This seemingly dubious plan was hatched in the spring, when my mother-in-law Dorothy began talking about wanting to see the land of her grandparents. She was born in the US, as were both her parents, but all are 100% Slovakian; she grew up in a Slovakian neighborhood, speaking Slovakian at home. But no one in her family had ever gone back to visit and she decided it was time to go.

Given her health problems, she couldn’t manage this on her own. Once we decided to take her, we realized we had to balance the need for careful planning with an equally urgent need to go as soon as possible. The upcoming summer was too soon and the following summer might not be soon enough. The fall was not possible for us, so we settled on mid-December. The downside was the strong possibility of snow and ice; the upside was the chance to spend time in the Christmas markets amidst the holiday festivities of southern Germany, Austria and Slovakia.

Planning took easily a hundred hours. The details and choices required much research into the definitions and availability of accessible bathrooms in hotel rooms, air and train transfers, wheelchair accommodations, accessible theatres, restaurants and venues for Christmas musical concerts, and more. We now know a LOT about these sorts of things!

The trip was a great success. Hard work, but quite wonderful in many ways. Travel is always about flexibility and being curious, being ready to be amazed and always being interested in new ideas, new sights and new experiences. Getting old is supposedly about losing flexibility, both mentally and physically. But with careful planning, an eye toward pacing and a little pushing, a trip like this can be incredibly rewarding.

Here are a few tips:

1. We scheduled an 8 day trip, with two days in each of four cities. We walked a fine line between making the schedule too hectic vs. making the whole trip too long.
2. Make all hotel reservations in advance. We found that Marriott has an international accessibility hotline: 1-888-236-2427. You can also call directly (it costs pennies to call Europe on Skype) to confirm the hotel bathrooms have walk-in showers with seats and plenty of grab bars in the shower and near the toilet. Then when you check-in, visit the bathroom and if it’s not as expected, get it fixed. We had to call housekeeping to get the shower bench delivered in a couple of the hotels.
3. Most large cities in Europe have extensive information about accessibility of local sights, tourist venues and restaurants. Their websites are very useful.
4. Make sure there are no more than one or two stair steps into and out of the hotel. (The scariest part of the whole trip was in one hotel where she tried to navigate two steps down by herself in her walker.) In our Salzburg hotel, we wanted to eat in their basement pub which was publicly accessible only down a long flight of stairs, so the staff very kindly took us through their kitchen elevator to reach it.
5. Book first class train tickets—that’s the only way you will have room for wheelchairs and walkers. Not all first class is the same, however, so check websites carefully. Also, some trains have “disability access” cars with tie-downs for wheelchairs and large, wheelchair accessible bathrooms. We booked in regular first class, but used the disabled bathrooms. RailJet in Austria and Germany worked well for us.
6. Plan to take more taxis than you might normally do. Buses and subways are likely not possible.
7. Check for numbers of stairs to any attractions you plan to attend. There are ramps in some places, but they tend to be steep and sometimes narrow, so make sure you are strong enough to manage the wheelchair.
8. Make sure your traveler has an up-to-date passport and that she brings it! Also have her bring an ATM or debit card so she can get money easily wherever you go.
9. Make sure she’s packed her medicines, copies of all prescriptions and her health insurance card. Most Medicare programs include emergency international care.
10. Bring extra plug adapters for the countries you will be visiting.
11. Appropriate clothing is essential. If necessary, have someone pack for her. For us, we were most concerned that she not get chilled sitting in the wheelchair.
12. Take plenty of pictures with your traveler’s camera and then follow up to put them in a scrapbook for her.
13. Plan to take breaks for naps and rests, but also push a little. In Vienna, after a lovely dinner, she was tired and wanted to go back to her room, but we said we would just take her for a quick wheelchair ride to the town square to see the church and the Christmas lights. It was beautiful and crisp and she loved it.
14. If the trip has emotional meaning, like this trip to her homeland, expect an emotional response.

Travel disrupts everything—time, location, sights, sounds, food, people—the variety and “newness” comes at you relentlessly. This is very different from an elderly person’s normal life. Respect the effect of so much change, but if you enjoy it yourself, and cast it in a positive light, you will go far to making the trip a wonderful series of memories for your aging relative.

One of the best clues we had that the trip went well was when we talked to her on the phone a few days after she returned, she was hoarse from telling people all about it.

Those books are well worth searching out. I covered 150 years of middle grade fiction in six exemplary books. The authors highlighted were Louisa May Alcott, E.B. White, Madeleine L’Engle, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett and Sherman Alexie. We covered geographical travel, time travel, travel into space, travel into different identities and circumstances. Reading is travel writ very large indeed.

I also couldn’t help mentioning my own coming-of-age novel DOT TO DOT, as this middle grade chapter book includes all kinds of travel—emotional, geographic and cultural, as well as a bit of timeslipping just to keep things lively.

I’m happy to give the talk elsewhere on request!

One of the many aspects of reality that irritate me is that books seem to have sell-by dates, as if they rot after a couple months in the open air. Books have seasons too—fall releases and spring releases, just like clothing. How stupid is that? How can ideas and stories and characters and experiences be sorted in and out of existence that way? Well, obviously they can, because they are, but it’s Not Right.

It’s all about the money, of course. The industry (the term “publishing industry” makes my skin crawl the same way “health care industry” does) rewards new books; too many people depend on new releases for their livelihood—the marketers, publicists and reviewers primarily. Authors are on contracts to deliver a new book every year, as if they were farmers producing annual crops. If memoirs from single mothers recovering from drug abuse and going on to become FBI directors are in fashion, publishers and editors encourage more of the same. A book sells because it is “like” another best-selling book already in print. God forbid that a reader be faced with a new idea or an innovative plot.

The classics, on the other hand, are books which have not rotted in the open air, and which are not copycats of existing merchandise (the word “merchandise” in the context of a book also gives me cold shivers). Virginia Woolf, an innovative novelist in the early twentieth century who coughed up more than a few classics, was asked in 1927 if too many books were being written and published. Surprisingly, she said no. She said reading should be ubiquitous and fun.

She did have a suggestion, though. Perhaps, she said, first editions of books should be printed “on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months’ time.” Then, “if a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound…No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.”

Well, gosh…there you have it: lettuce. And recycling. Substitute electrons and pixels for “perfectly clean dust” and she’s close to describing today. And maybe, after all, it’s not all bad.

While the rest of the country seems to be broiling to high degrees of summer doneness, our little upper left-hand corner in the Pacific Northwest is having the coolest, wettest spring and summer yet. Only four or five days have hit the mid-70s since last summer. The Parks Department lowered the temperature that triggers the filling of the wading pools around town—otherwise toddlers would have no place to splash except the rain puddles on the sidewalk.

We soldier on, however—Seattleites are used to grilling in the rain. We bundle up and eat fast. Or we cook outside and then eat inside. A couple hours of sunshine sends us into a tropical daze. We’re in our shorts and sandals in a flash, working in our gardens, washing cars, walking dogs.

Our gardens, yes. Very slow this year. Everything late. Hydrangeas think it’s still April. Roses have done pretty well, though. But blackberries may not even ripen if we don’t get a couple weeks of sunshine. Many of us have favorite spots for blackberry picking in parks, along roadsides and sidewalks, and our happy memories of annual blackberry pie feasts (not to mention scratched arms and blue-stained fingers) go back for decades.

Well, wherever you are, I hope your summer triggers some lovely, restorative downtime. Remember when you were a kid? Details like weather and food were just that, details. The big news was school was out and you had time to read and explore and hang out with friends and stay up late. So here’s my summer advice to grown-ups: Just Do It.

I don’t have a compulsion to write. Although I call myself a writer these days, and indeed have two books to show for it, and several new ones in the works, I can’t say that I can’t not write. If you get my drift. I also can’t say I’ve always wanted to be a writer. (If I did, I would have started ages ago, and not been a nurse and a hospital manager and a technology and healthcare business consultant for thirty years.)

But I do like writing. It’s like solving a puzzle. What goes here? How can this piece work with this piece? I enjoy the research that’s required for the kind of stuff I write. Having a final written product is a good excuse for trolling library stacks, used bookstores, special collections, and yes, even the internet. I travel, too—I like to see the places I’m writing about, and I like to talk with people, so I can write about the world as seen through eyes other than my own.

Right now I’m working on a talk I’ll be giving in a couple weeks. It’s about the women’s suffrage struggle in Washington State, my home state. I’ve read a lot about women’s fight to get the right to vote. It was a long battle—72 years from a small convention of women in upstate New York in 1848 to the final passage of the Constitutional amendment in 1920. Who today could imagine that the opposition was so strong and so successful for so long?

The interesting thing that you don’t read about if you concentrate on the “big” names—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul—is that the western states granted women the right to vote long before the eastern states. Wyoming and Utah were the first two states to allow women to vote. Women in Washington had a tricky time—they got the vote in 1883 and then it was taken away when they started showing up on juries and convicting gambling bosses and owners of brothels. The powers that be (men) didn’t like losing their recreational and financial pleasures. Washington women didn’t get the vote back until 1910—still, though, a decade ahead of the national amendment, and ahead of any eastern state.

It’s wonderful to look at photographs of those fighting women pioneers. Their turn-of-the-century long dresses, flowered hats, pins and brooches, gloves and shawls distract us today from their daring spirit and steely resolve. Who today is working (for free) as hard as they did for a cause as simple and undeniable as theirs?

Like a trusty perennial, my web address isn’t new, but it’s been considerably refurbished. Now that I think about it, the metaphor may be more spring cleaning than gardening—I had to clean out a few rooms and add on a bit (pun intended) more space to kitbakke.com to make room for my new DOT TO DOT, a novel for good readers 9-13 years old. And choosy teens and grown-ups too.

So please check back from time to time; I hope we can have a conversation. To prime the pump, see my previous blogs below for topics that might interest you—my travels to China, home economics classes, how fiction mixes it up with nonfiction and other burning topics of the day. I also contribute to other blogs, such as www.yellowwallpaperwriters.com, which has my “Writing as Dialogue, Not Monologue.”

All the best and more later!

If you start by being a white middle-class educated American with a house, a car, a fridge, an oven, and a computer with an Internet connection, you’ve exceeded the resources of 95% of your 6.8 billion fellow human beings. Put another way, if the world’s population were shrunk to a village of one hundred people, half the world’s wealth would be in the hands of six of them, mostly Americans. That’s us.

Being aware of our luck, my husband and I have become increasingly involved in the philosophy and practice of philanthropy. The language of giving is interesting — it used to be called “charity” and now it’s often called “social investment.” Like so much else in our society, philanthropy has become increasingly organized, results-driven, studied, monitored and, one hopes, more creative, collaborative, and effective.

Charitable giving in the US runs a little over $300 billion annually. This includes corporate, foundation, and individual gifts to all sorts of national and international nonprofits including churches, schools, social service organizations, and environmental and arts institutions. Corporate giving is about 5% of all gifts, foundation giving about 20%, and individual giving makes up 75% of all charitable donations. So next time you think you are small potatoes compared to the Gates Foundation, think again. You are part of, by far, the biggest slice.

Food banks, shelters, and community clinics have been inundated with service needs over the last two years, and in many areas that need continues unabated. Donations dropped in 2009 (the second least-charitable year since 1956), and although they appear to be picking up for 2010, it hasn’t been enough to meet the increased need. More bad news is on the way as states are slashing their human services and Medicaid budgets for 2011. Preventive and bridge services are often the first to be jettisoned, which only adds to the long-run economic, social, and human costs. For some reason, we’d rather house the mentally ill in jails (most colleges are cheaper) and care for them in expensive emergency rooms than provide them with less expensive supportive housing, counseling, and appropriate treatment.

Donors nowadays aren’t shy about questioning the effectiveness of the organizations they give to. Being part of a successful result is a bigger draw than being guilt-tripped. Gone are the days when a donor would trust United Way or the American Cancer Society to spend their charitable dollars with no follow-up reporting. There is now a flurry of research going on to help nonprofit organizations figure out how to measure and communicate the results of their work. For instance, a health care clinic for low-income people can’t just report the number of patients they saw; they need to provide information on what they did for those patients and whether or not those patients got better.

The Center on Philanthropy of Indiana University is an excellent resource for trends in research on philanthropy. There are even data showing that people who volunteer and donate to nonprofits are happier and healthier than those who don’t. Talk about win-win!

Another excellent resource is Charity Navigator. They have recently upgraded their rating system to include three areas: financial health (Is the organization financially stable and how much of its budget goes to overhead vs. direct service?); accountability (Does the organization engage in ethical practices, have good governance structures, and is it accountable to its constituents and target populations?); and outcomes (Can the organization demonstrate positive change in the lives of the people they serve?).

I am a member of the Washington Women’s Foundation, which gives away about $500,000 annually to nonprofits in five areas: the arts, the environment, education, human services, and health. We have three criteria for our grant review process in addition to Charity Navigator’s important list. We want to fund projects and organizations that are responding to urgent and critical needs, that incorporate new approaches to ongoing problems, and that are working on bold new ventures.

Which slice of the (guaranteed calorie-free) philanthropy pie do you like?

Happy holidays to ALL 6.8 billion of us!

I traveled with my husband and another couple. We did our homework ahead of time and made all our hotel and flight reservations in advance. Overall, we spent four days each in Beijing and Shanghai, then two or three days each in Hangzhou, Kunming, Lijiang, and Shangri-La.
Yes, Shangri-La — a small but growing town at the 10,500 foot level in the Himalayas on the far southwestern edge of Yunnan province, near Tibet and Burma. It’s an ethnic Tibetan community whose village fathers were savvy enough to change their name to draw the tourist trade. Today it’s a fascinating mix of subsistence farms (mostly barley and turnips), no plumbing, arranged marriages, hundreds of prayer flags, free-ranging livestock on the outskirts, and, in town, there’s an airport, broad, new (mostly empty) boulevards, new schools, electric plants, hotels, and car dealerships.

China faces enormous challenges, and its government is doing some things right and some things wrong. As in any country, there’s a disconnect between the politics and the people. China may have a totalitarian government, but it also has 1.3 billion people with a 5,000 year history who now, for the first time, have access to electricity and education.

The country is far too large for generalities. It would be like saying you know America because you’ve seen New York and Disney World. But here are a couple of quickies: We saw many Buddhist temples, all in daily use. We saw many statues of Mao. We visited artists and painters who are pushing boundaries with modern depictions of China’s worst environmental and human rights abuses. We ate terrific food every single day. They really do dance and do tai chi in the public parks. The air quality in Beijing is abysmal — the sun was always reddish and I doubt anyone ever saw the moon. We had guides in Yunnan point out “the most polluted lake in China” and various paintings and sculptures “damaged in the Cultural Revolution.” Shanghai is a global city with every high-end European retailer present and accounted for. You can’t drink the tap water anywhere. All of China is one time zone. Handpainted Chinese calligraphy is ethereally beautiful.

Besides the usual guidebooks, I read several excellent books to prepare for the trip. Nien Cheng’s gripping Life and Death in Shanghai, Anchee Min’s more literary but less informative Red Azalea, Peter Hessler’s wonderfully paradoxical River Town, and John Pomfret’s insightful Chinese Lessons were the best. All but Hessler’s book center on the Cultural Revolution and what it did to those who survived and those who did not.

Here’s a picture of part of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing at about 3 pm. See what I mean about the air pollution?

And here’s Jade Dragon Snow Mountain from Lijiang. So quiet and beautiful!

I can see Peter’s point, but I still love the concept. Shakespeare Wrote for Money is a compilation of Hornby’s columns for The Believer in 2007 and 2008, in which he listed the books he’d bought the previous month, and commented on the books he’d read that same month. A bonus treat for me, since I’m working on writing one, were the couple of months Hornby spent discovering, reading, and greatly enjoying young adult novels. Hornby’s lists of books bought and books read always overlapped, but were never identical. Book-choosing is such a personal pleasure; it was fun to imagine Hornby picking which books to read, and which to postpone until later, and how those choices might have been similar or different from mine.

So I thought I’d list the books I’ve bought recently, and the ones I’ve read in the last month or so.

Books bought: Book Thief by Markus Zuzak; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; Brooklyn by Colm Toibin; Music by Nicholas Cook; To Music by Ketis Bjornstad; The English Novel by Walter Allen; Community and Commitment by Rosabeth Moss Kanter; Angel in the Forest by Marguerite Young; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See; and, Utopia by Thomas More.

Books read: Community and Commitment; Brooklyn; most of Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee; a 1940s British murder mystery which I’ve already forgotten both author and title that I borrowed from a friend for a trip; Walden Two by B.F. Skinner; Utopia by Thomas More; and, The Paris Review Interviews with Women Writers, edited by George Plimpton.

Perhaps a theme emerges. A theme of confusion perhaps. Sherlock Holmes might notice that: 1. I don’t read much from the New York Times Bestseller lists; 2. I read fiction and nonfiction; 3. I seem to have a thing for women writers, maybe; and 4.What’s all this about utopias and music? Perhaps in the comments section we can explore this further.

The books we read are dependent on the sources we tap for book recommendations — friends, bookstore employees, printed reviews, the internet, covers that jump out at us while browsing, authors whose names we recognize as having enjoyed before. I enjoy combing bibliographies and references from books I’m already reading — like a frog leaping from lily pad to lily pad, I can go from book to book without ever leaving a book. On the other hand, I’m one of those people who’ve never joined a book club because I don’t want other people to tell me what to read, and yet, of course I take other people’s suggestions all the time. Recently, I’ve been pelted with more than the usual number of “you must read this!” comments (including from Walter, my hair guy) for The Help by Kathyrn Stockett. Friends who know you well enough to recommend books that you would have chosen for yourself are a treasure.

We read for differing reasons — to escape, to relax, to learn, to prepare, to keep up — and there are books to meet all those needs. Even the act of reading has meaning, regardless of content. At a recent Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, I heard a literary agent say that books are among the few places children can go nowadays to engage their minds in privacy and imagination.

I couldn’t agree more. And that goes double for adults.