Well, for heaven sake, they threw the carnelian stone off the canoe dock into the lake!
“It wanted to live there.”
In fact, I think the stone had done its work, and it was really an intense Stone—sort of not for keeping.
Thank you, Stone!
Thank you, Dolls!
Thank you, Lake!
I was going to work but I ended up at the lake. Since I gave up 4 hours/week (allotted to social media), I don’t actually owe any more hours to work this pay period.
The girlettes brought an Orphan Red Stone (carnelian) to “ rotate our tires”, they say. They mean “balance their chakras”, I’m guessing — Human is not their first language and they jumble things up (sometimes on purpose, I think, to be funny).
Also, everything is theirs—that’s my mask.
They are taking turns. I think they’re just pretending—they don’t get out of alignment—but I do! I feel better just watching them.
After I resigned as Curator of Social Media this week, I feel like I've redeemed a part of myself from the Pawn Shop of Hearts.
I have broken up from a one-sided love, and––so unexpected––
I feel great! Liberated, and returned to my self.
I've been so off-center for so long at the store.
Maybe (maybe) now I can be there and do The BOOK'S, which I love, and not feel off my rocker.
We shall see.
Meahwhile, look at all the love the girlettes have garnered: People give them gifts! The girlettes love them!
Spike (space ballerina) is riding a hoverboard from HouseMate, holding a metal straw from bink;
the IoP and Bridget are playing with the Garuna & Ganesh puppets from a customer at the store, and Ass't Man, of all people, gave them that yellow truck.
At gym class yesterday, the teacher had me doing twists:
hold onto something solid, to anchor yourself, and slowly twist away from and into your center.
"It's strengthening, and it also helps release emotions," he said, "like wringing out a wet cloth."
Helpful!
I feel fine in myself, generally, but I also feel oversaturated...
Even the good stuff is intense:
Oh, yay! We have a vaccine [...so we don't die from a virulent virus].
Hooray! I'm free of a workplace burden [...that I used to do for love until it became onerous].
You'd think we'd get a break on the personal front, wouldn't you, when we're dealing with outbreaks of global pandemics and social (in)justice? But, noooo.
In my case, the extra crud this past year has mostly been around work, but a lot of friends are dealing with other stuff too--family pain, health issues not related to the Big C, etc.
This morning though, I got a really sweet note from a manager at the other store:
Wow. Nice to hear."Completely understand wanting to be off social media.
Thank you for a very thorough set of guidelines.
What made you great at posting are your smarts and your heart – you care about people and it shows in your work."
I'd gone downtown to the PO yesterday. The government center where Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder is no longer wrapped in barb-wire.
Sheets of plywood are coming down off windows on many (not all) stores.
On the ground around a different government building (Public Health, I just realized--ha!) was littered with these wire clamp-hook things (below).
ALL THAT TENSION . . . cut free.
Here's a whole different twist---from a panaderia (Mexican bakery) near the store:
Ring out, Wild Bells...
Ring out the old, ring in the new...Ring out the grief that saps the mind.
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
--Tennyson, "Ring Out, Wild Bells"
_______________
P.S. I took down one of my posts about work & Big Boss. (Thanks everyone who read and commented!)
It helps to write my frustrations out, but I don't want to load the blog down with details, especially about an individual.
I saved it in my drafts and left enough up to be representative.
Oh! One more twist--I forgot I'd photographed this wonderful book cover at work:
Woo-hoo! The first step toward freedom---I resigned as Social Media Coordinator this morning!
I emailed all the managers (4) of both stores, and I posted (totally anodyne) good-bye notices on the society's FB & IG.
Also mine:
"I've wanted to get off social media, personally, for a while now--it kinda drives me nuts. [THIS IS TRUE]
With a new Marketing Director coming on (Ed's wife, Mary X), and with the successful conclusion of the Chauvin murder trial, and with our all having gotten our final Covid shot, now is a perfect time for me to close this chapter."
I could have said:
"I cannot work with a Marketing Director who imports the attitude of her former employer, Cargill, which in 2019 was named ‘Worst Company in the World’. (New York Times article):I'll still do books 20 hours/week. (And toys, which I inherited when a volunteer left--I resented the impossible workload, but I've come to enjoy the task, not surprisingly. TOYS!)
Feeding People by Killing the Planet.
They are doing to the Amazon what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd: choking the air out of it.
Translated here = Feeding her husband's pet project, the food bank, by screwing the workers.
It's hard to be in a job that disrespects people---having our bags checked is par for the course at these sorts of jobs.
But the coworkers are such an interesting lot... I still learn a lot from them, and we share mutual respect.
I'm happy enough to be there with them, for now.
I changed my FB profile picture to a flowering artichoke--my image of myself, in this season.
A new girlette has swapped outerwear with the Infant of Prague (statue of Baby Jesus):
her yellow school hat for his red bejeweled cloak.
I sort of stole this IoP statue from the thrift store.
(No, okay––I stole it.)
I could have put it on my monthly store credit––I have enough, and the IoP was only $1.99.
I was devious in reaction to a new policy that we workers have to show our bags to a manager when we leave work, to make sure we aren't stealing stuff.
I don't doubt workers steal stuff, but given what we're paid, I don't care. And it's not like the store gets diamonds. Well, not usually.
(I didn't tell the girlette, but those gems on the cloak are glass.)
Furthermore, the store sells $ statues and rosaries and other Catholic trinkets ("sacramentals") that people donate to be given away, for free.
I could have asked the woman in charge of that ministry, and she'd have given me the statue.
So, I was a sneak. I am not denying that.
But here's another thing:
In medieval times it was believed that if someone stole a holy relic, say the bones of a saint, it was because the saint allowed it.
Article: "When Monks Went Undercover to Steal Relics":
"Because relics were infused with the living presence of a saint, capable of working miracles, they were perfectly able to stop a thief.
Any relic that didn’t wish to be moved could simply become too heavy to lift, or cause all the doors of the church to spontaneously lock.
By this logic, if a relic was stolen, it wanted to be.."*
So, I am a thief, but I am a holy thief!
The IoP must have wanted to come play dress-up with the other dolls, as it is used to doing:
The original statue is dressed by the Carmelite Sisters of Prague.
Epiphany
I used to have about 40 teeny, tiny gold-plastic Infants of Prague, from a store in Chicago.
bink keeps one of these (still!) in her little tin of lip balm, in her pocket.
On Epiphany 1995 (Epiphany, Jan. 6, is when the Magi arrived to see Baby Jesus), bink was waiting in a bus stop shelter, on her way to the hospital to see our friend Jim, who was dying of AIDS.
A big car swerved and careened into the bus shelter--(it was later determined the driver had had a heart attack).
bink just had time to take ONE step back, as the car wrenched the shelter's bench out of the ground.
Safety glass showered around her, like diamonds, and the bench came to rest inches in front of her.
She was not even scratched.
Well, I don't believe in miracles, I believe in viruses.
Jim died the next month, one month before his fortieth birthday.
But I do have a special love for the IoP. I'm sure it would keep us safe if it could.
________________
*
bink
has written and illustrated a graphic novel about a relic thief, a
young woman who encounters zombies. It's a fun mash-up of medieval
theology and modern fears.
(Do you have any artwork from that to share, bink?)
___________
P.S. I had symptoms from the Covid vaccine no. 2 for about 24 hours, starting a few hours after I got the shot.
My body felt like my laptop when I've used it for hours on a hot summer day--like it was working hard and overheating.
I slept most of the time, drank lots of water & grapefruit juice, and took ipuprofen.
Oh, oh, oh---DO take a closer look at these (and 38 more!) fantastic hats by artist Lizz Daniels in her Virtual Show "Hats in a Pandemic".
More info, an interview, and link to Daniels's other art too.
(You can buy posters of her hats on her website.)
Linda Sue put me onto this fantastic artist, who is a friend of hers.
Lizz Daniels says:
“These hats came into being at the beginning of self-quarantine in March 2020, when ‘normal’ ceased to be normal and where everything took on a strange perspective. It was a time when I felt a certain sense of powerlessness creeping in. As such, It was the perfect time to embark on a creative journey such as this.
"For 60 days I was my true authentic self.
The hats gave permission for me to be me, freeing characters that had long been suppressed and enabling me to present myself to the public in an unashamed completely over the top way!
"The relief of finally putting to use some of the vast stash of materials I have been collecting for years was a blessing.””
Marz makes hat art too.
I’m going to stay in bed with doll, book, and tea. And sleep.
Grateful for this instead of the option.
I. Inside a Flannery O'Connor Short Story
The meeting with the Marketing Director (and Big Boss) was among the weirdest, ickiest––and most fascinating––human encounters of my life.
It was like being inside a Flannery O'Connor short story, everyday characters acting out grace or evil in mundane ways.
It's rare that positions are so clear, so pure.
I told a coworker at the till yesterday that the marketing woman was "a minion of Satan--capitalism personified".
(A young woman looking at the jewelry nearby laughed.)
I'm not kidding. This woman's insistence on Money First was evil.
And Big Boss backed her up, every step of the way.
However, some things I said must have hit a chord with Big Boss.
At the weekly all-staff meeting on Tuesday (four hours before news came that a verdict had been reached), BB said,
"Someone suggested we should talk about what's going on. We don't have much time now, so anyone who wants to, let's meet Thursday morning."
II. Holy, Holey, Wholly...
Thursday was yesterday. We met outside in the sunny parking lot.
BB said, "This meeting is not sanctioned by Saint Vincent de Paul."
How embarrassing that he feels he has to make that disclaimer, like he's a naughty kid holding a secret meeting in the club house.
He's co-executive director!
I chimed in. "Maybe the saint himself sanctions it."
I'd thought about what I wanted to talk about, the night before.
One of the things I'd said to Mrs. Marketer, a Catholic, was, "Aren't we here to be saints?"
And she and Big Boss (an evangelical Christian) had both jumped in to reply, "No!"
But, actually, that's not only Catholic theology––we are baptized to be "priests, prophets, and kings" [it's in the rite], to be, in fact, "another Christ"––it's in the society's mission statement too:
we are here "to grow in holiness", that is, to grow in sanctity, sainthood. [Holy = Latin sanctus]
So yesterday morning, I said something like this:
"You know I'm always quoting the mission statement, that we are a network of friends working for a more just world.
Well, there's a phrase in there I always leave out:
"we're a network of friends growing in holiness".
I leave it out because it sounds prissy, or, if you're not Christian or another religion, it can sound off-putting.But I was thinking about why I'm here, and what holiness means.
I looked it up, and it comes from an ancient word, from before Christianity, that meant "whole," like the whole pie, and "unable to be violated." [etymology of holy]I want to be like that--no matter what happens to you, you have some part of you, your spirit, intact, whole, unbroken.
I wouldn't want to be George Floyd, dying like a fish on the ground.
But maybe even less would I want to be Derek Chauvin. He is broken, he is not whole. He is not holy.Working here with you all, and talking with the people who come here, helps me grow toward being whole.
The things you all say, the things you do...
Yesterday THREE people fed me:
B. gave me part of a shrimp omelette she'd made.
Mike brought in a pan of mashed sweet-potatoes leftover from the free lunch at the Salvation Army [down the street].
Mr. Furniture was asking people if they wanted anything from McDonald's. I wanted a milk shake but when I pulled out my money, I only had half what it cost. He said, "I've got you," and wouldn't accept even that half.
Thank you for being here, and talking, and feeding me, and helping me to be whole. And I hope we're doing that together."
____________________
And Big Boss said "Preach."
In a Flannery O'Connor story, Mrs. Marketing would be the minion of Satan.
I would be... I don't even know, some child with a doll who says unexpected things?
But the arc of the story, I think, would be BB's.
I don't know where he's going.
If I were writing the story, his character would leave, would strike out on his own, away from the safe haven of obedience to the father.
It's hard to grow up if you've never left your father's house.
Lots of people are pointing out that the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial is not enough, and another cop murdered another Black person, and there's lots of work to be done.
YES!
We are a rum species and we perpetrate horrors upon ourselves. There is always work to be done.
I remain jubilant.
I consider the alternatives:
Trump is president.
There is no vaccine.
Chauvin has just been found not-guilty.
We have untied ourselves from one tangle, and we can use the rope to walk forward.
The illustration is from an Italian cover of On the
Marionette Theater––an essay by 19th cent. German playwright Heinrich von Kleist I'd mentioned a few posts back.
OMG. I did NOT believe this would happen. I truly didn't.
I thought we would be going to war tonight. I even was thinking how I could wear my respirator in case I got tear-gassed.
And now.
A calm.
Thank god.
I heard helicopters overhead a little while ago, and for the first time in ten months I am not afraid.
"Must just be the news helicopters" I thought.
Twitter reports people are dancing at George Floyd Square (a mile from me) to a tuba and "an improvised drum that appears to include a Bundt pan."
LOL
HM just went down there to join in.
I need to rest and restore.
_____________________________________
Cartoon:
Garry Trudeau, May
29, 1973, Doonesbury: During Watergate, Mark Slackmeyer pronounces
Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell "guilty, guilty, guilty" on the radio.
(Mitchell was found guilt of perjury, conspiracy, etc. in 1975.)
Life here is WEIRD.
So, once again, some of the living words of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail":"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers.First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate."I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner,but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice;who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action";who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.""Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. "
Good morning, blog friends!
It's ten o'clock in the morning here, as I start to write this.
I'm feeling well--I woke up at six o'clock and blogged about arches and marionettes.
I'd really wanted just to chit-chat about nothing, but as normal I went down a Rabbit Hole That Looked Interesting (and was).
Last night Marz read me a piece of "contour writing" she'd done--an exercise in which you outline your surroundings in words.
She'd written it in a coffee shop (she's had her second shot!), and she told me it was boring.
Actually, it was weirdly fascinating to hear a description of an ordinary place I know, and some images remain in my brain this morning. For instance, Marz had written that the red sanitizing bucket was the only red in the café that otherwise was the color of tiramisu.
The Naming of Things
I don't usually pay close attention to my physical surroundings, so this might be a good exercise for me.
It's hard to write about things when you don't have a good thingish vocabulary---like, I never know what the parts of a window are called. So that might be a good exercise too.
Even the most ordinary surroundings can be interesting.
My surroundings aren't ordinary right now.
My sister emailed me this morning that yesterday she'd driven down Lake Street for the first time this month.
"It's sobering to see all the military vehicles, rifles, flak gear and police on Lake St.", she wrote.
Lake Street is a major thoroughfare running the five miles between the swank area around chain of
lakes and the Mississippi River.
Along the way, it goes through an impoverished neighborhood where it intersects with the street down which George
Floyd was killed.
(Ay, ay, ay--that's what I mean about describing everyday physical things--it's hard to describe a location without getting all tangled up!)
The thrift store is half-a-block off Lake St., about a mile from the murder site that is now (for the time being) called George Floyd Square, so I am right there.
The military presence my sister remarked on is in place
because of the protests and opportunistic looting after the police
killed Daunte Wright last week, but it was there anyway, put in place
earlier for the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
The feeling is, if Chauvin gets off, or gets off lightly, the city will explode. Again.
As I'd biked down Lake St on Friday, I saw shops boarding up windows, just in case.
Having cleaned up broken glass after the store was looted last May, I see the wisdom in taking that precaution. But I'm glad the thrift store isn't doing that. Or, not yet.
It's a risk not to board up, but boarding up sends such a hostile, fearful message.
I don't know... At this point, I want to err on the side of openness, but that might be naive. At any rate, it's not my decision.
Damn.
This isn't what I wanted to blog-chat about. But here it is--that's what's going on around me.
It's really, really bizarre to be living in something like Police State–Lite in a Time of Uprising for Social Justice, . . . and it's also bizarre how, while it remains out of the ordinary, you also sorta get used to it as The New Normal.
(But please, don't let it get any worse.)
Subtle Flavors
Other things are happening too. Nice things!
bink came over for dinner on Friday, for the first time since it was warm enough to eat outside last fall.
She and I are both about to get our second shot, so we are still masked unless we're outside.
Final note: Last night I watched The Spy Who Came In from the Cold for the first time in years.
It was excellent--wonderfully and effectively emotionally removed, like a subtle, dry white wine that sneaks up on you...
Oskar Werner, left, and Richard Burton, the unbridgeable gap:
BUT, it's really not at all suitable for Penny Cooper: Secret Agent. The girlettes are too young for dry white wine.
They could have a sip of sweet champagne, but I need to come up with something more like grape juice that leaves a purple smudge on your upper lip.
There's work to be done.
Tootle-oo. All for now. Have a good week ahead, wherever you are!
Lova ya!
I'd written yesterday, "We walk on. Shoes help the dolls stand up."
And what helps us stand (or withstand)?
I. Fall together
In reply, here's a quote that blogger Tororo sent me a while ago in a comment.
The idea in the quote is for me (Fresca) a wonderful and humorous consolation, and it feels true, that we hold each other up not because we have superhuman strength but because we all are falling down at the same time.
Tororo wrote:
"I thought that you may be interested in a translation (a
better one than the ones Google or Microsoft can provide) of the [ German playwright and theorist] Kleist
quote I posted, "Heinrich von Kleist, Lettre à Wilhelmine von Zenge, 16-18 novembre 1800":
"On the evening before that most important day of my life, in Würzburg, I went for a walk. When the sun went down, it seemed as though my happiness were sinking with it. I was horrified to think that I might be forced to part with everything, everything of importance to me.
I was walking back to the city, lost in my own thoughts, through an arched gateway. Why, I asked myself, does this arch not collapse, since after all it has no support?
It remains standing, I answered, because all the stones want to fall down at the same time - and from this thought I derived an indescribable heartening consolation, which stayed with me right up to the decisive moment:
I too would not collapse, even if all my support were removed."
________________________
II. Go round the back
Oh--von Kleist wrote an essay "On the Marionette Theatre" (1810) that is about the physics of movement (among other things---dance, and, somewhat related, dolls).
"Female knight in armor with shield" Sicilian marionette, via Getty:
'I inquired about the mechanism of these figures. I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one's fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance.
His answer was that I must not imagine each limb as being individually positioned and moved by the operator in the various phases of the dance.
Each movement, he said, will have a center of gravity; it would suffice to direct this crucial point to the inside of the figure.
The limbs that function as nothing more than a pendulum, swinging freely, will follow the movement in their own fashion without anyone’s aid.'"
He goes on to say that puppets have a negative advantage over humans--they cannot be guilty of affectation...
" Misconceptions like this [affectations] are unavoidable," he said, "now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge.I love that--travel around to see if it is open at the back.
But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us.
We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back."
________________
III. Rely on your own skin
This morning I found this, about the self-supporting St. Louis Gateway Arch:
"How Does it Stand?
From brazen designs to banal, most buildings require columns and beams as part of their internal assembly. However, this catenary [U-shaped, like a hanging chain] construction has no structural skeleton, and instead relies on its own skin for support."
ABOVE: Eero Saarinen amongst some of his test models and sketches exploring the Arch’s catenary curve.
. . . & THAT IS MY THEOLOGICAL EXCUSE TO BUY MORE ORPHAN REDS, and I'm sticking to it.
"Lila (Hinduism), pronounced Leela: an Indic concept of the universe as a playground of the divine" *
Ha-ha!
But, really. A new girlette arrived last week and soon went out the door again--"I only meant to stay a while"--she's going to live with HM's grandchild.
And two of the four pairs of shoes that came with her went to an old coworker from publishing days who has a couple shoeless girlettes and whose son my age recently took his own life.
"We walk on," I wrote her, "and shoes help the dolls stand up."
So I need to replenish the Orphans.
They want to do a version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold... with a happy ending.
"They were just pretending to die," Penny Cooper points out.
Me: Penny! You're supposed to warn about Spoilers!
P.C. says that everyone already knows it's a sad ending.
Penny Cooper will play the Richard Burton role in her pink fluffy coat. ("We must adapt.")
Option E is perfect for the Oskar Werner role. He doesn't look so blond and sweet in Spy––in cap, top left––but you can see the two are pretty much the same person--a person I love:
"the rosebud garden of girls"
I
have discovered FB market (another display of humanity that would make a
great a comic novel). The dolls there are priced all over the board--often
way more but sometimes way less than eBay.
I just scooped up five with outfits and traveling box for $35 (well, $47 with shipping and tax, but still a v. good deal).
I don't need another Miss Clavel (Linda Sue?
want her as a gift? She needs to get out of that outfit!), but I've
been wondering about having some other orphans to play roles in
tableaux. Penny Cooper: Secret Agent may benefit from some supporting actors.
Maybe the doll with long hair can take Clair Bloom's role.
The
darkhair girlette is Pepito--a boy in the Madeline books, but the doll
has no markers for people who don't know that, so they sometimes turn up as a
girl on Instagram, like here, from mlle madeline in Korea: "🍭 Suddenly Fall in 🖤 w/ Madeline".
(The Asian girlettes get The Best Clothes Ever.)
Maybe this doll is Leela, for the playfulness of gender & sex.
(A friend who loves Cabbage Patch dolls [her IG] say people in that doll-dom tend to be conservative and get intense about correctly identifying what gender their dolls are.
I say,
People. These are things of plastic and cloth.
(But of course the dolls are also us, so. )
Here's another thing:
I cannot stand to leave a Girlette in the Orphanage Jail, especially if she is only wearing panties and shoes (and is affordable).
I usually wait a while to see if someone else will take them.
This brave and hopeful darling was on FB market for weeks, so now for [a relatively measly] $7 she is coming here.
Her name might be Maud, from a scrap of poetry I remember:
"Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat night is flown..."
Looked it up--that's "Maud" by Tennyson.
Penny Cooper suggests I got the wrong end of the stick, though--this doll's name might be Black Bat Night!
We will have to ask when she arrives.
Wow--I just now see that in "Maud" there's a description of a redhead --" little head, sunning over with curls"––a rose from "the rosebud garden of girls"!
| Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, | |
| Come hither, the dances are done, | |
| In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, | 55 |
| Queen lily and rose in one; | |
| Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, | |
| To the flowers, and be their sun. |
Okay, then!
"Let them name it who can,
The beauty would be the same."
* More:
"Lila is the play of creation.
To awakened consciousness, the entire universe, with all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, appears as a divine game, sport, or drama. It is a play in which the one Consciousness performs all the roles.
Alluding to this lila of the Divine Mother the physical universe is a 'mansion of mirth.'"
--Ramakrishna, in Selections from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (2005), p. 130
I'm not generally a fan of Emerson, but, here, yeah, he's O. K.
From a lecture he gave in 1854 in New York City, "The Fugitive Slave Law":
"Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself of every last wrong. But the spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of short-lived men.Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. ...'God may consent, but not forever.'"
More of Other Things That Are Not Work... That's what the doctor ordered.
UPDATE: Such as The Rite of Spring Toy Orchestra posted on Orange Crate Art.
Yes, yes, yes!!!
I'm looking for a new job, but in the meantime I want to keep my weekly 24-hours at the thrift store to 24-hours in my brain.
Easier said than done, since emotional content acts like water--seeping under and through barriers...
I feel conflicted about leaving my job because it is so interesting and I learn a lot, which is worth a lot.
I've never worked among such a diverse crew.
A retirement-age coworker from Mississippi was telling me her mother cleaned houses for "rich white ladies" all her life, and how in her mother's later years, she'd go get one of these ladies out of the nursing home to accompany her (the mother) to the doctor.
The white lady was a doctor herself, and when she was present, the mother would get good care.
And when she wasn't, she didn't.
My coworker eventually moved up here to get health care for her disabled son.
"I miss the food and the friendly people," she said.
"What food?" I asked, and she told me about all these fruit desserts---peach pie and berry cobblers... MMmmmmm.
_______________
Making Stuff Displaces Intrusive Thoughts
I read an article about how during Covid, work has become even more of the all-defining factor for Americans, who are already defined by our jobs.
That's true for me.
To displace work concerns, I was thinking I'd need to find other people, join groups, etc., but really, I can simply do more creative ME things.
Another larger project with the girlettes, for instance.
Last summer I'd worked on "Penny Cooper Undaunted: the Blitz".
Prepping for it, making clothes (bink made 9 pairs of Mary Jane shoes out of black paper!), and setting them up filled my brain in the best, fun way.
It turned into a couple wonderful tableaux, not the movie I'd originally intended, but the WORK was the thing. My work, good work.
bink took me scouting for locations for a new project along the Mississippi River yesterday. A mile or two from my house.
Penny Cooper has a new pink coat (I was surprised, but she loves it), and Option E wore the new rain poncho.
"We can film over there."
Below are the operation buildings for Lock and Dam No. 1.
Built in the early 1900s and last renovated in the 1980s, they're like Cold War bunkers.
I've always wanted to set an espionage movie there.
Penny Cooper, Secret Agent?
That's an old turbine for water power behind bink. We had turkey pastrami sandwiches (not pictured, but important) from my new favorite place, Cecil's Deli.
A Visit to the Library
Afterward, I went to my local library, newly reopened.
Penny Cooper spotted all the books with "girl" in the title.
I only checked out the book I'd put on hold:
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler = photos and essays about one of my favorite things: how things look like other things (my blog tag).
I have 18 posts about that ^ including how the War Room in Star Trek: Into Darkness, top, looks like the one in Dr Strangelove.
Not that that's an accident.
In reality, the Situation Room in the White House, below, looks like something in the basement of a motel:
I hadn't been able to check out a library book in more than a year.
I felt a pang of happiness when the check-out machine pinged its family ping.
I said hello to a librarian too, to make human contact.
I finally watched the opening of last week's Saturday Night Live---this skit is like a documentary.
"Minnesota News Cold Open": SNL
I hear this exact conversation at work*--nice white people (like me) say, "Oh this time it's going to be different and the cop won't get off, it's so egregious."
And my Black coworkers are, like, "You know this happened before, right?"
This morning I was thinking of how some Muslims fast on Ramadan to raise their compassion for people who live with hunger.
As a white person, I'm starting to be more aware, to feel the stress my Black coworkers have lived with their whole lives, like some people live with hunger while I never go without food.
To me these ongoing murders and violence are shocking, out of the ordinary.
To my coworkers like Mr Furniture, the threat of violence is ordinary;
you live with that level of fear and injustice every day, your whole life.
Many of my coworkers just keep their heads down at work.
The disgust, anger, frustration I feel at the unjust management of the store, so that I want to go somewhere else...
Some of them have lived with "bad management" forever. There is no "somewhere else" to go.
My coworkers are mostly poor, but it's the same for upper class Black people like the Obamas:
You can move to the White House and the injustice hangs in the air there too, like the smell of cigarettes.
This isn't to say I shouldn't leave.
I'm lucky I have options.
I don't want to adapt to injustice, and I just can't get a foothold at the store... The management is, in my eyes, unskilled, and it unquestioningly follows the default setting of "ask no questions, shut up, and obey Father".
I don't know... I've learned a lot there about being ground down. You can learn a kind of Zenlike wisdom in response. (woo-sah)
Not sure there's much benefit in me sticking around longer though.
Could it be different?
It is a privilege to be able to say, Yes.
And I do say it.
Everyone should have that privilege, to think things can change, to always have food to eat.
But those aren't givens.
__________________________
*From the SNL skit:
"Let's just say, we've seen this movie before," Nwodim said.
"That's fair, I think skepticism of the legal process is valid ... historically police have gotten away in other cases like this," McKinnon responds.
"Historically?" says Thompson.
"She means: every single time," Nwodim adds.
It would be so great if not this time. But I'm not betting on it.
Also--the weather report is real:
Cold, cold, cold, July: HOT AS HELL, cold, cold, cold.
