Happy [Noble Sacrificial Death Holiday] from The Noble Penny Cooper (and me)

 

Noble-minded Penny Cooper loves to ride in a tumbrel to the guillotine every Easter, declaiming, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done" (Tale of Two Cities, you know.)

The Mars Explorer is keen, but Bunny looks dubious:
"She has mixed up her sacrificial deaths."

(The backdrop is silk I harvested from an Italian tie. I never can bring myself to construct a guillotine, though I'm sure Penny Cooper would love it. 

"You could put my head back on," she says.
True, but... I just can't do it.)

Here is Penny Cooper in a Tumbrel, Easter 2019

Gosh, I have lots of good Easter posts! I didn't realize this holiday inspires me so much...

Upside-Down

I'm doing a thing you're not supposed to do:
making an untried recipe for a party.

I said I'd make a pineapple upside-down cake for BJ's Easter dinner.  BJ's the one with lung cancer. Two of her foster-sisters are in town to see her, and they're making dinner. Lunch, actually.

I've always used
my mother's pineapple upside-down recipe, (right, in her handwriting)
but instead decided to try
one with sour cream
that I found online.

(Partly because I have free sour cream from the thrift store--leftover from our weekly food give-aways.)

...and Sideways

Hey, ya'll, have you noticed? groceries have really gone up in price?
I scrounge so much free food from my workplace, and pick up oddments here and there, and I eat out a lot, so I don't often do a big grocery shop.

The other day I went to a big grocery chain store and ... toothpaste was five dollars?!?
When did that happen?
AND the shelves were not overflowing, which I've noticed before, of course--stores have never fully recovered from the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of the first Covid wave.
 

Is this all supply-chain stuff?
Looked it up, and yeah--that and labor, etc.
More of the slippage and slideage of the era.

I was thinking I should make a list of little changes I notice. Some of it good, or, who knows?

Let's see...

Somali Women Bus Drivers

While there's an uproar about racial divisions in the US, and rightfully, so, I also see a ton of people... um, just rubbing along together.

I saw my first woman bus driver wearing a hijab this winter. No one batted an eye. I first saw a woman wearing hijab about twenty years ago? When refugees from Somalia started to arrive. 

The other day, I met my first family from Afghanistan--refugees from the end of the latest iteration (the US version, 2001--2021) of that ongoing ... what do you even call it, "struggles in the region"?  (BBC overview)

My coworkers are from Eritrea, Mexico, Hungary, the Deep South, and small-towns and big cities of the Midwest. Hardly anyone grew up in this city.
Customers are from all over.
NOT that everyone gets along all the time, but

Decentralized digital currency

The grocery store where toothpaste costs $5 also had an ATM or some sort of electronic kiosk to handle Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies? I didn't look closely). Housemate has bought some, because her son is really into it, so I've been hearing about it.

Yikes--so much more, but I have to get going... In between writing this, I made the cake and set up Penny Cooper's Easter Tableaux.

Happy Easter, or whichever tale of redemption you subscribe to!

My Grandfathers, 1910s

These photos of my grandfathers were taken around the same time.

Top: (far right) my mother's father, Lytton, 1912, in Kentucky

Bottom photo: my father's father, Vincenzo; photo taken in Sicily in the 19'teens: Vincenzo is in the photo held by his brother, far right, because he emigrated to the U.S. in 1913.

 

The parents in the photos are, of course, my great-grandparents.
Top, left: Martha & James
Below, center: Marianna & Michele (seated)

And the siblings, my great- aunts and uncles.
Top: Pearl and Bertha
Bottom photo: Prudenzia, Frank, and Anthony (I presume those names were originally Francesco and Antonio--Prudenzia became "Prudence" in the US.)

I just noticed that my Kentucky relatives are not touching each other--there's just the slightest air-gap between each one, while the Siclians are all touching.

(It's not that the Sicilians were nicer, though. [cough, cough] Oh, no.*)

I've cut the bottom of the photo off, but Michele is holding the hand of that little unknown person next to him--no one knows who this child is. Perhaps she died? or was someone else's child who stayed in Sicily?

*Okay, to be fair, my father and Auntie Vi loved their grandfather, Michele--said he was kind and friendly--even though he spoke no English and they, almost no Sicilian (tho' my father said he was surprised how much he understood when he went to Sicily in his fifties).
But mostly they said this branch of the family was mean.
I feel it in myself sometimes--a kind of bitter, cutting energy.

And I feel a kind of preachiness in me, too--from the other side?
Big Boss even said I am a preacher!
I try to quash that (not exactly effectively, as you may have noticed); but he told me he meant it as a compliment.

All these threads!

Preachers and Enslavers

More family...
My mother's side, this time, who lived in the Mid-South––Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee––since colonists first pushed over the Appalachian Mountains.

I. Preachers

Yesterday I found online  The Mountain Preacher––digitalized by the Library of Congress––written by my great-grandfather (mother's father's father), James Lonzo Davis, and published in 1909.

Beautifully readable (or downloadable) at the Internet Archive:
archive.org/details/mountainpreacher00davi

I used to have a copy of it, and had even transcribed the whole thing onto computer in the late 1990s, before PDFs even existed. Strangely, I lost the book and the typescript, or I loaned it out and never got it back.
So I also ordered a beat-up copy of it off eBay ($14); I'd like to have a hard copy again.

Here're the opening lines:

My grandfather, Lytton, was this guy James's son.
James was a tyrannical father (and preacher--you can read in his book--he relished conflict with competing churches--and everyone was carrying rifles).

Here is the Davis family on their Kentucky farm, 1912. 

Left to Right:  parents Martha & James (the preacher), their daughters Pearl and Bertha (daughter Maude had already left), and son, (my mother's father), Lytton Somer Davis (1900-1976).

My grandfather hated his preacher father, ran away when he a teenager, and eventually married the daughter of a small-town lawyer, my grandmother Meribel--and they were the parents of my mother.

II. People Who Own People

While the preacher's family were hardscrabble hill people, Meribel's was middle class––doctors and lawyers, mostly.
But some landed gentry types in there too...

In fact, my mother always thought one branch of the family––the Hines––enslaved people, back when that was legal in the United States.

The other day, with a few minutes searching online, my sister found that branch.
She wrote to me:

"Florence Owsley, the aunt and adoptive-mother of our orphaned great-grandmother, (Virginia),  married into a slave-holding family.

"Florence married Virgil Hines, whose grandfather's uncle  was John Hines, who lived from 1771-1853.
From Western Kentucky Scholar:

'John Hines was unusually successful and accumulated a large fortune. He was sheriff of Warren County [southern Kentucky] for several years and was a large tobacco planter with about 3,000 acres of land and over 100 slaves.'

[Sister continues...]
"Woah. I'm kinda short of breath.
Dunno why I thought we wouldn't have a connection to slaver-holders, given the geographic roots of our maternal side of the family, but didn't realize I'd find it as quickly as I did. 

"So, from an initial online search--based on what was easy to find--it appears that the Hines side of the family (that would be thru Virgil Hines--Virginia Sutherland's uncle by marriage) dates back to the Revolutionary War, however many great-greats that is.
The progenitor of the Hines clan in America--Henry Sr--served in that war.

"The Hines family lived originally in colonial Virginia, and the next generation moved westward thru the Cumberland Gap to southern Kentucky (Bowling Green area, near TN border).
This is all historically slave country, though KY was a border state and never joined the Confederacy. 
Subsequent generations moved farther west to Missouri. 

"Henry Sr's son John built a saw- and gristmill (Hine's Mill) in the Bowling Green area, and 'was a large tobacco planter with about 3,000 acres of land and over 100 slaves.'

"So there we have it. Just to clarify, John Hines was the uncle of Virgil Hines's grandfather. I think.
So Florence Owsley, our great-grandmother Virginia's aunt [who raised Virginia after she was orphaned], married into a slave-holding family."

[end email from sister]

Well, that's what my mother thought, so I'd already taken the idea in, but it was indeed... just weird to see it spelled out, with names and places and numbers.
To "own" one hundred people, to use them to grow tobacco...

Photo from a Kentucky tobacco farm in 1940:

What an American mish-mash I am, colonists, preachers, enslavers, runaways and lawyers, 20th-century immigrants from Sicily. (The Sicilian immigrants were shoe makers and sewers, seamstresses, from towns near Palermo.)

So much...!

Family History Book: "interesting photo even if one wouldn't know the personages"

I'm sorting sixty-some old (1920– ) photos from my father's family. Auntie Vi gave me most of them while she was still alive. We'd looked at them together many times, so I know them, and luckily she'd jotted notes about them too.

There's a scanner here where I'm house-sitting, and I got inspired to scan the photos for myself, so I can eventually give the originals to a cousin, Rodger, who wrote that he "would LOVE to have them".

My sister, brother, and I are getting older, and none of us have children to pass the photos on to. Rodger's two children are young adults, and he has several nieces and nephews too, so I'm hoping he and they will be good stewards.

I'm going to keep a few of my favorite photos (eating spaghetti outside!), and I think my sister wants all the ones with our father (Daniele) in them. And, why not make a photo book?

(Photo-print companies always offer some huge discount; I went with shutterfly's half-off printing and free shipping if you spend more than $75.
I got four photo books for $85, total--I'll give them to a couple cousins and my sister. Our brother doesn't care.)

 I spent all day yesterday putting these together. I wrote the barest of notes--I didn't want it to be text-heavy. The handwritten notes are from Vi.
I'll make a family tree to tuck into the book too.

I told my cousin I didn't want to do the work to post these on familysearch dot org (the free LDS site), but maybe I will, now I've got them in order.

This is the 1917 marriage portrait of my grandparents (my father's parents):

ABOVE: Handwritten note from my Uncle Gabe: "This is an interesting photo even if one wouldn't know the personages." 
It was taken in Sicily; in 1913 my grandfather emigrated to America, so a brother holds his photo. (Eventually the whole family joined him in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

 

My grandfather Vincenzo/James was a brutal man, but I noticed he is always smiling and looking lively in the photos--he plays the tuba!
If you didn't know better, you'd think he was a loving father and husband.

My grandmother, Rosaria/Sarah, meanwhile, never smiles in photos.
I liked ending with a 1969 photo of her (in blue dress) grinning happily. Her husband, my grandfather, died in 1956, at sixty-two.

(There's the back cover photo of her too, reading--that always intrigued me.
Who would she have been if she hadn't been forced into an unwanted marriage at seventeen?)

Candlesticks & Ice Picks

Waiting at a café for an old friend to arrive this Saturday morning.
I got this bronze bunny-friends candlesticks holder for her, from the thrift store of course, for Easter.
(I set it on my coffee cup to get height for my laptop camera--I still only have a flip phone. I miss the iPhone camera, but otherwise am much saner without the Internet on my hip.)

The café is around the corner from my cat-sitting house--another friend says it reminds him of Palo Alto.
There's nothing at all like it near the thrift store, that's for sure.

Yesterday after work, I was sitting on the bus-stop bench with Mr Linens, and he started counting his cash money.
"Don't count your money in public!" I said.

He--from the roughside of Chicago--said, "Don't tell me what to do, woman!"

"Yeah, yeah," I said, "but this is the bus stop where that woman got stabbed."

He put away his money, opened his bag and showed me a knife--in a sheath--and a small ice-pick (like for cocktail ice cubes).

I didn't say, Fat lot of good those are going to do you, in your bag, if someone comes at you out of nowhere.

I said, "That ice pick looks good."

"You want it?" he said.

"Sure!" I said. (It looks handy for poking holes in toy-related objects, or, you know, poking someone in the eye, except I doubt I'd be good at that.)

It's in my bike bag with me here at the café, so I'M PREPARED.

P.S. It occurs to me, for self-defense, slinging a heavy bronze candlestick holder would probably work better than an ice pick.

Bestowers of Beauty and Charm

Above: hem of tiny, embroidered, dancing stars

Grace (n):  from Latin gratia "favor, esteem, regard; pleasing quality, good will, gratitude"

1. In the Classical sense, one of the three sister goddesses, bestowers of beauty and charm

2. Sense of "beauty of form or movement, pleasing quality" is mid-14c.

______________

Four vintage (1930s?) christening gowns were donated to the thrift store this week. They're very long, white gowns for baby baptisms.
I pulled them from the baling bin--going to textile-recycling, the fate of most of the vintage linens that come to the store.

My coworkers say, "No one will buy those," because they themselves wouldn't. They see old linens as . . . I'm not even sure what they'd say. Useless, old, etc. And certainly too much bother for them to price futzy little hankies, etc.

However, if I price old linens and put them out, they do sell, of course. To people who do textile art, handwork, embroidery, mending, or just to people who love fabrics.
Some people tell me they even use them. 

I have a couple big linen napkins I use--I love them and don't worry about staining them. Better to use them up than throw them away or store them forever.

I looked the gowns up online, and ones like these sell for 20 US dollars and up, so I priced them 5 each.

I took them to the store parking lot and photographed them in the cold spring wind. (The bricks look extra dark because they were wet from snow flurries!)

 

They are so so gorgeous, some trimmed with lace and decorated with tucks and whitework embroidery. I don't know if they're cotton or fine linen--I can't tell. (I'd guess cotton?)

 Rusted lace trim on sleeve:

They give me a longing for... not for ownership of these object, but for... beauty and grace, and the human appreciation of those qualities.

Also, there's a sort of painful beauty in good design--the clever way the ties of this dress--you can' really see it here, but one slots through an opening in the side...

 

 

That (beauty, grace, and appreciation) are not located IN these objects,
they're in people, right?
(Also, Victorian aesthetics carry some distinctly unlovely socio-economics; Penny Cooper says ORPHANS with their tiny fingers had to stitch these dresses!)
They're qualities to be cultivated in humus––
to grow in my (our) own worm-chewed dirt, and to bestow.
That's how I see it.

 

Say "yes" more.

 BJ's doctor says she has weeks of life left, not months. "It's weird," she said.

Yesterday I jotted down her life advice, from this perspective:

Say "yes" more.

But yes to what? Girlette Low (below, in yellow) says this means I should say yes to letting them use sharp tools more...

Let Me Be Worm Dirt

A pal was saying how humble he is--(bragging, really)--which was funny since he strikes me as a pretty arrogant* guy.
I'd guess his arrogance actually arises from low self-esteem, and it's this feeling of being not-worth-much, feeling humiliated in himself, maybe, that he mistakes for humility.

This morning I was reading a Lenten prayer (of St Ephrem) that asks for humility (among other things).
I decided to dig into the word.
I'd always heard the root of "humble" is "humus", for soil, and so it is. Specifically, rich top soil.

humble: literally "on the ground"; from humus "earth".

Humus is the substance (the top few inches of soil) left over after a long process of thorough decomposition done by earthworms, bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms.
The color of humus is brown or black, and it has a loose, crumbly, and spongy texture.

 Humus is food for plants, and its texture allows air and water to circulate.
I like that!
Life grinds us down, but we can be ground down into despair and/or ground down into fine particles that feed life.

 

*arrogance: "a manifest feeling of superiority of one's worth or importance, combined with contempt of others"

The interior is un/cluttered

Michael of OCA informed me there's a KonMari line of products you can buy at the Container Store. "Indispensable products" for your "tidying journey", designed by Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

I have liked Kondo's teaching: clear the clutter, keep what you love.
But that she is creating more stuff, more mass-produced, spendy stuff, as "solutions" to create harmony and calm, (so the ad copy says), in a world that is drowning in stuff? 

That doesn't seem like a solution at all.
It seems like more of the same, but covered in linen.

Here is the KonMari Method™ Harmony Linen Storage Box.
I painted it.
The copy says the box is a "joy-sparker", so I added a plug.
It doesn't have a plug, really. Or a lid.

The Product Information says, "The interior is uncluttered...".
Yes. It's a box.

 

Fifty bucks.

WHAT CAN WE BUILD INSTEAD?

All the creative mending that's going on in recent years is a better response to all the crap in the world. It's not about making everything look clean, it's about living with the mess. 

The drive to purity can be dangerous. How can we get rid of the inconveniences of life?
Turns out, blasting living problems with antibiotics doesn't work so well in the long run. The interior is cluttered--necessarily so!
Could we work to incorporate them better somehow?

Julia is a friend whose mending shows me what that can look like. From her Instagram, here's a sweater she bought already holey at the (my) thrift store that is a continual state of mending:

Visible mending can seem a bit precious, a bit twee, but look at how it works if you apply it to other things,
if you extend the idea of mending a sweater:
it expands into a whole way of solving problems, from relationships to climate crisis.

If you extend the "solutions" of KonMari Products,
those linen boxes get dented and dirty and you're back where you started in the search for purity.

Blue & Yellow/ "What Can We Build Instead?"

I set up a book display last week for Ukraine.
Just the colors of the flag--the books' contents don't signify (unlike the related War & Peace display I set up in early March).

The print, top center, by Micah Bazant, quotes activist Mariame Kaba:

"When something can't be fixed,
the the question is
WHAT CAN WE BUILD
INSTEAD?"

(That's supposed to be a broken-open geode--
it more brings to my mind
"The Doomsday Machine" >
from Star Trek-TOS.)

I didn't add a sign to the book display--
I see Ukraine flags all over the city, but I wonder if customers will get the reference.

Not that I'd know, mostly,
especially since I've been out with a cold (the old-fashioned virus) since the day after I put the display up.

This is one of my first watercolors, painted when I was in bed with some virus nine years ago––2013––when getting a cold or the flu wasn't so fraught:

It's one of a series of postcard paintings I was making back then, with my gouache pan-paints.
I also painted maybe my favorite-ever series that year, the Snadgers in Space Flashcards:
gugeo.blogspot.com/2013/10/name-that-vegetable-flashcards.html

I've always thought of myself as a beginning artist.
Ridiculous! It's past-time I graduated to calling myself an amateur artist, or whatever--just something more realistic about where I am in time.

I was doing the math: my father and my grandmother both died at eighty-six years old.
If I live that long, I have twenty-five years left.
2022 + 25 = 2047.
Hm. Not bad, but it definitely calls for a change in how I perceive myself. Not a beginner.

The Federation of Dolls and Bears Issues a Special Birthday Passport

For a certain someone who doesn't like having her photo taken, whose birthday is today.
The Federation of Dolls and Bears (FDB) issued this special passport in the bearer's legal name, but we know her by nickname.
Happy Birthday, Little Miss Almond Confection!

I questioned that the passport is only good "on land or sea".

Representatives of the FDB said they prefer not to travel by air, and of course she will be accompanied by one of the Federation, so air is not automatically granted.
They would, however, take a request for travel by hot air balloon under consideration, upon application.

No More Cats That Look Like Cats

Why am I painting cats?
I don't recognize myself in that. Even though I house sit a lot of cats, and I like those cats, I'm not overall a cat person.
If I were to paint them, I'd imagine myself painting them abstractly--something like the fabulous flat cats of Mary Fedden.
But, no.
I'm painting fur that looks like fur.

Last Sunday I painted Miss Marty. She is, or was, the cat of BJ, a pal who is dying of lung cancer.
It took me for-bloody-ever, but the portrait looks like BJ's cat, which I knew is what she'd want.
(It helped that I'd bought quality gouache (by M. Graham, a small Oregon company). The colors are clear, not chalky like the cheap pan paints I'd been using (and not cheap, either).

BJ is a couple years younger than me. I know her because she lives across the alley from the thrift store. Before she got too sick, she came in almost every day.

I remember when BJ rescued a feral cat during the killing polar vortex from the Arctic three winters ago.
That cat is Miss Marty.

BJ'd wanted to keep the cat till the end of her own life, but after she left a tea kettle to burn dry on the stove, she couldn't trust her body anymore. A couple weeks ago, she found a new home for Marty with a friend who loves the cat.

After Marty left, I offered to paint her portrait, and BJ said she'd like that.

As I was painting this very fluffy cat, it came to me:
THIS is why I've been painting cats:

so I could do a good job on a cat portrait for a dying friend.

You never know (or, anyway, I never seem to know) what the bigger picture of one's actions might be...

When I gave BJ the portrait, I could see her react to it, as if she were holding something living that she loved.

Mission accomplished.
Now maybe I should try painting a cat that looks like a flounder?

________________

P.S. Oh, yes, in between postings, I also painted The Finnish Friend's cat, Pulla––postcard sized.
I like this little picture a lot, little gray kitty on a pink background.