Florence Wallace, summer 1929, on left

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – My mother would have been 100 today and although she isn’t with us (she lived to a fine age of 95), my three sisters and I are sharing old family photos that Jeanne, the oldest, had scanned and sent to us all on CDs.

They live in three states and I live in Switzerland, which in her youth would have amazed my mother.

We’re chuckling over so many good memories and cringing at a few others, usually where we weren’t at our best for Florence Lonergan, who married our dad Bob Wallace.

My sister Mary recalls her great sense of humour, which stayed with her until the end; she could have the nursing home laughing to the point of tears over her sharp remarks about politicians.

She would have loved to have been around for another US election, and I’m sorry she missed Barack Obama’s win four years ago, but as it was, she lived through interesting times.

The Titanic sank when she was three months old and the Great War started when she was a toddler, although in her Irish-American household in Reinbeck, Iowa the greater excitement was over the Irish-Anglo Treaty that was signed just as she was turning 10 and which ended British rule in Ireland.

She graduated from high school as the world was tottering financially, in the summer of 1929, and dreams of college were pushed off for a bit while everyone counted his money, or what he didn’t have.

The Crash, the Depression, love and war and babies

She fell in love with a handsome and very nice guy in the heart of the Great Depression, and just as it was ending she spent three months watching her first child slowly die of a heart problem that it’s now commonplace to repair. Two small girls came along, but so did another war, and in 1942 her husband headed off to fight in the Pacific for more than two years, out of pride and principle rather than because he had to.

Tough enough for the 50s, 60s, and 4 more decades

Bob Wallace and Florence Lonergan, wedding day 1936

Two more girls came after the war and then Florence the mother had her hands full for several years with ABC and rock ‘n roll parties at the same time. To my enormous admiration today she never lost her sense of self, the sharp edge that made her impatient with any kind of phoniness or people with airs, just as she kept her wonderful trim figure and grand and unswerving moral sense that there’s only one way to live and that is honestly, decently, fairly.

And modestly, which didn’t go down well with me in the freewheeling late 1960s when I bought a forbidden bikini and sneaked off to the beach with my friends; I discovered to my horror that she had sewn a lace ruffle along the top during the night.

And intelligently, which meant that she was forever correcting our grammar and pointing out mind-enriching articles. For years after I left home she clipped every newspaper column on grammar or how to make the world a better place and mailed them to me, with her comments in the margins.

And frugally, so that even when my parents had enough money to travel abroad, long after we kids left home, she still melted scraps of soap to make new bars. I hated our bathroom soap and wondered why we couldn’t have perfumed brand name ones, but she loved saving pennies thanks to Hints from Heloise.

She didn’t believe in leaving margins blank, so her letters were filled on both sides of the paper, then she carried on writing in her untidy scrawl, often with different ink or pencil in all directions in all the margins. And she loved abbreviating words.

Her letters were a challenge to read.

My sister Tara just sent me something she found among her own papers, a Mother’s Day card that I gave to Florence in May 1961.

The Wallace "girls" in Colorado, 1957: Tara, Mary, Jeanne, Florence, Ellen

We didn’t call her Florence, I hasten to add, until she was well into her nineties, and never to her face. The grandchildren knew her as Grandma Flo.

“May 1961

“Dear Mom,

“I love you very much and will try to please you.  I’ll do everything you asked me to do today.  I would like to finish my Memory book for Camp Fire though.  I can’t find my bathing suit so I can’t tell if it fits me.  Anyway the straps are broken and then my suit always falls off.  It was kinda of small last summer.  It probably doesn’t fit me.  You owe me $2.10.”

Tara says the front of the card has “you owe me $2.10 with the amount written several times. Mom wrote in red crayon “Pd.”

Our debt to her will never be repaid, I’m afraid.

I’ll bake a pie in her memory this weekend, since she loved pies almost as much as she loved donuts. And tonight we’re eating a Florence special from the 1950s, hardly changed and still a hugely popular family meal: tuna casserole (critics abstain – it’s great!). It’s a frugal, intelligently tasty, modest dish which any honest person can decently enjoy.

Here’s to you, Mother!

BERN, SWITZERLAND – A lot of travelers’ blogs run past me during any given week, but few reflect the sheer joie de vivre of Marie-Michele Gagnon‘s pause in Bern, shared on her blog. The 22-year-old ski racer from Quebec is photographing and filming her world travels and she has just done a fine job in Bern where, of course, the famous bears were nowhere to be seen. Chances are that a skier will only be passing through when the bears hibernate but here is hoping their schedules match at some point.

BERN, SWITZERLAND – Shortly before the holidays the good news made it into the UK press that Jack Widdowson, the 19-year-old British dancer with Bern Ballett, is recovering far better than expected in the hours after a mugging appeared likely to leave him paralyzed for life.

Widdowson was attacked in Cardiff, Wales, apparently for the theft of an iPhone, in early December, and it was feared the dancer might never walk again, much less dance. He was visiting his family for the weekend after making his first solo performance with the Bern troupe. He and a brother were out for the evening and he was walking home when the attack occurred near the docks area.

By Christmas, the family was able to celebrate that Jack could take a few steps unaided.

Links to other sites: BBC, Daily Mail, Walesonline

Tara loves cars and apples and will go to great lengths to find them

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Only 10 minutes left to tell you that a) this is International Day of Persons with Disabilities  (nice way of getting around labeling them handicapped or disabled – writing lesson here!), as the Swiss government reminded me, and b) Scientific American has a good article, “The hidden potential of autistic kids”.

Nothing spectacularly new in the article, and no, it isn’t about savants, those amazingly remarkable autistic people who make up only a tiny fraction of all people with autism.

It’s about the rest of us, who are seeing things from the other side of the fence, remaining open: “At the other, ‘low functioning’ side are people who cannot operate on their own. Many of them are diagnosed with mental retardation and have to be kept under constant care. But these diagnoses focus on what autistic people cannot do. Now a growing number of scientists are turning that around to look at what autistic people are good at.”

Let me give you a concrete example I shared with an online discussion group, meta-mito-autism on Yahoo, that I belong to, where I was talking about my 19-year-old daughter Tara: “the article caught my eye because we had an interesting experience a week ago. I picked Tara up at the place where she lives during the week, to spend the afternoon with her. I wanted to take a walk before we drove off, but she loves the car so I hid it in a parking lot a 10-minute walk away, where I’ve never gone with her. She does take a lot of walks there, so apparently knows the grounds (big), even though she’s been there just a year. I said I didn’t have the car, but she ignored me and set off in a direction we don’t usually take, then she proceeded to systematically check out each of the parking areas in the place, clearly looking for our car, ignoring cars that looked a bit like it. After 15 minutes she found it and looked at me triumphantly. That took logic, memory, recognition, in brief, orderly thinking. She could do it because it interested her ).”

Good night, another five minutes left to tip your hat at those whose lives are a bit different from yours and mine.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Statistical Office in Bern should be applauded for making stats a little more fun with their one a week dose, and they even offer this in English, so you can turn it into a foreign language lesson. There’s a little problem on the right edge, but you’ll probably work out the missing bits.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Melissa Fleming, head of communications at the UNHCR, the refugee organization, has been given some just praise for her active approach to using social media, by Devex, an international development news site. The Geneva-based group is one of the easiest for journalists to work with because of the ease with which they can find photos and videos, thanks to Fleming’s support for using flickr and YouTube. She also tweets and is working with local UNHCR offices to encourage greater use of social media.

Devex focuses, in its interview, on how Fleming and her team use social media. For other organizations grappling with the issues, this is a great starting point. Having 100,000 “likes” on Facebook is no small feat and says much about the organization’s effective approach to social media.

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Brian Ferris recently joined Google in Zurich but before he did he left a legacy that remains popular with public transport users in Seattle. Ferris, as a PhD student at the University of Washington, designed a handy little set of smart phone apps called One Bus Away, which allows people to see when buses are expected to arrive at their stops.

The Seattle Times reports that bus riders continue to use it, to the tune of 50,000 a week, and the university and public transit authorities are now working out a plan to keep it alive and up to date.

GeekWire reports that Ferris was hoping to develop more realtime transit services for Google once in Zurich; the company has rolled out testing for some similar programmes in a handful of cities in Europe and the US.

Royal weddings, such as that of Britain's Prince William and bride Kate, are widely credited with influencing couples to have more lavish, costly weddings

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – How many people get cold feet before they marry? According to an insurance broker interviewed by Bloomberg‘s Carolyn Bandel in Zurich, “the percentage of claims for change of heart is ‘very high.’”

Bandel has written an intriguing article about the relatively new niche insurance business, insurance for couples about to marry, which has grown up because people are spending more on their weddings than they used to. The average cost of a wedding in Switzerland has doubled in 10 years, to about CHF30,000, according to a Zurich Insurance company official interviewed by Bandel. If you think you might get off more cheaply in the US, given the low dollar, that’s one option, given that the average cost rose in 2010 to just over $24,000.

So what kind of coverage do brides- and grooms-to-be get? Power outages, caterers being shut down by health inspectors, illness and flooding are specifically mentioned in the general conditions at Zurich, which has been offering wedding insurance since January 2011.

A quick look at Zurich’s offer (you can buy the insurance online for CHF69) shows that it even includes the possibility of fire. I recall a niece’s lively wedding where the barbecue set the rest of the wedding area on fire; maybe there is something to this. You’re covered in case of rock slides and avalanches, but not for earthquakes and volcanoes.

Zurich’s policy covers only post-ceremony events and the limit is CH20,000, so there’s no coverage for bachelor parties the night before – and no coverage for cold feet, which is sometimes on offer by US insurers according to Bloomberg.

So how many brides or grooms don’t show up? A US writer says she believes the figure commonly mentioned of half of one percent is low, possibly 10,000 a year. Could they have saved money by getting “change of mind” insurance? No, but their parents might have: you can only take out the insurance if you are not one of the people getting married, so with parents of the bride footing bills that run into thousands of dollars, Dad might be able to get a little peace of mind ahead of the big day.

Jonathan Manthorpe at the Vancouver Sun has written a well-researched, long story about public discontent in China with the abuse of wealth and power, focusing on a road rage accident that involved a general’s son.

Hat’s off to his incisive yet critical article on of the Chinese public’s attitudes towards officialdom, a rarity in western media: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Opinion+Chinese+recoil+antics+arrogant+spoiled+princelings/5422350/story.html

De Caferacer, The Netherlands: green school buses that use push-power are just one variety of group pedal powered vehicles (photo, De Caferacer)

De Cafe Racer from The Netherlands has taken the tandem bike to new heights, or at least lengths and widths, making group-powered bicycles that are used mainly for events.

Now they’re putting kids to work pedalling bikes not just for fun, but to fuel their own “green” school buses. Springwise writes that the buses hold 10 children plus an adult who has the option to add electric power, presumably to avoid slowing down as the children near school and lose power.

A bike-pooling bus clearly makes more sense health-wise than car-pooling.

De Caferacer, in Dutch

(With thanks to Bernino Lind, who pointed me to this)