Cindy Stodola Pomerleau
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LOL (Little Old Lady)

I am an essayist, memoirist, and blogger. I'm also 80 years old, which makes me older than more than 96% of the U.S. population. A little wine helps.

My name is Cindy Stodola Pom​erleau and this is my author's blog. Watch f​or news about my current work, previews of work-in-progress, what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, what's going on around me, and probably an occasional shout-out to my cat.

CONNIE CONVERSE (1924-????)

4/30/2023

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Connie Converse, or Elizabeth Eaton Converse as her parents named her, was born on August 3, 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire. She dropped out of Mount Holyoke College after two years and moved to New York City in hopes of launching a musical career. But despite (or perhaps because of) being a pioneer singer-songwriter who wrote hauntingly beautiful and unusually intelligent folksongs and art songs, she never managed to get a foothold in New York--unlike Bob Dylan, who had far better luck doing something similar not long after. 

In 1961, discouraged and depressed, she moved to Ann Arbor, where her younger brother Philip Converse was a prominent political scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and ended up with a job writing and editing for the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Then, in 1972, the journal was auctioned off to Yale without her knowledge, and at around the same time she was informed that she needed major surgery.

Finally, in 1974, after writing letters to her relatives stating her intentions to try and make a new life for herself somewhere else and asking them not to look for her, she drove off in her little Volkswagen--and was never seen or heard from again. 

Her work briefly came to public attention in 2004, when the graphic artist Gene Deitch, a longtime supporter of her work, played some of it on the radio; this led to a search for more of her music, which turned up in a  filing cabinet in Ann Arbor, followed by the release of a 17-song album in 2009. But except for this little flurry of activity, she and her work have otherwise remained largely unknown. 

That is about to change. The 100th anniversary of her birth and the 50th anniversary of her disappearance are coming up in 2024 and are already being marked by some long-overdue recognition for her work:
  • A beautiful, sensitive piece entitled "The Art of Disappearance," by Hanif Abdurraqib, including a strikingly evocative illustration, was published in the New York Times Magazine on August 11 (updated August 17), 2022.
  • The opera singer Julia Bullock delivered a stunning performance of a Converse song, One by One, accompanied by her husband Christian Reif on piano, in her debut solo album released in late 2022.
  • In Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X, published on March 21, Connie Converse is portrayed as having been X’s lesbian lover and music partner. Lacey resolves the unanswered question of Connie's fate by writing a fictional ending for her.
  • A major biography by Howard Fishman, To Anyone Who Ever Asks, was published on May 2.
  • The Connie Converse story (though unnecessarily evasive about what little is known about her disappearance) made the front page of the New York Times on May 8.
  • An article by Eve Silberman is featured in the May edition of the Ann Arbor Observer (a reminder that the Connie Converse story is in part an Ann Arbor story).
  • Ronnie Kuller, a Chicago-based composer and arranger, is collaborating with the singer Emmy Bean on an ambitious orchestral arrangement and vocal performance called Her Only Light, devoted entirely to Connie Converse and her songs, to be presented next fall at the Steppenwolf Theater. After that, they are planning to take the show on tour, including fulfillment of their dream of bringing Connie Converse back to Ann Arbor, the town that at first provided her with solace and refuge when she so badly needed them but ultimately led to disillusionment and despair.

My daughter Julie is assisting Kuller and Bean with their project and helping them spread the word. She is the one who introduced me to Connie Converse. A sampler of their program will be premiered on May 19, both live in Chicago and online. (To purchase tickets click here.)


[originally published April 30, 2023; updated periodically as the Connie Converse story continues to unfold]
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ED KOREN R.I.P.

4/18/2023

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Ed Koren as I remember him (undated photo)
I read Ed Koren’s obituary in the New York Times with sadness—the kind of sadness that’s only slightly tempered by the realization that he was not felled in midflight but lived a long and full life. (He died on April 14, 2023, at the age of 87. He never stopped cartooning, however, so who knows what the world has lost by his death?)

Even if you don’t recognize the name, you will instantly recognize his wonderful New Yorker cartoons featuring what my husband always refers to as “furry alligators.” He tried for the most part to remain above passing political controversies, focusing instead on au courant topics like fitness fads, electronic gadgetry, and pop psychology. He poked fun at contemporary relationships but steered clear of sex. “Animals are gentle and funny,” he said. Disguising his subjects as animals allowed him to avoid exposing their anger or bitterness and instead portray them with affection for their foibles. “I’m the kind of American middle-class folk I like to draw,” he wryly admitted.

His furry alligator cartoons emerged organically from his experience of daily life. “Within his comfort zone,” wrote a critic in 2010, “Mr. Koren can be funny, psychologically acute and philosophically provocative. He has a pitch-perfect feel for gag lines, and with his scribbly draftsmanship has forged one of the most distinctive styles in cartooning.” As noted in his obituary, “He found subjects everywhere. Walking in the woods in California, he was passed by a jogger, who called out: ‘Working on my quads!’ ‘There’s a cartoon,’ Mr. Koren said.”

I knew Ed only briefly and slightly, from our days as summer residents of Vermont, where our circle of friends overlapped with his, meaning that we occasionally found ourselves in his company at dinner parties and small gatherings. I remember him vividly because—well, because he was Ed Koren, the famous cartoonist. He would likely be able to place my husband, who has a talent for engaging a wide variety of people in conversation on a wide variety of topics. He might even remember me as well, if only because I was one of those passers-by in his quotidian existence who inadvertently evoked the comment, “There’s a cartoon.”

Only later, while thumbing through a book of his work, did I learn that I had been immortalized in an Ed Koren cartoon published in the New Yorker on April 22, 1974. The moment I saw it I was teleported back to that dreamy summer evening in Brookfield, Vermont, sitting around a picnic table with Ed and others eating corn-on-the-cob that had been growing in the field only an hour before, and shushing one of my daughters who was clamoring for dessert, “No more carbohydrates until you finish your protein.” Pitch-perfect indeed—it was an exact quotation.

​But what is even more remarkable was that although there I was, with my long curly hair and glasses, I had been transmogrified into a mom in her suburban Philadelphia kitchen, standing near a refrigerator festooned with a couple of  alphabets' worth of plastic letters, cheerfully telling her grumpy daughter, “No more carbohydrates until you finish your protein.” (The New Yorker Cartoon Bank thinks the child is a boy, but I know better.) It was an entirely accurate rendition of our kitchen—except that (and here’s the creepy part) Ed had never once visited our home in Philadelphia, he knew us only in our Vermont incarnation.
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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: ELIZABETH II ASCENDS THE THRONE OF ENGLAND

2/6/2023

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PictureOfficial Coronation portrait, 1952
On February 6, 1952, King George VI of England died and his daughter, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, ascended to the throne of England, retaining her own name as her regnal name and becoming Queen Elizabeth II. (What else? If you happen to be a British monarch, it’s hard to imagine a more propitious namesake male or female than the first Queen Elizabeth.) At the time she was notified, she and her husband Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, were on a royal tour in Africa and had spent the night in a treehouse in Aberdare National Park in Kenya—a fitting start to a career marked by a strong commitment to carrying out her obligations wherever they might take her. She went on to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history, continuing her duties practically until the moment of death. No quiet quitting for her.

Because details about her life dominated the news for days after her death in September of 2022, there must be few who are unfamiliar (unless you actively choose to be) with her mostly exemplary life as well as with the unsquelchable (is that even a word?) stories about her dysfunctional family. But perhaps many are less familiar with her contributions to the decolonization of England's great Empire. Many of England's early decolonizations, like those of its European neighbors, went poorly to say the least. But then, Queen Elizabeth II wasn't on hand for those occasions. Because this story is about Queen Elizabeth II, and because I happen to be distantly related to Pierre and Justin Trudeau (along, I hasten to add, with probably thousands of others), I will concentrate on one of Britain’s classiest decolonization efforts, that of Canada.

By way of background, Canada was initially colonized by Europeans in the 16th century, first by the Spanish and the Portuguese and later by the French and the English. These two nations were in a state of perpetual conflict, with dominance seesawing between the two, but in 1763 the British decisively took control with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and Canada officially became a British colony. Since then, it has gradually inched its way to becoming a fully self-governing entity. In 1867 England reorganized three of its colonies into the Dominion of Canada, ending Canada's status as a colony though it lacked legal autonomy and a British governor-general continued to represent British interests. In 1931 England continued slow-walking Canada towards autonomy by bringing it into alignment with other Commonwealth countries—but retaining the ability to amend the Canadian constitution. So—almost there, but not quite.
Picturethe famous "Pierre pirouette" photograph, taken in Buckingham Palace in 1977
Fast forward to 1977, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, reputed to be a republican, amused himself during a state visit to Buckingham Palace by sliding down banisters and by pirouetting behind the queen’s back at a formal dinner, caught in mid-spin in a photo that went viral (although  the royal back in question later turned out to belong to Princess Margaret and not the Queen). This behavior did not escape the Queen’s notice and left her understandably concerned about whether Trudeau was really taking Canada’s relationship with the Crown sufficiently seriously. So she set about using her soft powers to fix the situation. When Canadian politicians came to London in 1980 to discuss what they termed “patriation” of the constitution, she surprised them with her sophisticated grasp of the issues--including her awareness that whether to retain a monarch was under hot debate. In 1982, the Queen flew to Ottawa to sign Canada’s Constitutional Act, granting Canada complete independence—but declaring it a constitutional monarchy that continued to accept the British (figurehead) monarch as its own.
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Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada's Constitutional Act as Pierre Trudeau looks on.
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Justin Trudeau with one of his "favorite people in the world."
From then on, Queen Elizabeth II apparently managed to retain the affection of her Canadian subjects, even those in high places; Justin Trudeau, Pierre’s son and current Prime Minister of Canada, eulogized her at her death as “one of my favorite people in the world.”

​Now it is King Charles’s turn to keep England’s relationship with Canada warm.
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"RESIGNING THE NEEDLE FOR THE PEN" - PREFACE TO THE GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY EDITION

1/19/2023

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My work in progress, scheduled for publication later in 2023. Here's a sneak peak at the Preface to the new edition:
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Ready to graduate! Here I am on the Penn campus with my daughter Julie, then almost 6, and my husband Ovide, then a member of the Penn faculty and sporting his Columbia University academic regalia. My younger daughter Aimee, the one mentioned below, was too young to sit through the ceremony so she stayed with my father and stepmother.
PictureMe, shortly after my days at Penn
In 1974, I duly presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, my doctoral dissertation on autobiographical writings of 17th and 18th century British women. It was uncharted territory at the time, scholarly speaking, and for fifteen minutes I was probably the world’s expert on the topic. In fact, I was probably the only person in the world who had even read all these books. My dissertation supervisor certainly hadn’t.

I accepted an invitation to include an article based on my dissertation in a book of essays--a propitious start to an academic career, and my next move should have been to find a publisher for the dissertation itself. But like many of my cohort, I was deflected by the professional Darwinism of the 1970s, when the MacArthur Foundation had funded graduate students in the humanities so lavishly that the balance between supply and demand for tenure-track academic positions all around the country had been upset. There were two openings that year in the Philadelphia area, both with red flags. I had a delightful interview for one, but then the funding dried up as they had warned me it might and the job evaporated; the other, a one-year part-time position, went to someone else.
​
Meanwhile, something far more terrifying than the prospect of unemployment happened: My three-year-old daughter was stricken with h. flu meningitis and hospitalized for several weeks. Children are now routinely vaccinated against this dread disease, but at the time the only option was an extended course of intravenous antibiotics, which did not always work, and which even when it did could leave victims seriously impaired. Many of the women whose life stories I was reading had lost child after child to infectious disease, and I spent a lot of time at my daughter’s bedside wondering how they could survive such a devastating blow not just once but repeatedly without succumbing to despair. The only answer I could come up with, still not entirely satisfactory, was that the fragility of life in those days must have somewhat tempered their expectations.

​Job or no job, there I was in Philadelphia. Clearly it was time to relinquish the ragged dream of an academic career in the humanities and rethink my future. Long story short, I accepted a position as the director of an oral history project on women physicians at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, which sparked an interest in scientific research, and my life veered off in a different direction.
*     *     *     *     *
We eventually moved to Connecticut and then to Michigan. Nearly two decades later, the same daughter—happily recovered and by then a women’s studies major at the University of Michigan—told me a fellow student had found my dissertation on a supplementary reading list for one of her courses and asked the question every author dreams of hearing: “Is your mother THE Cynthia Pomerleau?”

By then I had heard not only from my daughter’s friend but from enough people around the world to realize that over the years my seemingly obscure dissertation had developed its own little cult following. The original document had been typed by a professional dissertation typist in 1974, with two photocopies deposited in the University of Pennsylvania Library and otherwise available only on microfilm. It occurred to me that if I was willing to pay to have the text word-processed, it could be more easily reproduced and thus made more readily accessible to both the casual and the serious reader. Had I known what I was getting myself and my two stalwart typists into—I with a more than full-time job doing grant-funded research in a scientific laboratory, my typists forced to deal with an unexpectedly difficult text full of archaic language—I probably would have abandoned the project then and there. But once started, there was no turning back, and by 1996 Dissertation 2.0 had been completed. Since then, it has been downloadable free of charge from the Penn Libraries Scholarly Commons and hundreds of people have done so.

More recently yet another revolution in book production has taken place, and through the miracle of indie publishing I am now able to provide the convenience and portability of a paperback version at a modest price. You are holding the results in your hand. I have corrected a few obvious typos—without, I hope, introducing too many more--improved the title, and added this new preface, but I have otherwise made only minimal changes in the text. I have moved on without regret from the life in academia to which I once aspired, and modern literary scholarship has undoubtedly taken our understanding of the history of women’s autobiography far beyond where I left this topic in 1974.

What I have not left behind is my abiding interest in women’s origin stories, reflected not just in my doctoral dissertation but in my subsequent work on the women physicians project and now in what I like to call my “post-professional career” of memoir- and essay-writing. I am not alone in this obsession. Memoir was recently described by Adam Gopnik in the Atlantic Monthly as “perhaps the leading genre of our time, much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century.” He cited the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Annie Ernaux, the first ever to a memoirist, as evidence of the ascendancy of the genre (though tell that to the members of my book club, or to the estimated five million book clubbers in the U.S.) This is a seismic shift. If nothing else, I hope my efforts to trace the emergence of the autobiographical impulse in women, and the underlying changes in prose style during the seventeenth century towards a less rhetorical and syntactically looser structure that lends itself to self-revelation, will continue to remind us not to forget where we came from if we hope to understand where we are.
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HOW PROJECT DIANA HELPED TO RESHAPE THE AMERICAN MYTH

1/6/2023

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On January 10, 1946,  a small group of Army scientists at Camp Evans in Belmar, New Jersey successfully bounced radio waves off the moon--and the world has never been the same. Today marks the 77th anniversary of Project Diana.

​The following passage is taken from an essay appearing in my 2021 book, To the Moon and Back: Essays on the Life and Times of Project Diana. My father, E. King Stodola, was Chief Scientist on Project Diana, and Jack DeWitt, mentioned below, was his boss. Most of the essay, which was written in celebration of an earlier anniversary, is devoted to the practical consequences of the successful moonbounce--military uses, scientific implications, advances in communication. In the last few lines I attempt to grapple with some of the more intangible effects of Project Diana on the American psyche:
​
Picturea contemporary explainer
Coming as it did on the heels of America's contribution to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, based on our "can do" spirit and technological expertise, [Project Diana] was so to speak the frosting on the cake, suggesting a host of peaceful as well as military applications for our capabilities. Since previous moon bounce efforts (including our own) had failed, and since many reputable scientists believed the ionosphere could not be penetrated by radio waves, Project Diana burnished our self-image as a people who could do the impossible. Because the team basically improvised, modifying equipment they already had, it reinforced our faith in our talent as engineers and tinkerers. Finally, it provided a cultural template for subsequent space exploration, initiating the tradition of naming such projects after ancient Greek and Roman gods like Mercury and Apollo and glorifying (in the person of Jack DeWitt) the cowboy hero with the "right stuff" later exemplified by American astronauts.

Every country creates a mythology about itself that helps to form its national identity and make its people feel as though they are part of something larger than themselves. What aligns with the mythology is selected; what doesn't tends to be winnowed out. The postwar years were a time when America was starting to flex its muscles on a global scale, and its sense of itself was rapidly evolving to accommodate these developments. Project Diana was perfectly poised to be part of this process. For a variety of reasons, it is not so easy these days to feel exceptional on the global stage, which is probably why so many Americans harbor nostalgia for what in retrospect seem to them to have been simpler, better times.
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THE LABYRINTH AND THE MAZE

11/23/2022

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On this day before Thanksgiving 2022, I am thankful for being thankful, knowing that for one reason or another, this blessing is beyond the reach of some. And yet even those with blessings enough to count may be finding it takes a little more effort now, coming off nearly three years of a pandemic that may or may not be over, depending on whom you ask and where they are in this life.

For some reason these musings led me to harken back to a week not so long ago, which started when Ovide and I attended the dedication ceremony for the beautiful new stone labyrinth at the Historic Barns Botanic Garden in Traverse City. As soon as it ended, I knew we had to book-end that outing with a visit to another nearby attraction, the Jacob's Farm Corn Maze, which we did a few days later.

The terms "labyrinth" and "maze" are sometimes used interchangeably, and indeed they have overlapping histories. But in modern parlance labyrinths tend to be "unicursal" -- there is only one path from the entrance to the goal, which remains in clear view at all times; whereas mazes are "multicursal," with paths wending their way through, say, rows of withered cornstalks that completely obstruct your line of sight, full of dead ends, deliberately designed to confuse and challenge (and in some cases even to entrap).

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I walked both and the two experiences could hardly have been more different. Walking a labyrinth requires you to maintain a minimal level of calm awareness of your surroundings but doesn't need to consume your entire consciousness. As long as you don't completely lose yourself in contemplation or allow your attention to be directed away from what you're doing, you cannot fail to wind your way from the entrance to the center and back. The labyrinth is its own map. You find the path by walking.
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A maze is something else altogether. Although this was Ovide's first visit to the corn maze, it was actually my second. Shortly B.C. (Before Covid), I went with a group of friends who are as directionally challenged as I am, in which our goal quickly shifted from solving the puzzle to just finding our way out. (My niece recently took her family to a corn maze that provides a flag to raise in case you find yourself in need of rescue. No such amenities at Jacob's!) My visit this summer, on the other hand, was with someone who was able to read the map well enough to allow us to solve the puzzle comfortably within the predicted hour and a half.

Yet in some ways my second maze experience wasn't all that different from my first, since I succeeded in completing the circuit only because I tagged along with someone with superior navigational skills. In short, both experiences required relaxing some of my control needs and forcing myself to get comfortable with being, well, seriously lost.

On the other hand, I count myself fortunate the first time to have been with a posse of friends with whom I could share a lot of laughter at our ludicrous predicament; and the second time to have had a companion by my side who loves me enough to help me find my way when I am lost, knowing there will be other moments when I will be there to help him.

The labyrinth was a pilgrimage, the maze an adventure. I am thankful for both.
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A SCORNED LOVER'S REVENGE

10/31/2022

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A collateral ancestor of mine had the dubious distinction of being the victim of the first person to be tried for witchcraft in French Canada.
 
Pierre Etienne Gadois (~1630-1714), a master armorer and gunsmith, was an older brother of my seventh great grandfather Jean-Baptiste Gadois. Uncle Pierre’s first wife, Marie Pontonnier, was apparently much sought after and had chosen Pierre over another suitor, a soldier named René Besnard dit Bourjoly. Angry at being rejected, René swore revenge, casting a spell over the couple by secretly knotting a cord three times during the wedding ceremony, supposedly rendering the marriage childless so long as the knots remained tied.
 
Of course, there’s not much satisfaction in casting a successful spell unless you can tell someone about it, and René did. So when Marie failed to become pregnant by the end of her first year of marriage, René found himself on trial for sorcery – which carried the possible penalty of hanging. Unfortunately for René, his vigorous denials were countered by the testimony of several witnesses to his boasts, and the trial ended with his being sentenced to imprisonment and subsequent banishment from Montréal. (But at least he wasn’t hanged! As one of my sisters commented, things might have gone differently for him had he been a woman.)

After an additional three-year waiting period as specified by canon law, the marriage of Pierre and Marie, still childless, was annulled. Pierre then married Jeanne Bénard – who bore him fourteen children. Meanwhile, Marie, widowed after a brief second marriage to Pierre Martin dit La Rivière, who was decapitated in an attack by the Iroquois (sadly not an uncommon occurrence at that time), gave birth seven months later to her husband's posthumous child. She was then married for a third time, to Honoré Langlois dit Lachapelle et Croustille, with whom she produced ten more children.
 
So both Pierre and Marie were clearly able to have children (lots of them!), just not with each other. 

Did René’s curse have anything to do with it?!
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WORDS TO LIVE BY

7/9/2021

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My maternal grandmother, Daisy Frances Ward, was descended from the austere and pious Puritans who arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and around 1642 (not to be confused with the more famous Pilgrims who landed just a few years earlier on the Mayflower). Somewhere between 1759 and 1768, my branch of the Ward family emigrated to Canada—not, as I first guessed, as Loyalists, though quite possibly they were, but  as Planters, recipients of land grants offered by the British Crown to New Englanders recruited to replace French settlers expelled during the Grand Dérangement, one of the sadder episodes in Canadian history. The Wards and their relatives were part of an influx of some 2000 families to the rich (but cold) farmland in the Bay of Fundy area, now part of New Brunswick but then part of Nova Scotia or, as it was also known, Acadia.

All this is by way of saying that Daisy came from a long line of very Protestant Protestants.

Somewhere around 1888, when Daisy was around eight years old, she was brought to the tiny town of Barre in Central Massachusetts, not far from where the Wards had originally started their New World adventure 250 years earlier, by a family who, in return for extracting her from the hardscrabble circumstances in which the Wards found themselves, expected her to do domestic labor—to be a servant girl, in other words. Fortunately, Daisy was smart enough to teach herself to read and write, though she never found a way to lift herself out of the hard-working working-class existence in which she was mired.

In 1897 Daisy married a first generation French Canadian from Port Henry, New York named John Richard Dahart. (D-A-H-A-R-T, pronounced DAY-heart, was apparently the best the census takers or border officials could do with the family's original surname, DesHaies.) Daisy was 17, John was 20, and their first child was already on the way. Probably as a condition of a marriage she was in no position to decline, Daisy agreed to raise her children in the Catholic faith.

After her first five or six children, however, Daisy decided she had fulfilled her obligation to the Catholic Church, and the rest of her children attended the much more conveniently located Methodist Church. My mother, Elsa Dahart, was eighth in the lineup and thus part of the Methodist contingent.

As I noted in my book about my father and his work as a radar scientist, however, her Methodist faith wasn’t sticky enough to survive her exposure to the Unitarian Church to which my father belonged. A religion that combined rationality, social justice, and something like a spiritual connection suited her quite well, and she happily remained in its fold for the rest of her days.

One small exception, however—my mother always maintained that the Methodists had better hymns than the Unitarians. My mother never forgot the words to any poem, song, or corny saying she ever heard, and one of her favorite hymns, as she often told me, was “Brighten the corner where you are.” I googled the lyrics as I was writing this post, and although they predictably dive deeper and deeper into religious doctrine as the verses progress, the chorus pretty much sums up the message:
     Brighten the corner where you are!
     Brighten the corner where you are!
     Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;
     Brighten the corner where you are!
*     *     *     *     *
In April of 2021, more than a year into what my husband calls our “voluntary house arrest,” the New York Times published an article by Shannon Doyne posing the questions, "What is the code you live by? How do you sum up in just a few words your philosophy about life, how you treat others and what you value?" The article provided a few examples offered by readers and invited further submissions. Responses were often inspiring and sometimes provocative, ranging from the platinum rule (treat others as they would like to be treated) and “be the person your dog thinks you are” to "YOLO" and "carpe diem."

Obviously the timing of the article was driven by the pandemic, which encouraged reflection on the fragility of life and on the principles that should guide us at such moments. As I framed my own thoughts on the topic, I decided I could do worse than “Brighten the corner where you are.” As an intractable introvert, I actually found myself quite well adapted to perpetual quarantine. Of course, I missed the simple luxuries of daily living like choosing my own onions and tomatoes, and I longed to hug my daughters and grandchildren. I also readily acknowledge my great good fortune in having enough elbow room, enough food to eat, enough of the comforts of home to support my health and wellbeing.
​     
But within these parameters, I didn’t miss restaurant outings or movie theaters or parties or foreign travel nearly as much as so many others seemed to do. I was never restless or bored. As I frequently remarked, as long as I had my “four C’s”—my companion, my computer, my cat, and my cooking—I was able to stay sane and active, and productive enough to write a book. I found that weekly Zoom sessions with friends and relatives—including a new tradition of going on a weekly “walk” with one of my daughters—actually deepened some of my relationships and added dimensions that hadn’t been there before.
     
To the extent that brightening the corner where you are means buying local, when I surveyed what some might call my constricted little world, one of the first items I saw on my desk was a tile painted by a Michigan artist with essentially the same message: “Bloom where you’re planted.” It's a small reminder that pleases me every time it catches my eye.
     
As I grow older, I no longer see my life as looming endlessly before me. Only a finite amount of time remains to make progress on my still-lengthy to-do list. (I don’t have a bucket list but yes I do have a to-do list—mostly consisting of finding ways to beguile my family with the stories I think they need to hear about how their forebears, including the Wards and the Daharts, participated in the larger sweep of human history. You may not need to know where you came from to know who you are, but it sure does help!)
   
​Living through a pandemic is not a feature I’d have chosen as part of my lifetime window on the world, and no, I’m not looking to return to seclusion anytime soon—though I now know I can do it if I have to. But a pandemic however unwelcome is what we've all had doled out to us, and I hope some of the unexpected blessings and life lessons accrued from sheltering in place don’t go away just because we eventually manage to achieve herd immunity.
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WELCOME TO LOL

4/19/2021

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PictureAvailable NOW in both ebook and paperback versions
What was your pandemic project? Some people learned to bake sourdough bread or took dancing classes online. A lot of unfinished sewing and woodworking projects came tumbling out of a lot of closets. My husband created a Great Books course for himself and figured out how to be his own barber. 

I wrote a book.

To back up a little, five years ago I started blogging about the first successful attempt to bounce radio waves off the moon, code-named Project Diana, and my experiences growing up in its shadow. My father was a radar scientist and served as chief scientist on the project, which achieved its goal on January 10, 1946; and although I was just shy of my third birthday at the time, Project Diana was part of my childhood iconography.
The 75th anniversary of that historic event took place in January of 2021. By then I had written dozens of essays, and it occurred to me that if I pulled them together into a book. it would be my unique contribution to the celebration.

​What could be easier? I mean, the book was already written, right? All I had to do was rearrange my entries a little and write an intro.

How wrong I was! 

Although many of the essays started life as blog posts, they have been extensively revised and updated, and in some instances completely rethought. New entries have been added. Organizing them by topic (something I actively resisted while blogging), and more or less chronologically within topic, has exposed a through-line that surprised even me. 

​I think even my most devoted blog followers will find this book a very different reading experience from browsing the patchwork of blog entries. Those who have never dipped into my blog are in for a treat - not necessarily because I'm such a great writer (you'll have to decide that for yourself) but because I had such great material to work with. 

Nearly half the book is devoted to World War II, with particular attention to the history of radar at Camp Evans, starting with its fumbling beginnings at Pearl Harbor and culminating in the stunning success of Project Diana. The second section is devoted to my father and an examination of the confluence of internal and external factors that made him the right man for the moment. The last section provides a sampler of Jersey Shore life (e.g., the boardwalk, the Neptune Music Circus), contemporary American life (e.g., Sears, nylon stockings), and my own little-girl activities (e.g., my Toni doll, my parakeet Archie, my Islander ukulele). Something for everyone, I like to think.
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Here are the links for ordering:
Kindle (e-book)
Paperback

​It can also be purchased from the InfoAge Science & History Museums Bookstore.
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If you read and enjoy the book, I'd be grateful if you'd leave a review on amazon.com--thanks!
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    About Cindy

    Look for my "official" bio on the  About Me tab. Or stay right here and learn about five things most people don't know about me: 1) I collect women's smoking artifacts. (See my virtual museum, Domesticating the Cigarette) 2) I am a licensed ham, call sign W2AXO. 3) I am a proud Februarian who keeps a list of 28 (and occasionally 29) reasons why this much maligned month is actually the best one of the year. 4) I am a compulsive Wikipedia editor; whenever I stumble across a factual or grammatical error, I'm on it. 5) I am a true Short Sleeper and do just fine on 3-5 hours of sleep per night. This is my super-power!

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