Thursday, November 17, 2011

Giving and receiving

Here is one of the kids in my enrichment math class. She's nine years old, smart as they come. She has just figured out a new strategy in Hands On Algebra! "I get this! I get this" she says. All these nine kids need more than they can get in their regular classes, so they come to me once a week for an hour. I feel privileged to be there and trusted (this is a public school!) We meet in an empty room that seems to be a storage place for rogue tables and chairs. This is great, we all know this, and everyone hunkers down for the sheer pleasure of  learning algebra. The hour passes like a whiz. These kids are brown and white and black, girls and boys, and they speak Spanish and English. What they have in common is a strong curiosity  and the desire to learn.
Ninety six percent of the kids in this school are on free lunch. On weekends they do not have enough to eat.
 And here am I preparing a holiday gift list for my very own fortunate family! Scratch that, I think. Who needs fancy gifts from Harry and David? Who needs redundant fleece jackets from LLBean? So, this year, I will spend my holiday money on a field trip for one of the classes at this school. Those field trips are furniture for the mind.
I had meant to write about my amazing vegetable garden and send photos of the huge broccoli and collards, the snow peas and carrots, the turnips and lettuce and even tomatoes. Just imagine it. And come next February when our school garden grant comes through, our school community will be in vegetable production mode as well, feeding some of our families.
In this community there are so many generous people. They care with their hearts and energy and pocketbooks. They humble me.


Saturday, November 12, 2011

Being Grandma

Quincy, my youngest grandson, has been here for the long weekend. He was delivered here by friends who are staying the weekend in the guest house. He boiled out of their car, talking a mile a minute and was eager to get here and reconnect with the place he has known since infancy. He calls our place his other home, and of course, it is. He went right to his room, shedding shoes, luggage, stuffed animals and the lunch box from school.
Soon we began to hear the familiar sounds of toys being pulled out and assembled in the upstairs playroom. And then he begins to come down periodically to tell us everything on his mind. I wonder what "unit" he'll be in this visit. Six weeks ago his mom decided that Quincy needed to have more childhood and less screens so now there is no t.v., no video games, no smart phones. No problem!
It is a joy to see his active imagination at work. First of all he got out  the horrid train set with hundreds of opaque pieces that we gave him when he was three (and he was way too young for it). Now, the whole set up is easy for him and all that was needed was a fresh battery, easily installed.
With this boy, just turned seven, life is easy. His tether is long and he easily rides his bike a mile and back to the gate and we don't worry. He drives the golf cart all over the place and gives "tour guide" talks along the way. He took one of the guests out to see his museum he has made over the last year in a remote cabin. He explained the exhibits of bones he has found on the property, and even gave her a guest pass so she could touch the bones. What a little bureaucrat!
And so much else in a weekend! He'd written a book and made a board game. Before a dinner for guests he cleaned up the downstairs of the house, prepared cheese hors d'oeurves, and arrranged for a predinner concert in which he starred playing the violin from the stair landing. (He has no clue about the violin. He takes recorder lessons, but he loves the violin we have here.)
All through the day there are all these interesting and fantastic happenings in his mind. And all through the day he dings me with his thoughts and suggestions.
I love this wonderfully interesting and handsome grandson, so worth the effort of having had him here over and over from the time he was a baby and really hard and picking him up hurt our backs and we never slept well and we never had a moment to call our own.
We used to say that 'quality' time bested 'quantity' time. NOT!
As a grandma talking, I think that the quantity of time I have spent with Quincy is stellar. My oldest grandson, Diego, now in college, has also spent many hours here and with me, and again, that quantity time gives us both such a bedrock of love and attention.
My grandchildren on the west coast are wonderful kids and I am so glad their parents continually send us photos, school work pages, drawings. It kind of keeps us connected between trips out to see them. Two of Diego's brothers visit occasionally and we so love their visits. But it is not the same as quantity and frequency. We send stuff to our grandchildren and often we have no idea if they ever receive them. Barking into a void gets old.
In our society we want our kids to go forth and do what they want. So often this means that they will be far away from parents who will be the grandparents of their children. And it's meant to be! So, whoever the nearest grandparents are, they are it.
But, for now, I am so amazingly happy to really know a few of my grandchildren who can be here, and I always want to keep up the potential connections.
I have a feeling that I may see quite a bit of the upcoming twin grandkids!



This is the name of our mobile society. For our far flung grandchildren I rely on their other grandmas and grandpas to
Now he is that quite capable and responsible seven year old person, a joy to me.







Thursday, November 10, 2011

I hate football

I met my husband of fifty years at a football game so I shouldn't hate the sport. He was not on the team but was a member of the band. This was a blind date arranged by one of my college friends. Her brother was in the band also. Then, as is the case now, Ivy League colleges did not take football seriously. As I remember, the Harvard band went out on the field at half time and made a formation of a toilet (Flush Brown). Few people really cared who won.
My husband used to watch football games on t.v. and I would make negative comments and leave the scene. (A blood sport!) We never let our kids participate in football because of the injury risk, and as athetic kids they were into soccer, swimming, sailing, cycling and basketball. In my mother's heart I knew absolutely that I did not want to have my intelligent kids' brains battered by football.
But wait! There is so much more negative about football, especially in colleges. To begin, high school kids are courted for their football skills. They are invited to attend colleges to play football, never mind that they cannot cut the mustard academically. They play for the alma mater, everyone cheers them on, they are paid royally and some of them go on to have rich and puny lives. Many of them are forever damaged by having their heads repeatedly traumatized, and more are devastated by unfulfilled expectations. They don't get a good education.
So, college football (Not to mention national football!) is BIG MONEY, the one percent, cynical about our youth.  Let's not go to any college football games. Give money to the anthropology department. Stop subsidizing brain injuries, stop subsidizing the coaches who make more than a million a year and feel free to rape little kids in the shower stall because they know no one will notice.
Time to stand up for the right thing to do!

Monday, November 07, 2011

Mind furniture- and Grief

Many years ago, at least twelve, my business partner and I decided we wanted to travel to parts unknown. And for many years we went somewhere pristine each year. She had lived in Peru as a child and I had recently traveled there as a spose on a business trip. So we had to go.
Our first trip was to a romote part of Costa Rica - and it was so incredible, hot, miles of hiking through the jungle, swimming in rivers.
The next trip was to Peru, Puerto Maldonado, canoeing up the Madre de Dios River to Tambopata. These were not tour guided trips. Just us, adventuring alone, with one guide. We'd look at each other periodically and breathe, "We're here.." So amazing.
Tambopata might have been the most amazing and magical of all our trips. After many hours of navigating the river we came to the dock of the biological station we had come to visit. There was no sound of anything manmade and we walked up the long trail to the lodge carrying our backpacks, totally in love at first sight with the sounds and sights and smells of everything we had wanted to know for our whole lives.
We spent the next ten days or so in a primitive lodge whose beauty cannot be described. Our room was open to the jungle, we had bed nets to protect us from whatevers. We had never been more perfectly happy.
The scientists living there were pleased to show us their projects from the cultivation of certain plants to the incubation of Macaws. We got up at dawn to hear the howler monkeys and go to the clay licks covered with dozens of parrots. We hiked miles in the rain forest and found tarantulas, tapir tracks, huge snakes, monkeys, so many birds. We saw bioluminescents at night in the forest, we saw many bats. Our minds were thick with new knowledge.
Tonight I heard a report on T.V. that as gold has been discovered in that area, much of the forest has been stripped, Puerto Moldonato is now a gold mining town, Tambopata is no more as we once knew it. I wept.
Our children and grandchildren will not know what it is to be in the Amazon Rain Forest, alone, where there is total silence and even an agnostic can find a sort of belief in seeing a harpy eagle on the nest. They'll never have the chance to feel the total darkness in the Amazon forest at night.  Perhaps they'll have to do with a harpy eagle ap on their phone.
I grieve for the lack of natural habitat that is coming from having such an abundance of people (SEVEN BILLION!)




Friday, November 04, 2011

Frugality

We are frugal. Tonight we had a delicous dinner from the leftover chicken and rice we served to friends last night. Vegetables came from our garden and we ate bread we had made yesterday.
This morning with a chill in the air we were energized to examine the front porch for the first time since the heat of the summer. The metal retro chairs and tables we have had for  years looked quite shabby with peeling paint so we hauled them off to the barn to scrape off the old paint and repaint them with a new coat of forest green. I washed all the old cushions and we found a sort of new flag to  replace the old tattered one flying on the porch.
No trip to Ikea was required. After we hose off the spider poop, the porch will be perfect.
In another iteration of prosperity we would have just ordered new porch furniture and cushions.
We are not particularly fashion conscious because we are always doing dirty work on the ranch. I find that our local Walmart has pretty good everyday clothes: soft and lovely White Stag tee shirts for $4.00. (So, why buy LL Bean's tees for $25?) For $4 a pop I can have many colors of tees and refresh them often. Men's jeans and pajamas are the same. Who needs Brooks Brothers for these things? Frugality!
In the name of frugality we repurpose many things. My spouse cut down a dead orange tree yesterday. Most of it was cut up to be wood for our fireplace. The huge leftover stumps will be moved to the doorway garden as sculptural elements.
Our trimmings from cooking vegetables go into the compost. Our old newspapers become mulch for the vegetable garden. Crap from cleaning out closets go to the library or the consignment shops.
I cannot be so pure as those folks who have no waste. But we try to have a light footprint on the land and on the globe, ever mindful that we consume A LOT.
In our own ways, we need to be frugal because our earth depends on it.