Day 166 - Washingon, D.C., The First Time

Image of Washington Metro by Devin Westhause,
via Flickr.com

In the first week of March of 1985, I arrived in Washington, D.C., for the beginning of my Foreign Service career. In the month before leaving Minnesota, I had put my house on the market, sold my car, quit my job, and packed up everything I owned except what would fit into two suitcases and put them into storage, with no assurance of when I would see them again.

Two days after I arrived in D.C., I started looking for an apartment for my temporary stay in D.C. I knew that I would be in in D.C. for at least two months, but possibly as long as six months, but I wouldn't know how long for at least a month. Most landlords in the area required a minimum lease term of six months, so the available places were limited, and the competition for them fierce.

The first five weeks were orientation. In the first week, we signed papers - so many papers - including the commitment to complete at least one year's service overseas to avoid having to pay back all the costs the U.S. government had incurred to get me to this point. The orientation consisted of a series of lecturers representing offices in the Department and other Foreign Affairs agencies, orienting us to what we needed to know for the future. We did role-playing to get an idea of what the work would be like. And we went through more assessments, including tests of our knowledge of foreign languages and the Modern Language Aptitude Test or MLAT to determine how much or little time we would need for language training for future assignments. I was tested in German, Spanish, Romanian, and Farsi. My scores were not high enough in any of them to exempt me from language training, but the language I would end up being trained in would depend on my assignment.

At the end of the five weeks of orientation, if someone had told me I could change my mind, give up the Foreign Service, go back to Minneapolis and pick up where I left things in March, that I wouldn't need to pay back my transportation costs, my hotel bills, my per diem, the packing up and storage of my possessions, and my salary to that point, I would have accepted it. But by that point, I couldn't afford to change my mind, even if I could have gone right back to the job I had quit and move back into the house I had sold.

So I continued.

The MLAT was not accurate for me and that fact resulted in some very skewed results later. The MLAT consisted of presenting us with a series of vocabulary items, written in a phonetic alphabet, followed by a test of how well we could recall and record what the foreign words, written in the phonetic script meant. The vocabulary items used in MLAT are from obscure, little known languages, based on the assumption that those being tested would be unlikely to have encountered them.

The MLAT was developed at the University of Michigan, one of the first universities involved in developing language training materials, originally I believe for the U.S. military. When I was teaching in San Francisco, we used many of University of Michigan's textbooks, including one to teach pronunciation. That textbook used a modified phonetic alphabet to help non-English speakers see in order to improve their ability to hear and then produce the English sounds that are so different from their own languages. That was the phonetic alphabet used in the MLAT.

In the case of my orientation class, the language used in the MLAT was Kurdish. While Kurdish and Farsi, the language spoken in Iran, are quite different, they share a lot of vocabulary items.

Bottom line - where the MLAT was designed to test language aptitude, in my case the combination of the language and the phoetic alphabet used tested my language experience. A perfect score on MLAT is 80. My score was 77.

The result of my MLAT score was once I was assigned to Stuttgart, Germany, for my first consular position, I was put into a class of four others who had completed 12 weeks of German language training together, during which time they had covered the material that normally was covered in 24 weeks. The instructors and the head of the Germanic languages department thought that my high MLAT score meant I would be able to catch up with this group easily. They were wrong. I spent every day in those classes not understanding either the vocabulary or the grammatical concepts that the others had already mastered. In addition, I missed all the role playing for the work that I was going to be doing - visa interviews - because those lessons were normally covered in the 8th week. Instead of learning the vocabulary I needed to ask questions and understand the answers regarding everyday living, I learned the vocabulary to discuss macroeconomic trends, inflation, and the strategic defense initiative.

The remainder of the six months I spent in Washington consisted of security training, consular training, and area studies, taught by Dr. Kendal Meyers.

At the end of the formal training, I had a week of consultations in Washington and two days of consultation with Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York, after which I flew off to Stuttgart where I arrived in September 1985.

That is when my real orientation to life in the Foreign Service began.

Day 143 - Home

312 Dudrey Court, Moorhead, MN, aka home

I noticed when I was in Iran that I started to think differently about what home meant. Instead of home conveying warmth about where I was currently living, I realized that I thought of home as the place I wasn't, the place I came from. I realized that when I lived in California after graduating from college, I thought of home as Minnesota. And when I traveled back to Moorhead from California, I thought of California as home. So it wasn't surprising when in Iran I thought of both Minnesota and California as home. Minnesota would always be my home state. And I expected to return to San Francisco. I went to Iran expecting to stay there two years, so it would never be home. But when after 15 months I traveled back to the U.S. on vacation, I surprised myself when I found myself thnking of Tehran as home. It happened both in Minnesota and California. I found myself talking about returning to Tehran as returning home.

Shellagh and Bill in my home in Tehran, Iran

After Iran, there was Romania, another place I hadn't expected to stay long, another place I knew I wouldn't ever consider home. So California and Minnesota were both home to me during that year. But while I was in Romania, California voters passed Proposition 13 which changed the way school districts would be funded. And the immediate response was for schools to stop hiring teachers. And that meant my return to California was no longer likely. Instead, after a few weeks in Minnesota, I was hired via a telephone interview to join the staff of the Center for English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a one-year appointment, although I thought I might be able to remain there at least a few years. But Minnesota remained home during my stay in Illinois.

After Carbondale, I ended up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, back in Minnesota. And while I was there, I only had Minnesota to think of as home, until I joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. Now I was in a career where home was always going to be somewhere else. Minnesota would always be my home state. While overseas, home would be the District of Columbia metropolitan area.

An incident in Germany during my first tour emphasized this for me when one of the women I met there told me I looked familiar. She was a soldier, so I didn't think we had ever been in the same place at the same time, but I rattled off the list of places I had lived and when I lived there. We didn't find anything in common through that list. But then Lisa, another woman in the conversation, mentioned that she knew I had lived in Arlington, Virginia, for six months while I attended orientation and language classes at the Foreign Service Institute. The soldier asked me when and after I told her, she said that is where she had seen me. While she was stationed in DC, she had a part-time job as a security guard at one of the FSI buildings. She had seen me as I came and went each day.

The view from the kitchen of our home
in Arlington, Virginia

I learned a lot in that conversation. I learned that being in a place for a temporary period, even if only for a few months, doesn't mean it wasn't home. And I learned that it is all too easy to walk by someone every day without seeing. I decided that I would never do that again. I would look at the people in my life and I would see them, not look past them.

For the next 25 years, home meant three places - the one I was in; Washington, DC; and Minnesota. Then in August, we sold our house in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to San Diego. So many years had passed since I thought of California as home. I'm learning to think of it as home again. But a bit of my heart is still in Virginia, in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. Minnesota will always be my home state. And someday maybe California will again feel like home.

Living Room in El Cajon

Day 72 - Spy Story - Part III

Image by vpickering, via Flickr

When I lived in Romania, I knew that I was being followed wherever I went. In Romania, there was no such thing as a coincidence.

For example, everywhere I went in Iasi or Bucharest, whether on foot, on the tram, or by train, I would see the same bearded guy. Initially I didn't think much of it until I heard from my students how unusual it was for anyone to travel between Iasi and Bucharest as often as I did. The guy wasn't in any of my classes, but I assumed he was a student.

Before I went to Romania, I hasn't realized how rare English language books would be. I had brought a few paperbacks with me and in desperation I took those order forms for more paperbacks from the back of all of them and I ordered every one of them. I didn't know how long it would be before I could buy more. One of those books was The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. All the books I ordered were delivered via unclassified pouch to the embassy in Bucharest where I picked them up when I traveled there. Except The Painted Bird. That one was dropped off on the floor in the hallway outside my apartment one evening while I was in the apartment. There was no note with it to explain who brought it. I was the only American in Iasi. Someone knew where I lived, but I had no idea who.

I also would get phone calls from people who just wanted to speak English. Phone lines were rare. Once a line was put in, the number stayed with the house or apartment. That meant that anyone who ever had the phone number of the American lecturer in the past had my phone number. So they called even though I has no idea who they were.

Because I was there on a Fulbright grant, it is very likely that the Romanian government had a file on me, built from whatever all those people who followed me thought they learned. My apartment was broken into while I was in France on vacation at Christmas and half of anything of value was stolen. Half, not all. And that itself was significant because I had put two cartons of cigarettes in the freezer and two cartons in my underwear drawer. One carton from each location was taken. The thief took one of my two bottles of vodka, one of my two bottles of gin, and one of my two very large bottles of soy sauce which I had had to store with the liquor because the bottles were too large to put into the kitchen cupboard. I would have given anything to see the thief's face as he opened that bottle for a swig. It was also very likely that bugging devices were left in my apartment. For me, it was all a game because I really didn't see how following me would be of any use to the Romanian government.

But then I joined the State Department. So I knew there was a possibility that the information the Romanians had gathered could be useful to some intelligence service. But the real link was only recently revealed.

Kendall Myers, the area studies director while I was in German language training, was a spy for the Cubans. In 2009, he and his wife were arrested and they are now in prison. Details of their recruitment available in a variety of sources are contradictory, but it appears the Cubans recruited both Myers from South Dakota where they had moved when his wife's employment as a member of the staff of Senator Abourezk ended when he chose not to run again. In fact, it was the Cubans who convinced Kendall to try to get work with either the CIA or State. He had worked at the Foreign Service Institute on a temporary basis before, so he returned to State in 1980.

Remember, I accepted a book from Kendall before I went off to Stuttgart. It never occurred to me that there might be something in that book to track me. I'll never know if all those coincidences in Germany had anything to do with Kendall Meyers. But learning that he was a spy provides a possible explanation. At a minimum, it makes a good story, right?

Day 71 - Spy Story - Part II

spy vs spy image by tr.robinson, via Flickr

Today's piece is more about coincidences than spying. But some don't believe in coincidences. Do you?

One evening, I went to an art exhibit opening on behalf of the Consul General. The art was all from eastern Europe, and the Consul General knew I had been in Romania, so he gave me his invitation. While there, I met a woman from Yugoslavia who told me her son was going to a party later that week at the home of a British artist who lived in Stuttgart. She asked if I would like to go with her son. She seemed nice, and I decided I could control the situation, so I agreed. Her son called a day later to arrange to pick me up. I decided it would be safer not to tell him where I lived, so we met at the gallery where I had met his mother. When I told him I was from Minnesota, he said he had met some people from Minnesota a couple of years before. They were part of a baseball team that toured in Germany. He said the players were from Moorhead. I chose not to tell him how much of a coincidence that was. I didn't let him know that I was from Moorhead. I never heard from him again.

I spent a lot of time in Germany with a German, Karl Ullrich, while I was in Stuttgart. We met at a German/American friendship organization. I had been attending the meetings for several weeks before Karl Ullrich started attending. In the course of our first conversation, I probably told him where I was from and then he mentioned that he had spent Christmas in the United States, in Fargo. He had spent Christmas in Fargo because his wife was on a teacher exchange there. He and his wife had gotten married so that they could both go to Fargo - U.S. law makes it tough for unmarried couples to spend extended periods of time in the U.S. He and his wife had been living together for several years; they married because of the teacher exchange visa, but then he decided he really didn't want to spend the year in the U.S. because he wouldn't be able to work. His wife was accepted for the exchange, although they had both applied. So instead of going with her, he stayed in Stuttgart. When she got back to Germany, they were divorced.

The reason I was assigned to Stuttgart was that I had lived in Iran. I know that may sound strange, but Germany was the furthest point west that Iran Air flew, so the wealthiest of Iranians who wanted to travel to the U.S. would fly into Frankfurt. The Frankfurt consular section was full of Iranian applicants every day. Stuttgart was a little bit further away, but we still got our share of Iranians. I didn't conduct any interviews in Farsi, but I was able to use my knowledge of Farsi to understand what was going on behind the scenes.

Most of the time, the course of an interview with Iranian applicants was predictable. So when an applicant's story varied from the predictable, it was memorable. One man came to Stuttgart to apply for a visa to travel to the U.S. to visit his children. He was accompanied by an Iranian couple who lived in Stuttgart and served as his translators.  Both the man's son and daughter had left Iran before the revolution. They attended high school in England and then went to the U.S. for college. It had been seven years since this man had seen his children. But it was difficult for for any Iranian to overcome the presumption of being an intending immigrant, so I refused his application. Later that day, I filed his application away together with his previous five applications - all of them refused - and a letter from a rabbi in Los Angeles on this man's behalf. We had received it several weeks before. In it, the rabbi requested we give him positive consideration for a visa so that he could attend his son's wedding. The applicant's son was raised Christian - the man's first wife was Christian - and he was marrying a Jewish woman. The applicant was Muslim.

The next day, the applicant came back by himself. Since I had connected him with the letter, I chose to reinterview him. Because he didn't bring a translator this time, the interview was in English. The first question I asked him was why he hadn't told me he was applying in order to attend his son's wedding. He gave me the most sensible, and atypical, answer ever. He said he had applied for a visa to travel to see his children. If he arrived the day after his son's wedding, that was OK because what he really wanted was to see his children, not to attend a ceremony. I asked why he had come back again a day after I had already refused him. He had a feeling that he would be able to answer my questions better himself than through a translator. I decided to take a chance - actually several chances. First, I gave him a visa. Second, I told him that I had been close to a Jewish family in Iran when I lived there. And I wondered what had happened to that family. I asked if he could help me find out about the family when he returned to Iran.

About three months later, I got a phone call from the applicant. He was back in Germany and wanted to see me. He had had to convince the German consular officer in Los Angeles to give him another visa so he could stop in Germany again on his way back. I guess that consul trusted him, too. I shouldn't have agreed to meet with him, at least not without telling someone else at the consulate. But I trusted him. It's an intuition thing. I met him for lunch on a Saturday. He told me he had found my Iranian family now living in Los Angeles.  He said I should expect a phone call from my friend Abraham soon. He also admitted that he had told me one lie during his interview; he said he had a job in Tehran when he was unemployed. He knew that telling the truth about that would have made it much more difficult for me to grant him a visa. But he wanted me to know about the lie so that I would continue to trust that he would tell the truth in the future.

I did get a phone call, but it wasn't from the Abraham I wanted to hear from. It was his nephew whose name was also Abraham. The nephew was two years older than the uncle. The family had gotten out of Iran several years before and were living in Los Angeles. But my Abraham had been arrested by the Revolutionary Guard and executed. If I hadn't trusted the unusual Iranian applicant, I probably would still not know what happened to Abie.

Another Iranian applicant appeared with her husband who had been living in Germany for the past several years. He had come to Germany to get his Ph.D. and had stayed on. His wife hadn't been in Germany long; her German wasn't strong. Neither was her English, so her husband translated. During the course of the interview, I realized not just that his face was familiar, but why. He had been in my first English class at National Iranian Radio and Television in Tehran. That term I had the most advanced students, so his English had been quite good then. But he wouldn't speak English with me.  Several years in another country, speaking a third language, was enough of an explanation for that, but I asked some probing questions to be absolutely sure I had not mistaken him for a former student. While most Iranians are able to keep a straight face when telling what we call lies, but they define as something else, in his case, a puzzled look appeared and grew deeper as I asked questions about aspects of his history that no American consular officer should have any knowledge of. Eventually he, too, recognized me and the puzzled look turned into a smile.

A few months later, he came to the consulate to invite me to join him and his wife for dinner at a popular restaurant. I agreed, but then later got cold feet. I had gone so far as to contact one of the security guys at the military base to accompany me, but when I realized I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face or maintain any story about the security guy being my boyfriend or any other plausible story, I pulled out the Iranian's wife's visa application to find their telephone number and called them to say I couldn't make it.

Another Iranian gentleman applied for a visa in Stuttgart and got me as his interviewer by chance. The day before his wife had applied in Munich and been refused. His answers were also memorable for being so sensible and therefore atypical. I asked why he had come to Stuttgart to apply instead of applying in Munich. He looked me in the eye and said it made no sense to apply there when his wife had been refused. But it wasn't just his apparent honesty that led me to take a chance on him. He handed me a letter of invitation from his son's landlord. Most of the time we didn't put much stock in invitations. But this one was signed by one of my high school classmates who worked at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. The applicant's son lived in a basement apartment of the couple's Moorhead house. I showed the applicant the signature on the invitation and explained that I knew the couple who had invited him, and I knew they were honest and honorable people who would never do anything illegal. So when they said they would make sure he would return to Iran at the end of his three-month stay, I knew they meant it. I was willing to give him a visa because I also knew there was no way that he could have known in advance that I knew his son's landlord.

The next day I got a phone call from that high school classmate who asked if I would also give their tenant's mother a visa, too. I agreed. I never did think that giving a visa only to one spouse was an effective way to ensure an applicant wasn't intending to stay anyway.

Were all of these just coincidences?

More later. . .

Day 70 - Spy Story, Part I

Image by ocularinvasion, via Flickr

This is a story about coincidences and other spooky things.

Before my first State Department assignment, I had lots of training:

• five weeks of orientation;
• five weeks of ConGen Rosslyn, the Foreign Service Institute's training for consular officers;
• two weeks of Western European area studies;
• fourteen weeks of German language training which included a half-day each week of advanced area studies of Germany;
• one day of security training.

The area studies course was taught by the same man who taught the advanced area studies course, Kendell Meyers. He offered those of us who promised to read it, a copy of a book on "the German problem," the term used in those days for the likelihood - or unlikelihood - of the two Germanies ever being reunited. I picked up a copy of the book from him, although I never did read it.

The one day of security training brought me to the attention of Diplomatic Security because I was the only one in the room to raise my hand when they asked if anyone had ever lived in the eastern block. They asked me to stick around for a special briefing which consisted primarily of them asking what kind of contact I still had with anyone living in or from Romania. Since most of those contacts were limited to exchanging Christmas cards with my former students from Iasi, they didn't seem overly worried. They warned me about the possibility that one of those contacts might suddenly reappear or get in touch without a good reason. They warned me to be very cautious of anyone from that region, especially if they asked questions about my work. And they told me I should be sure to contact them if anything suspicious happened. Afterwards, I had visions - nightmares - of my ex-husband's family making contact with me. I would have been happy to turn to Diplomatic Security for help if that happened.

I am a very good student, so I followed the instructions from the security experts very well. Before I got onto the plane in New York, I took everything out of my wallet that would identify me as an employee of the State Department, except my diplomatic passport, and I put them with a card into an envelope and mailed them to myself at my German address.  And I hid my diplomatic passport at the bottom of my carry on bag, keeping my tourist passport handy on top. That way if the plane was hijacked, the chances of my being identified as a federal employee would be smaller, or at least so I thought. Later I realized that my ticket had a dead giveaway on it - the GTR number that indicated it was purchased by the government. That's an irrelevant fact at this point in the story.

While I was on the plane, a woman sitting across the aisle from me and who spoke with an eastern European accent asked me if I had a spare contact lens case. She said she was having trouble with her contacts and she wanted to take them out. I had a spare case, so I gave it to her. When she gave it back to me on our arrival, I threw it away, just to be sure she wasn't trying to sneak something into my new home.

Once I got to Stuttgart, I established some habits for security. I really didn't think I had to worry about it, but I used it as a game. And because I had lived in Romania several years earlier, I knew the value of following security tips.  One example was that every morning when I left for work, I would put a small sliver of paper in the door jamb as I closed it. When I got home in the evening, I would check to see if the sliver was still there before I unlocked my door.

One day at work, the phone rang in the visa section where I worked. A local employee answered it and told me the call was for me. So I answered it. The man on the other end of the phone said something like, "Hi, Sandra, guess who this is," in an American accent. I didn't know many people yet, so I said the name of the only American man I had met at that point, David. He said yes, and then he started asking me questions about what I was doing, what I was wearing, and where I was within the Consulate. He was chatty and friendly, a little flirty. I avoided answering any questionable questions. But when he asked me a couple of questions that David should have known the answers to, I didn't answer and told him he already knew that. At that point, the caller hung up. I still hadn't caught on that the caller wasn't David or anyone else I knew. I called David right back to ask him why he hung up on me. As soon as David answered the phone I realized the guy who called wasn't anyone I knew.

The way the guy got through to me was pretty tricky. I don't know if it was a security issue or if the guy was just a lonely American. He called the Consulate and told the operator that he had been at the Consulate the day before and he was calling to talk with the woman he had talked with then. So the operator put him through to the consular officer on the American citizen services side of the consular section. She was a bit more savvy than I and concluded that the guy just wanted to talk to an American woman, so she hung up on him.

The guy called back and told the operator that she had put him through to the wrong consular officer, so the operator put him through to the visa side of the consular section. When the local employee answered the phone, he said he wanted to talk to the consular officer. She asked if he meant Ms. Wenner. He said yes, so she put the call through to me. I answered with my first name, so now he had my full name.

I talked with the security officer right away about the incident and he brought the Marine Security Guard detachment commander into the conversation. Together we concluded that it was probably nothing. But when I got home from work that day, the slip of paper was on the floor in the hall, not stuck in the door jamb. So I called the Det Commander; he came over and went through the house to be sure there was nothing out of place. I realized that the slip of paper might have fallen out during the day. Or maybe I was careless and turned the knob before putting the key into the lock, releasing the tension that kept the paper sliver in place. We concluded that unless something else happened, my day had just been a series of coincidences.

Or had it?

More later. . .

Day 69 - Picking Out Potatoes

Potatoes image by lisibo, via Flickr

I learned another lesson from Mom that I use every single day of my life - both at work and at home. That's why this one deserves individual attention. And I learned this one before the age of 12 when we still lived in 307, before the move across the street to 312. It is a slight variation on the cleaning up spilled milk lesson.

I don't know that Mom set out to teach me anything that day. She needed help getting dinner ready. She gave me a potato and asked me to go downstairs and find five more about the same size.  With four kids in the family, we ate a lot of potatoes so Dad bought them at a potato farm in 50-pound bags, kept in the basement. I went down to the bag and pulled out five more potatoes, but I didn't settle for the little size of the one Mom gave me. I picked up five much larger potatoes and thought Mom would be pleased.

She wasn't.

She wanted six potatoes about the same size because she planned to bake them. If the potatoes were larger, they would take longer. If they weren't all the same size, they wouldn't be done at the same time.

I don't recall if Mom sent me back down for potatoes the right size or if she went down herself. No matter. The message stuck.

But I needed a reminder. While I was in college, I worked at my church in the office for one summer. During that summer, something went wrong with the transportation of the kids home from camp. Pastor  told me to prepare a letter to all the parents and send it right away. I prepared the letter, but I didn't see any point in sending it because it wouldn't arrive in time for the parents to get the message. Besides, I knew that all the parents were being called with the same message. So I didn't bring the letters to the post office. The next day, Pastor saw the stack of envelopes on my desk and asked me why I hadn't mailed them. I said it would be a waste of money because the letters wouldn't arrive in time. He looked at me and told me that sometimes it was important to take an action even if some other factor would interfere. In this case, he wanted the parents to know that we took every step possible to let them know about the problem. Instead, I hadn't mailed the letters. And that meant it was likely that some parents would complain that we hadn't told them. Answering machines were a thing of the future so parents who weren't home when the phone call was made would have good reason to think we hadn't informed them.

Once again, I realized that knowing the reason for the instruction would have been helped me avoid making an error in judgment. Now the lesson was firmly planted.

When my first husband Don and I arrived in Berkeley several years later, I again went to work for a church. Whenever my boss, Pastor Walt, told me to do something, I asked him "Why?" One day he commented that my generation seemed obsessed with knowing the answer to "Why?" I think he thought the question implied "Why should I do what you tell me to do?" when what I meant was "What are you hoping to accomplish if I do it that way?" With that explanation, he seemed satisfied.

How do I use this lesson these days? At work, nearly every day someone comes to me to ask me for "a SharePoint site." SharePoint is a web-based platform that can serve as a content management system (think libraries online), a content delivery system (think website), a workflow processing system (think applications, such as automated data processing for calculating and delivering payroll), or a collaboration zone (think wikis, blogs, discussion boards, or even Facebook). So "a SharePoint site" can mean any number of different things. So you see why my first question in response is some variation of "Why?" Sometimes what my customer needs is just a document library, not an entire site. But even if they need a site, I need to know what they will use it for, who will need to access it, what the relationship of the site is to already existing sites. Knowing why my customer thinks they need a SharePoint site is essential to providing them with what they need.  If I just gave them what they asked for, I wouldn't be helping them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

At home these days, knowing the answer to "why?" is essential when I help Alex with his physical therapy for his repaired knee. The first day the physical therapist came to see Alex, he hadn't gotten a full answer to "why?" from Alex's surgeon, so he started Alex out with exercises at the usual pace, too aggressive for Alex. As soon as he heard from Alex's doctor's office, he called us back to tell us not to continue with the exercises until he came back the next day. Then he showed me not only what to do but explained why Alex's therapy needed to be more conservative. If he hadn't given me that explanation, if I only knew what to do, I could be pushing Alex to do too much. For one exercise, it is important for me to lift Alex's leg to be as straight as possible and then for him to pull my hand down to the bed. But if I lifted Alex's leg up from his hip, that would be too much extension. The action would look the same, but the method would put strain on the wrong muscles.

In the house, we have a canister lighting system in the kitchen. There are six canisters, but when we flip the switch, we never know how many will turn on. We usually get four, sometimes only three. And every now and then - but not often - we get all six. We wanted to know why. We called our home warranty company to request an electrician come to look at what we believed might be faulty electrical system. The electrician looked at the lights and explained that there are two reasons that one of them might not come on: either the transformer was not functioning or the thermostat sensed the light was too hot. He eliminated the first possibility because if there was a problem with the transformer, the lights wouldn't be intermittent - once off, they would remain off until the transformer is replaced. But the thermostat is designed to turn the lights off when they overheat. His conclusion was that the canister fixtures themselves are faulty, but the electrical system is fine.

Now we know. We don't have to worry about the lights. We can put up with them until we can't put up with them any more. It is important to know the answer to the question, "Why?".

Warming Up - Exercise 7

Rituals – Why We Need Them

Do we really have to put up a Christmas tree this year?  We won’t even be home to enjoy it.

I’ve heard this thought a couple of times.  I’ve even said it myself.  In fact, the version I spoke was more a statement than a question.  My then-husband and I planned to spend the Christmas holiday with my family in northern Minnesota.  Being ever so practical, I told my husband that it didn’t make any sense to put up a tree that year.  And since I had already come to that very sensible conclusion, there wasn’t much room for my husband to provide his counter arguments.  We didn’t put up a tree that year.

It wasn’t until after the holiday that he told me he felt cheated that year.  We spent the holidays with my Scandinavian family where we ate buttered lefse sprinkled with sugar on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and every other day spent at my parents’ home, but there was nothing of his Romanian traditions – no whiskey shots before each meal, no Romanian carols.  There was nothing that meant Christmas to him.  Once I realized how important the elements of tradition – the ritual of the holiday – were to him, I also realized that by not putting up a tree, I robbed both of us of an opportunity to establish some of our own uniquely Scandinavian/American-Romanian/Canadian traditions. 

Since my practical nature is likely due in large measure to the influence of my practical parents, I wasn’t surprised one Thanksgiving to hear my father say he didn’t think it was necessary for him to put up a Christmas tree that year.  It was the first Christmas after my mother’s passing the previous January.  Her death came just days after the previous year’s Christmas tree had been taken down and stored away.  I had already decided that we kids would put up the tree, lights and decorations for my father before I returned to Washington.  And that we did – most of the decorations were placed by me – Dad’s oldest child – and three-year-old Megan – Dad’s youngest grandchild.

The next year, I traveled back to Minnesota again for Christmas.  This time, my husband traveled with me.  And our son traveled to England to spend the holidays with his English relatives.  So again, I wasn’t surprised when my very practical husband pointed out that he didn’t think we needed to put up the tree that year since no one would be home on Christmas anyway.  He was a little surprised to hear me laugh so loudly in response to the idea – I couldn’t help but think of the contrast to the time so many years ago when I first said the same thing.  It felt good to know that my husband and I share that practical streak.  But since our family consists of three, I advised him that we need to know how our son would feel about skipping the tradition.  Our son’s response was that well, yes, it wasn’t necessary for us to put up the tree, especially since he’ll be gone for two weeks and we’ll be gone for eight days.  But he added that it wouldn’t be Christmas without a tree, even if was no one would be at home.


We put up the tree that week.

Warming Up - Exercise 1

I plan to start my 365 Project next month, but I will do some warming up between now and then. That means I will pick out some pieces I wrote before and do something to update them for this blog. To get used to the idea of sharing my thoughts with others. The one below is the first speech I gave at Toastmasters, the Ice Breaker. The objective of the Ice Breaker speech is to introduce the speaker to the audience. It is an element of genius in the Toastmasters program because no one but the speaker is an expert on the subject. And that by itself removes some of the nervousness that new speakers feel.

My name is Sandra, and I am an INFJ.  While that may sound like an opening line for a 12-step program, I am actually quite proud of being an INFJ.  Are there any other INFJs in the room?

Is there anyone here who hasn’t completed at least one of the Foreign Service Institute's Leadership and Management Training Continuum courses?  That's where I learned about the matrix of 16 Myers Briggs Personality Types.

In my case, the first indicator, “I” for introversion, represents the source and direction of my energy:  I get my energy from my internal world.  When stress hits me, I retreat to a quiet place with a good book.  I find myself carried away in the worlds created by authors such as Iris Murdoch, Thornton Wilder, and Saul Bellow.  I am there with the protagonists as they face challenges and resolve them.  In doing so, I practice facing my own challenges, turning them into opportunities instead of problems.

The second indicator, “N” for intuition, represents how I know what to believe when facing the stream of information coming at me.  Unlike intuition’s counterpart, sensing, I don’t need tangible proof from the outside world to know what to believe.  My world is full of “facts” that cannot be seen, tasted, heard, touched, or smelled.  ESP is real.  Communication happens without telephone wires or radio waves or satellite signals. 

The third indicator, “F” for feeling, represents how I process the information in order to make decisions.  I make decisions based on emotion, not logic, or “thinking” in the MBTI vocabulary.  This is the indicator that has made me a believer in the MBTI matrix.  This is the indicator that has been the most difficult for me to accept.  The only unacceptable grade I can remember getting in school was an “N” (for “Needs Improvement”) for “Exercises self-control.”  Expressing emotion was not positively reinforced during my childhood.

So I spent many years suppressing that third indicator, feeling.  I used my childhood strategies for overcoming emotion – applying logic to every problem – to give the T of “thinking” in the MBTI world a boost.  But in spite of my protestations in the past, I admit that I have always looked for “signs” that my choices were right.  That’s not logic; that’s emotion.

And finally, the fourth indicator, “J” judging, represents how I use the information I receive.  I organize my life events and act strictly according to my plans.  I’m willing to adjust my plans when necessary, but I’m more likely to find ways to fit alternatives within my plans than to seek new alternatives or to improvise once I have begun as would someone with judging’s counterpart, “perceiving” indicator.  Once I find a car I want, I stop looking.  I don’t regret learning later that I could have gotten a better deal.

So what’s the bottom line?  How does the alphabet soup of MBTI attributes contribute to my self-portrait? 

First, being an INFJ puts me into a very exclusive group.  Just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s population fall into this group.  But what a group!  Other INFJs include former President Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mohandes Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt; and just to ensure there is a little levity as well, Billy Crystal and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau are also INFJs. 

Can you see why I am proud to be among such company?  We are “counselor idealists;” we hold deep convictions about the weightier matters of life, becoming activists for a cause, not for personal glory or political power.

Here’s what’s in it for me:  I like the company I am in.  And knowing that I am one of a very small group makes it easier to accept that I might be misunderstood by – or misunderstand – those around me.

What’s in it for you?  I hope that by sharing what I have learned about myself, I have provided you with a tool to understanding me, especially when I passionately leap into a discussion about my latest cause, my latest dream, my latest plan.  And I hope that along the way I’ll be able to sign many of you up as co-activists.