Adoption Stories: How Eleanor Got Her Middle Name

After my ex and I agreed on our newborn daughter's first name, we chose “Eileen” as her middle name. She's named after Grandma. When you combine "Eileen" with “Eleanor” and “Leishman,” my daughter’s signature becomes a dizzying spiral of l’s and e’s. 

“Eileen” is my mother’s middle name. And, in one of those strange coincidences that will not surprise regular readers of this blog, “Eileen” also happens to be my sainted ex-mother-in-law Judy’s middle name.

I’ll let Eleanor ask her grandmothers the specific origin of their shared middle names. No doubt long-dead Mormon and Lutheran great aunts are involved.

Instead, let’s approach Eleanor’s middle name as a matter of statistics. What are the odds of having two non-Irish grandmothers named Eileen?  

The Social Security Administration doesn’t publish data about middle names, but as every expectant parent knows, SSA maintains a marvelous first name database going back to 1880. The year Grandma Judy was born, “Judith” was the twelfth most popular girl baby name in the country. “Eileen” was way down the charts at #113. As you can see from www.names.org’s handy graph above, “Eileen” had languished in a similar range after enjoying modest popularity in the early 1920s.

When my mother was born four years later, “Marcia” had crawled from #116 to #105. But “Eileen” had jumped to #88. Of course, that's still only 0.002233% of the baby girls born in Grandma Marcia's birth year.

Multiplying these two independent probabilities gives you the odds of drawing a pair of "Grandma Eileen" cards from the baby name deck: 1 in 2,239,140,170.

I'm more interested in another question – what caused the sudden spike in Eileen’s popularity between the births of Eleanor’s grandmothers? My Sister Eileen.

In 1942, Columbia Pictures released the movie version of this successful Broadway play. My Sister Eileen was originally based on a series of autobiographical short stories Ruth McKenney published in The New Yorker. The movie was so popular it soon inspired a movie musical remake with Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon, as well as a separate Broadway musical.

Every version has the same plot:

Sisters Ruth and Eileen move from Ohio to New York to make it big. Ruth wants to be a writer, while Eileen is an actress. The rent a dreary basement apartment in Greenwich village, and meet a cavalcade of quirky New Yorkers. Ruth is the dreamy, quiet one. In contrast, Eileen is arrested after accidentally starting a riot.

Hmm, Eileen sounds like another Drama Queen.

I’ve never seen My Sister Eileen. However, I’ve attended a production of the musical Wonderful Town, which is based on the same story. Wonderful Town has a lovely score by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by Adolph Comden and Betty Green. As I was doing research for this essay, I discovered Rosalind Russell won the 1953 Best Actress Tony for playing Ruth in the original Broadway cast of Wonderful Town.

I love Rosalind Russell. She’s amazing in classic movies from His Girl Friday to The Women. In fact, Russell’s iconic performance as Auntie Mame was one of two primary inspirations when we named our second daughter “Rosalind.” (The other homage was to Shakespeare’s sparkling heroine in As You Like It.)

Then I noticed that Rosalind Russell also played Ruth in the original 1942 movie version of “My Sister Eileen.” 

As it turns out, both my daughters are named after the same pair of sisters. What are the odds?

Yes, I realize the title of this essay could also be
 "How Rosalind Got Her First Name." Stay tuned.

Click here for more episodes of Adoption Stories.

Woke Humans

Humans think we’re special. On some level that’s just our delusion of grandeur. Numerous other species are faster, stronger, prettier, more numerous, etc. Some species have actual Marvel Cinematic Universe superpowers, like flying or inflating. 

On the other hand, our species’ accomplishments – for better and for worse – have transformed the planet. Just look at our name. We’re "homo sapiens," which is Latin for “wise men.” Humans are special because we can think. At least we think so.

Other animal species have brains, too. Many animals share similar cerebral structures. Some species even have some of that impressively rational grey matter on top. Nevertheless, other than a few obsessed primate researchers and all devoted pet owners, the rest of us would agree no other species matches the kind of consciousness every unimpaired human exhibits after a certain age.

So how did pre-human brains make the leap to human minds? 

Under some brain/mind models, consciousness arises from sheer processing power. For example, in the Terminator movies, the good Arnold Schwarzenegger warns us not to flip the switch and turn on a scary global “Skynet," because it will lead to computers taking charge of the planet. Similarly, adding more peripherals and memory eventually woke up my personal favorite sentient computer, Mycroft in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A big-is-better approach made particular sense to mid-20th-century behaviorists, who argued brains consisted of undifferentiated and malleable neurons. 

More recent brain/mind models emphasize particular brain regions and their associated functions. You can expect more from life than lower animals, because they're limited to a reptilian brain stem and cerebellum. Like other mammals, we're also blessed with purely emotional limbic lobes that sometimes think they’re in charge. But even our clever chimp and dolphin cousins would envy the wrinkly grey folds of our well-endowed cortex. 

The newest and most human part of the brain is the “prefrontal cortex." This is the home of executive function and other highly complex mental processes, including key aspects of language and presumably consciousness. 

Regardless of your specific brain/mind map of human consciousness, it’s fun to think about how we got here. Evolutionary biologists and child psychologists have tried to identify when the human mind originated. Both point to the same breakthrough in the development of the human species and in the development of each human individual child:  “Theory of Mind.”

This phrase comes from an influential 1978 paper by David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” Their model is rooted in philosophical writing that goes back to Descartes and beyond. 

In one of those annoyingly postmodern ways, the term is self-referential. “Theory of Mind” is not merely shorthand for a prominent theory about how minds develop. It’s also the essential human brain function itself:  having the capacity to understand our experience and act based on the proposition that other individuals possess a mental state that may differ from our own. 

Under this theory, a child – or a species – attains the capacity for “Theory of Mind” when their brains have developed enough to perform the following functions:

You and I can each feel, believe, and imagine different things. And we both know it.

To pound the point again, true consciousness doesn’t mean merely having a brain that can feel, think, and envision things. Don't get me wrong, these are impressive feats. A minuscule fraction of all species have accomplished feeling, and even fewer can make a feeble claim for anything resembling thinking. As far as we know, no other species is capable of imagining alternative futures. Nevertheless, having a "mind" also means your brain is powerful enough to recognize there are other folks out there who desire, think, and dream, too.

There’s a second and perhaps more subversive element of the mind/brain theory of Theory of Mind. I’ll skip its history and implications because I am a humble English major, not a "Philosophy Ph.D." [Ed. Note: That’s another annoyingly self-referential term.] Anyway, the capacity for Theory of Mind also means your brain can perform this operation:

I recognize my mental state and your mental state are independent of the real world – we can each feel, believe, and foresee things that are not true and never will be.¹

            ¹Hopefully no one is tediously postmodern enough to ask the follow-up question “Does it matter whether you think I recognize that, too?” 

As with other mental health impairments, some individuals’ capacity for Theory of Mind may be diminished in one way or another. This can result from a wide variety of influences on your brain/mind, from autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and ADHD, to damage from drugs including cocaine and alcohol, to malignant narcissism.

Did you know that when you type the phrase “Theory of Mind” into Google Images, you will find multiple PowerPoint presentations from introductory psychology courses, all including this same cartoon?

Anyway, let me tell you my theory of Theory of Mind.

There’s lots of living things out there. Zillions of species have enough brains to do Me.

Many species can do both Me and That. “That” is everything that’s not “Me.” "That" is not all the same. For example, only some of That is edible.

A creature with Theory of Mind can do Me, That, and They. “They” is sorta like “Me.” As with That, eventually we figure out They is not all the same. For example, only some of They is edible. #chemistry #MeToo.

Ultimately, Theory of Mind allows humans to understand other people, as well as ourselves. Hopefully by working together we can better understand all the That that’s out there, and solve some of the world's pressing problems. Isn't that what thinking is all about?

But maybe, just maybe, there’s a little bit more.

According to Blogger’s statistics, the all-time least-read post on this blog is my essay last month about Pixar movies and brain anatomy, “Inside Out.” I blame Facebook’s rapacious new algorithm. Or maybe the off-putting topics. Of course, Blogger is part of the Separate But Evil Google Empire, so it could be their fault. Math is hard. 

Whatever the cause, my post’s neglect makes me sad. Until now it was probably my personal favorite of all the essays I wrote this year that didn’t involve either my family or Canada. After discussing Fear, Joy, Anger, Disgust, and the brain modules corresponding to those four emotions from Inside Out, this is what I wrote about Sadness:

I started this essay months ago, but I got stuck trying to write about Sadness. 

My life is depressing. Some days when the kids are gone I can't get out of bed, let alone write. More importantly, I didn’t want to characterize this emotion as a mere negative – an insufficient supply of dopamine. To the contrary, the complex relationship between Sadness and Joy is at the center of the movie Inside Out.  

Then at my friend Henry’s suggestion I read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst. Sapolsky is an excellent writer, and he does an amazing job of explaining brain function and its relationship to other physiological and social processes. Behave starts at the level of the individual neuron, and telescopes out to address neural networks, brain modules, hormones, developmental biology, genetics, cultural transmission, and natural selection. 

Sapolsky discusses the role of the brain’s Anterior Cingulate Cortex region. The ACC monitors our internal and external environments for any discrepancies with our expectations. The ACC not only identifies “unexpected pain,” but it also helps us process the "meaning of pain." For example, major depression is linked to ACC dysfunction. 

Significantly, the ACC also plays a key part in a uniquely human trait:  empathy. Observing and understanding pain – ourselves’ and others’ – apparently is essential to our shared humanity.

Under my theory, a healthy Theory of Mind requires another essential brain capacity. Humans are not only the species who can do Me, That, and They; we can also do We. “We” is the portion of They that we treat like an Us – rather than a Them.

So what happens when humans finally evolve enough to feel empathy?

Our brains grow three sizes. Not just our hearts.

Happy Holidays from Bellingham and Vancouver 

Canada Customs

I cross the border into Canada at least once a week. The representatives of Canada Customs are invariably polite and friendly. They’ve never hassled me or suggested I wasn’t welcome in their country. 

Here are typical questions I get as I drive north past the Peace Arch, which marks where the 49th parallel runs into the ocean:

“Where do you live?" Bellingham.   

“What’s the purpose of your visit?” I sing in Vancouver Men’s Chorus, and we rehearse on Wednesdays. 

“Why do you sing in a chorus in Vancouver?” I used to sing in Seattle Men’s Chorus, but when I moved to Bellingham I realized the commute to Vancouver would be much easier.

“Are you bringing anything into Canada you intend to leave behind?”  No /  I’m bringing Trader Joe’s wine/peppermint cremes/eggplant as a gift for my host.

“When was the last time you were in Canada?” Last Wednesday. Or Sunday. Or Thursday. Whatever, Mary.

Many of the Canada Customs agents seem genuinely curious about the Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Some of the random questions I’ve gotten:

“What part do you sing?”

“What kind of a chorus is it?”

“What kind of music do you guys sing?”

“Where do you perform?”

“When are your concerts?”

“What’s the hardest part about singing?”

“Is it weird singing with only men?”

“Do you get paid to sing in the chorus?”

“Do you know a guy named Tony? I think he's a bass.”

“How often do you rehearse?”

“Isn’t it usually just once a week?”

“Does anyone else from the States sing in the chorus?”

“Is it true baritones are just second tenors who can’t read music?”

I’ve also gotten plenty of oddball non-chorus questions over the years. 

For example, last Sunday the guy from Canada Customs asked me "How did you break your driver's side mirror?" (A truck hit me and I couldn't afford to fix it, so I've been praying for a new car instead. It's only been two and a half years. Thoughts and prayers....)

Some questions at the border probably make more sense in context. For example:

“Do your parents know this man is taking you into Canada to ride roller coasters?”

FYI, Eleanor and her friends were on our way to celebrate her birthday at the PNE.

Last Wednesday I got another brand new question. It was a follow up to the regular “When will you be returning from Canada?” 

“Do you stay overnight every time you come up for chorus?" 

My answer:  “I have my kids half the time, so the weeks when they’re with me instead of with my ex I have to hurry home after rehearsal to relieve the babysitter.”

How about this preposterous question: 

 “Are you carrying over $10,000 in cash or negotiable instruments?”   

I’m an unemployed disabled single dad teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Go figure. 

Only one person at Canada Customs has ever asked me to show him the money. In contrast, I regularly get this same tragicomic question from the overzealous Boy Scouts at United States Customs & Border Protection.

What's your guess for Canada Customs’ second most frequent inquiry, after “Where do you live”? 

This is no exaggeration. I get some version of this question virtually every time I cross the border into Canada: 

“Are you carrying any firearms?” (Or “Are you carrying any firearms, knives, or other weapons?” “Any Mace?” Etc.)

I’m amazed every time. I’m a middle-aged liberal driving his kid-ravaged minivan to gay choir practice. Do I match the National Rifle Association's profile of a typical gun-toting American? Or are Canadians just particularly gullible?

Besides, if I were planning to go postal, I wouldn’t be heading to Canada.

This next question from Canada Customs is officially the second most homophobic thing anyone in authority has ever said to me, other than my bigoted former employers. (My blog post last Sunday, "Adoption Stories: Flying the Friendly Skies," was about my most homophobic official encounter.)

I’ve gotten this particular question multiple times at the border in the past, although I haven’t had occasion to hear it recently. Nevertheless, other gay guys also complain about getting the same question, which I suspect is not routinely asked to straight couples:

“How do you two know each other?”  

A few months ago, the booth at Canada Customs was manned by an agent I’d never seen before. The new guy was a total dude, with shaggy Whistler ski bum hair. He’s the only person who’s ever asked me the following question:

“Are you carrying any firearms or cannabis products?”

This was on Wednesday, October 17, 2018, the day recreational marijuana use became legal across Canada. He was smiling.

As with many questions from Canada Customs, the correct answer is a polite “No.”

Backing Up

Recently my parents’ ancient PC began making ominous noises. Then the screen went black. It came back to life a few days later, but you never know. Despite growing up with parents who lectured them about the Great Depression, my own spendthrift parents quickly went out and purchased a new HP laptop at Best Buy. I told them to finally buy a Mac, but they said it's too late to change.

They asked me to help back up all their data and transfer everything over to the new computer. It's been a fun week. My parents and I are smart, funny people. We enjoy spending time together. You could film a witty Netflix sitcom just of us backing up the computer at their house. I bet you’d be convinced they're Jewish, too. [Ed. Note: You remember they're Mormon, right?]

In fact, you could film a Netflix sitcom at my parents' house. When my father did the remodel, he insisted on installing heterosexual light fixtures so bright you can perform surgery or film a movie in any room in the house.

    [LAUGH TRACK]

Anyway, when it comes to actual computer skills, you’d think my parents would be able find someone more useful than me. I have three brothers, three sisters-in-law, twelve nieces and nephews, and three thoroughly plugged-in children. Two of my nephews are currently on Mormon missions in the African jungle, so they’re unavailable. Still, surely someone else in the family is more agile than me. There are lots of young folks who grew up in a world filled with miniature supercomputers. Frankly, most of them are addicted to their little supercomputers.

Plus I’m an oldest child. So everyone in the entire family is younger than me – except my parents. Including the two teenaged grandchildren who are currently squatting in the spare bedrooms at my parents’ house. 

Not to mention my brother the computer guy. Prior to working in IT at Harvard then programming for Google, he began his career as a telephone custom service representative for a Bellingham company that sold software.

Of course, my computer brother has lived in Boston for so long he cheers for evil sports teams. My lawyer brother moved to Africa years ago, so he’s no use. Even my insurance adjustor brother recently snuck out of Bellingham in the dead of night, this time moving to the hinterlands of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. 

I hate to be the one to say this. But why is it always the spinster daughter and/or gay son who gets stranded alone in the small town with the “aged ancestors”?¹

¹This is the term of endearment that Bertie Wooster uses when referring to his beloved Aunt Dahlia. Not to his nasty Aunt Agatha.

     

The truth is, I’m the only one who can help my parents back up their vintage computer and move its prehistoric data to the new laptop. Because I’m the only one in the family who remembers it all – DOS, 512k RAM, MS-DOS, Windows, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows ME, the whole decades-long dysfunctional relationship among IBM, Microsoft, and their traumatized customers. Plus, as a person living with PTSD, I've developed special skills for coping with the day-to-day frustrations you can expect from any Kafka-esque situation.

Fortunately for my kids’ sake, our little family switched to Apple long ago. Over here at our house it's all iPhones, Macbooks, and iMacs. Nevertheless, because of various former employers’ misguided IT choices, I've never completely escaped the tractor beam pull of Microsoft’s Death Star. I still know my way around a Window. 

Unfortunately for both my kids’ and my parents’ sake, for the last couple of years I’ve worked at home on the iMac. I was also busy dealing with my PTSD diagnosis. My PC skills are a little rusty.

So this week I’m busy coming up to speed with Windows 10 – in between wrangling kids, and memorizing French and Hebrew carols for the Vancouver Men's Chorus concerts that begin Saturday. I've already made numerous house calls to the old homestead across town on Alabama Hill. 

Sadly, I’m the best thing my poor parents can hope for. As usual.

With the possible exception of my brother the computer guy. Who has a cellphone and is only three time zones away.

Obviously I’m not going to reveal any parental confidences about the actual backup-and-transfer experience at the Leishman house. (Unlike my home, their house is pronounced "Lishman" rather than "Leashman." No one's house is pronounced "Leischman." It's complicated.) Instead, I’ll conclude with my all-time favorite backing up story. It comes from when I was on my Mormon mission in Seoul, Korea.

There are two kinds of folk stories: myth and history. My favorite history story from my mission really is one of the true ones, or at least as true as anything can be after being filtered through thirty-five years of memories. I had ocular proof, from my own file cabinet when I served in the mission office. 

But I’ll save that story for another day. This is my favorite Korean missionary myth:

On your mission you have all kinds of amazing and miraculous experiences that let you tell stories decades later. Nevertheless, being a missionary is stressful. You’re away from home, in an alien country, living a regimented lifestyle, sharing the gospel with strangers, because God himself told the Prophet to call you to this exact time and place. That’s a lot to process. It changes you, mostly for good. 

You also pick up lots of useful life skills, like cooking, foreign languages, public speaking, and operating heavy equipment. For example, when I was a teenager in Utah and Washington, I never got around to learning how to drive a stick shift. All our cars had automatic transmissions. Besides, my parents live on the top of a steep hill, in a rain forest – I was terrified of stalling and sliding back down Alabama Street. Instead, I learned to drive a manual transmission at age twenty, when the Seoul Mission President called me to help out at mission headquarters. Unlike Mormon missions in other parts of the world, only the mission office staff ever drove cars. All the other missionaries walked or used public transit. In our very urban mission, riding a bike would have been suicidal.

Driving was pretty fraught, too. In 1984, the roads of Seoul were like something out of a Mad Max movie. The lines between lanes were newly painted, and uniformly ignored. There were no speed limits other than the laws of physics. Nevertheless, this is where I first learned to drive a stick shift. In rush-hour traffic outside the central post office. In the rain. In a Bongo minivan.²

³Hmm. Do you think my current Kia minivan triggered my PTSD symptoms? [Ed. Note:  No.]

As I recall, the mission Bongo was manufactured by Kia, but it could have been Hyundai (which is Korean for “Modern”) or Samsung (which is Korean for “Three Star”). All the vans in Seoul looked the same. And they all sounded the same. For example, most Korean vehicles played the same sound whenever you backed up. Not a beep, but a song. Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” 

Anyway, I heard this story from another missionary, not long after I landed in Korea. It's about an Elder who left before I arrived. But not long before, because supposedly there still was some missionary in Suwon who served together with this guy when he was a greenie.

Although the other missionaries in the district could tell this Elder was struggling a little, his companion hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Then one morning as the other Elders in the apartment were eating breakfast, they heard the faint sounds of Fur Elise:  “na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-nah.” Then a little louder: “Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Nah.” Then “NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NAH!” Continuing his loud chant, the Elder began to back around the apartment like a truck. They had to call the Mission President and a doctor.

As with the Shady Dame from Seville in the musical Victor/Victoria, "the rest of the tale’s not a pretty one." The missionary was sent home. Supposedly he tried to castrate himself with a spoon in the airport. No one seemed to know what ultimately happened to the mythic Elder.

Most have you have seen The Book of Mormon. Or you’ve illicitly listened to the soundtrack when everyone else was at church, and you stayed home “sick.” I went with my mother for her birthday. 

                          

There’s lots of mythmaking involved with both Mormon missions and Broadway musicals. In most ways, my experiences in Korea were very different from what the play portrays as the experiences of Elder Price and his brethren in Africa. (With the obvious exception of Elder McKinley, the repressed gay missionary who told you how to “Turn it Off.”) Nevertheless, part of the reason audiences respond to The Book of Mormon is there’s at least a kernel of truth in all good stories.

I hope the part of the Korean story that’s true is the backing up. 

Adoption Stories: Flying the Friendly Skies

Here's the story of the most horribly homophobic thing anyone ever said to me.

My ex is ten years younger than me. We were 41 and 31 when we adopted Eleanor. 

When Eleanor was a couple of months old, we took her on a plane for the first time. We were visiting friends and family in the Midwest. Our flight left out of a crowded Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Obviously we flew with both an overstuffed diaper bag and a bulky car seat. 

Jason went through the metal detector first, carrying our daughter. I wrestled the bags and car seat into the x-ray machine.

Admiring my amateur efforts, the perky TSA Security Agent said “And you must be the grandfather!"

Click here for more episodes of Adoption Stories.