Mending, and Happy Halloween!

 Julia and I mended and talked for four hours yesterday. We’ve barely seen each other since Covid, and it was so, so nice to catch up a little.
We first met when we were both volunteering at [now closed] Steeple People Thrift Store in 2013. She inspired me to start mending, and I also started rescuing stuffed animals from the store trash--the beginning of SNARP (Stuffed Needy Animal Rescue Program).
She's the person who most shares my thrifting aesthetic, and I've missed physically SEEING her.

It did snow last night, and the roads are icy this morning--the worst  for biking. Though the ice will melt by afternoon, I will play it safe and bus this morning. And it’s windy… Not a happy kick-off to winter biking season.

The girlettes lined up looking out the windows for Halloween,  illuminated with strings of lights. They are disappointed because last year we sat outside to distribute candy--not this year, and I bet there will be far fewer trick-or-treaters. I'm glad we had an outing on Sunday with bink.

Thanks for suggesting ways to save blog posts!
XML files are text-only, so maybe I'll start with saving a few individual posts as PDFs.
Or maybe I'll just let it be.
Not sure I want to bother if I can't save the whole thing--(I could, but ponderously)--might be better to accept that the blog is temporary, even if it does last another twenty years.

Everything is temporary! as they say in Moonstruck.
Or, as Walter White says, "Every life comes with a death sentence".
(Marz just watched Breaking Bad and showed me the clip where he says this, which I appreciated. She loved the entire show, but the first episode was more than enough for me.)

Spike's Hat/ Save the Blog?

Spike couldn't go on the field trip with the others yesterday:
bink had glued her whipped-cream hat on & the glue was still wet.
I was surprised Spike was so patient as to want to stay home and let it dry, but the girlettes are going to parade in the windows tomorrow--Halloween--and she wanted to be ready for that.
Which she is!

It will be an inside parade, in the windowsills, because it's going to be freezing cold. It might even snow (a little) tonight.

Snow is not unheard of for Halloween here--everyone old enough, like me, still talks about the Halloween blizzard of 1991--"one of the state's historical great blizzards", says the MN DNR:
"The storm total in the Twin Cities was 28.4 inches of snow, establishing a single-storm snowfall record."

I was helping a friend move Nov. 1, so I remember the blizzard extra well, me slogging with boxes through a little path shoveled to the truck, which I'm surprised could even get down the street.

Has anyone here printed or otherwise saved their blog?

Reading Frances Partridge's diaries from the 1950s, I've started to wonder about saving--printing?--some of my posts.
FP's paper journals were there when she wanted to publish them 20-some years after she wrote them, and remain stable now, 70 years later.

Doesn't look like parent company Google is going anywhere anytime soon or looking to shut down Blogger (though they do shut down their products); but I wonder:
will online writing still be accessible in a dozen or more years?

We know how fast tech can change. I remember being excited about electric typewriters! And I used to write for the publisher on floppy disks.

Not that I expect my blog to outlive me, I just want it to live as long as me.
I'd like to be able to look back at it should I live another twenty years, to 82--around my statistical life expectancy.

Twenty years? Eek.
A lot of my relatives lived into their late 80s––that would only give me a few more years, but I'd take them--and some lived into their late 90s, though frankly illnesses made their last few years awfully hard.
And no years are guaranteed, of course.

But to print the whole blog?
That would be massive! Maybe I should/would like to start editing it, at least selecting favorite posts.

I have an index tag, "favorite posts". I've used it inconsistently though--you don't know a post is a favorite right away.
There are twenty-one posts with that tag. What even are they?
[goes and looks]

Okay, a lot of them are photos of favorite things I've made,
but I didn't even tag the girlettes recreating Manet's "Bundle of Asparagus", which makes me as pleased and proud as anything I've ever done. I've just added the tag.
(Gee, that was only one year ago.)

But the point of the blog isn't stand-out individual posts so much as the accumulation of average ones.

When the month turns over, often I'll go look at posts from that month in past years---just now looking at November from eight years ago-- 2015. There's no one post from that month that stands out in particular, but I liked revisiting it--it was an interesting month, and I'd forgotten a lot of it!
For instance, this quote from Joyce Appleby's biography, Thomas Jefferson that I liked:

"Jefferson had in abundance what most people 

are lucky to have in small doses: imagination."

Lots of bad things were happening, and I was/people were already speaking of the world being at war.
I wrote:

Has anyone else named it World War III?
Pope Francis has. Last year, on September 13, 2014, he said,

"After the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction."

 Not that that's cheering, but it helps place me in time. "Oh, that's right, we've been here a while."

Yes, cheering: I was also meeting weekly with pals to Sew 'n' Snack & Chat--and this morning I hope to meet up with one of them for the first time since Covid for just that--a mending date at a coffee shop.

ABOVE, L to R: [bink's arm holding Pinky (bear)],
me, Esther, & Julia, 2015

The Girletting of Hill House

It was Halloween Costume Day with bink & girlettes this Sunday morning.

Then we walked over to the kindaspooky house on the hill…

Field Trip Photo:

Plug It In

Erg, now I wish I'd bought this ^ electric cat candle. 
At work yesterday I'd plugged it in to test it. It was so cute I left it turned on, and soon someone had it in their cart.

Plug It In

"Do you think it's happier here at work, the past couple weeks?" Manageress asked me.

I do!
Spirits have lifted with Ass't Man leaving a month ago & Supervolunteer Dalton arriving.
Dalton runs on overdrive, which creates its own problems, but it's inspiring that she is plugged-in.

Her style reminds me of something Gen. Colin Powell said:
Train people so they can do and believe they can do what needs to be done. Then trust them to do it.
He's a realist:
Maybe they (you) won't be able to do it, he admits, but going into a situation with training and confidence is a great start.

That's the opposite of Ass't Man's overly cautious approach.
Whenever a change was suggested, his response was, "Well, the problem with that is..."
He wouldn't even try to plug in the light.

Not that the store employs Colin Powell's approach.
Rather the opposite.
Yesterday I asked Grateful-J to get moving on (literally) plugging lights into the dimly lit Book Nook. That project is so back-assward, sadly SOP for the store. Drives me nuts.
It's been more than a month since I'd first asked G-J to get lights in there. He's a grown man who knows how to do stuff, but he acts like a boy who needs permission.
He told me he has to check with Big Boss.

"No you don't", I said. "BB is in charge of the other store and 30 parish groups too--he doesn't need us to bother him with stuff we can do ourselves. Let's just do it."

We looked at the space, and he said he could rig up something basic. "Even a bare bulb on a string would get us going," I said.
We'll see what happens, if anything.
______________________

BELOW: I also redid end caps yesterday. Ass't Man's were the best, but mine are fine. I don't spend much time on them, which is also fine.

A dozen more banana boxes of media were found--AM had stashed them away in a closet. Jesusmaryandjoseph!
I threw out all the VHS tapes that'd been out for months—including FIVE videotapes of Dances with Wolves—and put out all fresh stock. (Surprising, but some people still use VHS players.)

DVDs are moving at the 49¢ sale price, but meanwhile, more media is continually being donated.

I wish I had someone to discuss these work things with, but there really isn't anyone. Dalton's 'do-it' energy is great, but she doesn't know much about retail, less about thrift, and nothing about vintage. 
She just likes order.
She's been a sharp clean wind, much appreciated, but I'm not sorry she'll be moving on in two months.

I have to roll my eyes at myself, though:
I am not particularly effective in own personal affairs. Like, I have some financial papers that have needed attention for more than a year.

I am going to sign up for a refresher course in Attending to Annoying Things on Your Desk at C-KAPE, the Captain Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence.

There are always alternatives.

A short post this morning---inspired by reading Frances Partridge's diaries from the 1950s.
I do not love her personally, but her diaries remind me that reading about daily doings can be very interesting--even reading about the weather. She's much more poetic in describing landscape and weather than I care for--I skim that stuff--but I like to hear about the HUMAN side of it--this sort of thing: "We couldn't take baths for days because the pipes froze".

So I will record that this morning the trees are blowing so wildly outside my windows, I am going to take the bus to work, 20 minutes from now.
It's cold too--about 30ºF--but that's not bad--it's biking in the wind that is such a chore, I hate it.

I. Book Nook Underway!

Happy news at work--
for mysterious reasons known to himself, Big Boss decided to put this space, below, to better use. It held the glass case where I displayed expensive books, but we sold maybe one a week? (Partly because often no staff member was around to open the case for anyone interested.)


I suggested I move some bookshelves out of the Furniture room--where I am always battling for space--pushing back wardrobes, desks, and tables to keep the aisle open.

Weirdly, Big Boss agreed.
Well, or not weirdly--it does make sense as a book nook, and furniture always needs more space.

Getting the space ready for bookshelves has been a farce.
I was going to project manage it, but Big Boss stepped in--he always says he doesn't want to micromanage, but he can't let go.
Upshot: nothing much got done.

Finally in frustration, mattdamon began to patch the walls to prepare for painting on his own initiative.
His dad was a Marine.
DO IT!

II. Destroy the Runway

I read Gen. Colin Powell's book on leadership the other night--it's not written for my personality type (very much not), but I appreciate his description of good leadership--which includes talking to EVERYONE in the organization--he tells a story about talking to parking lot attendants at the Pentagon.
Clear & comprehensive communication.
What a golden dream that is.

Of course I'd rather work for Big Boss than Colin Powell!
"Oh, sorry about that little problem with Iraq..."

Powell told one story that did personally inspire me. Philippine President Corazon Aquino called him one night--the presidential palace was being attacked in a coup from the ground, and she was afraid the air base would send planes to attack too.
Would the US bomb the air base?

Powell reasoned that killing any Filipino soldiers would be a bad move, so he didn't order bombing--he ordered US planes to buzz the airbase and show "extreme hostility"--whatever that looks like from the air--AND if any planes looked like they were going to take to the air, to shoot them down or... to shoot up the runway.

No runway, no flights.

I love this!
As Mr Spock says, There are always alternatives.

The [sometimes almost incomprehensible] Loves of Others [are maybe not so incomprehensible]

HouseWares (HW) came to me the other day at work, holding a wadded-up American flag.
"How much do you think we should price this?" she said.

"I don't know, a dollar ninety-nine?" I said. "There's not exactly a lot of fans in this neighborhood...".

HW said, "That's about what I thought too, but Ass't Man always wanted me to price them high," and she went back to her work area.

(AM did price a lot of things too high.)

Coworker mattdamon had overheard us, and he came up to me.
"Actually, a lot of veterans come in here. Someone might love that flag."
His dad, who is dead, was a Marine who'd served in Vietnam. "My dad showed me how to fold it to look cool."

He and his father had disagreed violently, I knew, but I felt his respect for this object that his father had loved, and I respect that.

"Let's fold it up nice," I said. "Can you show me? Go get it from HW."

He went and got the flag, and we folded it into a triangle.
I always thought that looked great, like a puffy Cheese Frenchee (deep-fried grilled cheese sandwich), and it's incredibly easy to do with two people, though actually we ended up with the stars on the inside... But anyway...

As we folded it, I told him I hadn't mean to disrespect the flag.
"It stands for wonderful ideals," I said. " I mean, I have the First Amendment up over my desk! And even if we don't live up to those ideals, sometimes we move in their direction."

He agreed--we're politically in synch--and he hadn't taken offense.

BELOW: I do think a leg stripe is a beautiful thing.
(The stripe on dress uniform's trouser seams has a name of course, which I just discovered: it's a lampasse.)

Feeling grateful that I'd been able to meet mattdamon over the flag, I remembered something important I'd learned from my Classics prof, Oliver:
that in studying people in history--(or in seeking to understand anyone, alive or dead)--pay attention to WHAT THEY LOVE, and strive to see it as they saw it.
It is a magic thread to their heart––through the maze of misdirection that personality constructs––not to see there their marshmallow-fluff sentiments, but to see in a glint-of-steel what drives them.

You may believe that Joan of Arc was a deluded schizophrenic, and maybe that's true (and maybe it isn't)--but either way,
you will never understand her if you don't understand how SHE saw her visions and grok the flint of her overwhelming love of God.

(I was surprised when I learned that Mark Twain loved Joan of Arc, but he's a great example of seeing through the trappings. He said his book on her was his favorite and his best book:
"Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it."

ABOVE: "Joan of Arc" (w/ Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine appearing to her), by Jules Bastien-Lepage, French, 1879, via MMA

The fastest way to lose that guiding thread is through easy judgment.
If this were a fairy story, the seekers who say of an object of love, "It is stupid" would lose the thread every time.
It would only be the youngest, least powerful sibling––the one who felt they had nothing to lose and no right to judge––who would find the prince(ss)/the grail/the way out of the forest--who would release (recognize) another being disguised by a spell.

Whenever I hear myself say,
"How can they ever believe [x, y, z]?" I know I have locked down my imagination--that I am not bringing my full attention--to enter into that person's reality.

If I had not heard mattdamon's conflicted love for his father in his (mild) defense of the American flag, if I had not attended to that--if I had said instead "Patriotism is stupid", even though he might agree with that, he--the thread between us--would simply have melted away.

I'm as judgemental as they come, I think that's easy to see. But I always, always want to slip under over around the walls of judgement that I erect, because as much as I love feeling Superior and Correct, I love more the BETTER STORY.
The loves of others open a door in the wall. And that way lies a better story.

My Work Wall

I've added bits and pieces to the wall in my work area over the five+ years (June 2018) I've been BOOK's Lady at the thrift store. It's mostly stuff from donations.

I've posted most photos original size--might be slow to load and you may need to scroll right to see whole image.

BELOW, clockwise:
Shelley Winters as a showgirl (1954?);
Tarot Card, 8 of Discs (coins or pentacles): "This card can act as a reminder to commit to working hard on something that you really enjoy doing. "
(Background poster is Chris Evans as Captain America)

ABOVE, right: text on yellow card:

"Wisdom is radiant & unfading... & is found by those who seek her.
Although she is only one, she can do all things.
While remaining in herself, she renews all things.
In every generation she passes into holy souls..."
--from the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 6

BELOW, clockwise:
San Francisco, my nickname from Mr Furniture;
art-show poster signed by Douglas Ewart;
homemade stereoscope cards of the North Shore (Lake Superior)--donated;
[girlette calendar, October 2023];
handwritten note and envelope from blogger Crow (Martha)

BELOW:
"Not my circus, not my monkeys" --Polish saying

MAGIC card: “creatures with heroic abilities rise to meet the challenges;

Heroic 🥔 Potato!

^ ABOVE, clockwise:
3 postcard paintings by me:
"It's MY Year." [Year of the Tiger]
"Frostbite can happen in minutes."
"bounce";
St. Therese of the Little Flowers;
Drawing of Madeline by E-V, 7-yo daughter of Ass't Man

___________________

BELOW, clockwise:  BJ (d. 2022) holding stuffed Woodstock from Auntie Vi:
"Neil" added to Diamond by coworker Grateful-J;
Postcard of Albrecht Durer's "St. Jerome in His Study";
Archangel Michael by Pieter Bruegel the Elder [full painting]

BELOW:
"There could be something new about this moment"--supporting the 2021 referendum to replace the Mpls. police dept. Man is/was the gardener at George Floyd Square.

BELOW: "[California] Senate Resolution relative to the attempt of Don Piccard to establish a new [hot air] balloon ascension record"

BELOW, clockwise:
From Good Omens (N. Gaiman & T. Pratchett): "Read Angel, for the final days are upon us";
"serious" Too-Ticky, Tove Janson's Moomin character based on her (woman) life-partner, Tuulikki Pietilä;
Animals rescue human child: "Off they started over the snow"
Spock rescues Kirk (a real book cover, not fan art).

Whole Wall OVERVIEW

The First Amendment poster was letterpress printed by the Minnesota Newspaper Museum at the MN State Fair:

"We think today more than ever, we need to get out the message of how important the First Amendment is to our democracy, and how important the freedom of the press is."

Wonder Tales, & Maura the Wondrous

 

There. This morning's work: ostrich-feather barbs in dorsal salt-shaker caps, and eye-exam lenses for pectoral fins.
This fish might be complete, but I won't lock everything in place until I'm sure. (I already had to uncurl the hat pins to restick them through the hole in the shaft of the lenses.)

Maybe Fish wants to hold something in its mouth... 
Isn't there a fairy story about that?

How fun! Googling "fish holding something in mouth" I found  a miracle of Jesus that's in classic fairy-tale territory.
It's no insult to call something a fairy (or wonder-) tale--there's truth in fairy tales, whether or not they're factual.

Here's 'The Fish with a Coin in Its Mouth':

When they reached Capernaum, the collectors of the [Jerusalem] temple tax came to Peter and said, “Does your teacher not pay the temple tax?”
“Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

“From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

--Matthew 17:24–27 [See interpretations at Wikipedia]

Fan artists  love to imagine What Happened Next. Here, Italian painter Masaccio shows Peter & the fish, in a detail of a fresco, The Tribute Money, painted in the 1420s in Florence. via Wikipedia

Isn't Masaccio tender with Peter, his little hands reaching into the fish's mouth and the way he bends his legs? He has a cane that he's careful not to let fall on the ground--he is old and stiff, it is hard for him to get up and down.

Here's an article about what  coin Peter would've found in the fish's mouth: a shekel minted in Tyre, "certainly the most commonly circulated silver coin in the ancient Holy Land".

It's beautiful, isn't it? Above, left ^ is the god Melquart, a Tyrian version of Herakles, and on the right, an eagle.

"Because Roman coinage was only 80% silver, the purer (94% or more) Tyrian shekels were required to pay the temple tax in Jerusalem." (I read that they would also be the "thirty pieces of silver" the Romans paid Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus. But wouldn't the Romans pay OUT coins with less silver?)
___________________

Happy Birthday, Maura!

One thing leads to another. I like finding the facts that wonder tales are set in. Tyre was and still is 105 miles north of Jerusalem--in Lebanon.

And Maura's mother's family is from Lebanon, and it's Maura's 60th birthday party today!

Yesterday I went to the apple orchard with bink (left) & Maura--here, striding along like models in an outdoor clothing ad:

I love Maura. She has qualities of her maternal ancestors, the ancient Phoenicians (of Lebanon), including Industrious Fearlessness:
she would totally get in a boat and sail around the edge of the Mediterranean selling purple dye.

Our alphabet comes from the Phoenicians, so it's not surprising she's a calligrapher, with a studio space full of inks and pens and her beautiful hand-lettered work hanging from clothespins.

Libras are supposed to be complicated, and while Maura's personality is pretty straightforward, her interests and activities aren't.

As president of the local calligraphy guild, she revamped its entire online presence at the Colleagues of Calligraphy a few years ago. Elegant stuff.
She's also an auctioneer for nonprofit auctions, and she loved attending Auctioneer School with guys in cowboy hats selling livestock.
(Her father was sparkling Irish, and Maura could charm me into buying a cow for a good cause, I'm sure.)

Maura ran a full 26.2 mile marathon on her fortieth birthday;
and every year she looks forward to SLUG FEST--a get-away with old friends (one from high school--Libras are loyal)--where difficulties do not rise above the eating of rice-krispie treats.

Maura is like an orchid--they may seem tender, but species of orchids are found almost anywhere on Earth. Adaptable! In her twenties, for instance, Maura moved from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Alaska.
She inspires loyalty in others, too: one of the young men she'd met in NOLO told her he'd come visit. He showed up at her workplace in AK--he'd traveled with no money all the way, because he'd said he would.

There are many many more wonder tales to tell about Maura--and ALL TRUE! Because Libras are truth tellers... or, maybe because they do such interesting things, they don't feel the need to fabricate tales.

Happy Birthday, dear friend--and many more!
XO Fresca

Soft Landing

Afternoon at an apple orchard with L & M—

I tried to jump for the camera in front of a corn field, but the best photo was a landing. 

Thud.

It was good to get out of myself and into the countryside today —after being so sad yesterday about Jody’s death.  I’m holding a new old bear from the store, where I’d worked half a day. 

I’d also unpacked a copy of Horse, a new (2022) novel by Geraldine Brooks that I want to read—it’s partly? about the little known history of Black horsemen in 19th century horse racing. When I was a kid I was into horses, so I know a tiny bit about horse racing—along the (outdated) lines of Man o’ War and (fictional) National Velvet—and am interested to know this. 

Brooks has written a lot of bestsellers. I’ve read none of them since Year of Wonders (2001), set in England during the plague of the 1600s. I hadn’t liked it, can’t remember why. But Brooks is well regarded—her March won a Pulitzer Prize—copies of it are often donated. We’ve none at the moment, and I hope one comes in soon—I’m setting aside PP winners for a future display—I have a dozen now. 

Also, this morning before work I started a new little apotropaic, adapting a wooden fish on rollers. It’s not coming together yet, but I did add pearly eyes with curly eyebrow-feelers, vaguely like catfish whiskers—made from hat pins. It’s good to tinker.

"Small, contained, protected." JW flies away...

Oh...
As I was starting to write a different post here, I got an email from an old friend, Allan K, notifying me that a mutual friend from the art college, Jody Williams, has died. She was sixty-seven.

Jody, "JW", was a Wonder Cabinet: a printmaker, writer, and a book artist who taught at the college where I worked in the library, evenings. She and I had collaborated once, in 1998:
we'd invited fourteen other artists to contribute a page to the book Bugs of Summer.
Jody screenprinted it (I helped with that, like, I held the squeegee or something), and we bound the pages into accordion books.

JW was an architect and engineer of paper and board, in miniature. Her work was miniature, and often tucked in boxes, often quite intricate, that she designed and constructed. (A couple in photo below, along with Bugs of Summer.)

Here, Puck and Penny Cooper look at JW's bug page:

"I did kill two kaydids
and now I am sorry."

Oh, my.
I am sad.
I am crying.

I am grateful.
Not only to have known JW, but also I'm grateful that she'd contacted me this summer, and we'd gotten together for the first time since Covid.
She was in an unusually sweet mood the day we met for coffee, though she didn't look well. But she never looked well: she had had ovarian cancer and been on chemo for NINE years.
As usual, she barely mentioned that. She told me that a new treatment had stabilized her at a new normal and, as always, it was a worse one.

Mostly we talked about doing our work--my theme of the decade. I told her about my motto of the year: Just do it badly.
Yes, she agreed, "just do something!"

And she, who was very accomplished, talked about my dolls, the girlettes, as an example of Doing Good Work.
(I wish I remembered exactly how she phrased it, but that was the jist of it: "you are doing it".)

Looking back, I see that Jody always championed me, always saw me as an artist, which certainly isn't the case in The Art World (which can be quite elitist). She was like the artists I've mentioned who frequent the thrift store--Douglas E. & Al W.—seeing art everywhere, and seeing creators for their creations, not their social status.

BELOW, top: Cake in the library: me (left), with JW on my fortieth birthday:
bottom: Jody with her cat on her shoulder--Trixie--who I've house/cat-sat.


Jody was funny and sharp, and she could be rather acerbic; while I knew her for thirty years and counted her as a friend, I wouldn't say we were close-up emotionally .
I wasn't involved in her death, for instance.
However, I'd written a Wikipedia entry for her a few years ago, and I'm glad that in that way I could show her that I valued and honored her. 

If I have any regrets--and I don't, really--it's just that I wish I'd sent her photos of the girlettes' moth funeral in Duluth this summer. (There had been a bee burial a few years earlier too.)
At the time I didn't connect the moth with Bugs of Summer, but it's surely a descendant, and its funeral could be a whole book in itself...
(In fact, thinking about it, I have a theme of bugs in my art--including my film Orestes and the Fly. Huh. I never put that together before.)

I never used the linocut print set I bought this summer. The moth  would look great in prints. I will try and make a little book of its funeral.
A memorial, of sorts, for a life flown away...

____________________

BELOW: JW's pencil pots...

Jody's desk is a portrait of her: meticulous, whimsical, wonderfully sharp and dry. She said:

"With five siblings, and four major relocations before I was ten, I found it necessary to keep my possessions small, contained, and protected."

--from a good overview of JW and her work: "Circumstantial Evidence", Augsburg U, 2016.

 More of her art at Jody Williams's website: Flying Paper Press

Could You, Would You . . . Do Your Work?

Kirsten commented on the difference between 'could' and 'would', and I thought of another book that was big for me when I was little:
Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham.
It's one of the first books I remember owning--a present on my fifth birthday from neighbors. My parents were not into Dr. Seuss, but I loved it! It's shiny orange cover.
I still love it.
"Could you, would you with a goat?" Ha!

I suppose the message of GEAH influenced me:
that if you try something you might like it;
but maybe more––what I remember loving––that words, sounds can play, and you can play with them.
__________________

Yesterday for the first time, someone donated a book by diarist Frances Partridge: Everything to Lose: Diaries 1945–1960.
I'd discovered FP through my good friend and library coworker Barrett (d. 2011), who was deeply into Bloomsbury.
Partridge was part of that tangled social group [< info at the Tate Gallery], by marriage:
She married Ralph Partridge, who had been married to Carrington, who was in love with Lytton Strachey, who was in love with Ralph.

Barrett thought this was all deeply romantic.
I see people who live in houses with rising damp, wearing corduroys with egg stains.
Still, they're always reading (what else would they be doing?), and that makes for nice photos:

BELOW: Dora Carrington; [in back] Saxon Sydney-Turner; Ralph Partridge; Lytton Strachey--snapshot by Frances Partridge, 1926-1927 (NPG)

Frances Partridge was not emotionally damp anyway. She's quite a dry observer, in fact, and I love that.  Insightful, but restrained.

An entry shortly after WWII in Europe had concluded reminded me of now:

May 27th [1945]

"I sat brooding over the horrors of the world––feeling too hot with the electric fire burning my outer crust, yet a chill numbness within...
Without actually believing in progress, I used unconsciously to assume that there was some degree of stability in the stream of human existence that would prevent any great loss of civilization already won.
Now it seems as though that very thing has happened, and an almost prehistoric barbarity had spread over the earth.
And the violence of the present world!"

I feel all that––especially losing the illusion that "civilization already won" couldn't be lost––but I wouldn't add, as she does:

"Oh how one longs for tolerance, humanity, kindness, and for thought and discussion to come into their own again and drive out black, blind feelings."

Well, yes, "tolerance, humanity, kindness"; but I can't help scoffing at this privileged puffery, as if everyone before WWII were sitting on the lawn having tea. Thought and discussion "again" for whom? 
Someone else is doing your dishes!
(A Mrs Chant is their "daily help from the village".)

Still, I like FP. Or I used to... I'm not very far into rereading this book. Will it be another area I cannot reenter with pleasure or equanimity after George Floyd's murder?

I hope I can reenter––and with enjoyment.
I want to get over this rage at hypocrisy that, while justifiable, is mostly an impediment.
I think my heightened annoyance is a kind of what we now call PTSD.
Understandable, but it's an impediment to love and, crucially, to WORK.

That's what I keep coming to, over and over:
 DO YOUR OWN WORK.

I meet people who are so immersed in their work (like Douglas E), I'm sure they note self-delusion and social stupidity, but it doesn't derail them. Or they incorporate it in their work (like Douglas Ewart's George Floyd Bunt Pan Staff).

One of my favorite such people came into the store yesterday, as he does frequently. I love this guy! I knew him slightly years ago when I worked at the library of the art college where he was a student.

He's become a successful artist, working with found objects and junk.  Everything is art material--he's always showing me something cool he found at the store. Some of his sculptures are HUGE outside pieces and some are quite simple.
I love the simple horse as much as the intricate elephant:

^ Via NY Studio Gallery

Yesterday I showed him the bottom of an old mini–oil can, like the Tin Man uses, but wee. It's orange, and it makes such a wonderful pupping sound when you press the bottom.
I told him it was going to be part of a spaceship for my dolls.

"Oh, you have dolls?" he said. "Can I see?"

Of course I adore people who show interest in the girlettes. I showed him their most recent creative endeavor--the funeral for the sphinx moth (the one with the inner pink wings).
And he said, "I've worked with the same dead moth!"
Wow! How wonderful and odd is that?

He showed me a photo of a construction he'd made--a crow skull with marble eyes and the moth as a sort of diadem. It wasn't permanent, he told me, it was a thank-you gift he left, like a bouquet, for a friend he'd visited.

I want to be such a friend, to myself.

Veiled Requests

I love when people decorate their homes with anything--a pot of flowers at the door, handkerchief ghosts in trees, bat lights...

I got up in the deep dark this morning--at what I thought was a very early hour but turned out to be 7 a.m. Not early at all! Everyone driving to work could've enjoyed my bat lights if they'd been on--so this week before Halloween I'll leave them on all night. 

Two coworkers have said they'll dress up on Tuesday. Yesterday I got a strange, fuzzy, homemade, raccoon pillowcase that I will try to turn into a costume. Even if only a couple of us dress up, it'll be a lift.

I. Talk This Way

The mood at work is good.
I'm not the only one who's finding the presence of Dalton + the absence of Ass't Man = a positive.
A trio of volunteers who've been coming for years let me know they're glad Asst Man is gone––he'd alienated them by instructing them without taking their experience into account––and Manageress pointedly said that Dalton is not only efficient, but she is "peaceful".

Unlike AM, Dalton is not on a crusade to Instruct and Improve People (though she told me she's shocked at the store's mismanagement).
No one likes being Improved for Your Own Sake without your say-so.

Dalton did give me a tip for improvement though. I'd told her that three separate coworkers had not helped me lift something heavy when I'd asked. I was giving that as an example of our workplace culture. Everyone for themself.

She said, "That's because you say, 'Would you...?' Don't say that. Say, 'I need...'"

"Like, 'I need you to help me'?" I said.

"No. 'I need you to do this.'"

I've been trying out this "need" phrase.
It works.
But I don't like it. I'm going to stick with my way, but work on accepting that my coworkers hear would you help? as a genuine question.

Life works better if I have different scripts at hand that match various people and situations.
Obvious enough on the surface, but it gets more complex in emotional relationships.
I was thinking about how HouseMate never talked to me about what she wanted or needed, instead she sabotaged things physically---like setting up her computer on the dining room table when I came home from house sitting, rather than saying she felt cramped for space and that our arrangement wasn't working for her.

Her style got her point across alright, but over the almost-three years we lived together, it also destroyed any trust I had in her: what she said in words might be, often was, unsaid by her actions.
When I moved out, she said, "Isn't it great we're still friends after living together?"
In fact, I've avoided seeing her since. (Because when I was direct with her in the past, that had NOT worked well.)

Upshot: if I ask my coworkers for help, I will accept that to them, that's a question.
If I ask a question, I'm going to accept––without resentment (that's key!)––that the answer may be no.

II. Something to Read

I look at news headlines most days--often at the Guardian––"Is it World War III yet?" (pretty much)––but I don't usually read the articles because they're an onslaught of horror.

Looking around for something smart & relevant––and free––that I would read in-depth, I found JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org, which, as you may already know, "provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic... material. " (JSTOR stands for Journal Storage.)
Like so:

III. Cat foster?

Finally, I miss the cats I used to sit. Two have left town, some have died, (some I didn't like the owners or their house), one I still sit.
But I don't want new clients because I love my home and don't want to leave (unlike when I was living with HouseMate and welcomed weeks- or even months-long sits).

I don't want to own a cat though, because it's just me--I wouldn't feel right leaving the cat alone so much. But it occurred to me I could look into fostering a cat. So I'll check that out. (Anyone done that?)

Possible problem: friends like bink who are allergic...

Cold Weather, Bad Books, Good Kids

Today is a day I would've emailed Auntie Vi about the weather--the sort of daily chit-chat I miss exchanging with her.

I. Mitten Weather

Daytime temps here are rocketing between 40 and 60ºF (4 to 15ºC).
Not quite freezing at night, but close.
I brought my big Boston fern inside the other day--it's grown a lot, summering on the shady north side. I expect it will now drop leaves like confetti... I don't have a good spot for it, both out of the sun and away from radiators. I hope it will hang on and revive next summer.

The fern came from the house where I cat-sat (cats George & Anna) for four months, two years ago. When I'd gone back to HouseMate's, it was clear that wasn't going to work, and I moved out within three weeks--to the wonderful Apt 320 where I am now.
One sign: she'd turned the dining room table into her computer desk... That was the passive-aggressive way she communicated.

I'd have moved out earlier if it hadn't been Covid-time--with everything shut down, it felt too awkward to make any changes. So I stayed almost three years (with several long house sitting gigs to break it up).
Hard as HouseMate was, we did share overall values, and it'd have been worse living all alone during Covid when there was NOWHERE to go to be around people--no libraries,  coffee shops, movie theaters... You remember!
I was working, but that was not relaxing.

I'm slow to get myself to make big physical changes like moving--or even something easy, like picking up my sunglasses that were ready three months ago but I just picked up yesterday. I have a pair of clip-ons that I love, but bink pointed out I'll want them when it snows and the sun bounces up off it. True. I can keep a pair in two bags, so I always have one.

I'm wearing mittens to bike to work in the morning--and trying to remember not leave them at work because it's warm biking home again.

Medieval people who had to spin thread and weave cloth would not throw out mittens. You may have seen the figures going round about how much a shirt was worth in the Middle Ages? [Here's one estimate--6 days' pay--now it's barely one hour's pay, depending.]

BELOW: Snowball fight! The rabbit hunter (top, right) wears mittens--but people are throwing snowballs with their bare hands.

^ The Month of January, c. 1400, possibly by Maestro Venceslao, Fresco, at Torre Aquila [Eagle Tower], Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, Italy

II. The Worst Book

Oh! I wanted to say--Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting is The Worst Book I've read in ages--a bad mishmash of Rebecca + Jane Eyre. Long, boring, and ludicrous--the heroine, Linda, falls for Raoul, the disturbed tall, dark, & handsome son of the manor, after one night out dancing, even though he attacks her sexually and mocks her for being upset:
"Don't be so Sabine, it was only a kiss."

If "I didn't rape you" is your defense, you might want to check your standards.

But Linda is a governess and she sees Raoul as a "lonely little boy", and the two head off to get married after . . . a week?
I don't know, I didn't read it closely, I leap-frogged to the end.
I don't predict happiness for the heroine, I predict bruises.

BUT... the reason I reread Nine Coaches was to try to reclaim/remember being the girl who'd liked it...
Did I accept the idea that a man's overpowering sexual attention was proof of love?
I think I sort of did, yes? (This was around 1974.) Or at least that his aggression was proof of your own attractiveness. Raoul says as much to Linda--when she asks why he loves her, he shows her herself in a mirror:
Tender meat!
(Also, she is an orphan, entirely alone in the world and with no money, but I didn't think of Linda as a victim--nor does she think of herself that way. She trusts Raoul!)

I was afraid of men when I was young--my own father being mildly violent (fear has the same quality whether the physical act is "mild" or not)--and testosterone-driven characters like Raoul couldn't have helped me be less afraid.
It took me years and years to see that a lot of men are more like golden retrievers than ravenous wolves.

I noticed in rereading, too, that there are no complex women characters in Cannery Row, which I'd read around the same time --eight grade, when I was thirteen... (I was a year younger than my classmates). Just good-hearted whores who understand it's in a man's nature to throw a punch...

Thank God for Jane Eyre!
I'd read it when I was even younger, maybe ten. At that age I didn't care much about Jane's romance with Rochester--I was more interested in Jane's growing up years at the dreadful boarding school Lowood and her friendship there with the noble Helen Burns, who dies at thirteen of... typhoid, is it?
No--tuberculosis (consumption, which killed several of Charlotte Bronte's siblings)--but the other girl students are dying from an outbreak of typhus fever.

Jane is guided all along by the clarity and nobility of Helen Burns, and thus she has the integrity to see through the ignobility of the morally... confused Rochester. (Until he gets his comeuppance, and then Jane can accept him.)

Makes sense that I've reread Jane Eyre many times but never went back to Mary Stewart's books or Cannery Row as an adult.

III. Getting Clear

Almost time to go to work.
I had a great time helping Dalton on Saturday, clearing out boxes and boxes of stuff Asst Man (AM) had stored--boxes behind, under, above boxes. She has tossed out crap (boxes of unattractive 8-oz. tea cups the kind that NEVER sell), and priced jumbled piles of good stuff (including some expensive electronics).
Zip, zip, zip.

I felt evil glee when AM came in on Saturday for the first time since he left two weeks ago, and he saw his old area transformed. Dalton had even pulled out the shelves (now half- empty) and swept and mopped under them.
(She's kind of a nut. "Type A", she says. On steroids. I love it.)

AM gawped.
He'd always blamed everyone else, so it was satisfactory, very, to see him realize that one person could do––in two weeks––what he'd never managed.
I said hello, but he did not engage.

Hm.
Perhaps powerful characters like Raoul are attractive (on paper!) because in real life most humans are not sure and strong--lots of people of any sex are pass-the-buck types. Nor noble either, like Helen Burns.*
(Though maybe if you die in childhood like her, you retain your integrity.)

 Aggressive, take-charge males in romance novels are secretly sensitive and just need a good woman's love to puppify them.
In real life, they're likely to be more like Trump and his minions.
__________________

*The nobility and clarity of the girl Helen Burns feels totally real to me. I always say I was my best self in fourth grade, when I was eight, turning nine in March.Last spring, a pediatrician said on TikTok that he loves all kids, but "the highest form of humanity are eight-year-old girls."
Of course! The Orphan Red girlettes are eight years old.

“Eight-year-old girls are magnanimous. They're sympathetic. They're empathetic. They're emotionally mature. They love to help. They love to give. They love to do for others. They’re accepting of everybody," he said.

[And my own eight-year-old self can personally can attest to this:]
"They always, they're the ones who see the sign for the lost cat and want to go find it!”

He loves the boys too:
“Eight year-old boys can ‘Ocean's Eleven’ almost any situation. If 8-year-old girls should be running Congress, 8-year-old boys should be running the Army Corps of Engineers.”

I do believe eight-year olds could have put New Orleans and all its lost pets back together again.

"Why don’t we try one more time?"

This morning, I remembered that the mutual love of children was the turning point of President Jimmy Carter's successful peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt.
(I mean the meetings at Camp David in 1978. I was seventeen.)

I was thinking about it because this past weekend, a little boy in Illinois was murdered by his landlord who was outraged by Hamas violence in Israel/Palestine [NYTimes]. The boy was Palestinian American Muslim.

I found Carter reminiscing about the moment when love turned things around in this speech: "Remarks by President Jimmy Carter in Recognition of the 20th Anniversary of the Camp David Accords, October 25, 1998"

President Carter:  "[Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin had decided to leave [Camp David]. I had decided to leave, and so had [Egyptian president Anwar] Sadat.

"Begin asked me to sign a photograph of the three of us for his grandchildren. My secretary brought me eight photographs, and she had also discovered the names of Begin’s grandchildren. So instead of just signing Jimmy Carter, I put 'With Love to' and wrote the name of every one of his grandchildren.

"I took them over to his cabin. He was hardly speaking to me. I knocked at the door and went in.
I handed him the photographs, a stack of them.
He said, 'Thank you, Mr. President' and turned around, dismissing me in effect. And he looked down and he read the first photograph, and he called out the name of his granddaughter. And then one by one he read out the names of his grandchildren.

"Tears ran down his cheeks, and when I saw them I also cried.
And he said, "Why don’t we try one more time?"

_______________

BELOW: Sept. 15, 1966, then Georgia State Sen. Jimmy Carter hugs his wife, Rosalynn, at his Atlanta campaign headquarters.

Jimmy Carter turned ninety-nine a couple weeks ago, on October 1, 2023. He's been on hospice at home since February and did not make a personal statement about the violence, so far as I can see, but the Carter Center did on October 8:

"The Carter Center: 

"Our hearts are heavy with sorrow for the tragic loss of innocent lives on all sides of the conflict. We urge all parties to prioritize the protection and well-being of civilians by refraining from actions that target residential areas.

"The Carter Center calls upon the international community to engage actively in building peace in the region.
The urgency for a robust and renewed peace process has never been greater. There is not a military solution to the crisis – only a political one.

"We implore the international community to fulfill its responsibilities and reinvigorate a credible process that brings peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians while safeguarding the lives of all civilians."
___________

BELOW: From the Jimmy Carter Library: "Camp David Accords: Twenty-Five Photographs After Twenty-Five Years"

 "On March 26, 1979, on the North Grounds of the White House, Presidents Carter [above, center] and Sadat [left] and Prime Minister Begin [right] joined hands in celebration of the signing of the “Treaty of Peace Between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the State of Israel.” (This is among the most requested photographs in the holdings of the Carter Library.)

"Egyptian president Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamic fundamentalists dissatisfied with Sadat's concessions during the peace process.

"In 1995 Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin [not Menachem Begin] was assassinated by an Israeli student dissatisfied with Rabin's concessions during the peace process of the Oslo Accords."

Sunday Fluffery

Can I still jump? 

 Sort of! On this Sunday morning’s walk with bink in the bird sanctuary by Lake Harriet. 

Sunday afternoon Reclamation Reading:

I’d read Mary Stewart gothic mystery-romances when I was a young teen. I haven’t read them since, but when it was donated at work, I thought I recalled that Nine Coaches Waiting was a good one? 

The writing is weird—it’s sometimes imaginative

and always correct, but it’s all in one tone—everything seems portentous—as if an AI wrote it. Sort of Hallmark Horror, with a good vocabulary?

“There was a moment of appalling silence. Something came and went in Leon de Valmy’s face—the merest flick of an expression like a flash of a camera’s shutter…”

I’m not not-enjoying it, 43/272 pages in. I barely remember any of it except that the nine-year-old boy has a cut-out Windsor Castle construction.  Why do I remember that? Maybe it’ll be important later? I do also remember that the brooding dark unloved son of the manor, the love interest of the boy’s governess, is not the bad guy he seems to be. 

There’s the DVD set of the second season of Picard on the ottoman I’ll start tonight. I’d liked the first season.