MacArthur Foundation | mulberryshoots

Tag: MacArthur Foundation

It’s almost a week (tomorrow) since I took that fateful step off the stairs, thinking that I was nearer terra firma than I actually was. Instead, I fell on my right ankle which dislocated the tibia and broke a bunch of bones (what they call a compound fracture.)

Today, surrounded by beautiful flowers from well-wishers, I am biding my time until the surgeon operates on my foot next week (week by week it seems to go.) After lunch, I managed to use a walker to stand at the kitchen sink and wash my hair. It’s getting long, I keep telling myself as I comb it out and twist it securely on top of my head to dry in the sun while I sit and rest my leg.

Here’s a story that has been in the front of my mind: thirty years ago, a neighbor family who lived up the hill from us in Lexington were friends with my family. They had three girls and so did we. The girls were all classmates with one another. Their father taught at MIT and the mother was a well-known and well-liked activist in the education system in our town. First, we heard she was in the local hospital (Symmes Hospital in Arlington which is no longer there) for knee surgery. Then she went home. Then, she had a clot. And suddenly, she died, leaving the family on its own. We were so shocked that a seemingly innocuous operation could lead so quickly to such a sad end. Just so you know, though, the father raised the three girls by himself. Two of them studied at MIT, including graduate school. A. started a lab there which invented easy-to-use tools that helped people in Third World countries to purify water. I heard that she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius grant”) a couple of years later. What an amazing story of an amazing family who made its way in the absence of their vibrant mother all those years. Their father was well known at MIT for fifty years, during which time he taught electrical engineering, and then afterwards served as MIT’s head of undergraduate education and student affairs from 1990-1995.

You know where this is going, right? I described that sudden death from knee surgery situation to the orthopedic surgeon we met with on Monday. I said there seemed to be situations, rare perhaps but even so, times when someone may go in for a tonsillectomy, lapse into a coma and then die. Since my personality is proactive and organized, I reflected about what I wanted to have happen in my absence (if I died unexpectedly.) It’s taken a couple of days to learn there’s nothing like transparency to help align people you love.

Now, it’s time to plan what to make for dinner: roasted sweet potatoes and thin-sliced pork chops in a mustard-apple cider vinegar glaze, fresh spinach on the side. There’s even a half of a peach cobbler to warm up and eat with Haagen Daz vanilla bean ice cream after dinner. Yum!

Postscript: The week-by-week paradigm has kicked in: when the ER cast was opened up on Friday, there were skin blisters, a condition that required antiseptic applied to them and then a new cast closing the ankle up for another ten days. To avoid post-operative infection, the blisters should heal first. The next peek is scheduled for the week of March 10th.

In the meantime, my daughter C. helped me position pillows while resting on the couch, so that the cast is elevated higher than my heart–thereby promoting a less congested ankle area, helping it to heal sufficient to have surgery. One week at a time. . .

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October 2, 2012

prizes . . .

Okay, so the MacArthur Fellows were named yesterday.

These are the so-called “genius” awards consisting of about half of a million dollars to each of the people whose exceptional endeavors are singled out by the MacArthur Foundation. One of them this year is a stringed instrument bow maker in Boston. Another is an economist who surveyed about a million sources of data to come up with conclusions about how we learn. Chris Thile, a mandolin player whose recordings and Youtube clips attest to an amazing ability ignored phone calls from MacArthur, thinking they were political robocalls.

When my kids were growing up in Lexington, we knew a family with the same surname as ours who lived up the hill from us. Tragically, the mother died from a blood clot after routine knee surgery. The father, who taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) raised the three girls by himself and my daughters were friendly with them as classmates in school. Years later, I happened to hear that one of them had gone on to MIT herself and formed a group of her peers to invent and develop very simple devices that would help people in third world countries. Her invention was a handheld water purifier that worked manually by cranking it. Amy Smith was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004.

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to hearing about these awards every year. It comes after the Nobel prizes are announced earlier in the Fall. And they come after the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes, I think. In a way, it’s great to hear about these acknowledgements of human creativity and exceptional talent.

Sometimes I wonder, though, how other superhuman efforts are acknowledged in our culture. Like the parents who live across the street from me whose eldest son has cystic fibrosis, living in a wheelchair, picked up everyday by the public school bus. Or parents who have kids who are autistic or disabled in other ways that entails a lifetime of care and concerns about their welfare when they reach adulthood. One of my mentors when I worked at Genetics Institute had a son like that. The loving care he and his wife provided for their child extended beyond themselves to efforts putting through legislative initiatives in the public sector to help others with the same plight.

When I think about acknowledging meaning in one’s life, it comes in many different forms on so many different levels. The MacArthur celebrants are on one extreme of the spectrum. On a daily basis, there must be zillions more along the way.