelot and Mosaic Commons would jointly develop the land, building two separate 34 unit cohousing neighborhoods, and preserving most of the parcel as conservation land.

But before the project could go forward, we would have to get a comprehensive permit from the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals. That process turned out to be much more adversarial and contentious than we had been led to expect. Abutters fiercely argued against our project and the board itself was very skeptical about the merits of our project (and frankly, of our “strange” lifestyle). After two years, however, in what for us is still a stunning turn of events, the ZBA granted us our comprehensive permit this past January and the appeals period just ran out without any appeals having been filed.

So, we are ready to finalize our designs, break ground this summer, and move in to our new homes in the fall of 2008.

The New York Times today has a front-page article on unschooling (see also the Wikipedia article on unschooling). They profile an unschooling family from the North Side of Chicago and give a pretty good summary of the “child-led learning” approach to bringing up our children. We hear that children can learn how to read essentially by themselves because they want to learn how to read and that basic arithmetic comes very easy once you try to keep track of your allowance.

There is the obligatory establishment curmudgeon, who says things like “it is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math” and somewhat scary-sounding things like “as school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally. If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.” (The article does not challenge the presumption that the question of whether unschooling produces productive citizens should be addressed by consulting the feelings of the public and of policy makers, rather than checking in with reality: just find out whether unschooled children actually turn into effective adults — by which I don’t mean standardized testing, as hinted at in the article, but simply checking whether the adults that were unschooled as children now lead productive and enjoyable lives.)

The article does not draw the connection to free schools, such as Sudbury Valley (see also the Wikipedia article on SVS) which is where my children go to school. In my mind, such schools add to the unschooling idea the advantage of giving the children a space of their own (I am suspicious of the power structures involved in homeschooling) and a much more complex social environment than they face in their own home.

BTW, there is an Associated Press article on the Brooklyn Free School, which is being picked up by many news outlets around the nation, such as the MetroWest Daily News. Today, an abbreviated version appeared in the Boston Globe.

Time for some serious border disputes. Where exactly is the border of Red Sox Nation vis-a-vis Yankee Country? The New York Times investigated and came up with this map:

Note in particular the division of Connecticut and the small Red Sox enclaves across the border in New York state.

Last week, coming back from visiting Emma at Shire Village and from the Mosaic general meeting, my toothache started getting worse (I had medicated some tweaks for a few days with Advil). Over the next three days, it gradually reached the excruciating stage, to the point where I couldn’t sleep at night. The pain got better when I walked around but I have never learned the art of sleep-walking. So, it was time to go to the dentist.

If you are ever looking for a good dentist in the Boston area, go to Eric Klein. He’s good. An hour of root canal treatment later, the pain was gone. Of course, there are follow-up visits and such to come. But it’s great to be living without pain again.

PS. Of course, Eric is my other dentist, the one that gets to work on my teeth. My main dentist, as in my friend who is a dentist, is Sabine, who — before becoming the brilliant linguist that she is — was a professional dentist, among other things.

We had a nice dinner (à deux — with Emma at her sleep-away camp and Pascal in Maine with his best buddy Zach) at Mulino’s Trattoria in Northampton on Saturday night. We had an acceptable bottle of Chianti Classico and struggled to finish it, especially since I still had to drive us back to our camp site in the Erving State Forest quite a ways away. Just as we were leaving we saw a sign on the door saying that the restaurant was in compliance with the new law allowing patrons to take partially consumed bottles of wine home after a meal, properly resealed etc. A while ago, we knew that such a law was being discussed but we had no idea it had finally been passed.

Indeed:

The Massachusetts Legislature has amended Massachusetts law now to allow every holder of a “restaurant” or “hotel” type license issued under M.G.L. c. 138, § 12 to permit “a patron to retain and take off the premises only so much as may remain of a bottled wine purchased by the patron in conjunction with a meal and not totally consumed by the patron during such meal; provided further, that the bottle shall be resealed in accordance with regulations promulgated by the commission. [from the site of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission]

The law passed against the veto of Governor Romney. No idea why he vetoed it. The change is a great idea.

This is my brother Jens:

Jens, who works in IT at a TV/Radio network in Cologne, now has a blog about web technologies. Hi, Jens!

Now that it has been leaked to the New York Times that Floyd Landis’ urine sample after 17th stage of the Tour de France contained synthetic testosterone [btw, I seem to remember that this was leaked to someone else on the first day the story broke but it wasn’t picked up widely — and what’s with all the leaks anyway? That doesn’t make the whole process seem all that professional and competent], it’s probably time to become cynical and figure out what might have happened (while of course holding out hope that he is after all innocent). Here’s my best shot at making sense of it all:

• After the collapse during the 16th stage, Landis gets drunk with his teammates. He decides that he needs to try to make up time the next day. In spite of his upbringing, he is clearly not someone who can take being an also-ran or even just second fiddle.
• He asks his German doctor for something to bring him back up to speed. The doctor says that the only thing that could make a difference in such a short time-frame are amphetamines, which are easily detected in a drug test. So, they say no. [BTW: The doping expertise that East German doctors developed over the decades under the old regime is certainly something that they have continued to fine-tune and monetize. Reports are that the infamous Spanish doping doctor received his substances from Germany.]
• Landis decides on his own that some testosterone might help. Riders report that testosterone (which experts say does not give short-term boosts) can lead to euphoria — and maybe that’s all he needed. He self-administers and might have made a mistake in the dosage.
• He probably doesn’t expect to win the stage and thus be subject to a mandatory drug test. All he wanted was to make some time back to be in a position for a respectable finish after the time-trial.

I hope this is not what happened. I hope that Landis is clean. But one has to be realistic.

One thing I think that should happen in cleaning up cycling and other sports is to not just suspend or ban athletes who have been found guilty of doping. I think there should be zero tolerance, as in immediate life time bans, for any coaches, doctors, team managers, etc. who are involved in doping. The Phonak team with its managers and doctors etc. should not be allowed to continue operating. They’re clearly dirty. Similarly, I cannot believe that Trevor Graham, the coach of Justin Gatlin, is still in the sport. I see that the New York Times reports similar sentiments.

One of the more subtle pleasures of traveling comes from reading public signs in multiple languages. This one I found in the washroom of an ICE train in Germany:

German, French, and Italian speakers are admonished to follow the Golden Rule and to leave the room in the same state that they would have liked to find it (which is more likely to lead to better results than the rule of leaving it as you found it). English speakers are told to leave it clear (sic) and tidy — and are asked to do so out of courtesy.

Is there a suggestion that English speakers have a different ethical make-up that would make a non-golden-rule approach more efficacious?

I don’t know much about French politics these days. But I find it fascinating that the French starting line-up has three apparent Caucasians (Barthez, Sagnol, Ribery) in it and is otherwise made up of lots of differently colored players. Apparently, when they won in 1998, there was a period of romanticizing multi-culturalism, which quickly went back to sour ethnic (and more importantly: class and economic) relations. There is an informative article in today’s Observer. After notorious racist politician Le Pen spouted off about the team’s make-up, Lilian Thuram said this at a press conference:

What can I say about Monsieur Le Pen? Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn’t know anything about French history or society.

That’s pretty serious. He’s the type of person who’d turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: “Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What’s going on?”

When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn’t matter if we’re black or not, because we’re French. I’ve just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he’s got a problem with us, that’s down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants.

[Thanks to the NY Times world cup blog for the quote and the link to the Observer article.]

I’ll be cheering for France today, for many reasons, but one reason is that I want to celebrate the reality of diversity.

The final between Italy and France will bring a clash of two almost impenetrable defenses, certainly the best in the tournament. So, I don’t expect a lot of scoring. Both offenses are obviously capable of taking advantage of the smallest mistake. But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the game ended 0:0 with another penalty shoot-out (where I would favor the Italian keeper and the French shooters over the French keeper and the Italian shooters, so a toss-up, it seems), although France might be tired enough in an overtime to give up a late goal just like Germany did.

The small final between Germany and Portugal, while probably not as intense as the big final, might well be the more enjoyable game. The fear of losing gone, both teams might be more willing to just let their considerable attacking powers loose. Germany should be the favorite with their home field advantage. It seems that Oliver Kahn is getting a consolation start in goal (a gift from Jens Lehmann). Some other players need to be replaced (Mertesacker, Friedrich, Ballack, and Borowski are injured — that Ballack has been playing hurt has been obvious), but that gives Klinsmann the chance to conduct some experiments: for example, playing Lahm on the right side of the defense. I maintain that Germany is one central defender away from glory (someone like Thuram or Cannavaro, both of whom will play central roles in the big final).

Wow. What a great game. The Italians were headed for certain defeat in penalty kicks, just to score a last minute goal — a beautiful one at that. Germany had one chance to tie but Ballack’s shot was off target and then there was a garbage time second goal. I do not like the Italians’ game very much but in the end they deserved to win. The German team is young and one strong defender away from being the favorite for the most competitive tournament on the planet: the European Championship, 2008 in Austria & Switzerland.

Vive la France!

The quarterfinals are all set: Germany vs. Argentina, England vs. Portugal, Italy vs. Ukraine, and Brazil vs. France. Great stuff. It should be noted that of the 8 number one seeds in the world cup draw, 6 are in the quarterfinal. The two that didn’t make it were Spain and Mexico; instead, we have Portugal and Ukraine.

I can’t wait until Friday. My Ballack shirt is ready.

(Maybe it’s time to recall Gary Lineker’s famous saying: “Football is a simple game — you play for 120 minutes and then the Germans win on penalties.”)

This week I have reached a mile-stone, so to speak, in my 117th attempt at getting in shape. A couple of years ago, after some scary dizzy spells, my cardiovascular system checked out OK, but what with my family history of heart disease and my not so good cholesterol levels, my doctor gave me a 10% chance of a heart attack in the next few years. This was of course a shock. Unfortunately, I have not always been consistent in my project of getting completely healthy. Once in a while, I started running very regularly, only to get injured after several weeks. Getting orthotics helped with that. But still, I remained at the edge of being unhealthy.

Anyway, early this year I started working out almost every day, first in the gym, on the treadmill and on the weights. When the weather got better, I added more and more running to the routine. My first goal was to get up to 20 miles per week. This week I have reached that level (four runs of 5, 3, 9, and 3 miles).

20 miles is a bit of a magic level. I saw a snippet in my favorite journal, Runners World, that said that 20 miles a week is the level of exercise where one actually starts getting rid of abdominal or visceral fat, the most harmful kind of body fat. The source for that claim is this research article.

So, now my plan is to stay at this level for rest of the summer, adding some interval running on one of the short days. Then, in the fall, I’ll finally try to run a half marathon, after two failed attempts at running in races that I signed up for. This should finally get Jason Stanley off my back, who needs to know my half-marathon time (preferably at least twice as long as his, of course — Jason: my pace in today’s 9 mile run was a super-slow 11 minutes per mile).

How do I feel? Like I am slowly but surely getting healthier. I have not lost much weight at all, perhaps 6 pounds or so. But I feel quite a bit trimmer. Next up: my diet — perhaps, some dairy has to go. Also, I need to figure out how to not become a complete couch potato during the World Cup. Perhaps, I’ll need to use some handweights during the games.

In a sensitive, yet firmly scientific article in Sunday’s Globe Magazine, Dr. Darshak Sanghavi debunks the alleged link between child vaccinations and autism. Along the way, he reveals the truth about vaccinations:

The secret truth about vaccines is that they don’t have much of a benefit for the individual child who receives them. They’re mostly for the good of the community. My sons got multiple polio shots, for example, for little personal benefit. The same goes for flu, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and almost every other immunization. The reason they’d be fine without the shots is that most everybody else gets them. This concept is called “herd immunity,” and it is the foundation for disease control. Essentially, it means that once a critical “tipping point” for vaccination coverage occurs - say, about 90 percent of the population - the probability of getting a disease suddenly falls, since it can’t spread.

Following a 1957 influenza pandemic, the Japanese government began vaccinating all schoolchildren, since they spread flu efficiently. After mandatory vaccination ceased in 1994, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the vaccination campaign had prevented as many as 49,000 deaths annually among the Japanese population. That is, one older person’s life was saved for every 420 children vaccinated.

In the United States, getting your kids vaccinated is like paying your taxes: Cheating a little doesn’t really hurt anyone as long as everyone else pays up. But left to their own devices, parents may balk at subjecting their children to the needle when there’s no significant risk of disease. So the United States decided in the favor of greater good and not individual rights, making certain vaccinations compulsory for admission to public schools and day-care centers. As a result, despite well-publicized small outbreaks of whooping cough and even polio recently, vaccination rates in the United States are higher than ever. Today, about 90 percent of Massachusetts children and 80 percent nationwide are fully immunized - and millions of people enjoy some of the world’s lowest rates of devastating but preventable infections.

So, when you, as an affluent parent with all the access to superior health care, choose to not vaccinate your child, you are almost certainly not hurting your child’s health (although you are not helping it either), but you make it slightly more likely that some poor child somewhere or a vulnerable older person will contract a deadly disease. If many of us make that decision, we would hurt the general welfare of our society.

This week, a Japanese TV Crew has been filming a feature at Sudbury Valley School. The school got some free publicity out of this as both the Boston Globe and the MetroWest Daily have covered the event. On Tuesday, the crew actually came to our house to interview San, Emma, Pascal, and me about the school. I’ll post some excerpts from the interview when I have time.

A few weeks back, we went to a Pawtucket Red Sox game with a whole bunch of friends. We were sitting up in the stands halfway between home plate and first base. At one point, I was sipping my beer when a foul ball zoomed towards us. It flew by me and almost whacked the son of one our friends. Emma corralled the ball and gave it to him as a souvenir. For a moment, I got to hold the ball:

Thanks to Ken Porter for taking this picture and sharing it with me.

Last year, I coached the U10 soccer team my daughter Emma was part of. Working with these 8, 9, and 10 year old girls was very rewarding and fun. This year, I will be coaching the U8 boys team my son Pascal is on. More fun to look forward to, especially since my co-coach has experience coaching littler kids like these, so I can expect to learn much.

One thing that I learned last year is that coaching soccer is best done quietly. Especially, during actual games the kids need to learn how to make instantaneous decisions on the field. Soccer is a very spontaneous, creative game, without the structures and strictures of other popular American games like baseball or football. So, coaching loudly from the sidelines is really quite counter-productive. It was hard to refrain from yelling instructions, since certainly I knew what we had to do. But for the kids, it is useless and counter-productive. I also tried to encourage the parents to limit themselves to cheering (for good play by both teams) and not to try and yell instructions. The youth game is not a spectator sport but should be a space for kids to have healthy fun.

Only one time during the year did I have a problem. The parent I had a problem with wrote an essay about the experience which was just published in the Sunday Boston Globe: “In a new season, reflections of a soccer mom”. She starts with a nice compliment:

I was particularly proud of Ellie’s team and coach this year. He took a group of girls with abilities ranging from none to some and formed them into a cohesive unit that played well as a team. They were almost as proud of themselves when they lost as when they won. Playing on the teams has taught my daughters how to work together, how to play fair, be mutually dependent, welcome new players. It taught them to focus and pay attention and guided them through new social situations.

She goes on to describe the difficult circumstances in their family’s life last year (a dying mother). Watching the soccer games gave her a much needed escape. Then came the game against X-Town:

After a month of cold and rain, the girls were playing in 80-degree heat under a blazing sun during a holiday weekend when many families were away. Our team of 11 was down to six with no substitutes, against a team with at least 10 players. At halftime, the score was 1-0 in our opponents’ favor. Both teams had played hard. During the second half, the other team scored at least four more goals. Our girls played their hearts out, but their spirits and energy were flagging.

They got hit and they kept playing. Their coach made them drink water and poured it over them to keep them cool. But they were slowing down, while the other team, with waves of substitutes, plowed ahead. Parents were upset. When teams at this level of play get ahead by that many goals, coaches typically tell forwards they can’t score anymore. They have to play different positions or pass the ball a certain number of times before they can shoot on goal. But that didn’t happen in this case.

When the game was over, I watched our six players cross the field in tears. I marched across the field and informed the opposing coaches that I didn’t see the difference between winning 3 to 0 three to zero and winning 7 to 0. (Later, I was notified we had lost only 5 to 0.) “I don’t care about the score,” one coach said. “Do you think the kids do?” I snarled back. The coach said they had offered our team players, but our coach had turned them down. Who wants another team’s players helping out?

Ellie’s 13-year-old sister, Maggie, called her dad and said “Mom rocked” for standing up to the injustice. But I arrived home to discover an icy e-mail from my daughter’s coach, telling me I had been out of line and should have come to him first, that the league has a zero-tolerance policy toward parental interference on the field and takes it seriously.

That “icy” email was from me, of course, since I didn’t have a chance to talk to her at the game. She had left by the time I had finished packing up the equipment bags and talking to my players. Only then did I hear from the X-Town coach about her behavior.

What had happened is that she had completely misread the situation. A week earlier we had played the other X-Town team in our division and had played them to a tie. Now, that team was by far the best team in our division, and coached by a very confident — to the point of arrogance — coach. The other X-Town coach had watched the game and before the game we’re talking about, she approached me to congratulate me on our play the week before. She told me that she was proud of my girls and that she hoped her team could learn from us. So, they went into the game with the attitude that they were playing a much superior team and that they would do their best to keep up with us. When our girls got tired during the second half, they did offer us to give us a player or too, but my players would have none of that. The only thing that could have been construed as unfortunate was that their assistant coaches were yelling instructions from the sidelines throughout the game.

In any case, what Ellie’s mother should have done is to approach me with her concerns, instead of taking matters into her own hands. When the other coach told me what had happened, I smoothed things over. I told her (truthfully) that this had been the first time such a thing had happened and that I would make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Maybe, I shouldn’t have done that because our league has a zero-tolerance policy but I thought she should be given some slack. Nevertheless, my email told her in no uncertain terms that such behavior is unacceptable.

I called the coach, chagrined, like a kid apologizing to a parent or teacher for misbehaving. He was clearly angry, but polite. He said my daughter could be punished for my behavior — she could be kicked off the team. I lost my breath. I didn’t try to defend my actions. I sat in a dark room with my husband and cried. I cried for my mother, who had so much more grandmothering left to do, and for my daughter, who fought so hard to no avail, and for my own helplessness.

To clarify, when a parent behaves inappropriately, the only recourse that the league has is to suspend the player. And that might well have happened, if we hadn’t managed to address the situation “in house”. It would have been really sad if Ellie had been the one to suffer from her mother’s outburst. I was particularly proud of Ellie’s development over the year with my team and would have hated for that progress to be undermined.

The story concludes:

My mother died four weeks ago, and soccer is starting up again. I’m afraid of sitting on the sidelines, feeling the lack of control in my life and being judged by other parents and new coaches for my past behavior. I’m afraid soccer will remind me of how much I lost last year. But a new season holds the promise of giving me a chance to let go, and a glimpse of a future to feel optimistic about.

There is a lot of good material online about “sports rage” and tips for parents and coaches. One league even instituted a regular weekend of “silent games” where coaches and parents are not at all allowed to speak and shout — only clapping allowed. Check out some of the comments from kids in a brochure from Australia about sports rage:

“My dad is great — he just watches.”

“I don’t play anymore because mom used to yell too much. I got sick of it.”

“I play sports because it’s fun and you’ll be able to still move when you grow old.”

In other countries, much of kids’ sports occurs in unorganized pick-up games in parks and streets. I wish there was more of that here. In fact, I suspect that there is no way that US (men’s) soccer will ever reach the World Cup final until kids start playing soccer every day on their own without parental interference and coaching — the way I used to play when I was a kid in Germany.

In NPR’s series “This I Believe”, Gloria Steinem today presented an essay on “A Balance Between Nature and Nurture” that touches (unknowingly, I assume) on many points of the Sudbury Valley School philosophy. Here are some quotes:

Is it nature or is it nurture, heredity or society? In that great debate of our time, conservatives lean toward the former and liberals toward the latter.

I believe both are asking the wrong question. I believe it’s nature and nurture, and this is why.

I didn’t go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was “discovered” when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.

Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups — which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.

Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn’t prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.

[…]

Since then, I’ve spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, “It’s not fair!” It’s as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness — or any whisper of it that survives — is the root from which social justice movements grow.

So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being — the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

The truth is, we’ve been seduced into asking the wrong question by those who hope that the social order they want is inborn, or those who hope they can write the one they want on our uniquely long human childhoods.

But the real answer is a balance between nature and nurture. What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them? Or what would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

I believe we have no idea what might be possible on this “Space Ship Earth.”

Today’s Globe has an op-ed column by Derrick Z. Jackson that — while it may not agree with everyone’s politics — makes some intriguing points:

Even though the average size of the American family has shrunk, the average size of a new home has grown from an average of 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,330 square feet today, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The percentage of new homes over 2,400 square feet has zoomed from 10 percent in 1970 to 38 percent today. The percentage of new homes with two-car garages has grown from 39 percent in 1970 to 82 percent today.

In a New York Times feature this week about ”living large” in the exurbs, a sales representative joked with a family that was looking at a model home, ”Lots of places to hide, aren’t there, boys?” It is mathematically impossible for the rest of the world to live like this. As the boys play hide and seek for a moment, the parents play out the fantasy that hiding from the reality of consuming a quarter of the world’s energy and producing a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases is an all-American right.

Jackson finishes by urging us to ask “ourselves if we need that much room in the exurbs to hide from each other.”

I like this way of looking at what we’re doing with cohousing: not hiding from each other.

The name of my log is taken from the poem “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens, which was alluded to in the book Pale Kings and Princes by one of my favorite authors, Robert B. Parker. The poem starts with images of a pleasant Sunday morning and goes on to a meditation about religion etc.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.