Soon, we'll reach the tipping point, when languid summer spills into a bustling fall. Yet, distinct sounds vie for our attention now; the rustle of tree leaves and bounce of full-blossomed flowers; swaying marsh grass; ever-flowing water against a shore; the dash of hummingbird wings; a wind chime rustling up a thunderstorm.

Each morning, nature tunes the instruments of the day. Whether you are young or simply young at heart, taking note of the summer's tones can be as delicious as pausing to lick an ice cream cone.

You are welcome to consider a handful of poems I've written over the years, inspired by the sounds of summer. If you are in the midst of a city, in a wintry hemisphere or out at sea and away from summer delights, click to listen for instant recall. 

Watching Jenny Mow 2005

Vincenzo's 40-Something Birthday 1990

Foreground 1995

Mother Mine 1980

Visit the Listening Booth for other poetry readings.

A little life.
Big splash.
Race to the float,
But, first, better ask.

Fetch a medic on Survivor's dock.
Wipe the stock of photos from the
last bonfire.
Click, click.
Tock, tock.

The buzz of voices
turn a row of tanned
young moms.
The Adirondack chairs
gleam,
as seen from the seaplane.

Trees cast long shadows
as night falls,
As one by one,
they call,
"Mommy, watch me!"

What fun echoes across the lake:
"Not my circus. Not my monkeys."

Such a charmed life,
for the children's sake.

Spiffy library-related moments: Lifework led to the reward of a book copyright in my name as primary author in the United States Library of Congress, one whose card I found in the 1990s as I flipped through the Dewey Decimal System catalog at a Westchester County, New York library. Then, too, copyrights of poetry and short story collections I wrote between 1975 and 2010 are recorded in the Library of Congress - a noteworthy thrill.

I visited that historic Library of Congress building one day while on a trip to Washington, DC. All I could say was, "Thank you for launching it all in 1800, John Adams." And "Thank you, Thomas Jefferson. As a child, I remember first reading how you liked to collect books." More than 6,000 Jefferson books on all sorts of topics formed the basis of our first collection in the original Library of Congress.

Every state has its private library gems. In New York on the east side of the Hudson River - from Washington Irving's Sunnyside in Irvington to Olana in Hudson - the historic estates of the rich housed libraries for their residents that today can be toured by the public for the price of admission. Children file though on field trips to peer at the leather-bound books under light filtered through bedazzling stain glass, exposed to the mystery of a time nearly forgotten.

According to his foundation, industrialist Andrew Carnegie established more than 1,600 free libraries in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Century to benefit those willing to better themselves and immigrants who needed to acclimate to their new homeland. As a young immigrant, Carnegie enjoyed access to books from a businessman's private collection and extolled the value of learning.

Yet, Jefferson's impulse to provide a free library for all citizens ever bears repeating for the sake of all youth to senior citizens. I applaud the urge to appropriate funds for government-sponsored resources for an informed nation. I wonder how could the answer be more apparent when the discussion turns to funding a bookmobile or a local library branch?

Educated people contribute to their society and lead richer lives. Unless you are of the opinion that society has no need for an informed citizenry - one that has developed discernment, pays attention to what is happening under its own nose and votes? Or, you side with the philosophy of one Southern municipality restricting rights to payment that expects homeowners to fork over set fees to have their house fires extinguished and the rest of the homeowners can go to blazes.

The debate about a society's responsibility may have begun at the tiniest town library circulation desk, and it continues at public computer terminals where average citizens freely do their research and acquire knowledge. That responsibility to provide access to knowledge may not be exactly so stated in the United States Constitution, but the document itself has a home in a taxpayer-funded building. Copies of the document are in public libraries all over the country. I bet you can even find one on a bookmobile. It's something every child in America should have at his or her fingertips, though grumbling tax revolters seem to struggle to see the personal value of that public access.

Long ago in the bookmobile, I had come to value publicly funded libraries, schools, recreation programs, arts programs, then fire departments, peace officers, road construction crews, postal service workers and government workers operating the Library of Congress and a host of other agencies.

In 2015, a politician seeking the highest office in the land (who shall remain nameless) said he dreams of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and its tax forms - of having people send in a simple postcard. Larry Wilmore, the Comedy Central political pundit who replaced Stephen Colbert, labeled that dream a little confusing and wondered, "If you get rid of the IRS, to whom would one send the postcard?"

What do you think would happen if we take away all the libraries, let them die the death of grumpy neglect? May I direct your attention to the libraries of the ancient world, such as the library at Alexandria, Egypt, started in 283 BCE, and said (in a 2013 article in Ion9) to have closed after hundreds of years, not due to fire, but to government budget cuts? Look it up if you don't believe me. Look it up while you can.

Question: What is the biggest building in the world? Answer: The library. It has so many stories.
                                                                                             *  *  *
Around age seven, I climbed up the steps of a bookmobile (repurposed school bus). Compliments of the New York Public Library, the bookmobile regularly stopped in my neighborhood. That day, I glanced around at its half-dozen brimming bookcases, and, after assessing the situation, figured I could indeed read all the books in the library.

A few years later, when my family moved to a brownstone close enough to walk to a neighborhood public library branch, I pushed open the heavy wood doors of a graceful former mansion and gulped, taking in rooms full of tall bookcases under high ceilings and tall, paned windows with deep sills where one could sit in the sun and watch the dust dance. I reasoned that reading all the books in this library would take time, and I was up to the challenge.

Bowled over

When one day my father marched my sister and me as children from Manhattan's Grand Central Station to the 42nd Street's Main Branch of the New York Public Library at Bryant Park, and we strode past the stone lions and through the enormous entry, I had to sit down at a study hall table to take in the rows of catalog cabinets, stuffed as they were with Dewey Decimal System cards noting the location of the books. My ability to multiply did not extend into the millions. Chastened, I accepted my limitations. I could never read all the books in my world. That didn't mean I wouldn't try.

How to Tackle the Task

While my approach to selecting books in the bookmobile had been haphazard, I attacked the job in an organized manner in my neighborhood branch. First, biographies of artists, explorers, historic leaders, inventors, musicians, scientists and sports people. I learned how outstanding men and women overcame circumstances of birth and history. I gobbled up the biographies and considered well the notion of what a human could do. What one could be. It was something to contemplate while sitting on a window sill, watching the dancing dust.

Moving from biographies into fiction, I discovered authors on the shelves - A to Z - with mixed results. Quickly, I realized a novel - even a teen novel - is a commitment, one I felt obliged to meet once I checked out a book. So, I introduced myself to writers through their short stories, more quickly determining my interest level for the worlds and characters they conceived. Though Look, Life and Time magazines and Reader's Digest condensed books were all the rage in my house, few in the family seemed drawn to full books. It was a matter of personal discovery, one that raised eyebrows at the dinner table for my seemingly wide-ranging taste in books.

How Tall the Tower of Books

In those days, the heavy stack of books I carried four city blocks from the library to home rose up to tuck under my chin - sometimes perilously to my nose. I learned I best keep track of their pricey due dates and whereabouts in the house, warding off the fines from a librarian that could cut into my ice cream fund and the exasperation of my tidy parents.

Still, I heartily agree with Marcel Proust that, "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." I had so many favorite books. As author Neil Gaiman wrote, "A book is a dream that you hold in your hand." Thanks to the New York Public Library, I held countless dreams - for free.

Being Dazzled

Through college and graduate school, I would continue to savor time spent in an academic library, each year growing clearer on how little I knew beyond required readings. Rather than depress, the thought spurred me on to be precise in my leisure-reading choices.

True, I read my way in adulthood through a detective phase, an espionage phase, a legal thriller phase, a medical thriller phase and forays into The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby that still give me chills. Mostly, I sought out great writers to enjoy. The piercing works of a dozen writers, including Pearl S. Buck, Robert Graves and William Styron, proved unforgettable. Then, too, nonfiction held its sway for decades. It would be fair to say I shared the sentiment expressed by Jorge Luis Borges, "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."

Looking up

Freelance assignments led to the discovery of ever-expanding library research options, another great awakening. Working in Los Angeles in 1984 on the pre-production phase for the acclaimed Timothy Ferris television special, Creation of the Universe, I cut hours of the physical toil finding individual books in the library of the University of California to instead spin away the available microfilm and microfiche spools on topics as diverse as world creation mythology and particle physics.

Another project - this time in New York researching for a book on a 100-year history of child health care in America - brought me to the databases of Fordham University School of Social Work at Lincoln Center where I saved days of work in gathering the footnotes needed. So astonished was I by the speed of searching databases I could tap there that once again I just had to sit down - this time outside on the plaza steps at Lincoln Center as the crowd whizzed by. To think, I had come from a bookmobile to a vast reservoir of knowledge, and this only one of thousands in the world.

Like my first visit to the 42nd Street library, it proved to be a pivotal day, turning my attention more firmly toward modern information technology and all it could accomplish. I would seize this method of research again and again for articles, as readily as I had poured over handwritten colonial-era diaries and listened as a captive audience of one to recorded oral histories about the Civil War.

Addicted to Speed

I still frequent my local library - after searching its online databases and logging electronic requests. I also secure audio biographies and fiction online to hear on my phone. Face it: I am addicted to speed; though I still experience satisfaction following the Dewey snail trail to a particular book on a particular shelf - like embarking on my personal Lewis and Clark expedition.

Fast-forward to today's Internet and, well, you know how extraordinary it is to have so much information at our disposal. I do not begrudge my grandchildren the ease with which they can and will learn what they must. Hip-hip Hooray! Good for them. Go forth daily to be amazed.

                                                                                    End of Part I

It was the summer of 2013. Arriving for the first time at a cozy bungalow in the Hudson Valley just outside of New Paltz, New York, we took in the view of sloping lawn, woods and pool and savored the cool hilltop breeze - streaming in at a balmy temperature we last experienced in Florida in March.

We would set flowers on the dining table of the screened-in porch and relish time spent in this spot from morning to night. We also would encounter a fair share of noisy neighbors known as cicadas - these happen to emerge from underground abodes every 17 years. According to Gardenersnet.com, "When a particular brood (of cicadas) matures and emerges, it is usually in many millions of insects."

Our little bungalow colony was spared the worst of the lot, and after a while, we adapted to the daylong background cricket clatter. Harder to view were the thin branches of some deciduous trees falling victim to the insect's routine devastation. Said Gardenersnet. com, "Fortunately, their adult life span above ground is very brief, lasting about four to six weeks."

Still, we learned it was not so easy for those in an affected region who found their properties inundated with the cicadas; slender tree limbs draped with brown leaves and lawns blanketed with the carcasses of these crickets who had been living it up for their very brief lives. (I do mean living it up: A female cicada can deposit up to 600 eggs.) Forget about relaxing outside in such an insect orgy.

States affected in 2013 included CT, GA, MD, NC, NJ, NY, OK, PA, VA. In some cases, the remains of thousands and thousands and thousands of crickets carpeted lawns and yards. Raking them proved to be a macabre and unending task. It made winter's snow-blowing and autumn's leaf-blowing routines blithe by comparison.

In the face of such a deluge and with a choice between going absolutely mad and going creative, one New York resident came up with a wild, bright idea: fashioning garland from cricket remains and spraying the buggers bronze. Looking at the resulting garland, I marveled at the choice we have to face life's plagues of locust. (Being bronze, this option falls just short of foiling the creeps - but it is artfully defiant.)

Can't always run from unpleasant reality, and a "House for Sale" sign wouldn't work in the midst of 17-year cicada season. Residents somehow learned to hunker down and address the icky situation with the resources at hand. Up went nets over young trees. Down came damaged limbs. When at last the brunt of the invasion ended, and it was possible to kick back outside on a visible green lawn, the summer breeze never seemed so good. The relative peace never comforted so much.

If you are in the midst of a plague upon your life, I wish you a creative alternative to agonizing defeat. As with all things, this too shall pass. May you have some say in how it will leave you.

Swelling cello, coquettish strings.
Silencing birds who are want to sing.
The wind stirs leaves to polite applause.
We choose to linger here.
 
Viola and violins flit and weave.
A mosquito buzzes as he would please,
Licking "Off" by degree. 
as another movement proceeds.
 
Spindly trees stand round a
Table meant for Robert Starer,
Composer from 1924 Vienna
Who left the earth near Woodstock in 2001.

Robert's stone table and a summer breeze!
Cool any ire as
coughers cough and sneezers sneeze.
Sun dapples our carpet green.
Sun on your table, on nearby fallen trees.
Herr Maverick, thank you for
moments like these.
              
A bell rings to end the program’s break.
Chatty Boomers age gracefully
as Schubert commands violin and viola,
as the cello agrees.
 
The brow of Maverick arches
with its diamond window panes.
I heard they glow at night.
No mere barn could cast such light.

These woods befit a Viennese canter.
Hollywood Bowl musicians stir all souls.
Ghosts banter.

2015 Maverick Concerts @ Woodstock

As one of the constants that went entirely right in my life, music accounts for so much joy, intellectual enrichment and spiritual nourishment as to be essential to my being - a gift I wish for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Worth a Twirl around the Living Room

First performed in 1924, "Rhapsody in Blue," the jazz-era masterpiece for piano and symphony orchestra, is deemed a landmark in 20th Century American music. Hearing it as a child was enough to make me twirl ecstatically around the living room. With its sweeping 1920s cityscape and orchestral sections,  I tear up now when I hear it because, "It is so beautiful!"

Still Emotional

Emotion plays in me with most music; from my mother's sweet, lyric-soprano lullabies to the mash up of British alternative rock band Radiohead and "Brahms Symphony #1" performed in 2015 by composer/conductor Steve Hackman, The Florida Orchestra and vocalists at St. Petersburg's Mahaffey Theater.

"Buoyant" was the word at Tampa's Straz Center when, on a 2015 world tour, Steven Sharp Nelson of The Piano Guys, performed J.S. Bach's "Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1" backed by a video of renditions on eight cellos. (The so-called "Cello Song" collected 19,173,315 You Tube hits as of 7:45 p.m. Eastern time on June 18, 2015; though 1,864 of them added a thumbs down. I side with the 161,933 majority.)

Unforgettable and Divine

As to memorable night music: Nothing surpasses picnicking at a New York City park concert with a million people as the New York Philharmonic performs Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," complete with fireworks. And, minus fireworks, I can picture the silken-voiced Rosemary Clooney standing alone on the stage of the packed Hollywood Bowl on a magic night, wrapping the audience around her finger.

For cathedral music experiences: Attending evensong at St. Paul's in London and at York's cathedral as choirs sang baroque music stand out as enchanting trip highlights. The profound 2011 memorial for 9/11 victims held in Notre Dame, Paris, opened with thunderous organ music improvised by the cathedral's master Olivier Latry that rivaled the emotional turmoil of the event. And, saxophonist Paul Winter's annual Solstice, held since 1980 at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is a yearly uplifting extravaganza of world music.

Joyful Noise

I was thrilled to be among 5,000 people crowded into Riverside Church in Manhattan one Christmas season to perform Handel's "Messiah" with soloists from the Metropolitan Opera.

Singing in a choir each Sunday in another historic church next to the pipes of an organ played by a Juilliard-trained organist was a moving experience.

Sharing a Connecticut choir loft with superbly disciplined West Point choristers resonated to the core - that so many years after joining my first squirming childhood choir.

In a choral outreach at the Danbury Federal Correctional Facilities, I watched with delight as women inmates formed Gospel, Spanish and Caribbean choruses and gained fresh appreciation for the great escape of music.

Attending years of school concerts for my children held a certain charm, especially as one daughter stood poised with a violin and the other earned a seat in the flute section. Hearing my daughter sing Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" in a New York State high school solo competition filled me with gratitude for the legacy my mother left us.

Thanks to my singing family and esteemed choral maestros and maestras, music from the 12th Century onward is a lifelong passion. So touched was I by the experience of performing in Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna" with the Tampa Oratorio Singers and orchestra (and my husband) in 2003 and 2013, I had to email the California composer to express my thanks. He let me know of a haunting 2013 documentary "Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen" that shows Lauridsen with choirs around the world and explores his craft, as he practiced it on a secluded island in Washington's Puget Sound.

The Music Police Has My Number But ...

Pandora Radio, the online streaming service, informed me that I had listened to 1,304 songs in a month in 2015. As music-police records show, that didn't include one note of the soundtrack from the beloved "King & I" or "Sound of Music" or "South Pacific" or "Gypsy" or "Auntie Mame" or "West Side Story" or "Man of La Mancha" or "Les Miserables" or "Fiddler on the Roof" or "Jesus Christ Superstar" or "Tommie, the Rock Opera" or "Hair" or "The Lion King" or the Beatles-inspired "Across the Universe." It didn't list opera favorites: "Tannhäuser" or "Don Giovanni" or "Marriage of Figaro" or "Aida" or "La Boheme," or "Madame Butterfly" or "La Traviata" or "Carmen."

New to Me

My Pandora stations list is light on most doo-wop, classic rock, ambient and classical music I have in my library. Instead, the list is long on the works of new (to me) artists featured on St. Vincent, Neutral Milk Hotel, Mumford & Sons, Alternate Indie Love Songs and Adele.

How else would I get introduced properly to the talent of Regina Spektor, Christina Perri, Sara Bareilles, The Killers, Iron & Wine, The Shins, Band of Horses, Passenger, Bon Iver, Philip Philips, Balmorhea, Modest Mouse, Paul Cardall, Of Monsters & Men, Boiled in Lead, The Vitamin String Quartet, Dallas String Quartet and The Piano Guys? Or, reintroduced to Billy Holiday, Etta James, Glenn Miller Band, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Edith Piaf and other perennial greats?

A Whole World

I wish all such music for everyone. Yet, World Food Program reports, "Some 805 million people ... do not have enough food ..." Still, investment in music cannot come soon enough as news reports tell of extreme cultural impoverishment: The late Bob Simon of CBS 60 Minutes showed musical instruments being fashioned from garbage recycled in a landfill in Paraguay and distributed to poor children in surrounding ghettos with heartening results.

Simon also filmed the introduction of classical orchestral music to the Congo where eager recipients of donated instruments walked miles each day to practice and then perform Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." As with indigenous music, people responded enthusiastically to centuries-old European masterpieces.

We sentient beings appear ready at all times to be moved by music. With the ripple of the worldwide web, more people are exposed to more music. Consider the rags-to-riches story of Filipino Arnel Pineda, once a street urchin who ascended to be Journey's lead singer. The American rock group discovered him in a worldwide search in 2007, made possible because of the video files of Pineda's music that his friend uploaded, revealing a talent that rivaled the original lead Steve Perry.

Smarts

On an historic note: I am in good company in musical ardor. In the Internet article "Music and the Brain," Scottish musicist Laurence O'Donnell maintains, "Music helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence," citing he played his violin to "get the words from his brain onto the paper." O'Donnell says Albert Einstein, passionate about Mozart and Bach, figured the "reason he was so smart is because he played the violin." If it was good enough for Jefferson and Einstein ...

For All Ages

In a 2011 National Public Radio interview with Elena Mannes, author of "The Power Of Music," she said "... scientists have found that music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function."

Mannes also refers to Sheila Woodward, who researched musical sound in the womb. A miniature microphone placed in the uterus of a mother in early labor recorded Woodward playing music and the mother singing. The team detected strains of a Bach "Brandenburg Concerto" and the melody being sung. From womb to tomb, music expands life's possibilities. In the world of the hearing, each of us can decide - score by score - how far and wide we roam. We all have time for more joy.

So, to sign off making mischief with a song from my childhood, "The Happy Wanderer" (which you can find on YouTube), I hereby exit stage left with my swan song, "... Rhapsody, Rhapsoda, my knapsack on my back." 

 “...for 3.8 billion years ... Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected ... in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.” 
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Because of author Bill Bryson, the world is a better place. He is among the most creative in his generation of authors. It's his life's work to remind us how spectacular existence is.

Wouldn't you like it to be said you make the world a better place?  Who would you want to say it?

As author Michael A. Singer suggests in The Unfettered Soul, be the chief witness of your own life, and be reasonable. You are a tiny speck in vast space. And, while Singer says there isn't much you can do to affect the rising sun or setting moon, consider Dr. Seuss' words in his Happy Birthday to You! book: "If you hadn't been born, you might be a wasn't. A wasn't has no fun at all, no he doesn't."

And, as the creative 19th Century writer Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” 

If daring to be your creative self is among your life's aspirations, know it comes at a steep price. In Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, Scott Timberg says creative types in the 21st Century are hard-pressed to find enough paid work to sustain themselves.  

Public funding is sparse in America. A study by Grantmakers in the Arts - Supporting a Creative America points out that internationally, Ireland's $16.96 per capita spending on the arts (not including Northern Ireland) in 2012 compares to Unites States' $0.47 per capita spending on NEA funding in the same year. With no patrons and barely perceivable support from U.S. taxpayers, arts grant applicants of every ilk are left to vie for a sip from an arid well.

As a person whose first poem published (for cash American dollars) in a magazine in 1981, I already considered it a stretch to be a sustainable poet or fiction writer in the 20th Century. All but non-fiction writing seemed out of the question if I wanted to do right by my children. Non-fiction it has been - for magazines, newspapers, educational and marketing outlets and business - as creative as I can make it.

Among my most financially lucrative careers was a twelve-year stint as a writer in a corporate Information Technology department. It involved comprehending the operation of a given computer application (App) and adhering with singular devotion to the technical-writing style guide to describe steps to using the App.

When let lose to write an intranet article free of such style constraints, I basked in the task - a child at the beach. A subsequent nearly five-year position in the same firm called for article writing only. Sunscreen, please!

In the computer world, pressing the Ctrl+Z (Undo) keys lets you undo unsaved previous actions. It prompts a screen refresh, such as erasing text you haven't saved in a document. Everything you haven't saved, "Poof!"

Now, if I could press that key to undo something in my life, what would I erase that hasn't already warranted space in the recycle bin? Certainly, never ties that bind with my dear husband or family, nor with friends of the road. Not the poems or articles; not the video scripts or books, not short stories, essays, paintings or sketches and not the IT quick guides or online help. You can be sure I'm with Bill Bryson - basically thrilled by my life - and all I can say is what my  daughters say to me on Mother's Day: "Thanks so much!"

As time ticks away in my 90-year plan, I'm more inclined to one day press Ctrl+C (Copy) and Ctrl+V (Paste) on some futuristic computer and atom-by-atom download myself to a next world. Maybe art grants would be better there, and I could afford to be more creatively daring. Or, just continue to be content - no, amazed - to have lived and created at all. As Mr. Bryson says, consider the odds.

Modern dads rock. Even without the hilarious 2010 You Tube Dad Life video detailing their many fine qualities, they have ample reason to add a notch to their belts every Father's Day.

I say this as a living artifact of 1970s parenthood, that transitional phase when being with a fully functioning co-parent meant (with any luck) seeing a budding dad "help" with the kids and magnanimously wait for the applause to die down. That took time, since any act of male parenting - like sitting next to the bathtub and flipping through a magazine while the children splashed in it - was grounds for all around cheers.

Back then, it was common and acceptable for a dad to be too queasy about soiled diapers to change them; to exit the room if a baby spit up and wait until the all-clear sounded; to not hear a baby cry in the night, since he "had to work" in the morning.

Even at that, the 1970s dad was a far more involved co-parent than previous generations, those who were not expected to help with childcare at all, so clear was the division of labor in American homes up to the 1960s. The traditional dad served as breadwinner and acted as if his wife's fulltime parenting - which paid nothing - was not work.  

And who could blame a man for following in the footsteps of traditional fathers who, after a hard work week (and lawn/fix it duty), did no more than grab a beer and kick back in the recliner for the Saturday night fight or Sunday football game and holler to his wife to bring the pretzels and keep the kids quiet.

Still, old-fashioned dads gained our everlasting affection for taking us on outings to the softball field, fishing pier, woods, beach, circus, football stadium, and Thanksgiving Day parade; the later to let mother cook in peace.

Anyone can tell you, when the father of the house comes home, you can still hear a joyous, "Daddy!" from little kids (echoed by their relieved moms). The evolution observed to date includes for most families the induction of the co-provider, that female who works for pay outside the home and parents, even more, often carries the family's medical insurance. The one who now fights over the recliner and remote. (You can now hear a joyous, "Mommy!" from little kids (and their relieved dads) when she walks in the door.)

Even in the 1970s, it was becoming obvious one breadwinner was one too few. Back then, women could rightly balk at the physical impossibility of the Energizer bunny supermom model being touted in women's magazines. Looking around at typical family life, there seemed no way to be a supermom, super wife and super earner without an equally charged superdad, super husband and super earner.

I do not know how mothers and fathers do it today; the grueling schedules; the striving to keep their secure marriages, jobs and a roof over the family's head; the exhausting array of shared household tasks. They are super.

Though I admire mothers who parent with aplomb, I marvel when I see fathers tenderly placing babies into supermarket cart seats and tooling around the aisles, confidently selecting the formula, baby food, disposable diapers, diaper rash ointment - as if it is no big deal. Their wives are engaged in the career rat race, working late and often still solo commandeering the myriad details of their children's lives - annual physicals to school concerts to sports events and play dates.

There's something to be said about how both parents achieve strong bonds with their children and each other by such a high degree of parental involvement and true partnership. Today's families deserve society's support and the acknowledgement through governmental, educational, business and corporate policies that parents and children matter all the time and need their time together, even when they aren't making a dime. See the new book: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses – And How We Can Fix It Together

Happy Father's Day!  Dad Life

Native New Yorkers, especially women, are not easily impressed. We've shown ourselves inclined to suspect any rave of perfection and preemptively dismiss it. That's because we're reared to question life experiences with a shrewd appraisal.

Asked to opine, many of us respond with a shrug and (some claim) Yiddish expression that hardly meets the category of vocabulary. Instead, it implies by body language that the subject of discussion is a possible candidate for spitting up or, at least, indigestion.

For instance:

"So, what do you think of that new restaurant?"
"meh."
"How was your blind date?"
"meh."
"Would you say it was worth going to that Broadway show?"
"meh."

For those who see life that way in general, a handbag manufacturer stamped "meh ..." on the front of a clutch, allowing women to forego conversation and just wave the little bag at inquiring friends.

I'm waiting to see a "meh" bumper sticker, probably during the next election cycle.

(The house cats I know act out "meh" as a rejoinder to most of life and would say it if they could. I have detected "Meow" altered in certain situations.)

On top of the skeptical human response to life's supposedly fantastic, awesome, excellent wonders, the language we use when we are impressed tends to slide toward the dark side. A few examples:

"The musical was to die for."
"It was death by chocolate."
"I could kill for a diamond like that."
"I love the kid so much I could eat him."

Say, again? What's all that about?

It's the flip side of "meh." Ferocious certainty is what it is. And, when people who are not native New Yorkers engage us, some step back - literarily or figuratively - as if we might devour them. Fear not. The opinions expressed do not represent a physical threat to anyone. You might see us good-naturedly raise a brow at your opinion. Like that of my hero, the brilliant Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Think "meh."

Literary types familiar with poet W.H. Auden might expect to see the variant "mneh" with its similar pronunciation. According to Ben Zimmer writing for Slate in a September 6, 2013 article, "A History of Meh, from Leo Rosten to Auden to The Simpsons," Auden concluded "mneh" when he failed to be impressed by the understandable hoopla surrounding the historic 1969 space mission to the moon.

Basically, Auden said he preferred quiet, lush gardens to the moon's austere surface. Now, that was a poet who was tough to impress. Then again, Zimmer fast forwarded to fans of The Simpson's who heard it said in 1994, fitting snugly into their wickedly jaded view.

Given global, interactive and continuous networking and communication, the New York "meh" model now fits everywhere. (Los Angeles and Florida have always been suburbs of New York, so they were first to fit.) Humans are universally hard to impress:

• Certain I overheard a 'meh" exchanged in 2011 between two stylish women at a Parisian café, accentuated by a flick of their slim cigarettes, but, of course. 
• Saw two men in a Venice fish market in 2014 whose body language conveyed it, hands outstretched for emphasis. 
• Think I detected a guarded "meh" passed between Belizean father and son crewmen aboard a sailing vessel loaded with snorkelers and anchored along Hol Chan reef in 2013 - that as the two spooned out lunch to the day's tourists. Not sure if the "meh" was meant as a comment on the food or the tourists. 
• I would not be surprised to hear "meh" uttered in an Asian rice patty as a farmer clenched his cell phone between ear and shoulder and turned down a mediocre offer for his crop.

Finally, a "meh" was not so much said as implied in my all-time favorite failure to impress. On a jet ascending over the range of snow-capped peaks of Switzerland in July 1971, a passenger turned from the window to her seat mate and sighed, in typical New Yorker fashion, "Seen one Alp, you've seen em all."

A good one, huh? No? Not that good? Hmm.
 
Bet you've got far better encounters with "meh" to report, especially if you are from the Big Apple or its far-flung suburbs. Feel free to share them - other than when referring to this blog, if you would be so kind.