Shards and Shiny Things

This One's for Mimi, if She's Tuning In

2009-05-04T08:03:00.002-05:00

This is too super cool.

2009-04-19T19:26:00.005-05:00

The great salmon speaks: The secret is that nothing knows, the secret is that all life flows, the secret is that thoughts and heart are different beings, split apart, and though we change in skin and bone each being has its truth alone, while dreams and wandering take you far, accept yourself for what you are, there comes the time when close to home, your self must please itself alone, then sing beneath the lovely sky, the earth asks simply that you try

Can't get it spaced correctly, like a poem, because I don't want to learn to fiddle with the html, but if you read it aloud, you'll naturally hear the separate lines.

The poem is spoken by the salmon who is trying to leap up the water to his home in David Clement-Davies' brilliant novel Fell, the sequel to The Sight, which I haven't read. I won't spoil the plot, but if you love believable fantasy novels in which human - wild animal communication happens, you should try this gem. If you love wolves and their domesticated cousins, the German Shepherds, and know how the dog lies down with its nose on its paws in a posture of resigned patience underlaid with suppressed impatience, then try it. Girl heroine, destined for greatness, finds boy counterpart; much danger and death, many surprises, lots of wolves, and a cold Romanian landscape. Lovely writing. Clement-Davies has a nice website too, where you can see this and his other novels.

Virgin Woolite

2009-04-19T19:17:00.003-05:00

The title's a condensed triple pun. Never mind. This is too good not to share with toto el mundo, and of course they're all tuned in here!

Pretty shiny, eh?

Eloise Wilkin, Resistance is Futile!

2009-04-16T16:02:00.003-05:00

I think I posted a bit of this some time back, but good things, the REALLY good things, need to be brought out into the light every now and then. Much as I love the finest of the early Little Golden Books' illustrators, there were a few that were not so admirable. If you don't know about My Little Golden Book about Zogg, inspired by Jane Werner Watson and Eloise Wilkin, then don't wait -- take a look here, now. Here's a sample.

Gardener Writers

2009-03-25T19:35:00.008-05:00

When you're not digging in the garden, it's a joy to read writings by other gardeners. here are a couple of excerpts from books I've been enjoying on rainy days and dark evenings.

"How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary. Why are those wonderful weeping wisterias (or so they looked in a catalog: wonderful, inviting, even perfect) not fitting in the way I had imagined them, on opposite sides of a stone terrace made up of a patchwork of native Vermont stone? I had not yet understood and also had not yet been able to afford incorporating the element of water in my garden. I could not afford a pond. I could not understand exactly where a pond ought to go in the general arrangement of things. I do not even like a pond, really. When I was a child and living in another part of the world, the opposite of the part of the world in which I now live (and have made a garden), I knew ponds, small, really small bodies of water that had formed naturally (I knew of no human hand that had forced them to be that way), and they were not benign in their beauty: they held flowers, pond lilies, and the pond lilies bore a fruit that when roasted was very sweet, and to harvest the fruit of the lilies in the first place was very dangerous, for almost nobody who loved the taste of them (children) could swim, and so attempts to collect the fruit of pond lilies were dangerous; I believe I can remember people who died (children) trying to reach these pond lilies, but perhaps no such thing happened, perhaps I was only afraid that such a thing would happen, perhaps I only thought if I tried to reap the fruit of pond lilies I would die. I have eaten the fruit of pond lilies, they were delicious, but I can't remember what they tasted like, only that they were delicious and that they were delicious, and that no matter that I couldn't remember exactly what they tasted like, they were delicious again.
In my garden there ought to be a pond. All gardens, all gardens with serious intentions (but what could that mean) ought to have water as a feature. My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts."
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book):

"How much I long sometimes for a courtyard flagged with huge grey paving stones. I dream of it at night, and I think of it in the daytime, and I make pictures in my mind, and I know with the reasonable part of myself that never in this life shall I achieve such a thing, but I still continue to envy the fortunate people who live in a stone country, such as the Cotswolds, or in the northern counties of Yorkshire, Westmorland, and Cumberland....
"Amongst these essential and fundamental coverings I should plant small treasures. shall we say as an axiom that a very small garden should have very small things in it? The picture should fit the frame. I should have lots of little bulbs, all the spring-flowering bulbs; then for the later months I should let the pale-blue Camassias grow up, and some linarias, both pink and purple, such easy things, sowing themselves in every crevice. Every garden maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth. The tiniest garden is often the loveliest. Look at our cottage gardens, if you need to be convinced."
Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book (edited by Phillipa Nicholson)

Atlantic Sunrise

2009-03-15T14:32:00.004-05:00

At night, the sound of the ocean is lonely. The sound of it, heard from the campsite, makes me think of vastness and infinite spaces and loneliness. At sunrise, the human scale returns. I shared the beach with this strange creature, which the ranger told me was a tunicate and is actually a whole colony of small creatures living together. It's called sea pork. When the waves roll over it, it shrink to the size and shape of a small avocado. Such a sight!

Noro madness

2009-02-22T13:52:00.006-05:00

If you don't know it, there's a color-changing yarn around that has lots of people under its spell. A clever fellow in Brooklyn designed a 1X1 ribbed striped scarf that is so addictive that people all over the country are making them. I even know a woman who is working on TWO. You can find hundred of pictures of these on Flickr. Here's my first one in progress, made with Noro Silk Garden, a blend of silk, wool, and mohair. It's going to Caleb, who will be instructed to keep it on the outside of his coat, not next to his skin -- or he can hang it in his bedroom as a banner. The colors are really richer than shown here. The wonderful thing about working with this yarn, is that you never know which colors are going to turn up and what the juxtapositions will look like. I started with two colors, one quite bright and one quite dark, but in places they become almost the same. Time to buy some more. (Warning: it's not cheap. But it's worth it.)

Winter is edging over for spring, if you just look around

2009-02-22T13:42:00.002-05:00

I finally raked up all the oak leaves in the yard, because the warm spell made us all think it was nearly spring, and the daffodil shoots were getting blanched. Spring bulbs are hardy, so I thought exposure would be good for everyone. here are some treasures discovered lately. The one at the top is the beginning of the lovely pale yellow grape hyacinth that sursprised my last spring.

Laura Miller, Part 2

2009-01-28T19:22:00.004-05:00

Reading Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: a Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia was a pleasure on many fronts. We usually enjoy reading about books and writers we like and more often read these after the event, just as we read a movie review after seeing the movie, partly to see what another person thought of it and partly to relive the pleasure of watching it. So all through Miller's book we have a great romp through Narnia. But at the same time, Miller writes about the act of reading and how reading develops in children, and about her own life as well. Here's a passage that speaks to me:

"Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine -- the same time as which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me -- he too was 'living almost entirely in [the] imagination....' Like Lewis's, my material life often seemed to me nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm.... I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited....did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in the garden?."

I too sometimes wonder where my predominant traits come from. My parents liked to read but not to garden, and I can see now that they were in some ways people who enjoyed quiet and solitude. For the gardening gene I have to reach back to my maternal great-grandfather, who kept pencilled notes and page references on the endpapers of books and who grew nasturtiums and a vegetable garden in Middletown, Rhode Island.

Continuing the garden theme, Miller writes, "Gardens speak to people of this solitary temperament. Even those of us who don't tend the real ones find the idea of gardens, especially walled ones, evocative.... Garden are man-made concentrations of the natural world, places where nature is trained to seem more itself than it is when left to its own devices. In a way, the artificiality of gardens is like the artificiality of stories, which take the components of life and arrange them into forms that intensify and order them, saturating them with meaning."

Luckily, where I live you can practically garden all year round. Winter is the dormant season, but it's also mild and the ground is rarely frozen. And the long winter nights make lots of time for reading.

2009-01-25T17:18:00.004-05:00

I was a reading child. I got books from our village library, our town library, and the city library. Books from Providence would come home with my father, who would go there and get three at a time for me, recommended by the children's librarian. (No -- I never visited a school library, though I'm now a school librarian.) I lived in these books. Besides playing outdoors, in the small woods and on the shore, and riding my bike all over the neighborhood, reading is where I lived. When my father would come home with three new books, I'd wait till after supper or bedtime, get into my pajamas, then get into bed and examine each one in the stack -- smell it, look at it, savor its promise, then decide which one to read first. One day when I was about nine, he brought home what would become one of my favorite, most magical books. It was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Once I went into that wardrobe, my life changed forever. My bedroom had a large closet under the eaves, and I'd lie in bed at night, KNOWING that if I just believed hard enough I could go into my closet and reach back and enter Narnia. I never got out of bed and actually tried -- so maybe some part of me also knew that it wouldn't happen. Such is the duality of childhood thinking and desire. You KNOW that it's true, that the only thing lacking is your lack of faith. And you're not willing to risk being wrong. So you go on thinking about your closet and what might happen if you really try. (Just as, a few years later in junior high school, when I went on a science fiction reading jag, thanks to the tastes of a boy I had a crush on, I KNEW that if I believed and tried hard enough, then ESP would work, and I could silently transmit my thoughts to David Sanderson across the room.)

Narnia was where I wanted to go, and I read the magical book more than once and lived inside it. But -- and this baffles me -- I never found out till much later that there were other books in the series. I guess I always had enough to read, and I didn't talk about my reading with anyone, and the wonderful and anonymous librarian who sent these treasures home didn't think to send me more Narnia books, so I never knew that there were more.

Then some years later, in college, my friend Jennifer and I discovered Tolkien and also made friends with a graduate student at the Episcopal Theological School and his wife, who was a children's librarian. And this wonderful woman, Carol Hole, fed Jennifer and me with wonderful new children's books that we'd missed and ones that were new, and we discovered the remaining six Narnia books. And were not too old or sophisticated to enjoy them with the same intensity as our child selves. And we also discovered that Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford,England, would send us books on faith that we'd pay. So we acquired lovely hardcover versions of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings, and Charles Williams, and other writers. I still have these books, but I doubt that Blackwells is now so free about sending to unknown Americans.

And now, today, because my job kept me imprisoned for several hours of low-key supervision of teenage boys, I read all of Laura Miller's book about Narnia ("the Chronicles," as she calls them). Since I'm a huge fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books, I've read his virulent opposition to Lewis's fiction and been ambivalent about my own love of the Narnia books. But the brilliant and articulate Laura Miller has redeemed them for me, putting such criticisms in their place. I'm not writing here a review of Miller's very fluent and personal book but a suggestion that anyone who has been enchanted by Narnia might like to read what Miller has to say in The Magician's Book.

Out of Print, No Doubt, But Still Great

2009-01-24T16:34:00.007-05:00

There are some books that go out of print and stay that way because of changing sensibilities and changing ideas (usually for the better, but we need to think hard before condemning something) about what's good for readers, especially young ones. I have one such at home, and I try not to share it with the children, but I look at it a lot -- in fact, daily, because it's my lap desk, being just the right size. The illustrations are by the wonderful Fyodor Rojankovsky, one of the European immigrant illustrators who came to the U.S. around the time of WWII and found work with the Disney studios and the Golden Book company. His colors are gorgeous, his animals very lively, and his people a bit strange but very engaging. He illustrated lots of Little Golden books and some of the big ones, like this collection, which I remember from my childhood and found a year or so ago in a second-hand store. You can find copies easily on abebooks and other sites, an they're not expensive. There are stories composed mainly of pictures, poems, and regular stories. But the reason it's not currently sold is that some of its images wouldn't be considered appropriate for children nowadays.

While hunting is popular in the part of the country where I live, many modern parents just would not offer to their children a picture like this, with the rifle hanging on the wall behind the contented couple. (Not to mention the crucifix.) There are other pictures, too, which wouldn't be acceptable, like those of the tank and warplane. It's too bad, because it's such a fine book otherwise. Great stories and great illustrations. But it just won't fly.

So, if you're an adult, and you appreciate fine picture book illustration, find a copy of this gem. But you probably shouldn't share it with your youngest friends.

Coming soon: the Babar Question

Reading

2008-12-13T14:49:00.002-05:00

I was trying to read some book from somewhere, and it just wasn't grabbing me. Can't even remember what it was, but it was tedious. So I put it down and picked up another second-hand Penelope Lively find, Judgement Day. The change was like leaving the listless warm South Carolina ocean of late August and jumping into a bracing New England pond in June. Precise, economical writing, well-defined and sympathetic characters, and immediate psychological suspense. It's just a story of a sophisticated London woman finding engagement in her new home in the seemingly narrow-minded suburbs, trying to help out the local church with its historical pageant. There's an ineffectual parish minister, who is captured at once by Lively's description:

He spent several years as a curate in North London, where he found himself out of his depth, made to feel a lackluster figure both by his more racy colleagues and the parishioners. He was no good at Youth Clubs and disturbed black teenagers. They made rings around him, as did the jaunty young vicar and his jeaned, chain-smoking wife and her brisk, emphatic community-worker friends. When the Laddenham living came up he fled with relief.

The village' folk are drawn sympathetically but with a cool eye. Most of the suspense built up is of a quiet kind: will Clare find a meaningful place in the community? Will the rector break out and do something amazing? What of the quiet, widowed Sydney Porter? Is Clare's marriage truly happy? Nothing is predictable. And neither, says Lively, is modern life, in a village any more than in the city. While the novel lacks the darkness of McEwen's fiction, villate life is not all tea and flowers. Accident intrudes cruelly, and wanton human behavior. In a McEwen novel, Clare's child would not have been spared the accident that happens to another. But it still strikes near her, and she and we are aware that none of us is safe, but that we have to go on and try to live by our lights.

How to Spend a Pleasant Evening

2008-12-11T20:22:00.003-05:00

The early part of it, anyway, prime time maybe around 7 p.m.....http://cdn1.ustream.tv/swf/4/viewer.45.swf?cid=317016

A thousand thanks to the wonderful people who put this up. The puppies are no longer blond balls of fur, and there are just three left, but oh, joy abounding! And a thousand thanks to Roger Sutton, from whom I first heard of this.

Arcane Knowledge Department: Those Nifty Stamp Books!

2008-11-30T14:23:00.008-05:00

Did you know that some postage stamp sets are meant to be made into little booklets? I learned this once from a friendly postmistress. Here is a tutorial:

Tater on the High Range

2008-11-26T14:58:00.005-05:00

Tater often walks up and down the keys, quite deliberately, I'm sure. It's hard to catch him with the camera, but in this clip, he finally did a descending scale, with a nice resolution -- and then one more note.

He is accompanied this evening by the radio.
Of course, I can't prove to you that he is doing this deliberately. But why else would he walk down the 88 keys, thunderously, then up again, during certain wakeful periods. Of course, you say, he wants to go out! Just open the door!
But because he's a cat he can be perverse and apparently "indecisive." I doubt that a cat is indecisive at all. He's just weighing the odds that, given the cheddar cheese aroma lingering on your fingers from your snack, you will lead him to the kitchen for his own portion. rather than not.
Tater seems to walk deliberately down and up the keyboard. Sweet Pea, on the other hand, steps nimbly and soundlessly along the narrow edge of wood.

Yellow Cat Democrat

2008-11-17T19:15:00.007-05:00

For I will consider my cat Tater...

My old yellow cat Tater loves to sit on my lap and read the newspaper, but he also enjoys reading the bits and bytes of news at Truthdig.com. This evening we discovered that the "A-V Booth" at Truthdig gives us non-cable-TV households access to some very excellent content, such as this "60 Minutes" program interview with Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. Tater and I, though we don't go about shouting our our excitements, are thrilled about the election and are very happy that Senator Obama will be the 44th President of the United States. I can't speak for Tater's early enthusiasm, because he missed the momentous speech the senator gave at the Democratic convention four years ago, but I was lucky to be in Rhode Island that week, in a household with cable access, and when Obama made his amazing appearance on the national scene, I thought to myself, this man could be president some day. I truly didn't think it could happen so soon, but now that it has I am deeply thrilled and joyous and optimistic about the future of this country. The First-Lady-To-Be is an equally impressive a person, and the idea of those wonderful children in the White House is delightful. I know there are no instant miracles, and his road will be difficult and potentially dangerous for him, but I hope that the majority of citizens are responding with hope and confidence to the fresh air that is invigorating our country. And I truly believe that this is not a triumph of "liberals" over "conservatives," because it was clear to me from his first appearance that he is deeply conservative in the values that matter and wise and intelligent enough to govern well and to create an energetic consensus. Please visit the link to see this "60 Minutes" program.http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20081117_barack_and_michelle_obama_on_the_next_four_years/

November in the Mountains

2008-11-16T19:48:00.008-05:00

It's not mild Portland, Oregon, nor is it the colder southern New England, and there are thousands of microclimates here in the southern Appalachians, depending on elevation and aspect. In my little yard in town I have differing zones.. Here's some of what's going on in the sunnier areas these days. In this region we plant fall pansies. They are colorful in the fall and hunker down for the winter then come into their own in the spring.

This One's for Members of the Club

2008-11-16T19:38:00.003-05:00

Huzzah! Hurray! Long live Honda!
I got in my car this afternoon and noticed this (the picture is after I got home, so subtract a few). It's hard to read, but Club Members will Get It.

When the wonderful Impala reached 100,000, we were on the way to folk dancing on the Kingsport to Johnson City highway and stopped, as I remember, to celebrate the event. That was a good old car for its day, but it didn't make it to 200K. My friend Barbara in Massachusetts says she had a Honda that went 300K. That would be just fine with me.

The mark in the lower left is the ubiquitous pine sap, though how it got INSIDE I don't know.

Reading Catchup

2008-11-09T07:40:00.007-05:00

Blame the absence on work, or laziness, or the fact that the cats always try to sit on the keyboard. It's hard to type when you have to balance the laptop on the edge of your knee. It's much easier to just READ. And once in a while I read to the cats. (They love it.) So here are a few booknotes, first on children's books I've read recently. Now that it's a new school year it's time to read this year's Battle of the Books choices. The most recent is Christopher Paul Curtis's Elijah of Buxton. Curtis has been winning awards for his fine historical fiction, and it's not clear why this one was only a Newbery Honor Book, not THE winner. It's also a Coretta Scott King winner.

Elijah is the first freeborn child in the Canadian settlement of Buxton, a real place started by a white Presbyterian minister for free blacks, just over the border from Michigan. The time is the 1850s, and each family in the settlement has a house and a plot of land. There's an excellent school for the children, who learn Latin and Greek and everything an educated white child would be learning at the time. When a newly freed or rescued ex-slave arrives in the community, the Liberty Bell (cast in Philadelphia) is tolled ten times in welcome. Many residents bear marks of slavery, but 11-year old Elijah doesn't really know much about what slavery really was like. The first half of the novel consists of episodes of everyday life. Told in the first person in a dialect that's easy to get used to and believe in, the tales of school l and daily life and very funny escapades of Elijah and his friend Cooter constitute a typical children's story, and for a while it seems as though there will be no plot. But in the second half, the book darkens and becomes a breathtaking coming-of-age story as Elijah travels over the border into to Michigan to right a wrong. Slave catchers and ruthless people are everywhere, and Elijah becomes involved in a dangerous situation. Since this is a children's book, the outcome is eventually joyous, but not before Elijah witnesses misery and death first-hand and learns some of the reality of slavery. His final act before returning home is stunning, and I finished the book in tears.

Trail of Crumbs

2008-09-30T20:07:00.003-05:00

Kim Sunee's memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, appeared by chance on my lap. Kate found it at the Mars Hill Library and passed it on to me. It's the true story of a young (30-something) woman, born in Korea and abandoned at age three in a market, who is eventually adopted by a New Orleans couple and who, at the time of writing, has ended a domestic relationship with a wealthy Frenchman and is still searching for her true identity and her home. The book is as captivating as a novel because the author writes so well and has a tale to tell. Because Kim or "Keem" --(I call her that because she is so referred to by the people in her life AND because I can't manage the diacritical marks for her family name) loves to cook, the memoir is also suffused with recipes French, Asian, and New Orleanian.

Because there are people in my family who were adopted from other countries at an early age, Kim's story has extra meaning. We all seek our identity, our place in the world, and for the adopted person there is the extra question of who and why.

Kim Sunee writes beautifully, for the most part: I could have skipped a few of the more intimate amorous scenes. But her story is important and engaging, and I recommend this book to everyone.

2008-09-27T09:35:00.009-05:00

"Dead rock stars are singin' for me and the boys on the Rivet Line tonight. Hendrix. Morrison. Zeppelin. The Dead Rock Star catalogue churnin' outa Hogjaw's homemade boom box. There's Joplin and Brian Jones and plenty of Lynyrd Skynyrd Dead Rock Stars full of malice and sweet confusion. Tonight and every night they bawl. The Dead Rock Stars yowling at us as we kick out the quota."

This is how Ben Hamper's Rivethead. opens. This is as fine a piece of writing as you'll find anywhere.

Here's another opening (with slight apologies to the writer for not asking) that grabs your ear and imagination right away:

"Like spirits they came, over the hills. They came in pairs, always in pairs.... They still come now, somewhere in the part [of] my mind that takes reality and stores it and replays it. They were light and diaphanous. Each a star, a pair of stars, holding hands."

Good writing's good writing, whether it's Alana Nash's wonderful reviews in Stereo Review during the 70s or Thoreau or LeGuin or wherever.

The title of the story quoted above is "March of the Dead." Check it out. Or ask.

Leather

2008-08-26T19:24:00.002-05:00

This sign was an important part of my childhood and signified a milestone you passed at about age eight, though in that in between stage it helped you grab the rings.

"Headin' down south, to the land of the pine..."

2008-08-21T17:33:00.005-05:00

What makes a great song, or even a really good one? I'm talking about popular music here, not art songs. Folk, rock and roll, whatever. This summer I fell in love with a song, as happens every now and then. I mean to the point where I listened to the song over and over for several weeks. Since the band members are all young, the age of my children, I wondered if I was just wishing I were young again, with that feeling of freedom and optimism that seems to fade away. But now I really thing that some songs are just "classics" and bound to last. (The song is "Wagon Wheel [Rock Me, Mama] by the Old Crow Medicine Show.)

Here are a few things that I think make a great song, whether it's Woody Guthrie's "Let's Go Riding in the Car, Car." Libba Cotten singing "Freight Train," or Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," or any other classic. Melody, of course -- it's hard to define what makes a melody fine, but the really good ones are engaging and more inevitable than they are original -- by which I mean that the progression of the melody just flows naturally, like a stream, but not in a predictable or hackneyed way. You want to sing or hum along with it. The "sound devices" of poetry play in, too, things like assonance and alliteration, good (again neither predictable nor too oddly original, but inevitably right) rhyme and such.

And then the words. Listening for the umpteenth time to "Wagon Wheel" and then visiting the band's fansite and reading several comments by people who said things like "I can really relate to what they're saying about freedom, I feel that way too" and thinking about these comments, I realized that the best songs are just particular enough and just general enough that they touch almost everyone in a powerful way. A lot of singers write songs that are so full of particulars that the universal is lost and the song becomes boring, irrelevant or outdated after a few listenings. Too general, and it's like a typical teenage love poem, full of angst but no images. The best songs create just a few images (see the header for this post), enough to make the scene real, and touch universal themes -- of yearning, sorrow, desire, joy, or whatever, and they do it artfully. Maybe that's what it all comes down to, giving life to a universal theme through art.

Note: I think I'm talking about "lyric" songs here, as in lyric poetry -- not odes or memoriams, or ballads, or protest songs, though they all are created with artfulness or not. (And, of course, we DON'T all necessarily like the same songs. Some of us like Plovakian music, some prefer punk, some [shudder] barbershop singing....

Spooky Picture

2008-08-03T17:16:00.003-05:00

I can't say what this is. I won't say. But I have to post it, at last, somewhere. I may put a slightly differently- detailed picture elsewhere. Stay tuned. (It's not a happy story.)

I read non-fiction too

2008-07-29T16:06:00.004-05:00

Who woulda thunk it, two non-fiction books and one to go! And only one is required reading. For a note on Nathaniel's Philbrick's wonderful history, Mayflower, look over at St. Dunstan's Notes one of my library spots.

The Child and the Lorikeet

2008-07-02T18:12:00.004-05:00

At the Oregon Zoo in Portland (accessible by rapid transit from downtown and the suburbs) a child can experience close up creatures of different species. For the city child or for any modern child who doesn't live in the country, such encounters are usually with dogs, cats, minor rodent "pets" that live in little plastic worlds, and if the child is lucky enough an Uncle Milton's Ant Farm. it doesn't take a lot of occasional encounters to let the child know that she shares the air and earth and water with other, interesting creatures.
The Lorikeet exhibit at the Portland Zoo is an outdoor enclosed habitat with double doorways to ensure that the birds stay in. In the anteroom you can buy a cup of nectar for a dollar, and then you walk into the sunny preserve with flowery areas and a path bordered with wooden railings. If you are smart and have listened to the guide (or your parent has listened and passed this wisdom along to you), you stand still by a portion of fence, rest your forearm on the railing, and hold the little cup even and steady. Then you take a deep breath and hold still and wait. Soon a brilliantly colored bird lands on the rail (or on your wrist, if you're tall enough to rest your arm on the railing), holds tight with its feet, little foreclaws and backclaws, looks at you, then bobs its head into your cup. It drinks and drinks, and you hold very still and stare at the bird with wonder.
It doesn't take a lot to make a person aware, but someone needs to create the setting or provide the opportunity -- for the child, and for the child-in-us and for everyone.

Red 7

2008-07-01T10:43:00.002-05:00

Happy July 1. Mid summer, midyear. The Old Farmer's Almanac says it's Canada Day. It feels like a Canadian summer day today, a breezy gift of Aeolus and Sol, The butterfly bushes are reaching to the clouds, and bumblebees feed on the coneflowers. "The Garden Year" says this:

Hot July brings cooling showers,

Apricots and gilly-flowers.

Those days will come, but right now it's hotter in Portland, Oregon than it is here. Too nice a day to sit inside by the computer, however breezy the back porch is, where you feel you're perching in the trees, right by the blue jays. I have a friend who once lived in an apartment in Kingsport, Tennesee, a modest apartent in a modest neighborhood,. His living room had a door that opened out onto a flat rook, at tree top level. He put two chairs chairs out there, and a little side table. If you sat very still you could see birds come to the trees, warblers and others that never come down below roof level, The sunlight and wind filtered through the leaves and you were in a forest, far removed from the town just beyond on the other side of the house.

I read today of another high person brought low, a typical tawdry sex scandal -- except that oops, it was really crime, because the girls involved were underage -- having too much free time right now, I read the story and imagined the life of a man from the city -- Coney Island -- who became very wealthy and could live as he chose. What he chose was a Caribbean island and all the joys of isolation -- oh, and underage girls. The typical tawdry story. But he was interviewed as he faced moving from there to a prison. Other than the question of underage girls, and that's a deal-breaker, his life was otherwise okay -- he gave money away to worthy causes and minded his business. The thing I envied about his luxury was not the island, not the sand and sun and beaches and sunrises and sunsets (his house is on a promontory that overlooks both the Atlantic and the Caribbean), but this: he said he never went to meetings, "I don't ever have to be anywhere."

To me, that would be the best part (besides never worrying about money), never having to be anywhere. Days like that a a luxury, and this midsummer breezy lull before the hot days and back to work is to be savored. I'm on my little island.

Color: a Side Trip

2008-06-28T15:17:00.009-05:00

See this wonderful blogpost from colourlovers.com showing transportation maps of the world. If you love the MBTA map or the NY City system (which I have on a mug,) you'll love this.

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/02/13/navigating-by-color-in-maps/

Here's my mug again, and a couple of other things around the house:

Cowboys

2008-06-27T17:03:00.006-05:00

Quick: Whaddya think of FIRST when you think of cowboys?

. . .

[tick tick tick tick tick tick . . . ]

. . .

Now =

Check out this == http://www.magdalenatraildrivers.com/

****Here's the text, in case the link doesn't work, but it won't have the special effects:

"What is Sass?

he Single Action Shooting Society is an international organization created to preserve and promote the sport of Cowboy Action Shooting™. SASS endorses

regional matches conducted by affiliated clubs, stages END of TRAIL The World Championship of Cowboy Action Shooting, promulgates rules and procedures to ensure safety and consistency in Cowboy Action Shooting matches, and seeks to protect its members' 2nd Amendment rights. SASS members share a common interest in preserving the history of the Old West and competitive shooting.
Click here to learn more about SASS Mounted Shooting. Click here for a brief history.

!!!!!!!

I think about cowboys every now and then, when I see a horse and a saddle or hear a pistol or see a boy of crayons . .

So I was surprised and not surprised to get this link (above) today in an email from a friend who moved out west. He's in a cowboy group, pictured somewhere at the link. I'm so glad that Ted is doing this! We'd never agree on who to vote for, but we get along just great, and I'm glad he likes playing cowboy, It's certainly a long time fantasy life of mine. But I have to email him and ask all the rest of the cowboy dream questions: do you sleep out under the stars, do you sing to the dogies, do you even ride horses????? I think that politics aside, we as being of different genders, have a differnt idea of cowboys.

Coming up: Wilson Wakes Up!

Also, Horse Encounters in Fairview

Crayola Factory

~~~~

Clearly, there's more to find out. Until then, I have crayons and colored pencils, but I don't have the right coloring book. Ahhhl I DO have a Dover Indians of North American coloring book. Lemme go check it out. Get yourself something to drink and make yourself comfortable. I'll be back.

64 Different Brilliant Colors

2008-06-25T15:51:00.004-05:00

When I was a child I colored. I also painted and cut paper and glued and pasted and sometimes taped it together into creations. They were ephemerals, and I've always been since those days the fan but never the artist. I love crayons and colors and hues and intensities and color names and blending and the tactile nature of doing it on paper or whatever -- experiment!. The smell of Crayola crayons is important to my childhood, right up there with pine needles and beach air and low tide and fish parts drying on docks and wood fires. And it's still there, folks. Some visitor asked during my recent visit to the Crayola Factory (which see further on), "Uhh, where does the smell come from?" And the guy said brightly, "Paraffin wax and pigment!" and most of the people were satisfied and went on the the next question. I still don't know where the smell comes from (or maybe how).
~~~~~~~~~~~

I could write every day about crayons. I could have entries for at least a month. They would be alt of fun for me to write, and they would quickly get very boring for my faithful reader(s). But I'll do it anyway, because I like to. Better formatting than handwriting.

~~~
The song "64 Different Brilliant Colors" is a brilliant and colorful song with shades and shadows, performed by a pair of young women a decade or two ago. My copy of the original album is on tape.

If you feel like coloring and have a printer nearby, here's a real gem. It gives me a frisson from my childhood, when we could buy a coloring book and if we wanted to duplicate a picture we could trace it with tracing paper (probably produced by Crayola, oh yeah!).

http://www.crayola.com/free-coloring-pages/print/no.4-midnight-blue-coloring-page/

Old Tater's Almanac

2008-06-24T08:02:00.008-05:00

June 24

Nativity of St. John the Baptist~~Midsummer Day

For one week now the length of the days has been 14 hrs. 24 mins., the longest days of 2008. But the sun will continue to set at its latest until July 6, so Tater says, Stretch, breathe, watch the bees and enjoy midsummer.

From William Cullen Bryant:

Go forth under the open sky/And list to nature's teachings.

Or observe from your back porch. Tater's Quick Quiz: What do you see in both of these pictures? Look closely.

Jupiter is appearing earlier at night, and the hot humid weather of earlier in the month have gone away, and the days are sunny and showery and nights are cool.

"Perhaps you have felt [the truth of your essential goodness] on some rare day in early summer, when you have been alone in a wood on a blue-bell carpet, and your eyes, wandering to the hedge-wall, have seen it white with may; all around you there has been a silence--a silence that strikes like a blow; and suddenly it ceases to be silence for the birds are singing, and you wonder how long that music has been there without your noticing it. You are right away from the world...."

Ernest Raymond, Through Literature to Life: an Enthusiasm and an Anthology, 1928

Tater will work on his crossword puzzle now, while Star Cat watches for jays.

Summer Books

2008-06-20T11:44:00.006-05:00

Summer's the great time for reading, at least until those early evenings of winter which my friend Steve Cooper likes, because then you can settle into your chair by 8 or so and read. I decided it was silly to have a separate reading blog and will just note things here. Here are highlights from May and June:

Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers: The divine Mrs. W. at her most lyrical. I first saw parts of the TV adaptation, then read the book. The period is fascinating to me, as are the glimpses of society life in America and Europe, young lads and lasses on the make. Will the girl get the right guy? Will the cad win her heart? Not a dull moment here, and of course the lovely scenes of Newport and life in its summer "cottages." I went to college with Beryl Slocum, whose family owned one of the houses on Ocean Drive, and I once toured Rosecliff with Kate and Zack when they were little. Rosecliff was used for parts of the movie of The Great Gatsby, while, jarringly to a native, Long Island Sound was substituted for the lively Atlantic coast.

Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the Last Career Guide You've Ever Need. Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk Blog says that every high school library needs a copy of this book by Pink, the author of A Whole new Mind, a book already in my school library. So I bought it and then was delighted to find that our new academic dean was giving each of us a copy of WNM for our summer reading. i thought I'd start with johnny, as it's a quick, graphic novel study of pink's six rules. It's a little late in the game for me, but as I continue to work and think about my work and as the school and library continue to evolve in interesting ways, I'm glad to have these tools.

Salmon

2008-06-17T16:22:00.014-05:00

In Oregon salmon are everywhere. At the Bonneville Dam and the zoo and the airport, in murals and polished granite floor mosaics, bronze fish leap and live salmon swim up ladders and rivers. Children and adults in Portland and the region are reminded in public spaces by murals, mosaics, sculpture, viewing places, friendly interpreters of the natural world in which we humans still live despite our sometime attempts to pave it all over or rush by.

Oregon seems to invest a lot more of its resources than usual to projects which connect people to nature. From the Bonneville Dam to the Oregon Zoo, in the railway station and on the waterfront you can walk on images of the rivers and trace their courses on walls and imagine the journey of the salmon from the ocean to breeding places where the eggs hatch into young salmon that then return to the ocean.

I don't know enough to know whether the balance of protection of wildlife and use of the river to generate power is an ideal one, but I liked the Bonneville Dam, where the salmon ladder and the hydroelectric generators are both on display, and where if you are lucky and go on a quiet day you might get invited into the fish counting room, to see the fish pass the window, and then you might be entertained who volunteers at the dam information desk by "MacPherson's Retreat" or Dave Mallett's "Inch by Inch [The Garden Song]" and you can sing along if you like.

Finale: Eating Salmon. Right past this counter at Pike's Place in Seattle I picked out a piece of smoked salmon for my cat-sitter, but I don't have a picture of the fish nor of the poached salmon a couple of weeks later at Jacob's Bar Mitzvah in Allentown, Pa.

Bird Cloud, Oregon Dunes

2008-06-11T18:13:00.002-05:00

I have many images from my trip to the Pacific Northwest, but in cleaning up my library today I found a scrap of yellow paper on which I'd written this, and it will suffice for tonight:

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

-- R.W. Emerson

The picture doesn't quite capture the birdness of this cloud over the Oregon Dunes, but the real thing made me think of Lionel Feininger's "Bird Cloud," one of my favorite paintings when I was in college and discovering paintings.

I'm frustrated by the temporary loss of a second set of pictures and hope to find them soon, to show the prevalence of the idea of Salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

This is a shard.

The Pacific Northwest: the Confluence Project

2008-05-28T15:13:00.006-05:00

I'm visiting Zack in Portland for a roomy two weeks, and there's so much to show and tell. Today I want to mention Maya Lin's Confluence Project, a series of installations along the Columbia River, ending at the mouth of the river, where it flows into the Pacific at Ilwaco. Lin agreed to do this project for the 200th anniversary celebration of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Her intention was to show the chosen sites not just as they are now, but in a way that makes the visitor simultaneously inhabit past, present and future. Like the work of the archaeologist or fossil hunter, who draws our attention to the life that has been in a place before us and thereby makes us aware of the continuum of time in landscape, Lin's work here recreates past eras in a living way. These sites are not at all like the "living history" exhibits we can see at the Mayflower replica in Plymouth, Mass., nor even at Washington and Cape Disappointment State Park.Plimouth Plantation, nor the recreations at Old Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg. Those places have their use in giving us an image of human life in a particular landscape and try as best they can to show what life was like back then. But Lin's goal is more subtle: to show the continuity of human life in a specific location. In preparation for the work at the Cape Disappointment site, work was dune on reclaiming some of the dunes and natural features, and Lin's projects, created out of natural materials simply and subtly show that continuity. Her fish-cleaning table, above, was made out of a slab of basalt, which abounds here, and both reminds us of the Chinook's reliance on fish and provides a working space for fishermen now.
This is what we saw in the bay right off the end of the table.

Here's the site where you can read about the project and see a video of Lin talking about it:
http://www.confluenceproject.org.
Note: The Chinooks, like so many tribes, were nearly decimated by the arrival of the whites, and were about to gain recognition once more as a tribe at the end of Clinton's presidency. But when Bush came in he denied them this courtesy. I hope that the thinking of the people who commissioned this project and others like it and who encourage similar projects in the schools will prevail in the years to come.

So much depends upon...

2008-05-11T17:01:00.003-05:00

... a giant spider
passing over the city of Paris,
egg sac hanging below *

Giant spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, in the Jardin des Tuileries, in a photo of a picture torn from the New York Times and hanging on my fridge

Like the giant polar bear that used to grace my daily commute, this spider delights my soul. I hope she will come to the US. I might go to see her if she does. She's been to London, so maybe D.C.? Unless the President is an arachnophobe...

* in case you expected a wheelbarrow and a chicken, just wait -- they're coming soon.

My Grandmother and Edith Wharton

2008-05-10T19:57:00.005-05:00

Taking pictures of pictures isn't the greatest way to show them, but it sure is fun. This one is from a thin black album over a century old. Some of the photos are dated 1912, before my mother was born. The pictures of my grandmother, Evelyn Langley Manchester, and her sisters and friends remind me of the world of Henry James and Edith Wharton, a world I return to time and again in my reading. Edith Wharton was a summer visitor to Newport and might have passed my grandmother on the street or on Bellevue Avenue or Ocean Drive. I think my grandmother is more beautiful than Mrs. Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones.

In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer is in Newport at the same time as his forbidden love, Ellen Olenska. He goes out to a farm in Middletown to see some race horses, and sees Ellen down on the shore. My grandfather, David Coggeshall Simmons, was part of a Middletown family whose large farm on the East Main Road is now a land trust and while it no longer has dairy cattle is run by the youngest generation as a demonstration organic farm. You can still stop at the farm stand in the summer and buy fresh produce. It can't be too far from the farm that Archer visited. This man and horse are in my family album, not Newland Archer's.

Literature stands by itself as a deep source of pleasure, but that enjoyment is even greater when the place evoked is known to the reader. Last summer as I drove with my mother along Ocean Drive and some of the side roads, I looked for Wharton's summer cottage. I found one that looked promising, but I need to do a little more research. And I need to find out who the man is. Later: more 1912 photos.

Saturday Mashup

2008-04-26T18:41:00.005-05:00

Librarians are wonderful, and so are their children, and also the blogs which give us these surprising discoveries! Today a lot of shiny bits and pieces appeared out of the chaos that is daily life, and with patience and attention I might get to highlight a few of them. Until next time, here is a belated Easter image from Biltmore Village --

Oh, so maybe you wanted to see the McDonald's a block away, the one that sits by the entrance to the Biltmore Estate and mirrors its style? Be good and hopeful, and maybe I'll take a couple of pictures there. While you're waiting, listen to a child talk and read a good book and remember that while change is constant, the really good things don't change.

I'm quitting trying to be "with it," technologically. The last straw came in today's funnies, when the dad in Zits announced he's started a blog, and the teen kid told him blogs are over -- now it's vlogs. What's the point? Blogger spellcheck doesn't even recognize the word "vlog." Better to put your attention on the children and the books. Maybe I'll listen to my own wisdom.

April

2008-04-03T20:18:00.003-05:00

Sometimes it helps to see a big blue circle. This is why we need art, to take us out of our mental hamster wheels, out of our inward gazing and into the air of possibility and delight.

Going into nature, afield or in the back yard, does this too.

And when we go into a garden and find a big blue circle

and are allowed to touch it

and to find that we can turn it on its base

and we feel as happy as a child under the sky

then life feels a little better, a little more grounded.

Cloudscapes

2008-03-10T11:27:00.004-05:00

When you use gmail to let someone know you're going to have a colonoscopy, then use the spellchecker, the word "colonoscopy" is not recognized. But gmail helpfully offers you "cloudscape" and "kaleidoscope." So, tomorrow is my day to enjoy a cloudscape. (The real fun, of course, comes the evening before, as the actual procedure is not bothersome.) In the usual way of the world, the air has been full of cloudy mentions of late. The news that a friend who is only 35 has colon cancer, front page news about the detection procedure, and several other mentions in the media of the disease. Not a good week for clouds or people. But maybe if you live out in the Pacific Northwest, things are different; no one has ever heard of such a thing. They live their happy kaleidoscopic lives out there, filled with oysters and geoducks and beautiful cloudscapes over the Pacific. (With very sincere apologies to Porter, if he see my words, because he knows that this is not true. Maybe it's only in GoogLand that there is no disease.)

P.S. Those folks at GoogGroundZero must be too busy having fun at the mothership, because they apparently don't know about geoducks either.)

March Comes In

2008-03-09T19:04:00.005-05:00

... with its brezzes loud and shrill, and the etagerie on the front porch falls over, startling the cats indoors, while a long branch of white pine clanks onto the roof of the car and the windsocks are flying straight out. Suddenly, it seems, the bulbs are all blooming -- iris reticulata, snowdrops, daffodils, crocus, two colors of grape hyacinth, and one Forsythia blossom. The Old Farmer's Almanac announces St. David's Day, St. Piran, St. Perpetua, Daylight Savings Time, then Pure Monday, Palm Sunday, the vernal equinox, and Easter. Surely the non-Christian world has observances in this month as well, but they're not in the OFA. There's a lot going on in the world, but it's good to look at what's happening in right around you.

Social progress?

2008-02-21T21:45:00.003-05:00

I was walking today in my neighborhood, on some of the streets closer to the main drag and alongside a park, and picked up some trash, till my hands were full: two beer bottles, a crushed soda can, a Styrofoam food box, and then -- oh joy! a plastic grocery bag to carry it all in. And the trash made me think about class and race and neighborhoods. And it occurred to me again that maybe what people in this country really care about is class, not race. My neighborhood is racially mixed and mostly clean and peaceful, and that's part of why people enjoy living here. (The trash is an aberration and is a result of this particular street's location in the traffic flow.) I think most of us don't care about the color or gender preference of our neighbors: what we care about is how people behave.
And then I thought of Obama's rising popularity as a candidate, and how amazing it is that suddenly we've made this seemingly huge leap to what might have only recently seemed years away -- a non-white presidential candidate, wow! Later in the evening I read this NY Times article and thought, yeah, they like this guy because he's -- well, he's okay! He's good! He's like us! He shares our values! (Sure, there's vestigial racism in the remarks of some of the citizens reported on) but man, this is progress.!) And so it comes down to economics, getting people out of poverty and into the middle class. That's not to speak out in favor of a dreadful conformity, and there will always be some who want the heady mix of, say, the City, and those who prefer the quiet of the lone prairie. I'm just saying that I think we're maybe evolving and entering a state where it's not your race that matters so much as your fit with your community and the consensus of the greater society. My Kenilworth neighbors, for instance, value clean streets, quiet evenings, and within their houses the freedom to do what they want without disturbing others. For the most part we don't care what the race, political preference, or gender orientation is of our neighbors: we just want them to behave relatively decorously in public. We love the existence of New York City and other big cities where there's much more noise and variety of lifestyles, but for middle America I think more and more that middle class values trump the racial and gender divisions.

Fine, and Finer

2008-02-21T21:42:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregion/18semicolon.html?ex=1204261200&en=5416dc2fa9938301&ei=5070

That's wonderful news, but I would TOTALLY have used a colon.

Parlement of Foules

2008-02-14T20:56:00.005-05:00

I have no recent bird photos for St. Valentine's Day, when the birds are said to choose their mates, only those of a recent sky on a very windy day, and the emerging daffodils in the yard. But the birds I saw this week included --

five turkeys eating carrion on Christ School Rd.

thirteen wild geese flying overhead towards Kenilworth Lake at sunset

a solitary crow ("One crow sorrow") over the tall pines by the driveway, fussing at someone

a towhee scratching in the leaves

goldfinches on the feeders

and a pair of shy cardinals on the ground.

Does your cat read the paper?

2008-02-12T14:54:00.000-05:00

I missed the best picture, Tater looking up with bits of newspaper hanging from his mouth. My cat loves to read the paper. His method is to scratch it up with his claws and chew bits off.

Delectable, beyond words...

2008-02-10T16:22:00.000-05:00

One of the scrumptious holiday goodies from beth and Cary ane family. The grandchildren helped make short work of them. There were also crystallized ginger slices dipped in dark chocolate, and more.... yummmm....

Sometimes I jot down notes from things I hear on the radio. here's a tidbit, but the context is lost:

"How dare you? What the hell do you mean?"

"You handed her that halibut and expected her to--"

"To what? To cook it? That's all."

Today the wind is so strong I'm scared to go out under the ancient oaks and flimsy pines. The shelves on the proch blew over, and the porch is now covered with gardening gradu and shards of pottery. But Dougie MacLean's singing at 7 downtown: maybe the wind will have let up by then. Guess I'll learn the words to "Flower of Scotland' now.

Colorful, if not shiny

2008-02-09T12:31:00.000-05:00

Actually, Lambs' Pride wool IS a bit shiny, compared to most worsteds. That's probably because it's 15% mohair. This is a hat and scarf I made for Lute Lute. I learned to knit many decades ago but have never gotten very proficient at it. I attribute that lack to my preference for reading over TV. And to speed. I knit the continental way, which is quick and efficient, and I can't see why anybody would choose the more laborious yarn-in-the-right-hand-wrap-around-the-needle way. But most people are a lot more error-free than me. i just do it for fun and because I love the feel of wool yarn, and the colors. My mother-in-law was a wonderful and perfectionist knitter who once made an Aran Isles pullover for Ben and also a Kaffe Fassett sweater. I stick to scarves and hats. I once took a class to learn to make socks, made a lovely wool pair, then wore out the heels within weeks by walking barefoot around the hosue in them. That was a lot of work for holey socks. Hats are much more durable, although most of them seems to drift to other parts of the family. That's okay -- i enjoy seeing them on my relatives. I'm experimenting with felting, but in a guesswork way. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not. If you'd like a hat, let me know, and tell me your colors.

I just joined the huge knitting site Ravelry but won't submit pictures to it because my creations are not perfect. But knitting's fun and satisfying.

2008-01-16T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Chief sits in his cycle shop
Drinking his PBR;
Where can I get a good mechanic
To service my German car?

Up jumps a braw young lad
Lounging by the door
I’m your guy, I can make you fly,
I’ve serviced these wheels before.

He tinkered and tankered, pulled many a spruhl,
Made that old car a sleek modern ride,
Till the final day came, and he rolled it out
To the gleaming great outside.

Three cheers, three cheers, shouted all the lads,
Three cheers for the chief, our guy!
So our Chief rolled away on a bright Sunday
With hardly a cloud in the sky.

Oh they rode north, and they rode north,
Till they came to a great Valley –
“Look to the west, it’s clouding up fast,
And our Chief said, “Follow me!”

They followed him down that long valley
Till an exit appeared on their right;
Let’s stop here, boys, let’s find a motel,
And there’s we’ll spend the night.

Oh the TV played, and the ice cubes clanked,
And they dropped off, one by one,
While outside the wind and clouds rolled in
And of rain there came a great ton.

Oh long may the ladies wait,
With their children on their knee,
Before they see their laddies again
Who drowned in the great valley.

Oh far away the motel site sits,
Now a lake beside a town
And only a flower to mark the place
Where the Chief and his men lay down.

Kits or Kitsch, a Contest

2008-01-13T16:56:00.000-05:00

Here are the entries. Label each as

a) kits

b) kitsch

L-R: bright yellow, white, dull yellow

It's hard to capture the beguilinbg sparkle of the eyes. You can only imagine.

A shiny presence is gone from my house

2008-01-06T12:32:00.000-05:00

Today being Epiphany, I took down my Christmas tree, and already I miss it. It shimmered with tinsel, it shone with big old-fashioned lights, and it glistened with ornaments from my life: the tin fish from Georgetown in the 70s, the silver star my brother David made of Mylar and toothpicks, the Santa Claus Zack made out of construction paper, glue, and cotton many years ago, the Victorian fan Caleb made in forth grade, the feathery peacock from India which always goes on top, the striped pink and blue ball Anita gave my mom, and so many more. The tree was a thing of beauty. When I'd finished decorating it before Christmas, it was almost perfect, but one thing was lacking -- shimmer. So I covered it with tinsel. Not the heavy leaded tinsel of my childhood, but the modern, holographic plastic tinsel of today. That was the touch it needed. Since my camera is STILL in the repair shop I couldn't take its picture and am instead showing the cover of a wonderful book, Deborah Kogan Ray's treatment of the poem by e. e. cummings, which I will give here, as it deserves to be widely known:

little tree

little silent Christmas tree

you are so little

you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest

and were you very sorry to come away?

see i will comfort you

because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark

and hug you safe and tight

just as your mother would,

only don't be afraid

look the spangles

that sleep all the year in a dark box

dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,

the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms

and i'll give them all to you to hold

every finger shall have its ring

and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed

you'll stand in the window for everyone to see

and how they'll stare!

oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands

and looking up at our beautiful tree

we'll dance and sing

"Noel Noel"

~ e.e. cummings

Temporary aphasia

2008-01-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

Dear Neighbors,

Thank you so much for the delicious ... ah... ah... a...

bruschetta

croquettes

foccacia

Famiglia

frittata

escabeche

marscapone

menudo (no!!)

dulce de leche

BISCOTTI!

yes, biscotti!

"Cry havoc, and let loose the therapy dogs of war!"

2007-12-21T14:59:00.000-05:00

To celebrate the Solstice, a dull and damp day, I put tinsel on the tree. It's splendidly shiny now. By mistake, I came home with four cards of tinsel. If the day continues dank, I might open another one. The Solstice doesn't actually occur until 1 a.m. tonight. The earliest sunset was two weeks earlier, and we've already gained three more minutes at the end of the day, so welcome, sun! Even though we can't see you today, welcome.

I recommend a daily dose of "Sherman's Lagoon" to anyone who's ever loved the ocean. The fan group is over here. You'll have to go to the website for pictures, because we don't copy here at Shards. Over on the book blog, that's a different story. But not here, so no cartoons. Only my own pics. This one has been enhanced with water color effects, thanks to Picasa.

Celebration will continue later with "Left, Right and Center" at 6:30, a perfect opening to a Friday evening.

A poem excerpt for Christmas, from an unattributedsource:

And at night we win to the ancient inn,

Where the child in the frost is furled;

We follow the feet where all souls meet

At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown;

The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,

Ans a Child comes forth alone.

G.K. Chesterton,

"A Child of the Snows"

Waiting for Christmas

2007-12-18T11:34:00.000-05:00

It once was July, and I was in Rhode Island. Now my camera's still in the shop, and I'm lucky to have a store of summer pictures, to remember Little Rhody by. Because I won't be going up there for the holidays, not until March. I get to stay home, trim a tree, and be cozy, once I've mailed off my New England presents. There's nothing like a vacation at home. We had snow on Sunday, though most melted in. But all the children at Luther's birthday party were out sledding on the wet, snow-sprinkled hills, and playing in the magic garden until dark.

Love is where you find it

2007-12-06T09:28:00.001-05:00

I have not eaten the heart.

~~Ani, Papyrus: Book of the Dead

I will not eat my heart alone.
~~ Tennyson, In Memoriam

What shall we do then for food? "Shall the blessed Sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries?" (Shakespeare, King Henry IV)

Life is a puzzle. Or, as Lewis Hyde wrote,

Cold winter night,
Little bugs on the firewood:
What are we to do?

Are you clickable? I am....

2007-12-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

Technology & Learning for November 2007 has a one page bit called "The Importance of Being 'Clickable,'" talking about how important it is (at least for professional purposes) to have an online presence. So I went ahead and Googled myself, without the middle initial, and found one "real" me and the usual assortment of English chinchilla breeders, opera singers, actresses and a motley assortment of dead people. But then a light bulb went on, and I searched for "Jane L. Hyde." Aha! That made all the difference. I found lots of hits, nothing embarrassing but a bit surprising, most being comments I've left on other blogs and websites. It's curious to see your own comments out there on the web. So I'm reassured, I think, to find that I have an online presence, however modest. But my school blogs and personal ones are under different registrations, so maybe my professional connections don't show up as much as my enthusiastic responses to sundry topics.

Some Great Thoughts

2007-12-02T18:42:00.000-05:00

Oh bother, I can't remember any of them. They were good, or I thought so. But I was over at Brother Dunstan's den, helping him out... or maybe eating his currant scones, I forget which. Well, anyway, it's December, nearly St. Nicholas Day, and maybe it will snow some day soon.

The Last Days of November

2007-11-26T09:46:00.000-05:00

The Full Beaver Moon is waning, and finally, four days from the end of November, things are getting bare. For most of the months the oranges and reds of all hues have held on to the trees and shrubs, and the expected final blast didn't come until last night. Now there's intermittent rain and gusts of wind to blow most of them down.

Coming up this week are the birthdays of Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Lee, James Agee, Berry Gordy, Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Louisa May Alcott.

The Urban Almanac for 2006 quoted St. Francis of Assisi thus: Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. The other side of that is letting the dishes pile up in the sink [substitute and image of entropy] with he result that the next day you don't have time to go past what's necessary. many people live their lives keeping up with the necessary, some because it's all they can manage, and others out of a spiritual laziness that doesn't dare to dream -- or won't get off the couch. Fear or laziness, it all leads to nothing.

I meant to speak of Thanksgiving. Most of the tributes and reflections I've read recently have been either the typical ThanksyouGoiforeverything" or have been thoughtful and religiously non-committal musings on the good things all around us.

I'd like to write an anti-Thanksgiving prayer or statement. Because behind most of the celebration in this country (at least among those who are safely and securely living here) lies the Puritan belief that we deserved these blessings because we were among God's chosen ones, on a divine mission to settle here. Yes, they were thankful at Plymouth, of course, for surviving the winter, for food and houses, for freedom, and for -- so far -- cordial relations with the native people. But while they gave thanks they simultaneously included the affirmation that God was on their side. I know that the national holiday didn't exist until Lincoln's time, but the roots are in Plymouth, and we never forget it.

Why am I talking about this? Because I would like to declare that I am NOT "thankful" in the common American meaning of this. I am appreciative to be sure and thankful in my own sense for what I have and that I don't live under hardship, and I love all the simple things of nature and life and blah blah blah -- BUT I DON'T in fact thank anyone for any of this, because however it all came into being I do not think that a God person gave it to me for a purpose. Maybe there's teleology in biology, I tend towards the teleological explanations of things where they're possible, but none of it issued from a person-like creature to whom I can talk or who "knows" me.

I read thew Psalms for comfort. but I do not really think that there is One Who Knows my innermost soul.

I love to go to Plymouth and eat ice cream at Peaceful Meadows and clams at Wood's and buy postcards and visit the Mayflower and walk the old streets and look a,t the eroding rock, but it's more a feeling of being at home on those sandy grassy shores by the salt bay, forty miles from where I grew up.

Entertaining Ourselves

2007-11-25T18:31:00.000-05:00

Artist's Studio, West Barrington, RI, 2007

Unlike my children, I don't write only when I have something to say. I'd rather write a non-memorable paragraph every day than less, just for the practice of seeing my words in print, and for the discipline. Maybe a new winter's resolution is to do just that.

Here's a passage from one of my favorite books, Now That We Have to Walk by Raymond Tifft Fuller (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943):

"... a dismaying proportions of us Americans buy too many superfluous gadgets to save time and labor (working still harder than ever to possess and maintain them); neglect our health and our insurance, and live always above our income-level; we have put far too much of our 'saved' time into being entertained. Seductively placed before us is a variety of more or less effective diversions perhaps never equalled since the days of the Caesars. Eighteenth century royalties never had the time-killing opportunities we common Americans have. We are being painstakingly trained to regard entertainment and ever more entertainment as the crowning feature of civilized life. Subtly the passive role has been glorified into being the characteristic element of a high standard of living..... Millions of Americans have surrendered all personal sovereignty over their fun and their interests."

Zow. I say this all the time. Or, rather, I think it but do NOT say it, as I have an antipathy toward stating the obvious. And it's been said many times, probably centuries before Fuller. But this is from 1943 -- how long must the prophet speak in the wilderness?

I had a couple more passages to copy here, but this is enough food for thought for one session.

Beckoned by Bivalves

2007-11-24T14:59:00.000-05:00

I don't know if it's just the NY Times, or if everyone's doing it, but I've been noticing a number of alliterative headlines lately. And you can tell they're deliberate, because they're repeated on the inside page, the "Story continues on" page. There was a super duper one a couple of months ago in the theatre section: No Wonder He's Crunchy, He's Covered With Condiments." I like that. And I especially like "Beckoned By Bivalves," the header for a story about life on Prince Edward Island, a northernfFantasy if there ever was one.
As the url of this blog suggests, I grew up in the company of bivalves, so they have been beckoning to me all my life, along with the bear in "Snow White and Rose Red," Reddy kilowatt, and Winnie the Pooh, up in his forest. I don't think bivalves presented as food would be very tempting to someone not raised near salty tidal flats: they're slippery looking, with odd translucent yellow and grey parts, and an ominous dark stomach. Not food for the squeamish. You don't hare to travel like Anthony Bourdain to find squeamly food: just go to our Pilgrim shores. But to one raised on them, there is nothing more succulent than a cold, briny, littleneck on the half shell, unless it's an oyster, similarly served. With a touch of lemon and maybe a dash of cocktail sauce, but slid down from the shell with the salty liquid, it's food for the gods.
i consider bivalves among my earliest friends also because my first assigned research paper was a report on the quahog (the round bivalve of Rhode Island and nearby waters). Mr. Curran gave us the assignment (because, as he said, he'd once had to write an article on the quahog and it was darned hard, or interesting, or something. So we paired up, Valerie Cameron and I, and set out on the town. To the Providence Public Library and our first experiences in the dizzying world of microfilm and primary sources. We read old newspaper accounts and saw old photos of East Providence in its heyday of steamer rides up and down the bay and clambakes at the Squantum Club for the posh set and shore dinners at Crescent Park for the rest of us.
We rode our reporters' bikes down to Blount Seafood, on the waterfront street in Bristol, a place still operating and still housed in a green painted building with a large yard covered with crushed clam shells. We were received like the true reporters we were (barely out of our Nancy Drew days) and, seated in a large office with large brown chairs, we were told the story of commercial quahog harvesting.
And back in those dark days before anyone in the schools spoke about Native Americans except the obligatory paper hats and paper feather cutting and Thanksgiving stories, we learned that the Indians' form of cyurrency, , was made from the insides of the quahog shells. White beads were smaller units, as most of the inner shell was white; the violet was less plentiful and so provided t higher denomination beads. Before Mr. Rogers and Schoolhouse Rock, we at least learned a sold bit of American history and anthropology.
I'm sorry the paper we wrote has disappeared. I think it was 9 or 14 pages, handwritten, in all. It's disappeared, and I live farther from the salt-water mollusks and bivalves, but they always beckon.

Sad footnote: My third child just visited a mecca of the bivalve, Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Coast, but he doesn't like any kind of "seafood." I'm very glad he went but wished he could have capped off the trip with the ultimate bivalve experience.

My Soccer Team

2007-11-20T14:21:00.000-05:00

Since I forgot to bring home the book of science essays with Stevenson and Burroughs and Lewis Thomas, instead I'll present the roster of my school's fall varsity soccer team. All names are aliases, but they represent the variety of boys on the team.

Sam Willett

Gus Peterson

Tomas Arroya

Heinrich Heinicke

Henry Cho

Joe Spumoni

Blackmer Root

Ake Makole

McMillan Mulligan

Russell Pinckney

Tony Capisco

Rodney Yee

Anatoli Boxwood

Derek Walcott

Ali Mahoub

Tyler Spinnaker

Herb Yonik

and so on. That's a lot like our list. they are from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Jamaica, Korea, Sweden, Minnesota, Africa by way of East Tennessee and Washington State. just a slice of boarding school life in the southern mountains.

Now I'll look into my picture hoard and try to find something new.

Complexity

2007-11-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

This is way too much fun.

Daisy, Stripe and Button: A New Rutabaga Tale, or I Serve the Muse

2007-11-13T20:29:00.000-05:00

All day they were playing the Story Game, a version of Dungeons and Dragons and Zork and their always love for stories, with one person setting the plot and giving choices. The oldest's was many branching, wide open, and recently informed by the newly discovered pleasure of Zork, the ultimate imaginative adventure set in white text on a black ground, representing the Story master's voice and the response. The second played a similar story, but with predetermined choices: "You see a big tree. What do you do? Do you want to climb the tree?" "Yeah...." "You go into the town full of shops. Where do you go?" "I go to the pub, to talk to people and have a beer." "No, there's a weapon shop. You go to the weapon shop." "You meet a big monster. What do you do?" "I talk to the monster and offer him some of my lunch from the brown sack." "No -- you KILL the monster." "Oh."

Later, the little sister takes her turn. She is newly five. I cannot do justice to her story, can only tell you about it. She begins: "Once there were three people, Jemmy, Junny and Bami." (Bami was a nurturing African nurse in last night's book, Jim's Lion by Russell Hoban.) "No, they had different names. They were... Daisy, Stripe, and Button."*

The story continues (here's where I can't do it justice). It has three sections, three quests, with the last, Daisy's, being the triumphant one. The story structure is perfect, the plot perfect. It incorporates elements of the day's storytelling -- a maze, paths in the forest, treasures, choices. it is economical, and it is perfect. And there is a coda -- at the very end, there's a surprise ending: the grandmother appears and spanks them all!

*As i heard these names and wondered, I realized immediately that sitting by Daisy and listening were her brother in *striped* pajamas and her grandmother, in a brown sweater with large white *buttons.*

The imaginative power is strong, absorbent, as Maria Montessori observed, effortless, and instantaneous. Most of us lose it in the ensuing muddle that is life; a few, the poets and magicians, retain it.

Waiting for Iorek: Some Ideas

2007-10-30T11:48:00.000-05:00

1. Get bear (large, fierce, not teddy) cookie cutter. Make a polar bear cookie for everyone. Serve at *gathering* to introduce TGC.

2. Get PBs for everyone. [How many?]

3. Blog about it on SDL and invite parents (8th) to read it too.

4. Use tape at *gathering* and ***MAYBE*** loan tape.

5. Watch previews at *gathering* and drink cider.

I added the cider to avoid dealing with punctuation issues.

Evening Traffic Report

2007-10-28T13:27:00.001-05:00

4:30 p.m., traffic moving normally through the Village, sqwak! Chatter chitter chutter, swswswswsw. Looka that one, just turned into Wendeez withou blinking, ooh that one behinda didn like it, hes mad, givin the Eyetalian elbow. Those people still smokin on the bus stop bench, wonderin will the bus ever come. We could tell em it's already past HoJo's, comin down on the cathedral. Just wish that old guy would quit with the menthol, though, jeez it stinks.

Wish we could check out that crane over there, getta good view, but its still swingin back and forth. Too bad it doesn't quit till we go to the trees. Where you stay at? I stay in Seven Springs.Where you stay? Oh , I stay over at All Souls, its real cozy there. Haveta share with the bats, though.

Train's comin, onna theez days I gonna catch a ride down to Canton, see my neeces and nephews.

Here comes my cuzzin now, with his flock. Hey bro! Plennya room for all of yaz.

Three GOOD Dogs

2007-10-26T09:00:00.001-05:00

This picture fell out of the rubble on my desk last night -- three of the best, all now gone to Dog Heaven. That's D in the lead, being the youngest girl of the group, then Sophie, then Roni (Veronica). Since my last post generated more responses from my vast readership than do most, I thought people would like to see this picture of a picture.
Roni was a white German Shepherd-wolf mix, 120 lbs., golden eyes, and a super sweet disposition. Scary looking, but a lamb, unless you were swimming in Boone Lake with her. She loved to swim and would come right at you, paws scrabbling. I found the best way to manage that situation was to reach out my arms, grab her, turn her around (easy to move 120 lbs. when they're floating), and then hold on to the fur on her sides for a nice tow. On the shores of the lake she'd look at your eagerly, poised and ready for you to pick up a piece of shale and pitch it out into the water. She'd catch a piece of rock in her mouth, give it a few chews, then spit it out and ask for the next one. She'd go after sticks, too, but rocks were her specialty. At the beach, she'd thunder into the waves, fetch sticks, and swim.
Sophie HATED the beach, wasn't much for swimming and hated the heat. She wanted to run up into the dunes and flush out small wildlife. One night while Rob (Roni's person) and I were sitting by our campfire at the edge of a swampy bit of the maritime forest behind the dunes, Roni and Sophie, both leashed to trees because that was the park rule, bolted suddenly into the swamp after a raccoon, breaking their leashes.
On one late evening walk down the beach, the dogs, who were off-leash (oh no!) suddenly raced up over the dunes and disappeared for a few minutes. Shortly, we heard eerie, loud squealing cries which subsided after a minute or two. We never found out what they'd caught that night, but they definitely violated the island's wildlife.
Congratulations to Rebecca and Michele, who have made a fine choice of dogs and now have a German Shepherd, who will be their best friend for many years, if all goes well. You will never regret your choice!

In Memory of D, One of the World's Best Dogs

2007-10-14T19:19:00.000-05:00

December Pansy, October 1995--October 2007

D joins the company of Good Dogs we will always remember. She was one of the best. She was the dog who taught me that German Shepherds are just about perfect. Noble, intelligent, and protective, they love to learn and to obey their master or mistress. They are guarded with strangers and completely trustworthy with their family. They are the embodiment of Dog.

Last weekend I spent two nights with D and her mate and daughters, Corkscrew and Miry. I let D sleep in the house, a treat for her. I took these pictures of her out on the porch. Every time I'd visit she would stay near me when I sat on the porch. She'd long since given up hope that I'd take her home with me, but when I sat down, she'd curl up near me.

Fall Colors

2007-10-09T19:39:00.000-05:00

Seen migrating through the library of late.

Also, tiny pink Chucks on a very small girl, but no camera handy.

Another sighting in library:

And a whirl of color from a late September birthday party for J and J:

Butterflies

2007-09-26T20:06:00.000-05:00

An unusual butterfly was on the rue one day. Dusky brown wings with giant vees of buff, not one of the everyday visitors. Investigation found it to be the Giant Swallowtail. Since I didn't get its picture, this one will have to serve.

The purple morning glory vine seen here sent a bud over the top of the opened window to bloom indoors on the back porch, my treehouse.

Most days tiger swallowtails, black and spicebush swallowtails, monarchs, and white sulfurs come to the front yard. I found out that the hatchlings of the cabbage butterflies feed on nasturtiums. That explains a lot, but i never catch the butterflies laying eggs. They must wait till everyone's in bed.

Like Housman with his cherry trees, I think there's little time to watch the butterflies, so I keep an eye out when I'm near flowers. Te porch is a good place to sit quietly when it's too hot to sit out in the sun. And as long as the black and white cat's not under the bird feeder, you can see the chickadees and finches too.

Over at Reading Life, there's a note about a book to help anyone enjoy the seasons, even if you can't tramp through the rolling English landscape. As Cosmo Dogood showed us in his late, great Cosmo Dogood's Urban Almanac, all we have to do is to look out and up and around us. Nature is everywhere.

Anatolian Shepherd rescue! Adopt a Giant Sweetdog!

2007-09-09T20:16:00.000-05:00

Puppy Brody, from Flickr shared photos

Wanna see a Good Dog? "A Good Dog?" Wanna fall in love at first sight, and, like Opus and those late night TV offers he can't resist for Roncorini Spaghetti Busters Only $19.95* Sign up now!, you want to finger the touchpad and sign up now for adoption, restrictions apply please see information first about this breed from the National Anatolian Shepherd Rescue Network

Chapter One: "Do You Really Want an ASD?: Ask Yourself These Questions before Bringing One Home."

Oooh, I'd put a Good Dog picture here right now, but my respect for the conventions of copyright prevent me. But there are lots and lots of pictures out there. Start anywhere.

http://www.nasrn.com/doyou.ht

If your breaking heart knows that you do not have a yard large enough for your shepherd to run laps at will and securely fenced you will still go on to read the second chapter, "10 Reasons NOT to Get an ASD."

Some of the available dogs are pups, some are older. Some are nearby in NC or GA or SC, others all over the US. Some are Urgent! dogs. All look sweet and smart -- and really BIG. 100 lbs. or so at adulthood. Wow. That's a dog that could keep your feet warm -- or numb -- on winter nights.

2007-09-09T18:36:00.000-05:00

La luna pasa, sabe, canta, avanza y avanza sin descanso.

-- Vicente Aleixandre, "No existe el hombre" in World Alone: Mundo a Solas

15th Sunday after Pentecost. Madeleine L'Engle has entered the Church Triumphant. as they say in RI.

My brother's company had a lovely celebration Friday, the dedication of a Japanese garden in front of the building in Cranston in his memory. Over 100 employees came, as well as family members from the area. Many people spoke of David, of his warmth and quiet friendliness. One woman is reported to have said that she took a walk with him every day at noon in the parking lot. Another said every day at two he would walk around the two-story building, and say hello to people in the company. He was well liked and is clearly missed by everybody there.

His burial site in a quiet cemetery tucked away in Barrington, is now marked with

a granite stone, that says

LUTHER

David S.

with dates

My mother (David's mother) wishes it said

David Simmons Luther

The old slate stones are the best. You can see them at St. Mary's Churchyard on the East Main Road in Portsmouth, where most of my family is buried.

Time to ride my bike down to the boatyard. See you later.

Labor Day 2007

2007-09-03T21:03:00.000-05:00

"Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle.... You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions....

"You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness--the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!--depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of 'How to live on a given income of time,' instead of 'How to live on a given income of money'! ...

"We shall never have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is."

-- Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, 1910

Notes: 1) Photo: Labor day sunrise, Sweeten Creek Rd. 2) I am profoundly grateful that none of my family members were injured in recent accidents.

"I spoke to the sea... I turned to the blue heaven over"

2007-08-13T08:11:00.000-05:00

" Have you not often felt, I say, the truth of your essential goodness, and that your hard-set evil parts are an encrustation acquired from without and not grown from within? Perhaps you have felt it on some rare day in early summer, when you have been alone in a wood on a blue-bell carpet, wandering to the hedge wall, have seen it white with may; all around you there has been a silence--a silence that strikes like a blow; and suddenly it ceases to be silence for the birds are singing, and you wonder how long that music has been there without your noticing it....
"Dancing, riding, running, climbing, you still the mind from its doubts and questionings, and stir up the elemental life in you to say what is."
~~ Ernest Raymond, Through Literature to Life: An Enthusiasm and an Anthology (London, Cassell & Company, 1946)
(Post title from Richard Jeffries, The Story of My Heart, as quoted by Raymond)

"egg, EGG, EAT THAT EGG"

2007-08-08T16:56:00.000-05:00

Today is Zack's birthday, and in deference to his likes and dislikes I won't post the picture of an amazing spider I saw in the front yard the other day. That can wait. Today will be for Zack-frendy pictures only.

Sorry about the flash, but it's too hot to go out into the sunshine, even at 6 p.m., EDT.

Another quote from this great book, The Rotten Book, by Mary Rodgers (of Freaky Friday fame), with illustrations by Stephen Kellogg:

[the policeman says] "I'm afraid, madam, that your little boy is under arrest."

"That's fine by me," his mother would say.

"Whoopee!" his sister would say.

"Fair enough," his father would say.

"Jail's too good for a rotten kid like that," the fireman would say, and they'd all stand around in the doorway and watch the policeman drive off in the squad car with the boy sitting beside him in handcuffs.

This book was one of Zack's favorites, and every time I read it I understand why he loved it and why lots of us love it. Some of his other favorites back then were, as I remember, The Marvelous Mud-Washing Machine, In the Midnight Kitchen, Richard Scarry (of course), When the Sky is Like Lace, Benjamin's 365 Birthdays, and Bread and Jam for Frances. I still have all of these except the wonderful Benjamin, though the Mary Rodgers is a newer paperback, because we never owned it back in the '70s but would check it out of the D.C. public library (Blue Cat Branch) every other time we went.

I don't remember when Margaret Wise Brown's Sailor Dog (Garth Williams, ill.) came into our lives, but it's also a favorite of Zack's and mine, and the grandchildren, and eventually we discovered Mister Dog (Brown, Williams) and then later Hobo Dog (Thacher Hurd) and Art Dog (Thacher Hurd). In case the line of inheritance isn't clear to my readers, Thatcher Hurd is the son of Edith Thacher Hurd and Clement Hurd, who (Clement) illustrated Margaret Wise Brown's Good Night, Moon and Runaway Bunny. And, not to leave Edith out of the mix, she is the author of Catfish and the Kidnapped Cat, illustrated by her husband Clement and published in 1974. By the date, it could have been one of our favorites back then, but I didn't discover it until fairly recently. Isn't it great how there keep being new things to discover?

So a very happy birthday, Zack, and aren't you glad you're not at Pinewoods for it?

P.S. "Frendy" is not a typo but a literary reference, as in "dog-frendy."

2007-08-06T15:08:00.000-05:00

"It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."

-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

August 1

2007-08-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

August brings the sheaves of corn;

Now the harvest home is borne.

~- "The Garden Year"

August also brings back-to-school closer and closer, and a slew of family celebrations. Tomorrow, August 2, is the anniversary of Suzanne Eun Ha Luther's arrival in the USA as an infant, to become a member of the Luther/Packard-Luther family. For readers who are in touch with Suzanne (facebook, myspace, or wherever), you can congratulate her! (The same goes for any of the following notes.) August 2 is also Mimi K.'s birthday! Happy birthday, Mimi! The 4th of August is Jared Luther's 21st. Happy Birthday to Jared! He and a friend were making a canoe into an outrigger vessel, a la Kon-Tiki, when I was in RI recently. Bon voyage! Zack Hyde's birthday is on 8/8, so we can plan ahead for festooning him with money and gifts. Gail Hyde's birthday is on the 15th, and -- ta da! -- Leroy's birthday on the 16th! Leroy will be 11 and would love an iPod but might have to settle for less. (I'd love one, too, but I don't expect one on my birthday, 9/10.). Jacob Harry has his birthday on the 27th, the same day as the late great Carter Stanley.

A couple of literary birthdays in August as well: Herman Melville, on the 1st (1819); James Baldwin, Aug.2, 1924; Percy Bysshe Shelley, August 4, 1792; Tennyson, the 6th, 1809; on the 21st, Christopher Robin Milne, 1920... and the list could go on, but these are some high points.

August 1 is Lammas Day (go look it up, since I've already forgotten), the Dog Days continue, and according to my Old Farmer's Almanac, the "Cat Nights commence" on the 17th -- must be the ending of the Dog Days. I would love to see the Dog Star at night, 'cause then we'd be nice and cold. When the sun's up in the Last Visible Dog, we swelter and sweat. But flowers are blooming, and butterflies are visiting the flowers, so I'll enjoy the season's glories. Oh, and the Sturgeon Moon is full on the 28th, by which time my time will be in thrall to the school schedule once again.

Nature notes from Buckingham Ct.: The feeders are busy with the usual -- house finches, Carolina chickadees, titmice, little woodpeckers, and once in a while a goldfinch, who has been bust on the sunflowers in the back yard. The cardinals peck under the feeders, and the nuthatch visits too. If I sit by a window (it's too buggy outdoors) in the early evening I can see the hummingbird visit the bee-balm. The climbing vines are coming on: lots of Mina Lobata, cypress vine, and purple morning glories (volunteers from last year) are blooming. the moonflower vine is tall and developing buds. I have so far just two vines of the delicate and lovely "Love-in-a-Puff." Also, four colors of butterfly bushes, but no butterfly weed -- it just disappeared this year, as did the Queen Anne's Lace. When you have gardens over several years you see lots of changes. Nature is always dynamic (but "never spent," remember that).

The moon is waning, so I'm curious to see whether the haircut I got today lasts longer than the last one, done in the waxing moon. (If you haven't lived in the mountain south or another rural traditional area, this comment might not make sense to you). Maybe I'll trim my fingernails, too.

For fans of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) there's a new and expanded movie trailer out. You can find it somewhere on movies.yahoo.com. The movie looks super and is supposed to be out in December.

"Nature is never spent"

2007-07-30T10:18:00.000-05:00

...

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And thought the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-from "God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins

This post could also be called "What's great about Rhode Island."

Pictures I Missed on My Trip

2007-07-29T12:28:00.000-05:00

The only reason I'm putting this picture here is that I deleted too soon the picture of the blank blue sky I accidentally took while driving. That would have been a more fitting choice, as being almost a non-picture (though JJ, a young artist in NY and the son of my dear friend Barbara in Massachusetts, might disagree. Last year we had an interesting attempt at discussion between the layperson and the serious young art student/artist over a reproduction of a canvas which was, as best I can remember, a painting of a pale beige quadrangle with a narrow border of slightly darker beige, by an old and very famous woman named, I think, Gertrude somebody, surely famous but not in my ken), -- better for the purpose of illustrating Missed Photos than this one, which is actually a lifelike image of a twice daily phenomenon in a cove: the incoming tide. If I lived nearby I could go to this spot at different times of day, of month, of tide, and hope to capture a series, say, that centered on the turning of the tide. Then I might remember how to add audio to a little movie, and ... anyway , I'd go a lot and take lots of pictures, find better light than in this one. My mother has a very wonderful book, one that has nested in my memory and imagination, by another woman, maybe also a Gertrude, I can't remember, who's confined mainly by reaosns of health to a high rise apartment overlooking Central Park, and takes pictures throughout the year from her window. It's called something likeThe Tree From My Window. The concept is a brilliant, because the project, obviously, combines a more or less fixed scene (zoom lens or angle aside) with the continual changes of cyclical nature and of the more random human life. Tell you what -- let's all get on to abebooks and look it up! Okay, here's the

Pictures I Missed

* Outrigger canoe Jared and his friend are making in the back yard in Barrington
* Fargo walking calmly on the leash
* Barbara doing the puzzle
* Vern and Clay, cooking and talking
* the $5,000,000 condos facing Bristol Harbor
* a boiled lobster with an ear of corn
* what happened next with the lobster and its bodily effluvients
* Marilyn at the coffee shop in Warren
* More pictures of the interior of Ruffuls Restaurant at Wayland Square
* More pictures at Bri's (but we were too busy talking till it was time to go)

* Maybe a picture of the menu at the Newport Creamery and the reality of the "Sesame" grilled chicken on "arugula" and "baby" greens -- oops! iceberg lettuce! and "we ran out of Sesame dressing do you want ranchfrenchparmesanpeppercornthousandislandguargumdelightfromKraft on that?" I still love the Golden Cow, but should have gone with the tuna melt as harder to mess up. Go to the Creamery for tuna, for grilled cheese, and of course for milkshakes and ice cream if Gray's is too far away or you don't have $3 for a cone

Things on the Road

2007-07-29T11:12:00.000-05:00

NewJersey looks like rain on the windshield, but in Pennsylvania, on I-81, I saw lots of traveling THINGS, some quite mysterious.

Polka and Dunkin D: The Summer Tour

2007-07-10T08:27:00.000-05:00

People in Rhode Island (and Southeastern Mass., which is really the same thing) love to polka and can stay up all night dancing, thanks to the presence of a Dunkin Donuts shop every six blocks or so in town, every six miles or so out in the countryside. People say, "Doughnuts? You eat doughnuts?" but it's not about the donuts [sic], it's the coffee, donchaknow, and the subliminal joy the pink-and-orange brings to our hearts. Starbucks? An import, for the effete. Local shops? Well, yeah, there are those, too, in the more sophisticated burgs, but the good old blue collar quahoggers and construction workers, the Congregational Churchgoers, the beachgoers, the office workers, the politicians, the farmers and all of us townies have drunk the Coolattaid and find our cars turning whenever the sensor they install at R.I. garages notice the pinkandorange.

I hope no one will be offended by the mixed tone of this note, when I say that the picture below shows my devotion to the memory of my dear brother David, who according to his daughter (and my niece) Suzanne, said at his service last fall that she would always keep Dunkin Donuts napkins in her desk drawer, because her father did. This is my desk drawer.

The Summer Tour begins tomorrow morning. I will be in DD land before long. The signs start appearing in the Shenandoah Valley, along I-81, but they're not serious DD shops till you get about to PA or NJ. That's also where you can start hearing polka music on the car radio, with stations like the one where I picked up "Second Week of Deer Camp" last winter, and "Donnie the Reindeer." Oh, and where you can buy bait in vending machines.

P.S. My buddy Dave Awl in Chicago says sans serif fonts give him a headache. So I'll leave the little legs on this post and see how it looks.

A Dead But Not Buried Blog -- and Dogs, Gone

2007-07-09T17:10:00.000-05:00

Sophie at Sam's Gap

Two years ago when I was getting into this blogging thing I created a blog which still exists (two brief and one longer post, no pictures). It's weird to be able to see it but not to access it, although I created it. Since the fairy candle has come up again this year, I will here give the link: http://sohpiesbones.blogspot.com/ and add pictures. Pictures of pictures.

We never knew Sophie's birthday, but July is a good time to commemorate her and her friendship with her best dog friend Roni, both dogs gone to the Church Triumphant, as my Episcopalian parents would always say of our departed pets. This is the time of year when the Fairy Candle (Black Cohosh) appears over Sophie's grave in the back yard, and Roni's buried near a bamboo grove in East Tennessee. Both dogs were East Tennesseans. I called Sophie a Blue Ridge Beehound because she would catch and eat bees and hornets. Snap! Swallow! Gulp!... Watch... Snap! Swallow!

Give Yourself to Love (Kate Wolf video)

2007-07-08T13:12:00.000-05:00

I don't spend a lot of time watching youtube, but every once in a while you think of someone to look for. So I found a small (4-minute) clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwUwJgRBMcw of the wonderful California folksinger Kate Wolf (1942-1986), doing "Give Yourself to Love", buried in an overlong long TV program from Santa Barbara. The interviewer talks with a kind-of-but-not-professed Buddhist American woman with a good color sense (including shades of violet, rose, lavender and silver -- on her and the set). KW comes in at about minute 41 of 58. Load up the buffer then fast forward. Or watch the whole thing if you're in a lavender and tranquil mood, or would like to be. There's a too short tribute video to KW near the front, but then lots and lots of talk and roses... Kate Wolf looks more like a Judith than a Kate, but it's that great voice -- strong yet gentle, a pure folk style, with subtle nuances. It's good to see her live, and to see the group, with nice mandolin and lead guitar work.

... Happy 5th...nope, 6th

2007-07-05T23:39:00.000-05:00

I was in Gray, Tennessee, for the 4th and overnight, visiting my old friend Rob, who's having a coronary bypass next week. Years ago Rob planted bamboo in one corner of his large yard, which is mainly surrounded by fields and pastures. Rob has a science background and has been a gardener for as long as I've known him and is very knowledgeable about plants and all sorts of things. So I figured he knew what he was doing when he planted the bamboo, a couple of varieties from Steve Ray's Bamboo Farm somewhere in Alabama. The yard was large enough that Rob could set off 4th of July fireworks from a platform in the western corner and still have plenty of room for guests to sit on blankets on the grass, close enough to be dazzled but far enough to be safe. My visits to Gray were irregular over the years, as life went this way and that, and one year I discovered that Rob's modest planting had become a bamboo grove. You could wander among the towering plants, but there was still a view of the sunset over the fields.

This time I hadn't been over there for a few years and wasn't prepared for the bamboo forest which now dominates a large portion of that side of the yard. There's a small corner which still provides the long view, but otherwise it's panda heaven to the west. And the yard all the way to the deck is punctuated by bamboo stumps. It's sprouting up next to the deck and the path to the front. It's taken over a couple of raised beds, its roots driving out the other plants. When I asked Rob what he had THOUGHT would happen, he said, "I thought it would do like yours, and just stay in one place!" (My bamboo DID stay in place for years, because it was contained in its small area by the house and the low wall bordering the driveway.) I was briefly speechless. This is the man who once told me that if you ever plant mint you need to encase it in a concrete cell. He does have great orchids, one of which has been blooming for months. He's mostly pretty knowledgeable.

We had fireworks, too, one with the lovely name of -- Bamboo! He set them off right by the patio, and we found one giant cardboard bee the next morning when a breeze blew it down from the towering ash tree. And we also enjoyed everyone else's fireworks. Those folks over in Washington County love the 4th of July, and the evening sky was lit up all around us. In the morning I heard my first cicadas of the summer.

It's July, and no one knows where we're headed as a nation or a world. I'm adding a link to the sidebar for the 4th, 5th, 6th and on.

2007-07-01T20:08:00.000-05:00

(Child and Pigeons in Pritchard Park, jlh 6/07)
Here's to energy and optimism and love for the world and chasing away the spectres of despair (with apologies to the pigeons, who are really very beautiful and thanks to Philip Pullman for the word).

And could we loosen up the ".)" rule that is a big mental bug ? Get the Flit!

Hot July brings gilly-flowers/Apricots and cooling showers.....

2007-07-01T16:43:00.000-05:00

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings

~~~ "Happy Thought" from A Child's Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922.

That's one side of life, and a good one, for those who CAN say it: we SHOULD take this attitude, if we can. And then we should get on with the work of making more of the world that happy. Simple, but true. And hard to do.

On July 1, more less the year's midpoint, here's to the power of poetry and "happy thoughts.'

Today, July 1, is Canada Day. Venus is bright in the evening in Leo but slips to the south throughout the month.

Art by C.S. Hyde, circa 1980s-90s

Rosie, my new walking dog

2007-06-28T08:36:00.000-05:00

Rosie is the sweetest dog in the world. She is probably related to Stinkypotamous. Zack would love her. Everyone loves Rosie. People stop by her yard and visit with her. But I'm really lucky, because I finally met her owners, who told me that the children are welcome to come into the yard and play (The People are at work all day) AND that I could walk her any time I liked. The leash is in the outside shed.

So this morning, while it was still cool (with 95% humidity), I took Rosie for a walk. And guess what? She and I are perfect walk partners. She likes to walk along at a brisk pace, with stops for sniffing and marking. She will heel if I ask her to and knows how to stop at intersections, then start when I start up. She doesn't pull on the leash but does like to walk out in front, tracking the scents. She walks the same way Sophie did. She snuffs a bit, the way dogs do if slightly frustrated, when I don't let her go into someone's yard, but she obeys cheerfully. Just that little audible exhalation of breath. So, as long as it's summer and I'm home, I look forward to morning Walks With Rosie.

"Eat, eat, eat, Molt, expand, repeat!"

2007-06-27T19:35:00.000-05:00

This title is the lobsters' chant, as reported on NPR's Morning Edition this Tuesday.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11382976#email

It seems that no one knows how long a lobster can live and how big it can get. I certain;ly don't know, buI I do know, though, that once in a blue moon a bright blue lobster is caught and folks come to marvel. I know also that Warrens' Seafood, a small fish market in a small village near my home town of Riverside, RI, has caught two blue lobsters in recent years. I saw both of them, in two different summers, prowling around in the salt water holding tank next to the cases of littlenecks and steamers, mussels and squid, scrod, mackerel, and what ever else they'd caught.

The blue lobsters are a deep bright blue, deep cerulean, and tinged with the same hints of red and cream like the regular dull dark green ones.

Lobsters are great, boiled quickly (and perhaps cruelly?), and served very simply, either hot with drawn butter to dip in, or chilled, with same and mayo if you like. And good crusty French or Italian bread. You can break off each long thin claw and chew on it from tip to opening, squeezing out the sweet salty juices, A lobster can keep you busy for the better part of an hour, especially with a friend, cool drinks and a pleasant setting. You need no fries, no side orders, though last summer I had a modest looking but perfect dish of grilled zucchini pieces, done with garlic.

I was very lucky last summer, because I happened to be in Plymouth, Mass., a block from Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower replica, at a comfortable restaurant by the harbor, and it was Thursday, their "Twin lobsters for $19.95" night. One to eat and one to take home and chill for lobster salad, or a lobster roll, or plain, with melted butter.

They are usually very expensive, and lots of the people who catch them or live near those fishing villages can't usually afford to eat them.

One summer I had spent a few days in Waldoboro, Maine, and on my way home read that a truckload of Homarus americanus has overturned way up north on Route 1. The lobsters, which had been on their way to restaurants in big cities, were instead distributed throughout the town, to senior centers and all kinds of social agencies. For once, the people up there Down East could have a taste of their prime catch.

Who will protect the children?

2007-06-19T07:33:00.000-05:00

It's been said that one daily edition of the New York Times contains more information than a citizen of the world x hundred years ago would ever learn. (Sorry, I can't remember the number, but you get the idea.) Most of us barely have time to skim the surface of the day's news, whether online, on the radio, on TV, or in a newspaper. But since it's school summer vacation I have way too much time to read the paper.
It's sometimes depressing and sometimes very, very worrying. I understand why we need the sports news and the funnies (one reason for getting your local paper) to enable us to lighten up enough to get through the day. Between reading about the threat of extremist terrorism and pedophile rings, I need Sherman's Lagoon. And of course arts and science news.
But here's something practical for all of us that have anything to do with children. We can vote for legislators and presidential candidates who will supply funds for universal health insurance for U.S. children, and we can watch out what we put into their hands to play with.
See those little guys up there on the piano? Most of them were made in China. It says so right on their little backsides. Today's NYT has a huge story about a recall of Thomas the Tank Engine toys, sold by a company called RC2, which started in trading cards but turned to toys for greater profits. The company's way smaller than Mattel and Hasbro, but it sells toys tied in with very popular brand names -- Thomas, Dora the Explorer, John Deere, and Disney, among others. My little granddaughter loves Dora ("Doh-wa"), and I've sprung for aDora toy once or twice. If those brand names sound safe, all-American, and harmless (outside of the branding implications and, of course, choking hazards), think again. The Thomas toys were found to be coated with lead-based paint. A NYT reporter who went to the factory in China to investigate was detained for several hours by a factory manager who didn't want him asking questions.
The Times mentions the Imperfect Parent online magazine and blog for those who want to keep informed on children's safety, nutrition, and other good stuff, and suggests as well that you sign up for immediate notification of recalls at the website of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the staff of which was cut by more than 10% over the past two years. And I will also recommend that in this time of low governmental priorities for children, we should pay attention to the Children's Defense Fund, which is actively campaigning for health insurance for all of our children.

You know there ain't no devil, only God when He's drunk...

2007-06-18T20:20:00.000-05:00

I took the grandsons to the beach. On the way back they took pictures from the car window. US 21 going back north out of Beaufort, SC, offers images just as interesting as the postcard scenes of the shore. The almost-11 year old made sociological observations about the demographically excellent location of an unpretentious Chinese restaurant where you can get enormous servings of Chinese dishes as good as most anywhere else, amounts that could easily feed a family of four on just one dish. We had very good dumplings (eight to a serving), General Tso's chicken, and Moo Shu Shrimp. Did we finish it all? No way.

The beach? The lighthouse? Later

What's it all about?

2007-06-10T15:23:00.000-05:00

I'd like to know
What this whole show
Is all about
Before it's out.

Piet Hein, Grooks

The New York Times this week ran a lifestyles feature about a housing development in Arizona where people who love star-watching can buy a first or second home in an area with very little light pollution so that they can stargaze.
NPR this same week aired a report about family homes in Nepal where people develop severe lung disease because they cook indoors on wood fires with inadequate ventilation. They love the wood fires and love to gather around them.
I love to look at the stars and at wood fires. And it's not news that the world is full of inequality, but I still gape at the contrasts and wonder what I'm doing with MY life.

Feral kitties? Or, should we have a leash law for cats?

2007-06-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

These are my sweet cats. They purr, they knead my knees, they sleep with me whichever one gets there first. They are jealous of one another and sometimes show this, but I try to keep them all happy and make them feel as though they are, each one, my favorite. (YOU'RE my favorite boy kitty! YOU'RE my favorite black and white kitty, and so on. A trick one of the childrearing experts back in the 70s suggested as a way of dealing with children's inevitable "Which one of us is your favorite?") (Look at Tater's ears, up there on the right: he's listening to every word.)

But they are also true to their wild heritage and, despite the fake mice, rubber bands, balls, and so forth that I provide for them, they HUNT. I let them go outdoors. I grew up with indoor-outdoor cats and have always done this. Sometimes they catch a bird, and I feel sad, yesterday I heard Butter's Kitty (on the left) at the front door, making that unmistakable sound that means she has something in her mouth and wants to bring it in. It was a chipmunk. I managed to let it go and brought her in. But I made the mistake of not putting bell collars on them this season, and a neighborhood incident ensued.

My next door neighbor approached me on the weekend to ask if I'd bell my cats, because the small black one had caught and killed a baby bluejay from a nest on their front porch. And the next day, apparently, all the babies were gone and the mother jay was frantic. My neighbors were very upset. What do you say? What do you do? I felt awful, and I told them I would certainly put bells on all the cats. I went right out and bought collars, belled all three, and then picked flowers and wrote a contrite note to my neighbors saying how terrible I felt about it too. They were very nice about it, though in a very mournful way, and mentioned that the people on the other side of them had "feral cats" too. I didn't know what to say, and, characteristically, didn't dispute their designation. tTey have a new kitten, but it never goes out.

I once lived for two years in Carrboro, NC, where one of the biggest issues raging in the city council was whether or not to enact a "leash law" for cats. In the end, they didn't, but a lot of people were angry.

I feed the birds and give them fresh water, and I have indoor-outdoor cats. This is not a good combination, I know, but I'm not going to change my ways unless the law comes down on me. I also like to feel as though I'm on good terms with my neighbors and wonder if they'll still be friendly.

The nest, by the way, before it was defiled,was really a surprise. None of us had ever known blue jays to nest so near to people. I didn't know the nest was there until 6 year-old Luther noticed it just a couple of days before The Event.

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, with one cat asleep by me, one on a high shelf in the living room, and one outside, and heard a terrible noise of a screaming animal or bird.

By the way, it might not have been my cat, because there's an identical small black cat who comes over sometimes from across the street. I did mention this in my note to the neighbors.... But it could have been mine. I hope the bells work.

D-Day

2007-06-06T15:41:00.000-05:00

I'm not much of a flag waver (though I know the words to lots of patriotic songs from the US and other nations), and in this time of a disastrous and immoral war it's all too easy to slip into a cynical attitude towards all things military. But much as I'd like to say that all wars are wrong, I have to accept that sometimes they are necessary. Hitler had to be stopped, for example. Today is the anniversary of D-Day and the landing of Allied troops on the beaches at Normandy, a brave and brilliant day that changed the course of World War II in Europe and the course of history. Now that the generation that accomplished the Allied victory is dying by the hundreds every day, it's important that young people and all of us appreciate what they did.
This spring a World War II veteran of Normandy addressed the school in chapel. As he told us how the operation proceeded, from the careful and stealthy preparations to its outcome, we were vicariously, though safely, there. No one who listened will forget his account. His presence among us was a living treasure, a voice from a generation that's almost gone. Once all the veterans of that war are gone, will the war become a dusty subject in a textbook? Even the Vietnam war, so vivid to many of my generation, is almost a ho-hum subject for today's teenagers, just a part of "History."
My father, whose dogtags are shown here, was a Conscientious Objector in the war, because he was a Quaker. He served in the Army Air Force as a radio operator flying supplies over "the Hump" in Burma to allies in China. My mother says that it bothered him that because of his CO status he couldn't become an officer, but neither could he ignore his upbringing. He left for India before I was born and came back in June, 1945. I have his tags, and I have several notebooks of his letters to my mother, written in fountain pen on onion skin paper. I've tried reading them but always get stalled, both because they are so emotional and because they are also somewhat repetitive because he wasn't allowed to give any details of what was going on. Most of the letters I've read so far talk of his memories of good times he and she had during their courtship, questions about his baby daughter, and fantasies about where he would like to be with his bride and the wonderful times they will have when he returns.
This summer I will approach the letters again and also will try to learn more about his Burma experiences. Unfortunately, I grew up in a family that seldom talked about anything -- Lake Wobegon is a lot like Yankee Rhode Island -- and so I now feel the need to learn what I can.
People need to tell their stories and pass along to the younger generations what came before. One thing that gives me hope that the stories won't be lost is the work of novelists, like Britain's Mal Peet, whose novel Tamar tells a particular story of World War II and relates it to a present-day teenage girl whose father was in the war. We need to listen to the remaining veterans of that war, as long as some of them are alive, and those who have heard their stories have to pass them on however they can.

Missing the laptop

2007-06-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

June 1:I'm stuck, stymied, stonewalled, frustrated, and it's all because I don't have a laptop for a week or so. I HATE sitting at my desk. I hate trying to work on this computer. So, no messages until things get better.

June 6: Well, when I wrote that the computer was offline, because it's doing strange things. I still don't like using it, but here are some early summer flowers and a local memorial. Nasturtium and penstemon

Return of the Triffids

2007-05-21T16:32:00.000-05:00

Today I talked for forty minutes or more, thirty of them accompanied by a bang-up slide presentation I'd made, to the Aphasia Support Group at Thom's (now "Care Partners"). The embedded movies didn't work, because I had to show it from a quick CD, but the people liked it anyway. This was my day off before end of the year meetings and it was fittingly a non-work project.

The bamboo is not a part of the show. It's from the front yard, where Caleb's thoughtful root divisions are beginning to hint of a return of John Wyndham's triffids. (If you're not over fifty you probably don't remember the triffids. Too bad for you. But just imagine tall, willowy, swaying, moving green plant things moving into your neighborhood.0

Bamboo is interesting in its contradictions: graceful, feathery tops that sway in the wind; light, rustly leaves, and trunks of green Kevlar. Mattell Tough Stuff. Green steel.

Call in the flute makers! Reserve your fishing pole now! It's in its last days in MY yard.

Stinky Gardener

2007-05-20T19:07:00.001-05:00

Stinky was a prince of a dog. An enormous sofa dog, a sweet love, and smart! Look how he knew to "get out of the kitchen!" Though he was awful in the car, he was wonderful at home. He loved to "go for a walk," although I was once mislead into thinking he could as easily as I walk to downtown Portland and back over the bridge and home. No one told me ahead of time that about halfway, just after you'd turned to come back from the park with the water that sprays up out of the ground and pools on the polished granite, he'd start STOPPING, seriously stopping. All we could do was stop in a doorway for six or seven minutes, then struggle on a few more blocks. I thought I'd have to carry him. Eventually we got back. Later, Zack said, "Oh, of course! You have t stop and rest for ten minutes every so many blocks." After that, I'd walk Stinksters to the park a block from his house.

Here's to Stinky, and his long life in our hearts. A great dog passes.

Nature

2007-05-17T23:05:00.001-05:00

My mother sends me clippings from Rhode Island. Today I read about Buddy Cianci, the former mayor of Providence who has just gotten out of prison and whose spaghetti sauce is sold on grocery shelves, and another about a family in rural RI who have been driven out of their home and lost their money because of vultures. Turkey vultures. Buzzards. Buzzards are moving north, and apparently are not good neighbors if they take a fancy to your place. But the story should have come with a Graphic Nature Detail Advisory warning, since it described in detail the digestive and excretory practices of buzzards.

I once lived ten miles out of town, on a dead end road up a mountain side. My dog and cat and I could hike up the ridge behind the house. Once we bushwacked up to a high rock outcropping, where, while we drank water and looked at the distant view an enormous black bird with outspread wings appeared, floating slowly on the air below us, then disappeared. It seemed like a giant hawk or eagle or even a condor! -- but of course, it was a vulture. All in your point of view.

My heart leaps up when I behold...

2007-05-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

For Wordsworth, it was a rainbow. I find small moments when a trick of light enhances the color in the world, and my heart is suddenly lifted with delight. Here's one -- go figure. I guess it's good to be delighted by simple things.

Then there's the Dracula's Shadow iris, with and without flash (in sunlight):

Coming soon: Summer Plastics 2007

2007-05-07T17:34:00.000-05:00

So I'm putting up this picture of my vade mecums, and here comes Nanci Griffith on my iTunes, singing "Just Once In A Very Blue Moon." The whole week's been minor coincidences, most not recorded, and so it goes. The almanacs are basic to me and go way back. One here is the Golden Books edition I grew up with and imprinted on (I lost the original and found a copy dedicated to Mary Patricia G...., from Blanche and Fred, in 1948). The blue one, Eric Utne's Cosmo Dogood's Urban Almanac, was a terrific annual for a few annums, and while it's published no more I still refer to it. The third is the basic OFA (No.CCXV) wherein you can find the tides, sunrise and sunset times, visible planets, moon phases, and saints' days. Great stuff for daily life.

Oh -- the coincidence mentioned above -- it's the Blue Moon. My Old Farmer's Almanac shows (but doesn't tell) me that May is a month with a Blue Moon. It will be on the 31st. Watch for more. Since we couldn't see the first F.M. of the month, it would be good to see the second.

Scary Library Movie

2007-05-03T07:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne_WXP7lUWM

Since I haven't figured out how to get an actual video into my blog, here's the link to a great library video from Dunedin, New Zealand. There's no keeping those New Zealanders down, ever since Peter Jackson made it big there. Video from Ed Vielmetti in Michigan (vielmetti.typepad.com)

I Have Seen Sandcastles

2007-04-28T21:43:00.000-05:00

The waves roll out and the waves roll in,

And the night wind comes and goes;

But why the moon man fishes the sea

Only the moon man knows.

--Wynken, Blinken and Nod,

Eugene Field

Me too! Me too! Me tooo!

2007-04-26T09:19:00.000-05:00

Don and Rhonda and Heath want their pictures posted too! Little Capricorns all. I suppose the little pigs will want their day in the sun, too. Hold your breath....