Surprise Sparkle!

 I have to leave for work in fifteen minutes--after taking two days off for bad air quality, I am swamped with donations at work--a good thing, but a lot to sort.

Yesterday was the most unexpected sparkling day.
The main event was--I got a book volunteer! A delightful young woman from Bolivia, Gabriela. Maybe she's 22?

Gabriela wore sparkle makeup around her eyes. I've noticed more young people coming in with imaginative face paint--usually around their eyes—extending outward. Rings of dots in pink; dark paint with white dashes... They look great!

And she was sparkly, full of ideas and enthusiasm for books--she's a writer herself. I invited her to Mr Furniture's next art opening. "He is a genius, but he works here, making minimum wage."

"That's the way it is," she shrugged. "Artists can't think in terms of money."
Sparkle confetti fell from the sky.

Later I said I was going to take down my Reading Rainbow display for June, and we could put up a new display.
"Lets do red white and blue for July," she said.
And she made a sign--“Land of Revolution”—not something I’d ever think of. Great to have a different voice. 

There’s so little innovation at work usually, I was almost shocked.
Mr Furniture is an exception---oh, and I hadn't mentioned, the over-the-top creator Emmler has left--not at all surprisingly. I miss her so much.

Another excellent thing:
I went to the eye doctor and he said, "You do not have glaucoma or cataracts or macular degeneration. You just have a 5% change of vision in your right eye."

I had been freaking out a little—losing sight is a big fear.

And then I went to dinner with bink and Maura to Sushi Train, where the little plates of sushi travel past your table on a conveyor belt. All food should be like toys!
PennyCooper is lobbying for me to take them, but I fear they would climb onto the belt and be carried away, and of course they'd quickly be selected by the other diners.
No!
______

It's Day 3 of Camino for Marz. I should record here for her that bink & The Curmudgeon went to the bakery café where she worked, and bink reports the place felt different--the other workers were lackluster and slow...
One of them said, "Marz was the pulse of this place."
!!!
Marz, do you hear this??? I will tell you when you get back.

My Day 3 sketches, 2001:

I remember these poor bikers pushing their bikes through the mud--they were going to give up biking the trail at that point and take the road--full of trucks... Not so nice.

  This dinner was an exception--the food in 2001 was mostly terrible---cans of tuna and dry bread with cheese.
I think Spaniards along the way cater to international pilgrims' taste more now--money to be made, and demands to be met... Everyone with smartphones...
I'm sure it's better in some ways (I would have killed for a bowl of hot oatmeal! and really, dinner at 9 p.m. is bad when you're getting up at 6 to walk),
but I'm glad I'd walked when it was closer to the medieval experience.

Detecting Hope: "There is a Yes"

Last night I re-watched the third and last season (2017) of Detectorists (BBC article), one of my favorite creations of all time. Have you seen it?
It's like a smart friend who lets you discover a solution yourself.
The solutions––and the problems––in the show are real, but in miniature, mostly, like the things the characters uncover with their metal detectors--old buttons and ring pulls. They're so well and lovingly presented, it's like looking into a dollhouse and marveling at the perfection.

Like so:
Mackenzie Crook, the show's writer and director, plays Andy, a (temporarily? former) archaeologist. Andy is working day labor, and one day he is assigned to spray weed killer alongside a highway.
He fills the spray containers for himself and his coworker with water, then picks up the bottle of chemical he's supposed to add to the water. We see the industrial label--(I thought of the report on factory deaths from Dow herbicide I'd linked to the other day)--and . . . he simply doesn't add it.
He and his coworker go and water the roadside all day.

Later, Andy rescues a hedgehog from the road.
His coworker asks, "Is that a porcupine?"

Andy looks shocked. "No, mate, it's a hedgehog."

"I thought hedgehogs were flat."

"If they're run over, they're flat. When they're alive, they're spherical."

[Oh--I found this--21 seconds on youtube. Most of the show's humor is gentle, but this made me laugh out loud.]

Bigger issues are presented too, but it's mostly at the level of our hobbies. And it's all gold.

I. Andy's Hat

An unimportant detail jumped out at me this time:
the little castle insignia on the cap Andy always wears.

BELOW: You can see the logo on Andy's cap, right. On the left is his co-detectorist, Lance (Toby Jones).

I recognized it because the other day, Helen, my coworker who sorts clothes, had handed me an old felt hat with the same insignia. She'd asked if I'd like it for my Cool Old Books & Things section, which I did. It's a bit bashed and faded, so normally it'd go into baling, but she loves worn, old things and knows I do too.

The name on the inside band: Goorin Bros. I looked them up.
Cassel Goorin began selling custom hats from a horse-drawn cart in Pittsburgh in 1895. The castle is a play on his name. Now they've got a vintage but hip vibe--they make a pork pie hat like Walter White's of Breaking Bad.
Andy's is a brown cotton private cadet hat--doesn't look like Goorin carries them anymore, but I found them online for around $30.

Our felt fedora sells new for $150–.
I priced it five.
I hadn't put it out when I left on Monday--I've been home since, because of the terrible air quality. When I go in today, I'll see if it fits and keep it if it does. (And post a photo.)

II. "There is a Yes"

I'm sitting outside this morning-- the air quality is better, but still "unhealthy for sensitive groups". But after two days inside, I'm choosing to breathe the bad air.
This is irrational. I know it, and I do it anyway, because I'm tired of being cooped up.

My behavior reminds me of an ongoing question of mine--a real question, not a rhetorical one:
Why do people who think we're doomed choose to have babies?

If you have any thoughts or can answer for yourself, I'd be genuinely interested.
One woman I know who has three children--grown now--told me she'd chosen to have the third in defiance of how bad things are in the world. It was an act of hope, she said, in the face of her own despair.

I admired her hope, but I was a little baffled about her reasoning.
I didn't push her further, (I didn't want to imply I think it's wrong to have children), but I mean. . .
I see how having a third baby gave her hope, but it's her child who has to live on into the blighted future...
Also, she and her husband already had reproduced themselves with their first two children--weren't they enough of a YES in the world?

Speaking of a Yes in the world, another famous person to whom I felt some connection has died. You maybe saw, Julian Sands's body was found finally--he'd disappeared while hiking in winter.

George Emerson, dead.

George was a life force. But actually, in A Room with a View--one of my favorite movies (1985)––it's George's father, Mr Emerson, who talks about hope. Mr Emerson asks Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter), the girl George loves:

"Make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes."

I loved the happy ending of Room, but as an older person, I rather doubt Lucy and George were going to happy. (Though happier than the protagonist of Maurice was going to be... Talk about a preposterous ending.)

In this article from the British Library I see that I'm not the only one to wonder about E. M. Forster's endings:

"Questions have been raised about Forster’s ability to produce satisfying endings to his books.
In a journal entry of May 1917 his contemporary Katherine Mansfield did not mince her words when she voiced her frustration about this aspect of his writing:
‘E M Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm?
Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.’"'

Mr Emerson hints at that too. He talks in grand terms, but at the end of the novel, he observes,

"We can help one another but little."

Which brings me back to the littleness of Detectorists. We can help one another "but little", but that little is not nothing.

[SPOILER]

At the end of Detectorists, Andy and Lance manage to save a tree from being cut down, by putting up a bat box. This calls in the Bat Action Team, who have the power to halt tree cuttings.
The field where the tree grows is still lost to a solar power company, but the tree remains.
A nice, realistic little Yes.

And then, from the realm of fairy tales, Mr Crook grants Andy and Lance their just deserts, delivered by way of the tree's magpies.

______________________

I've gone back indoors now.

Here're sketches from Day 2 of my 1st Camino, July 8, 2001. I was already suffering painful blisters.
Marz never got any blisters in 2011, I hope she's not getting them this time either!

Gardens & Atoms

I. Sketch the Same Old Stuff Anyway

As I sit down to write this morning, Marz has likely finished her first day of walking the Camino. (Hi, Marz! Are you wearing your Crocs?)

BELOW: My first day, from my first Camino sketchbook, July 7, 2001
LEFT: bink looking like she has bad jetlag--not because I'm an amateur artist, but because she did.
RIGHT: I got the first of many blisters at the pass where Roland, a leader in Charlemagne's army, died in battle in 778, according to 11th century The Song of Roland.
At this point, you know you're not in Kansas.

I wish I'd kept sketching daily on Camino. I think I got bored of drawing feet and coffee cups...? I didn't appreciate that even mundane sketches are fun to look at later. (Photos, not so much.)

It's a challenge to draw what you see everyday. I'll take a sketchbook on my next walk--probably that'll be tomorrow, unless the air quality improves A LOT today. Smoke from Canada yesterday put us back in the red: "unhealthy for all groups"––I stayed home from work.

II. Consider the lilies...

Yesterday evening, the wind shifted and cleared the air somewhat, temporarily ––"Oh, good, it's only the yellow warning!"
I walked to the Turtle Fountain and took close-ups of lily buds:

This garden has an interesting history as part of an earlier era's push to make nice stuff for the sake of a healthy citizenry.
The idea being we would get better and better...

Part of the Lyndale Park Gardens, our garden was started in 1907 by park superintendent Theodore Wirth ("widely regarded as the dean of the local parks movement in America"), with the help of Louis Boeglin, the park board horticulturist.
(Hm, Wirth's Wikipedia page is rather scant--maybe I should improve that.)

III. The Praxis of Hope, Again

I'm reading God and the Atom (1945), written right after the US bombed Hiroshima, by the English writer Ronald A. Knox. ('A' for Arbuthnott--some girlettes are claiming this for a last name--it's a Scottish place name.)

Knox, who was fifty-seven in 1945, was the uncle of author Penelope Fitzgerald, author of The Bookshop, a favorite novel of mine. Fitzgerald was twenty-eight when the US dropped the atom bomb. Her first novel, The Bookshop, was published in 1978 when Fitzgerald was sixty-one.
(I have missed the deadline.)

From a 2014 article about Fitzgerald–– "Late Bloom"––in the New Yorker:

Penelope Knox was born into "a brilliantly clever English family distinguished by alarming honesty, caustic wit, shyness, moral rigour, willpower, oddness, and powerful banked-down feelings, erupting in moments of sentiment or in violent bursts of temper and gloom."

I'd enjoyed Fitzgerald's bio, The Knox Brothers.  (There were four.)
Her father's brilliant brother R. A. was a writer, theologian, priest (famously at the time, an Anglican convert to Catholicism), ... and an early influence on creative fandom. I put him in my fandom book! Specifically, on detective and Sherlock Holmes fandom. R.A. himself also wrote detective stories.

 
Knox starts God and the Atom with the moment of learning that the US had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima:

"At a moment when it seemed as if all our capacity for surprise were already exhausted, one day last August, we opened the paper to find that we were wrong. ...
A Japanese town ... had suddenly ceased to exist.

Our first reaction, probably, was one of fear...
followed, in many minds, by a sense of shame.
...A very general bewilderment was registered, a moral bewilderment...."

Knox then wonders what I've always wondered, *
"Would it not have been possible to introduce the new weapon by dropping in on some unfrequented mountain-side,
and asking the Japanese whether they wanted to go on with the war after that?"

Surely it was possible, but that's not what we did.
Knox talks about what a shock the bombing of Hiroshima was to the "let's build parks" sensibility that led to my Turtle Fountain park, spelling an end to the Victorian doctrine of progress:
that we were to harness nature for our gradual social betterment--eventually arriving at Utopia.

Every day we were to get better and better... and then, WWI.
Bad, but hope remained, if tattered: it was to be the war to end all wars.

BELOW: The Menin Road, (1919) by Paul Nash

  

And then, WWII--also bad, very very bad, and then...  BOOM!
There goes Utopia.

This happened on a social level in a specific time of history, but it can happen on a personal level in any individual's everyday life too. And, I think, what Knox writes applies, with changes where change is needed, whether you believe in a soul or a god or not. Or, his perspective helps atheist me, anyway.

Knox asks, "What then should be the posture of a soul which is submitted to this terrible ordeal [of feeling certain of doom]?"

Basically, he answers––toward the end of the book (after a whole lot of too much scholastic theology, most of which I skipped)––we should "go on behaving as if we hoped".

"Can a soul really hope, it may be asked, when the whole mind is overshadowed by the conviction that there is no hope at all? The best answer to that question is implied by a well known passage in the Imitation of Christ [early 1400s, Thomas à Kempis].

'There was a man that was tossed ever to and fro between hope and fear. One day, overcome with melancholy, he went into Church and threw himself down in prayer before one of the altars.
Ah, he thought to himself, if only I could be certain that I should go on persevering!

Whereupon he heard the Divine answer in his heart,
And if thou wert certain, what wouldst thou be doing?
Do now what thou wouldst be doing then, and thy anxieties will vanish.' "
[italics mine]

As we say now, "Act as if...". 
Keep the public gardens.
And a sketchbook.

________

P.S. I was going to go into work this afternoon if the air quality improved, but it hasn't. So let me go on a little further. It's a good day to think about how to be hopeful when your eyes and throat are dry from distant fires...

IV. Humanitarian Utopianism

*"What if the atomic bomb had been dropped on an unpopulated area instead of on Hiroshima is the premise of Kim Stanley Robinson's short story, "The Lucky Strike" (1984).
So, so good--one of my favorites.

OH--you can read "The Lucky Strike" here, reprinted online in 2014 by Strange Horizons magazine:
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-lucky-strike

 ABOVE: Kim Stanley Robinson, 2017, from article: "Kim Stanley Robinson: 'Science needs to think of itself more as a humanism and as an utopian politics'”

KS Robinson seems not to believe in god/s.
“Literature is my religion,” he said. “The novel is my way of making sense of things.
... In interviews he frequently speaks of the Zen rubric 'chop wood, carry water' and claims that it could just as easily be 'run five miles, write five pages.'” (via)

The New York Times actually described KSR as "utopian" last year (2022). When Robinson spoke at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, he was asked to predict what the world will look like in 2050.

"At 70, Robinson — who is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of his generation — stands as perhaps the last of the great utopians."

Robinson, whose novel, The Ministry for the Future, lays out a path for humanity that narrowly averts a biosphere collapse, sounded a note of cautious optimism. Overcome with emotion at times, he raised the possibility of a near future marked by 'human accomplishment and solidarity.'

'It should not be a solitary day dream of a writer sitting in his garden, imagining there could be a better world,' Robinson told the crowd."

--"A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’", by Alexandra Alter, New York Times, May 11, 2022.

Yeah, so for me, this is encouraging because it's what I came to many years ago:
find good stories, share good stories, write/tell/make good stories.
Or, you know, bad ones. But stories!

Walk This Way (The Giver)

 
Above: Me, walking on a pedestrian sign. 
The paths around the lakes are clearly marked, with the bike paths being One Way. People will chide you if you go the wrong way or are in the wrong lane. Minneapolis is tidy-minded like that.

When I went to Italy for the first time, I was shocked to see people STANDING in walking paths, talking to one another. Other Italians walked around them without concern.
I liked it.
Here, walkers would disapprovingly tell you to stand aside.

As I walked home along the lake path last night, I photographed people's feet and legs--fun to do, but the results were mostly not worth sharing.
Well, this one... It looks like I saturated the colors in iPhoto, but it was the low angle of the sun at 8 p.m. that made them glow.

 

 Below: the swimming beach at Bde Maka Ska. Adding to the glow, smoke from Canadian wildfires again.

Below: Me, reflected in the window of the Greek Orthodox Church, with an icon on the other side of the window.

I took this with Marz in mind because she likes this church.
She'll likely not be online in Spain--there used to be pay computers in pilgrim hostels, but not now most people have smartphones (not Marz tho'). But Marz--if you see this--the Theotokos here says hello!

The "One Way" mentality of Minneapolis--even in parks--is good for traffic safety.  I think we have far fewer accidents among Things in Motion than Rome does.
Our tidy-mindedness can also mask or corral things we want to keep out of sight, which can be good (garbage cans!), and not so good (inconvenient truths--they're in play whether we see them or not)...

Is risk our business? The Giver

What's the best relationship between conformity, risk, and freedom?

The original Star Trek (1966-69) was always asking this, and over and over it plumped for risk. Captain Kirk makes a speech to the crew, when asking for volunteers for a dangerous exploration:

"Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her."
But, he adds, "You may dissent without prejudice."

The children's novel The Giver (1993) asks the same question. Have you read it? That book was mentioned in an adult novel I liked, The Borrower (2011), by Rebecca Makkai, about a librarian who "borrows" her favorite ten-year-old patron, Ian, when she finds him hiding in the library because his mother has enrolled him in anti-gay classes.
The novel mentions lots of kids books--here's a list of them.

Rebecca Makkai said:

"Of this list, there are a few I’d certainly recommend more than others.
If you were ten years old and I had three minutes to fill your backpack with books, the ones I’d pick would be
The Westing Game, The Giver, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Egypt Game, The Twenty-One Balloons,
and The Princess Bride.
Oh, and The Pushcart War. (It’s hard to stop.)"

I'd looked that list up recently because of my plan to (re)read children's books. I haven't read half those books.
The next day The Giver was donated at work and I decided to read it because it makes so many "Best of" lists.

I'd have loved it when I was ten!
It's about a boy, Jonas, who lives in a peaceful community of the future, where no one would walk on a bike path or bike in the wrong direction. Or, if they did too many times, they'd be "released" from the community. An adult reader can guess right away that that's a euphemism.
Jonas discovers that long ago the community's founders chose "Sameness" as a way to ensure social harmony. He thinks it is a good choice––"if people choose their spouses and their jobs, they might choose wrongly"––and then he discovers the price.

The Giver is fairly simplistic, fitting for ten year olds, but it raises complicated questions with big extension---like, does "don't say gay" make gayness go away? *

The book's been banned in some places.

Its author, Lois Lowry, says of bannings and challenges:

“I think banning books is a very, very dangerous thing. It takes away an important freedom. Any time there is an attempt to ban a book, you should fight it as hard as you can.
It’s okay for a parent to say, ‘I don’t want my child to read this book.’ But it is not okay for anyone to try to make that decision for other people.
The world portrayed in The Giver is a world where choice has been taken away. It is a frightening world. Let’s work hard to keep it from truly happening.”

--from The Banned Books Project at Carnegie Mellon U [spoilers] 

____________________________

* Side note about "don't say gay".

I was just reading about puppy pregnancy syndrome (< that links to Wikipedia--here's an article in Scientific America)--an example of a "culture-bound syndrome": in a certain areas in West Bengal, India, people, including men, believe they can be impregnated with puppies via dog bite. 

This is not an eternal verity. Don’t say puppy pregnancy.

"Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home."

Graffiti along the Camino, 2001:
"Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. --Basho"

 Thinking about Marz on Camino––she must be on the train now (it's afternoon in Spain), almost to Pamplona, where she'll spend the night––I got out the tiny notebook I kept on my first Camino, twenty-two years ago, July 5 – August 16, 2001.

These are the very first pages--from flying into Madrid, where I stayed over, to getting on the train to Pamplona the next morning. (I wish I'd kept up drawing as much as I did on these first days--I did very little later.)

I was meeting bink at Roncesvalles later that day.
No regrets, but I wonder what it would be to walk the Camino alone, like Marz is doing. I envy her that. (I don't wonder enough to actually DO that, but I wonder.)
It's harder to travel alone--you have to make all the decisions--but also... I don't know... All the decisions are yours, and that makes you dig deeper. I let bink do all the navigating, for instance, so I never learned how.

But a lesson of Camino is that EVERY day is a a journey--there, or here. I am always navigating my life, or I am letting someone else do it.

I've planned my walk for today.
This morning, I'm going with a coworker to the funeral of volunteer Art's sister. (I didn't know her.)
Then to work, then to see Marcia, former publishing coworker and cat-sitting client.
In the evening, I will go a little out of my way to walk home along the lake path.

Maybe I should keep a sketchbook on my walks? Mm, probably more to my liking, a photo sketchbook.
I like the challenge to look CLOSELY, to see the familiar as foreign, to see home as a journey.

I took pictures on my little walk yesterday. Below: freshly cut tree stump

It had rained on my way home. I stopped under a tree for while, and then I said to myself a German phrase I learned on Instagram--"You are not made of sugar".
I walked home in the chilly rain, and I did not melt.

Below: rain drops inside a lily.

"profound disturbance of energy production"

A quick follow-up note:
Ms Moon was wondering how many deaths Dow Chemicals caused--they manufactured Agent Orange as well as napalm.

I went looking. The answer is "x", where "x" = a lot.

I found this brief Stephen King–like report on 5 Dow factory workers' deaths from exposure to 2,4-D, an ingredient in herbicide:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4923a3.htm

Why am I sharing it? I guess because five individual deaths are imaginable.
Also,  if I were going to write a horror story, I would borrow from this report--even this sentence about how the chemical works is gruesome:

"Uncoupling oxidative phosphorylation at the mitochondrial level leads to profound disturbance of energy production and may have caused the rapid deaths described in this report."

Over Hill

The Marz is in the air right now, this Sunday evening, on her way to Madrid (via Paris)—then train to Pamplona, bus to Roncesvalles, a blessing at the pilgrimage send-off Mass, and from there on, it’s by foot, all 500 miles to the sea. She bought a new pair of Crocs for it (but took hiking boots as well).

Thirty-two years old, she didn’t even bother to train for it. Neither did I at when I went at forty, but I did at fifty, and good thing. The Way is not mountain hiking, but it’s not flat.

I didn’t want to do the Camino a third time, but I’m a bit envious that she’s off on an adventure. It’s a kind of adventure in slow-motion. You walk. Every day, you walk. That’s it. Your entire life slows down to 3 miles an hour. I loved that. (Also, I didn't--it was boring and it hurt.)

I’ve decided to go for a walk every day while Marz is walking, even just a little one. To the Turtle Fountain (where I’m sitting now) and back is only a mile. Continuing on and walking the path around the lake adds another three. Easy and flat. I’m on my feet a lot and carrying stuff at work, but I rarely get in the rhythm of a good walk. 

If I’m feeling ambitious, I will walk up and down the hilly bowl in the park between my house and the lake. I lay down to take this panorama photo of the bowl, below. It looks ridiculously shallow, but that’s a good sledding hill behind me. For old-person me, it’s a workout. 

Buen Camino!

Minnesota Hot

 I’m sitting at a picnic bench at the farmers market 4 blocks from my house, with my bag of produce and a quart jar of Bloody Mary juice homemade with the Hispanic farmers’ tomatoes, onions, garlic & peppers, vinegar, sugar & salt. Five dollars.

“Do you want medium or hot?” the woman vendor said.

“How hot is hot?” I said.

“Minnesota hot,” she said. 

I laughed, and so did she. “I can handle that.”

I am not acclimated to truly hot food, but “Minnesota hot” means mild.

It’s Pride weekend here—I used to wander through Loring Park and see the folx, but I’m disengaged these days from most social gatherings  (except the farmers market). Happily so.

But here—in solidarity I’ve arranged a rainbow on the picnic table…

I’m heading home though—it rained during the night and looks like rain is coming again. Look at those clouds!

Me and U

“Be who you needed when you need it most.”

--Sign, below, with stuffies 

Restaurants and shops emptied out of the Uptown after George Floyd’s death.
McDonalds is one of the few remaining businesses on what was a swank strip. On the corner is a library. Also--a block away, Magers & Quinn, an indie BOOKSTORE. Yay, libraries & bookstores!

I stopped my bike to photograph this scene, above, and the young woman signing on the corner came over. 

“I love your toys,” I said. “Here’s ten dollars to buy them candy. Do they like candy?”

She was pretty blank (she looked exhausted), but she said thanks, yes they do.

“Do people give you these?”

I meant the stuffed animals, but she reached behind them and pulled out a bag of candy. Sour gummy worms.

“Sometimes.”

I wasn’t who she needed most, of course. (“I am not the savior.”) But I was not entirely not, either. And she was a touch of what I needed, by showing me the candy and the toys.

There are different philosophies about how to help people most effectively. I don’t see it for myself in terms of effectiveness…

For me, I'd say that the question isn’t so much “How to help people?” 

but rather,  “How to BE a person”.

If you want to be an effective philanthropist, you research and invest in schemes to do the most good for your buck. And that’s good!

If you want to be a human among human beings, that’s a little different. Giving ten bucks or a sandwich to someone desperate is as effective as dripping water onto a desert of hot sand.
Poof! It’s gone, seemingly wasted.

But the ecology of a human being doesn’t work quite like that, right? We’re not mathematical equations or corporate entities. Something else is exchanged when you give someone a sandwich or when you yourself receive charity (unnecessary kindness).

If you're looking for signs of your own effectiveness, and returns on your investment of energy, better to invest in malaria nets.
(Of course a person can do both. It's not either/or.)

It's not a person living on the street who I find it hardest to see, it's people like that volunteer Rob I mentioned last week--the rich, the complacent, the do-gooder. He raises money for effective charities. No doubt his work saves lives.

I talked to him again this week, trying to see that humanity, but for me, his is as shielded as a beetle. Or maybe there's nothing underneath his shields of religious platitudes? Maybe that's him. Someone who does good deeds for The Poor. (I hate that phrase, "the poor", like they're not us, they're A Specimen.)

Boy do I struggle with Rob in my mind. He told me that that evening, he and his wife were going out to a certain restaurant for their wedding anniversary.
I looked up that restaurant's menu--their ribeye steak is $58.

Ha-ha, yeah--I am looking for evidence against him!

I'll be honest. I do not like him.
If I had to accept charity from him, it would feel like an insult, not love.

I don't have to like someone to see our common humanity, but I can't see through this guy's shiny carapace.
I am laughing as I write this, but it is the truth.

Verdict:
Try again. What is a candy or a toy for him?

But I'm not going to try forever. Some people, you're never going to see or be seen by them.
It's okay--walk on. There's someone on the next corner who is what you need or who needs who you are.

Me and I 35.

 Here's an unlovely picture I took yesterday afternoon. Going to and from work, I must bike over Interstate 35 and there's no beautiful way to do that,
though in certain conditions downtown does look impressive. Here, it looks gray with the promise of  coming rain—which didn’t come. Maybe this afternoon. 

I’m looking north here (from 38th St.). Go 150 miles north on I-35, and it ends at Duluth, a port city on Lake Superior. (From Duluth to the Canadian border is another 150 miles on Highway 61.)

If you take I-35 all the way south, in 1,400 miles you’ll come to the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas. 

I challenged myself to name all the states that I-35 passes through (map below), and I got the center side-by-side two wrong!

Geez. I don’t drive and I don’t pay much attention to roads—or geography in general, but I should know that. I've even done it, though I was the passenger.

Can you name the states? I’ll put the answer in the comments. 

Tiny Bubbles at Cross Purposes

I stood at work holding a donated can of Scrubbing Bubbles, wanting it as bad as I'd want a warm brownie.
Scrubbing Bubbles is fantastic! I'd only discovered it last year when I moved into my new apartment where half a can had been left behind. Its soft white foam falls softly, gently––like fake snow in a Hallmark Christmas movie––and it twinkles away soap scum as if by magic.

It damn well should work great:
using Scrubbing Bubbles is like spraying napalm in your bathroom.*
It takes no prisoners. Its tiny bubbles score an F from the Environmental Working Group.
(At that link ^ you can search other household products, and more.)

I know that, and I WANTED IT ANYWAY.
It felt so good, so heavy, so effective in my hand, like a yellow Taser in a can.
The Prime Directive of all living things is to conserve energy, and bygod, Scrubbing Bubbles is Starfleet Command–approved in that category. You don't have to do anything but turn away.

I turned to Ass't Man, sorting electronics nearby, for help: "I know this stuff is bad. What cleaner do you use?"

"Dawn and vinegar."

And Helen, sorting clothes: "You don't even need the dish soap. Vinegar alone works great. And it's cheap."

At the Environmental Working Group site, vinegar gets an A.

I forced myself to put that warm brownie down. I didn't feel virtuous, I felt bereft and beleaguered.
I went home and scrubbed my bathroom with vinegar.
It does not sparkle.

I'm not kidding, you know. I had to MAKE myself not buy the Scrubbing Bubbles. I thought about that struggle to not-do the easy thing, the socially normal thing, when I read how Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings cleans her house in her memoir about living in Florida, Cross Creek.

Ms Moon got me interested in taking a closer look at Florida when she wrote a terrific post about her love for and her distress over her home state, Florida: "What Are We Doing Here?"

Also re Florida, elsewhere Ms Moon had mentioned M. K. Rawlings' The Yearling--and that's another book from my childhood that left an impression. It's in the category of books I'm not rereading though--books whose message about growing up is:
Either you or your pet have to go.
Old Yeller is another.

I know that is often the brutal reality of life, that we can't have what we want. (Put down that can of Scrubbing Bubbles.)
But in childhood literature, I prefer the message of Charlotte's Web: Reinvent reality! Write your way out of it!

We happened to have a copy of Cross Creek (1942) at the store though, so I picked it up. [Also, Finding Florida--pictured above. Has anyone read that? I will start it next.]

Cross Creek astonishes me. MKR's writing is as vivid as biting into an orange and as startling as seeing a snake. And, like To Kill a Mockingbird, it is not scoured of realities uncomfortable to the modern sensibility.

Since I am trying to understand, not to pass easy judgment,
this is useful.
For instance, so. . . how does Marjorie K Rawlings, a white woman, clean her house in the 1930s?

She buys a twelve-year-old Black girl. Literally. 
Here's the opening of  chapter 9 "Catching one young":

I bought Georgia of her father for five dollars. The surest way to keep a maid at the Creek, my new friends told me, was to take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways. She should be preferable without home ties so that she should become attached to me.
My friends traced a newly widowered father of a large family that he was unable to feed as a unit. He was happy to 'give' me Georgia, with no strings attached. A five-dollar-bill sealed the bargain."

Georgia is no Scrubbing Bubbles though--she does not give her all to making the house shine. MKR ends up paying the girl's father another five dollars "to take her back again".

MKR & ZNH

MKR became friends with another woman writer in Florida--Zora Neale Hurston, who was Black.
ZNH wrote a letter to MKR after reading Cross Creek praising it to the Moon. She even offered to come keep house for Marjorie KR after her maid Idella left (she'd finally found a "perfect" one):

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to Edith [Pope]
1943 Oct. 19. [Cross Creek?]

"Did I write you that Zora Neale Hurston wrote me of her distress and disgust at [MKR's maid] Idella's leaving, and knowing that I was trying to get to work on a book, offered--though she is working on a book of her own--to come and take over until I finished my book?
It is one of the biggest things I have ever known a human being to do. It made me ready to go-all for the Negro race."

––From the ZNH and MKR archive at the University of Florida.

Over and over I think, it is easy to judge people in the past for going along with social norms, but how will the future judge us for going along with the social norms of our time and place?
Won't the past hundred years of our snorting fossil fuels up our noses look evil & insane?

What do I risk in putting aside the social norm? Is it really such a price to pay, to clean my own bathtub? No, but I genuinely had to force myself not to buy those tiny bubbles.

Marjorie KR went along with the social norm of her time and place in buying a girl, and then she bucked it in befriending a woman. At first she is afraid a friendship with Zora Neale Hurston would hurt her husband's business, but later she declares she will pursue it even if it does.

It is simple from a distance, and it is complicated up close.
Reading, and writing, help me stand back and see.
Those tiny bubbles and my desire to do right are at cross purposes.
____________

* Re napalm. Wow. I did not know this till now, researching Scrubbing Bubbles further:
the product was originally called Dow Bathroom Cleaner, before it was sold to Johnson & Son.
From PBS: "Napalm and the Dow Chemical Co."

BELOW: Protesting Dow at the UW in Madison, where I grew up, in 1967--I would have been six. I remember many such student protests--we lived a couple miles from the U, and our grad student neighbors were very politically involved.

And I was right about the selling power of laziness--Scrubbing Bubbles' tagline is ––
"We work hard so you don't have to!"

Solstice Dress

How perfect—yesterday as I was wishing my coworker at the cash register a happy solstice, I spied a Sun, Earth + Moon dress on a nearby rack. Coworkers who love clothes, like Emmler, dig out fantastic finds for cheap, but I almost never look at clothes, because I don’t care. 

I bought this one though (it was half-off—only $4–but I’d have paid full price). Unfortunately it’s polyester—hot—but I cut off the sleeves and collars, and wearing a dress is cool on the legs at least…

You can see the light of the donations door, in the background—the heat and humidity pour in—we’re working in a sauna. 

I’m sorting a box of incoming toys here.

Welcome Summer! The Parade

 Happy Summer Solstice, everyone in the northern hemisphere, and Winter in the southern!

Above: The girlettes' parade w Macy's Balloon (Bed Bear).
They commenced in my north yard at the appointed time: Earth was at maximum tilt toward the Sun this morning at 9:57, US Central Standard Time.

BELOW: Rehearsals first... with final adjustments of hats & so forth.
Penny Cooper was born to be Drum Major.
She tried to get them to match in step, but they kept getting distracted. “This is not in our wheelhouse.”

I couldn't have managed all this alone.
BELOW: bink had folded the paper hats on Sunday, and I added plumes. She came this morning (striped shirt) and unrolled my tp roll to get the tube to make a drum for Ivy (riding the caboose bear).
It was Marz's idea to have a parade balloon, and she was Puppet-master.

The neighbor watering his yard above, right ^ came to see what was up. He told us that children's book author Kate DiCamillo lives  across the street, four houses down! (I knew she lived in town but had no idea she's a neighbor.)
She's famous for Because of Winn Dixie. I like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane best because it's about a Toy That Is Real.

BELOW: If anyone ever wonders what I'm truly like, I can show them this:

CLOSE UPS:

BELOW: They were tired afterward, but satisfied with a job well done.

My wish for this new season:
Surprised delight!

Front Door, Back Door

My apartment is on the first floor of a narrow building that was once a grocery store. So narrow, I have two entries with hallways:
a north door, below, where I often sit with my morning coffee. (That's my bike parked on the fence). I'd like to make a little patio of paving stones on the bare dirt...

And the official (mailbox) front door, facing the sunny south:

I'm halfway through reading the book ^ standing on my desk, Pioneer Girl (2014), by Bich Minh Nguyen.
It's good--interesting--about a young woman, Lee, born in the US to parents from Vietnam. Having finished her PhD in English, Lee is back home helping in the family restaurant, searching with no luck for an academic job--she can't even get a position as part-time adjunct faculty.

Through a fluke, Lee starts researching Rose Wilder Lane--the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder who edited and perhaps ghostwrote much of her mother's Little House series Lee grew up reading. She discovers that in 1965--this is fact!--RWL wrote a report for Woman's Day magazine from Vietnam, and this is where Lee imagines their histories intersecting. Was RWL the old, white woman customer of her grandfather's cafe, whom he always told stories about?

I know nothing about Rose Wilder Lane (RWL), and Pioneer Girl makes me curious. The good article "The Other Wilder: Rose Wilder Lane" (by Michael Zimny, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, 2017) quotes RWL writing of her own childhood:

“My father and mother were courageous, even gaily so. They did everything possible to make me happy, and I gaily responded with an effort to persuade them that they were succeeding.
But all unsuspected, I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.
. . . I hated everything and everybody in my childhood with such bitterness and resentment that I didn’t want to remember anything about it.”

RW Lane became a journalist and traveled widely. What an interesting life! Later, she became a right-wing, Ayn Rand type.
In Vietnam, she saw correctly, "There is something in these people that isn’t explained, something that does not give up, that is not conquered.”
No kidding. However, she foresaw victory for that unrelentingness for the wrong side, the South.

Pioneer Girl isn't just about the search for RWL. Bich Minh Nguyen weaves in Lee's childhood as a child of pioneers of a different sort in the US Midwest.

All of this connects with my childhood, though I'm a generation older than the author. I grew up in Madison, Wisc. during the Sixties, and the Vietnam War was the backdrop of my childhood. I remember the antiwar protests in our streets and the war footage on our little black-and-white TV.

In those years, I read my sister's set of Little House books several times, once when I was sick in bed--because they were there. They must have formed me, and they're are on my list of Children's Books to Reread. Far down the list, though because I didn't love them.
I remember I did love how the LH books were about a girl learning how to make and do things--like The Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I just reread.

Lee writes: the LH books were "a DIY guide to frontier living: how to make butter and cheese from the cow you milked yourself; how to make sausage from the pig you butchered in the yard; how to make a smooth pine floor and door with hinges; how to sew a lady's dress with all the requisite flounces and bustles..."

Maybe there's too much cheerful can-do pluckiness in the Little House books for me though? Is that what I didn't like about them--a preponderance of the sort of can-do individualism that led Rose W Lane to being a libertarian in old age?
Did that ring false to me?

I think maybe so. I liked grimmer stories. (There's no false cheer in Island of the Blue Dolphins, it's almost emotionally flat.) Of the LH series, I liked best The Long Winter, which is the frightening record of a winter when the Ingalls family almost starved to death.
(Similarly in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series, I liked best the related Emily of Deep Valley. Betsy & Tacy head off to college, and Emily is trapped at home. Though she makes good, it's a much bleaker story.)

The differences are nowhere near this stark, not at all! but I think of how Truman Capote was fascinated by Perry Smith, the murderer In Cold Blood who shared his background but went in a different direction. Capote wrote, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front."

To Keep a Father Company

Scrolling through posts tagged “father” on this Father’s Day, I came across this—the little stuffed Eeyore I’d saved from the trash and repaired to give my father, Daniele, because my father loved that character. His license plate even read EEYORE.

I gave the toy to Daniele before he went on what turned out to be his last trip. He and my sister went to the California coast, where my father took this photo. You can see the paper I’d clipped onto Eeyore reads,

“To keep Daniele company”:

Eeyore stayed on my father’s bedside table throughout his final illness—he died in 2017, five summers ago. My sister chose a few things to accompany our father into the cremation fires. Eeyore was among them. My message was still attached. 

My father hadn’t ever been easy with me. I am grateful that sometimes toys can do what we humans can’t.

Summer in the Making…

This Sunday morning coffee with bink was all for Solstice-Parade Hat Making (for Wednesday morning)!

Next up: tiny musical instruments 

bink did the paper folding—a wide hat for Oneshoe’s sticky-outy pigtails:

Let it be fun!

Potato chips and ice cream at the lake with Marz yesterday—she leaves for Camino in ONE WEEK… The girlette Low, below, who has been staying with her, is coming home with me for the duration. Forty days and forty nights… I one-thousand percent am excited for Marz to go, but I miss her already.   

What kind of ice-cream, did someone ask? (I would.) Häagen-Dazs Irish Cream Brownie—new to me.  

And potato chips? Little bags, “Miss Vicky’s”, one salt & vinegar, one jalapeño. Also kombucha—one ginger and one tart cherry. 

Biking on the lake path, (I was early) I stopped and talked to a guy with a handmade sign offering Free Prayers. I liked his vibe—goofy, musical—a young-middle aged white guy sitting on an upturned bucket, he had a shell necklace and an upright drum (a conga drum?) and was wearing an arrow joke hat, “like Steve Martin”, he said. 

Catholics don’t do public improv, in my experience—at least not the ‘free-prayer’ type—but the evangelical types I’ve encountered, like Big Boss, are often great at spinning it—like those cotton candy machines at the state fair—magic. 

I like to see what people with signs serve up—to me it’s like stopping at a garage sale. 

As I’d hoped from his vibe, sure enough, I told this guy about my young friend at a turning point in her life—what next?—going on pilgrimage (he knew someone who’d walked Camino)—and he offered a terrific prayer—for clarity and guidance—“…and let her have fun! Your way is joyous!”

I love that! A book came into work called Surprise Me!—about a woman who every morning prayed, “Surprise me, God!” My immediate response was to think of the unexpected horrors of recent years—even the surprising yellow color of the smoky sky a few days ago. “Eek! No more surprises!” 

But I like it, adapted—“Delight me!”  Or, as the lake guy said, “Let it be fun!” And especially for peregrina Marzipan! 

A Glimpse of the Good City thru' the Smoke

Happy Almost Summer Solstice! (It's Weds. June 23, 9:57 a.m. Central.) I'm going to watch Smiles of a Summer Night (free on utube).

I woke up feeling energetic yesterday, after two weeks of dragging around--that return of energy is the best.
This year I've been extra aware that one day, easy health won't return... I'm scared and sad about that, and I extra enjoy my good health while it's here!

BELOW: Oneshoe and Spike practiced for a Welcome Solstice Parade this morning. They report, "There is a distinct lack of musical instruments for dolls in this house." (Must make some before Wednesday.)

Behind them, the boulevard wheat springeth green... Doesn't wheat need water? I guess the city planted a drought-resistant variety. We are dry, dry, dry.

And, last week, smoky! The sky was foggy yellow from the Canadian wildfires.
This, below, wasn't even the worst of it--the AQI got up in the 220s--worst air in the country that day.
We were lucky though, with only 1 day of thick smoke (so far). I'm glad I was wearing a face mask anyway, for my cough and to protect against dust at work.

Now we are lingering in the Moderate range (AQI 80s). Not great, but the temps were so pleasant, I had dinner outside at bink & Maura's last night--here, with their wire-haired fox terrier, Astro. His mouth is dirty because he loves to dig in the dirt with his mouth.

A Spotty System

I was on a roll of complaining about work recently. I went back and edited the posts where I went on and on about it. It was good to write it out, but I don't want it lingering like Bad Air.

Yesterday I checked in with newish (3 months) coworker mattdamon, after I complained about something--was I being too negative? "I really love this place, I hope I express that too."

"No, I'm glad you speak up," he said. "It makes me know I'm not crazy. I'd say this place has systemic problems... but we don't even have a system!"

I laughed. "Yeah, last year I read the book Five Dysfunctions of a Team. We have all five dysfunctions, but we don't have a team."

But MY team--me!--has been working well. Only one manager was working yesterday--Ass't Man--so with that and the return of energy, I felt free to futz and faff for my whole shift.
I filled a bucket with hot water and a capful of mango-scented Fabuloso and washed down my display shelves.
(A volunteer who is a retired doctor complains about the chemical cleaners we buy--"Why don't we use something nontoxic?"--but my coworkers love Fabuloso--they say it smells clean. As problems with the store goes, this one is so minor, I don't even care.)

The colorful carpet I'd put down a few weeks ago has spots of grunge on it, so after washing the shelves, I got on my knees and scrubbed the spots. Without realizing it, I was also singing along to the R&B radio we play--a customer commented on how much fun I was having.

My City

Later that day, a young Native man asked me if we had a section of books about Native concerns.
We don't, I said, because those books always sell as fast as I put them out, so there's never enough to keep a section stocked. I pointed him to the History section, but said I didn't think there were any in stock...

While he looked there (I was right), I browsed the Fiction section and found Louise Erdrich's first book, Love Medicine, and Sherman Alexie's Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven--with the short story that was made into Smoke Signals--a favorite movie of mine.
The young man was surprised--he didn't know about either author (both Native). He thanked me and left with both books.

Louise Erdrich lives right here in town, where she founded the indie Birchbark Books & Native Arts (good website). I live about halfway between the thrift store and Birchbark. It's on the other side of Lake of the Isles-- I'll stop in when I walk around the lake--for fun--I rarely buy full-price books.
Erdrich has said in the past that the store makes no profit--does it even break even?--and she runs it for the sake of supporting BOOKS.

Another good business in town is Peace Coffee--not far from the thrift store, further toward the Mississippi River. They deliver their beans (fair trade, organic) by bike. Yesterday one of their bike couriers came up on me biking to work on the Greenway, going so fast I thought it was an e-bike, but as they passed--nope, it was a young biker pedaling full speed.
By the time I got my camera out, they were almost out of sight, but here, I magnified them with their low-slung red delivery cart:

BELOW: Here's another nice thing I bike past--a homemade shrine to a dead guy--I don't know his story--but it includes a doll house that people leave things in.
Maybe one day I will make a Protector for it...

The other day near this altar, I saw an older Native woman signing (holding a sign at the side of the road asking for money). I regularly give people cash or food––bought a guy a sandwich at Subway this week––but I don't usually stop my bike to do it.
But for women with gray hair, I will go out of my way.

As I biked nearer, she started to walk away across a parking lot. I called out to her, "Hey, hey there!", and she turned and came back.
I took my bike helmet off to show her my gray hair as I gave her ten bucks--"We have the same hair!"

She smiled and reached out to touch my shoulder, "Thank you for calling me back."
Her hand was warm, and she held my shoulder for a moment.