World Beginnings

Adopted children seem to have unending questions about their identity; I speak from personal experience.  Now imagine learning that you were adopted from China by American parents. As time passes, your adoptive parents reveal painful bits about your history: that you were abandoned by a busy roadside in a cardboard box wrapped in an adult raincoat or left on the steps of a busy government building? Next, stop at an overcrowded orphanage with room after room of twenty baby beds per room and one “nanny?” Netflix has a documentary called “Found,” focusing on three Chinese American teenaged girls who discover through the DNA kit “23 and Me” that they were cousins! The documentary follows the girls through a series of zoom meetings, discussions with their adoptive mothers/fathers, and finally meeting a young Chinese woman with a degree in genealogy and a passion for helping parents and adoptees find each other through the use of DNA research. Through this emotionally tumultuous journey,...

Sara Teasdale wrote There Will Come Soft Rains after the horror of WW1,   depicting the power of Mother Nature to regenerate after war’s destruction. In 1950, Ray Bradbury took the title and wrote a science fiction short story describing the destruction of a self-functioning house as it slowly breaks down after a strong wind blows a tree branch into the kitchen. Bradbury’s choice of the kitchen for the start of the destruction of the house is important. This room has traditionally been the symbol of family life…the hearth and the home. Love for the soul and food for the body. But the mother was replaced by automatic coffee makers and toasters. An automated voice droned out birthdays and the weather. The imagery of a busy family, dashing madly out of the door to make more money, to buy more things is painfully sad. What is our response after a disaster? Often it is one of defiance “We will rebuild bigger and better” with more gadgets to make our lives simp...

A Dancing Catrina is the fun loving, flirtatious skeleton representing triumph over the sadness of death. Just as the legend goes, she waits for us around corners and we never know when she will whisk us away to forever. Many expats have elaborate Catrina figures in their homes and she is immortalized in painting; murals; dolls of every type;    dinnerware; candy skulls and even trivets.   The pagan roots of Catrina figures and Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, go back to the ancient   Aztecs and the goddess Mictecacihuatl who was the guardian of the dead. This morphed, as many pagan rituals throughout  the ages, into the Catholic All Souls Day. The Catrina as we know her today, began life in Aquascalientes, MX and a political cartoonist,   Jose Guadalupe Posada. She was a satirical figure mocking Mexicans who were following foreign fashion styles. Her depiction soon evolved into representing people from all walks of life, symbo...