Sophia Serve

A Resurrection Story

 I owe my life to you, Henrietta Lacks. Your cells are the most important thing that's happened in medicine--maybe ever! Thanks to you, drugs and vaccines have been developed for treating cancer, polio, influenza, Parkinson's disease and so much more.

You were only 31 when you were diagnosed with cervical cancer. You were treated (with pretty ghastly radium) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore because they were one of the few hospitals that treated Blacks. You died in 1951 and your body was barely cool, lying down there in the basement drawer labeled "Colored," when parts of the dime sized piece of tissue your doctor had removed, were shared with the hospital lab. You see, they were trying to find cells that would stay alive long enough to experiment on and because a lab assistant named Mary put down her tuna fish sandwich, made her space sterile, labeled a vial HeLa after your name, you started traveling, girl! Tissue still can't legally be sold, but it can be shared for research purposes and believe me, you were shared!  People couldn't believe their eyes. Your cells multiplied faster than any other cells any researcher had ever worked with.

We don't know how many of your cells are still living around the world but we do know that "the gospel of HeLa" has been written about in thousands of medical articles. Your cells are still frozen and when they're thawed out, no matter when or where, they just keep multiplying.

In the years following your "death," cell factories began growing and sending you, quite literally, around the world and beyond. NASA even sent you into space. Some scientists fused you onto mouse cells and you taught them how genes work. The whole new field of gene therapy is thanks to you.

Rebecca Skloot, the artful and tenacious reporter who tracked down your family and tells your story, says one scientist thinks that even though cells weigh literally nothing, if all your cells could be stacked up on a gigantic scale, they'd weigh 50 metric tons! There's a lot of you going around, Henrietta.

In the mid 60s people discovered that cells float around and can land in other petri dishes, and if they're robust like yours, they contaminate other cultures.They called it the HeLa Bomb and you destroyed a lot of "pristine" research and caused millions of dollars of damage. But your family always did say you were the feisty one. Now they carefully isolate you from the other cultures.

When they found out about how no one had even asked them if they could share your Mom around like this, your family was naturally pretty upset. But of course we all sign consent forms when we enter hospitals and nobody really knows where their tissues go. It's just that yours are so much more valuable than anyone else's. Companies and foundations can charge for processing and storing your cells and as Skloot tells it, one vial of you is currently being sold for $250. That's more than your funeral cost. It must have been hard for your husband to understand how your cells (when the only cell he knew of at the time had bars on it) could still be living.

But you'll be happy to know your grandkids aren't planning to sue anybody. They don't want to stop your research. They just want people to remember who you were. And how much good you've created. Amen to that, Henrietta. You sure do know the meaning of resurrection.

 

A Concern in Trade

No doubt fortified by memories of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, I decided to post another 20 or so recycled wool hats under Kelsey Mountain Hats yesterday.  I am nearly as obsessed as he, but without the frizzy pinky-orange hair.

I’ve been hand-sewing hats for about a year, now. Since I don’t use toxins (as the earlier hatters did) I doubt that I’ll go mad but I sometimes catch my husband looking at the mound of sweaters I’ve amassed and I know he wonders.

At first they were all “my babies” and I hated to see them go away. Then they began to pile up and after making about 200 of them, including the 16 that recently were sold in a fund-raising project as “Hats for Haiti,” they begin to look a bit alike even though each is still quite unique. Just like children in large families, I suppose.

For Christmas, son Nate gave me A Concern in Trade: Hatting and the Bracebridges of Atherstone, 1612-1872. Just the title tells you a bit about him! He must have cruised the web for some time to find that book. Judy Vero wrote it and it was published by a small (quite small I’d guess) publisher in Warwick.  The only remaining hatting company that still survives happens to be Vero & Everett Ltd. 

Her family book tells all you ever need to know about the history of feltmaking (or planking which I tried by whacking wet wool with a rubber mallet to no avail…this made me decide if the wool wants to felt up in a hot washer and dryer it can; otherwise, I use it as is.)

Wool felting came to England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. I also learned that in 1732 Walpole, under George II, banned the import of beaver hats from America. Instead, we had to send over just the pelts so hats could be made in Britain. Another US industry down!

Because I know you’re dying to know, I’ll tell you that Samuel Butler in 1655 established his feltmaking shop and Samuel Bracebridge was working as a haberdasher of hats. This all took place during Cromwell’s commonwealth period. Feltmaking soon became a way for local wool to be put to good “common-wealth” activities. Especially for the Bracebridge family. Vero painstakingly lists all the people who first made hats, including appropriately enough, Joseph Hatton! But it was the Bracebridges of Atherstone who truly did it! Bracebridge owned property in Athens and participated in their revolt against the Turks. Then war broke out in the Crimea. Wars need hats so Bracebridge's coffers grew even larger. The Bracebridges, as it turns out, were friends of Florence Nightingale. (That was just a sidebar)

I gather Atherstone is no longer a great hatting center, but they do still make wool felt hoods, apparently.  I’m not sure who wears wool felt hoods after Robin Hood's gang. But after a few craft shows and farmers markets, I do know who buys my hats. And who doesn’t. The “Who Doesn’t” category includes women who take one look and say, “I like these, but I can’t wear hats.”  And the ones who say, “I love them, but I’m allergic to wool.” And most men. Although I’ve had several male customers fall in love with some and foist them on their female companions.

The  “Who Does” category includes my family and friends, of course. But they supported me during my “Let’s make waste paper baskets our of big ice cream containers,” phase, too, so I probably shouldn’t count them. Others include pre-teen girls who love to see themselves in the mirror which I always provide. Teens who gravitate to the hats with attitude.  Twenty-somethings who are making enough money to buy a hat for “fashion” reasons. Thirties through Fifties who say: “Wow. Are these all recycled?” And grandmothers who are looking for cute kids’ hats, forgetting that a toddler loses hats about as fast as Johnny Depp lost his train of thought in  “Alice in Wonderland.” Or the one grandmother who bought one recently. When I saw  her at our March Townmeeting and asked her how she was enjoying it, she said, “I don’t know. My granddaughter put it on and she won’t take it off!”

Hatting in Atherstone is a lost art. Hatting in my house is a found one—and I’m loving every minute.

Snicker-Snack

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the momeraths outgrabe…”

I’m guessing a lot of folks are digging out their old beaten-up copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass as I did, just to see how Tim Burton melded the two. After seeing the movie, I spotted glimmers of Harry Potter and Glinda the good witch as well. All in all, though, I thought his movie was…well, “twas brillig!”

Mia Wasikowska makes a wonderful Alice but I had looked forward to meeting the Walrus and Carpenter, and the Mock Turtle and see a bit of the chess game. But not even Burton can do everything! Just his croquet scene with bubble-headed Helena Bonham Carter swinging a flamingo mallet into a hedgehog is the worth the price of your ticket.

Alice, now 19, slips away from her toothy suitor, Hamish, and careens down the rabbit hole again only to return to Underland—a place where she went when she was six. But now she can’t pinch herself awake and must fulfill her quest: find the Vorpal Sword and kill the Jabberwocky in order to free her friends from the wrathful Red Queen.

We are Alice Everywoman/man. That is, if we take to heart what the scientific-mystic David Spangler writes about in Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes. Forgive me Lewis Carroll and David Spangler, but maybe I saw similarities because  I was so deeply immersed in Subtle Worlds before falling with Alice down the rabbit  hole.

Like Alice, we also need helpers and partners on our journey. And we, too, inhabit more than just our physical world.

Nearly every night we explore dream worlds and with careful training, we can enter many other zones.

Like each of us, Alice must take responsibility for her life. She need not always do what others expect of her, but she does need to follow her soul—even if it leads to encounters with Bandersnatch claws! It proves that what and who you meet in the “underworlds” or “overworlds” or “subtle worlds” may not always be what you think at first. 

Spangler, says, “Every thought and emotion has an energetic shape.” And like Alice who grows and shrinks by what she nibbles or drinks, our own energy fields also change. “Anything you do that stimulates and heightens your powers of imagination, whether it's of the creative or the conceptual variety, will help you in engaging with subtle worlds."

Seeing Alice in Wonderland definitely exercises the imagination.

What a treat, just to be in the company of the darling Dormouse and the loveable Tarrant Hightopp/Johnny Depp aka the addle-brained Mad Hatter with the price tag, 10/6--ten shillings, six pence--still on his magical hat.  And who wouldn't fall in love with the March Hare!  What a fabulous tea party!

Stephen Fry’s voice matches perfectly the antics of the Cheshire Cat.  But Alan Rickman as Absolem the Blue Caterpillar, puffing on his hookah, was my absolute favorite because he asks the most important question anyone could ever ask in this world or in any other:

“Who are you?…What size do you want to be?”

There was nothing subtle about Absolem or about any part of Alice's Wonderland. Still I couldn't help making more and more connections to Spangler's Subtle Worlds as I dropped my 3-D glasses into the waiting box. 

"Our task," he says, "is to bring forth a time when we will experience the earth not as two worlds, one physical and one non-physical, but as one united planet of sacred life and consciousness, singing a song of wholeness to the stars and taking its place as a radiance of love and blessing for all the universe." 

What could be more brillig?

The Joy of Reading

Our granddaughter, approaching three, sits on the kitchen floor and turns pages of the Joy of Cooking as she “reads” Dr. Seuss books out loud. She can repeat those magical word-rhymes and luscious alliterations all by heart, and she knows those squiggle-marks on the page mean something. So why not connect them, proving once again that all children are linguistic geniuses.

I can’t remember exactly when I cracked that code. I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.

“We were never born to read.” That’s how Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts childhood development professor, begins her book with the unlikely title: Proust and the Squid. It is, as her subtitle states, the story of science and the reading brain.  The title comes from the reading insights we gain from Proust (reading as a kind of intellectual sanctuary) and the squid (reading by making neuron connections).

We were never born to read; we were born to tell stories and keep oral histories going. Reading came late in our human development and “folks in the know” at various times said—don’t do it! It will destroy your memory. Socrates didn’t write because he believed books could short-circuit the work of critical understanding. In India during the 5^th century BCE Sanskrit scholars decried the written language (as did the Druids in another part of the world) because they thought oral traditions made for intellectual and spiritual growth.  But I tend to agree more with Menander who said, “Those who can read see twice as well.”

Now that everybody (but me it seems) twitters, we find ourselves substituting our rich written language for one that’s more tweety and syllable and icon-ripe. Why, after all, shouldn’t we spell “wine”  Yn? 

It seems a waste, though, to use only 144 characters when we all know so many more.

If we are using more than one written language, it's not the first time. The Sumerians, for instance, had a dialect called “fine tongue” which women used, as opposed to “the princely tongue” used by everyone. Kids spent long years in "tablet school" learning to read and write both. One old Chinese writing system used only by women was based on phonetic translations of word sounds and was called “female writing.” The Japanese have their kana syllabary used especially for foreign words, names of cities, people and newer words along with the their older Chinese-influenced logographic script called kanji.

Our granddaughter continues to separate out cat and kitty and meow and Riley, the cat’s name, and one day soon Josie's fertile brain will have figured out how to read in milliseconds all those words she's stuffing into her ever-expanding cranial word-cupboard. And, like Proust, she’ll then have access to untold realities she'll discover between the covers of books.

Sugaring Off

Dirt roads+melting snow=“mud season.” It’s here and it’s squishy.

But that’s what we Vermonters can expect every March along with our town meetings and lots of little tin buckets with pointy hats hanging off every maple tree around.  (The more serious sugar farmers up here run little white pipe lines from trees to holding tanks and evaporators. But it's the buckets that make March for me.)

There’s a saying in Vermont: It will sugar off.  That means you don’t have to worry about things too much because eventually, the sap boils off and you’ll have golden maple syrup. Things will settle down.  After all the collecting and the steam’s evaporated, the essence will appear.

I trust that will happen to our sappy steaming vat of national health care reform. What's sap and what's the real thing?  Maybe before Vermont’s sticky sugaring season is over, we’ll actually have something sweet to sink our teeth into. We've been wound up for a year now, listening to claims and counter-claims. I’ve decided to just stop thinking about it anymore.  It will all sugar off.

This morning I learned that meditating 12 minutes a day staves off aging. Excuse me. I'm off to be as still as one these buckets.