Désalpe- The Day Swiss Cows Take to the Streets

No wonder people love Switzerland. It’s a place where even the cows party. In October villagers throw a street bash in celebration of the livestock.

Cows were so commonplace in my childhood growing up in the Midwest, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would go out of their way to watch a herd of cattle, but during the désalpe, the day when cows come down from the mountains to the valley is a popular event, as much a part of Swiss tradition as Swiss cheese.

decorated cows

Thousands of visitors jam the cobblestone streets of Saint-Cergue perched on the Swiss side of the Jura, to applaud the herds of cows and sheep that parade through town. The désalpe festival honors the fat, four -legged fellows who keeps the country supplied in butter, milk and cheese.

The shepherds and herdsmen leave the highlands at the crack of dawn to arrive in the Swiss village on the lower slopes of the Jura mountains early in the day. The lead cows, wearing flowered headgear as elaborate as new brides wear, meander through town mooing. Leather collars a foot-wide hang around their necks, which attach to cow bells the size of lampshades.

For 24 hours at the end of summer, the quiet, ski village turns into a giant block party. The sidewalks and town square are filled with stands where merchants sell local Swiss specialties; raclette, crepes, sausages, soups, beer and wine. At overturned wine barrels tourists knock back white wine served in traditional tiny cups barely bigger than shot glasses.

Big burly-bearded men in jeans play the accordion, flute and violin. Bands of musicians dressed in traditional attire, black smocks embroidered with mountain flowers, black hats and gray pants, representing different mountain villages play the cor des alpes. The red-faced men blow into the the10-foot long straw-colored alpine horns creating sounds as forlorn as the nights of solitude that herders endure in the alpine pastures. Local choral groups sing equally mournful tunes. A short, stocky man in a black suit cackles when he demonstrates his whip cracking clearing a 100-foot circle in the crowd. A flag thrower twirls the red Swiss flag with a white cross.

Swiss horns

In Switzerland the cow is sacred. Senntumsmalerei, herd painting, is a special part of Swiss folk art, depicting the semi annual pilgrimage of the cows up and down the mountain.

In the spring another festival will honor the cows as they return up to the highlands for grazing in the summer. Most likely, I will be there paying homage. After seeing the désalpe, I’ll never take cows for granted again.

A Fond Farewell to Summer

On a steamy night in Chicago at the end of August, a symphony of crickets and katydids announce summer’s end. In a blink the hazy, lazy barefoot days of summer are over. Gone are morning sleep-ins, afternoon swims and evening backyard barbeques. School started with its frenzy of class lists, timetable changes, book buying, shoe tying and out-the-door-flying.

And I am back in the land of cheese and chocolate. From my back patio as the last rays of Indian summer sunshine shimmer over the white-peaked hood of Mt. Blanc, the end of the season melancholy hits me.

So how about a non-toxic, calorie-free pick me up? Nobody blasts away the blues better than the American saxophonist Grover Washington Jr’s window-shaking, horn blowing. R.I.P. Grover, your music lives on.

Thank you to the father of the smooth jazz genre for lifting up our spirits with the sounds of seventies. For a bit of nostalgia, kick back to a time when it was safe for children to play in the street after dusk, when neighbors helped raise all the kids in the hood and « drive by » was no more harmful than a McDonald’s lunch run.

TGIF from Switzerland!

Sending sunshine in a song!

Summer Song from the album Live at the Bijou (1977)

« Sing that Summer Song,

soon it will gone,

get that fever now,

come we’ll show you how,

sing it in the street »

September 11, 2001 – September 11, 2011 In Remembrance of 9/11

Ten years ago today, our sense of security was shattered instantly – the time it took passenger jets controlled by suicide bombers to crash into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

It was one of the moments in history where you will always remember what you were doing when you heard the news. When I arrived home from class, a friend was standing in my living room, her eyes glued to the TV screen. “Oh my God!” she cried, “The world is ending.”

I stared at replay of the film footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center disintegrating 110-floors of metal and concrete, leaving 3051 children without a parent, and destroying the lives of thousands of families.

Terrorism. Live. Direct. In our homeland. At our hearth. In a heartbeat.

Suddenly we are all thrown into a real life horror show.

Yet no matter how many times we heard and saw the televised broadcast, we remained frozen in disbelief.

Even though, I lived far away in Geneva, home of world’s greatest peacekeeping organizations, and in a safe environment in a neutral country, the news stunned my international community of globetrotters. That year, my English class students at a Swiss international school wrote to the children of the UN school in New York, whose students lost family in the bombing.

Today, a decade after 9/11, my new students can’t remember a world without terror. They all know someone who knows someone, who was at the wrong spot at the wrong time in Bali, Jakarta, London, Paris, New York.

Today, even the most seasoned travelers step on the plane with trepidation. And anyone with a conscience wonders, what kind of world are we leaving our children? A world where commercial flights become deadly human missiles, where buildings dissolve like sand castles in the storm, and where innocent lives are annihilated in the blink of an eye.

The Ground Zero monuments, museum and 10^th anniversary commemorations offer a tribute to the families of victims of 9/11 and to the American spirit of resiliency. As we take a moment of silence to reflect and honor the men and women who perished during the attack or rescue mission, may be we also say a prayer for those people of other lands who have also lost loved ones in the fall out of terrorism.

One of my former students was 12-years-old when her mom died in the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi. She wrote about it in class.

“When they told me, I was so upset I tried to run through a glass door. Now I write until my fingers bleed.”

Alone at night we still shake, terrified and powerless to curtail the madness of our 21^st century world; together in the light of day, we stand tall and reach out in small steps. Healing begins in our homeland, at our hearth, in a heartbeat.

Weather Predictions From the Front Porch

Weather is a safe topic in social circles unless you are a meteorologist. The weather journalist has a no win gig. If he/she warns viewers of the upcoming tornado, hurricane, cyclone, blizzard, we lament they are sensationalizing the news when the weather pattern changes direction/velocity/impact. Case in point Hurricane Irene. With an estimated 65 million people from the Carolinas to Cape Cod at risk of being in Irene’s projected path, governments declared a state of emergency. Yet afterwards journalists’ interviewed irate New Yorkers and tourists from abroad (all male) who cursed the evacuation warning and felt the stay indoors policy was over the top. I am sure the people in areas harder hit like North Carolina or Vermont were grateful for the warning. If the meteorologist neglects to alert viewers to dangers lurking in the clouds, then he/she is at bigger fault. Case in point, Hurricane Katrina.

I know only one weatherman who is right all the time. My dad. He inherited the weather forecasting gene from my grandpa. As soon as inclement weather is forecast anywhere within a 500 mile vicinity, he turns on his storm buster box, a static sounding, battery-run weather radio. Then just like his dad used to do, he’ll stand on the porch admiring the clouds and yelling at family, « Take cover. Now !» This may be a guy thing. One brother-in-law chases tornadoes on bike in Minneapolis. The other one, who farms in Illinois, can read the clouds like the back of his hand.

Unless you grew up in the Midwest though, you can’t fathom how fast storms can roll across the plains. This summer my folks were at a picnic at the other side of the lake, when a guy there saw storm warning on his Blackberry. My parents hopped in the car and drove a mile back to our cabin on the other side of the lake.

canoeing in front of torn up shoreline

«Bat down the hatches !» my dad hollered from the driveway just as my French husband was heading out to sea on his toy boat, a catamaran.

The Frenchman had no sooner lowered the sails, when the winds hit. My son saw the tarp over the motorboat go air born, raced down to the waterfront to fix it and came back up the hill yelling, « the sailboat is gone. »

Oops, there goes the brains of the family – the doc, the professor, the business exec – out into the torrential rain on a rescue mission to catch the runaway sailboat. While they dashed into the churning black water in 60mph winds, I paced in front of the picture window thinking OMG, « My family is going down! »

The storm lasted less than 10 minutes, yet wiped out a wide swath of forest 20 yards from us. The sun came out as if nothing had happened, but the straight line wind peeled bark from elms, uprooted cedars on the shoreline and toppled thousand year old trees onto rooftops. Nearby areas looked like a bombed out war zone.

uprooted trees

If a strong wind can wreak that much devastation in an isolated forest, imagine the fall out from a hurricane hitting the the urbanized, densely populated east coast. My thoughts and prayers go out to people caught in Hurricane Irene’s path.

We are so quick to blame the meteorologists for misreading storms and creating false alarms, yet with global warming, the weather has gone crazy. The adage- better safe than sorry – applies especially in storm season. If you question your local meteorologist’s predication, take my advice. Have the man of the house to stand on the porch and give you a play by play of the cloud action.

Illinois’ Sterling Girls Capture Little League World Champion Crown

Yoopie! Take me out to the ball game. I am going to jump on the bandwagon here and give a shout out to the folks back home in Sterling and their championship team. After all the gals of my generation helped build that wagon 40 years ago when Title IX passed into legislation, leveling the playing field by mandating equal opportunities (including sports) for girls in public education.

I applaud those pony-tailed girls with crooked grins on cusp of adolescence who whooped the world in a boys’ game. In my day, Little League was a private, male club that we never dreamed of one day entering.

Sterling vs Waco Texas http://www.softballworldseries.com/

I admire the pictures of those cute girls in baseball jerseys and can’t help but notice that the names of the three father coaches, matched those of three players. The coach/athlete, dad/daughter duo was an anomaly back in the day when my dad first taught my sisters and me to field grounders. Now it is the norm. Without a second thought, today’s dads fight to make sure their girls’ get their names on front page.

I have been out of the country too long – I had no idea that a Girls’ Little League World Championship existed. Yet, these little ladies are strutting their stuff on a Field of Dreams. « Today Little League, in existence since first in 1947 (for boys), is the largest youth sport organization with more than 25,000 softball teams and 360,000 participants worldwide. The program includes divisions of play for girls ages 5 to 18, which culminates at four Softball World Series tournaments for international competition and friendship.” http://www.littleleague.org/learn/about/divisions/softball-girls.htm

Hats off to Sterling, the Central Regional Championship Team, for winning 19 straight games and defeating Waco, Texas in the world series final in Portland Oregon. This year the event, established for girls in 1974, drew clubs from Puerto Rico, Philippines, Canada and Italy, as well as Texas, California, Oregon, New York and North Carolina.

I was surprised to find out that teams existed abroad, yet the European, Middle East and African regional champs were from Italy this year, from Poland last year, and from Germany, the year before that. The American game has gone international. Though at my school in Switzerland, I still teach softball as a ‘foreign’ sport because cricket (for men only) is considered the premier bat and ball game.

So yessiree, take me out to the ball park. Give me some peanuts and crackerjacks and I don’t care if I never get back for it’s one two three, hip hip hurray for the Sterling Girls Little League World Champions. Thanks for putting my hometown on the globe in a grand slam effort inspiring girls worldwide.

Happy 80th Birthday Dad – Celebrating friendship, fatherhood and family

From pine lined point of ol’ Camp Neyati and back to Beaver Bay, I glide through a silver blue lake, stroke after stroke, while you sit on an wrought iron chair under the elms on shore, watching to assure my safety. If I were in danger of drowning, you could never reach me, but I am confident knowing you are there ever watchful, a benevolent eye, just as you have watched over me for the past 54 years.

During my journey filled with adversity, you offer encouraging words from the background to keep me steady. You admire my courage fighting in the face of pain, commending the discipline that drives me to swim in an icy lake on a rainy day. You marvel that I traveled half way across the world in pursuit of a dream to play basketball and now in adulthood wonder how I can endure another teaching day with my health limitations. For me it doesn’t seem that extraordinary; after all, I am my father’s daughter.

If I was able to pioneer a career unheard of for women, move abroad and rewrite my script after my dream collapsed, it is because of you. I inherited the McKinzie iron will, a drive to pursue lofty ideals in spite of obstacles.

Though you still worry about your adult children and grandchildren, the tables have turned; now dozens of eyes watch over you. After your heart incident 25 years ago, I postponed my trip back to France to stay by your side. I witnessed how you changed your habits to accommodate a condition that altered your life, but never slowed you down. This year I supported you long distance as you recovered from 4 different surgeries. You still attained your goals: to stand up as your eldest granddaughter walked to take her Hippocratic Oath and to sit down at a middle granddaughter’s high school graduation party. Now a day never passes where I am not grateful that you are still with us to cheer us on.

Jim McKinzie (80th birthday) with Lenore and kids

Bad arteries, good heart. The best. It touched the lives of all whose paths you crossed. From Dekalb High classmates to Northern Illinois University teammates to Sterling High School colleagues to the Mighty Warriors and the Golden Girls, for decades, you were the marker to which so many students and fellow teachers measured their worth. Your words still inspire many athletes; your letters became treasured keepsakes.

Your generous heart helped finance college education, provide pocket change and gas money for grandkids. You helped perfect jump shots, spiral passes and line drives. Your patient heart read Good Night Moon to a demanding grandchild and balanced a checkbook for an even more demanding father. Your intuitive heart painted canvases, counseled female athletes, and recognized a child’s distress in the sound of a voice during a long distance phone call. Though you set extremely high standards for yourself, your accepting heart was the first to welcome a foreigner into the family, to treat people of all walks of life as equal, and to understand others who are different.

As the son of Coach Mac, integrity was deeply ingrained. As McKinzie kids we had to tow the line. But by emulating our father, the man who walked the talk too, you inspired each of us to stand taller.

We come from good blood. The life lessons passed on from your father, “Coach Mac” McKinzie trickled down to you and then onto each of us in our helping professions.

At halftime of the 1986 Super Bowl the United States President announced, “Whatever I am today, Coach Mac had an awful lot to do with it.”

I will never be as famous as Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, but I echo his words, “Whatever I am today, my own Papa Mac had an awful lot to do with.”

Now just as you stare at the Summit Lake water front and track my stroke, I in turn peek out the cabin window you to make sure you don’t stumble when your wander off in the woods. We watch over one another in a special father/daughter bond built from hours of sharing meals, shooting hoops, swapping stories, taking trips, and spending time together marking the milestones. Like 80^th birthdays!

Congratulations Dad and an extra special shout out to all the athletes, colleagues, family, friends and former teammates, who reminded us all in memorabilia and words, how lucky we are that you have touched our lives.