Overload

As I was out doing errands today to buy stuff for my volunteer gig at Lacoochee Elementary School, I was listening to the Diane Reim show on NPR and a caller on the line asked a sort of 'the emperor doesn't have any clothes on' question: why are the republicans in congress so against the ACA?

Seems like everyone dodges this question. Why, indeed, would we not want to have affordable health care for everyone?? Yes, this law will have many glitches as it moves into our lives just as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have done. Along the way there have been many tweaks to these programs. We forget.

So, there is the philosophy of conservatives that less federal intrusion is better- a tenable stance. But what is happening here and now, tonight, is the dregs of folks who want to thwart Obama in anything. Why is this? I believe it is about race and a fear of elitism.. It is also about the perceived need to pander to the tea party base. I believe it is also about deep ignorance. (These tea party folks do not "believe in global climate change' or the science of Darwinism. They are creationists. They are afraid of gays. They are afraid of women's' rights to control  contraception. They are afraid of tree huggers.)

These folks are profoundly entitled.  "I've got mine" could be their motto. Probably, most of the House Republicans, all white, mostly men, have never walked in the shoes of so many Americans, the poor, the undocumented, the people of color. They have never had to do without medical care because they did not have two nickels to click together. They have never had to wait for hours in an emergency room with a sick kid. They have never had to forgo orthodontia or glasses for their child because they could not afford it.

The tea party folks are mean spirited.

Hair

 

I love hair! I love looking at it and touching it. It is our crowning glory to have it.  My husband has a full head of curly white hair, though he often states that it is getting thin on top. In the sixties and seventies and beyond I cut his hair when it became too much. Now, we both go to a local salon and Angie and Danny tame our locks.

My own hair stays the same, blonde going to white, curls all over my head so that I never even need to comb my hair after a shower. My hair is the only thing that stays the same as I age.

A few decades ago we all had wild and unkempt hair. Our beautiful sons had shoulder length hair until I chopped it off. Our daughter had long blonde hair - such a trial to braid it or tame it into something manageable.

Then I came to know about black hair and all the issues with that! Straightening! Chemical doses! Can't swim! What happened to those beautiful little black girls in my class who sported lovely 'naturals'?

My favorite hair styles were those of little girls with very long hair whose moms or dads carefully braided it every day. I love the cornrows of so many black girls in my class. I love the wild curls parents allow on their boys and the straight dark falls of hair on the Asian kids.

And I especially love the longish hair on boys. I know that in the cities of this country parents prefer to have their boys wear longish hair. It is a marker of socioeconomic class. When we picked up my grandson from his (elitist!) camp last summer, I noticed that all the boys had shaggy hair. Of course these kids had been away from barbers for several weeks.

In my volunteer work with a poverty stricken stripe of rural America, I notice that hair is definitely a marker. Boys with buzz cuts or strange buzzes and long hair, sometimes dyed, always catch my attention. These kids are often the troublesome ones and I have to look at their families. (Why is their priority to have their child have a blue-tipped Mohawk hairdo?)

How people do their kids' hair tells me a lot. But, really, it's only hair.

Philanthropy and Volunteerism

Here are Lily and Deshawn planting some of the new seedlings we have for our fall school garden. Another child is getting water for her newly planted starts. When the beds were planted they looked so promising, and now, a couple of weeks later, and many inches of rain later, they are up and perky.

This group of kids, almost twenty of them, come to the 'Garden Ladies' two days a week after school. We are planting and caring for this school garden, cooking and eating the harvest, learning about nutrition and botany and each other.

At least, this was our vision! The photo you don't see is the one when we made popcorn and constructed lovely bean artworks. Total chaos! The kids glued their multicolored beans onto paper plates in less than five minutes. No one had listened to the instructions and they poured on the glue and scattered the beans over it. Done! They looked like preschool creations. No matter. On to the popcorn with so much grabbing and screaming and pushing. No child wondered why popcorn pops. Many of the kids sat at the tables and screamed for us to bring cheese and butter, more popcorn. No child helped in the massive clean-up.

Regroup. Several of us, all retirees and volunteers from our local garden club, have committed for this project. Most of us have teaching experience and we feel responsible to bring good food, nutrition know how and expertise to this very poverty stricken community. The kids are far behind the ordinary middle class kids I have taught for thirty-five years. These are hungry for food and attention and they have no idea how to behave or listen or focus or tend to their own needs or those of the community in which they find themselves. The idea of cleaning up their spaces is unknown to them.  It seems there is no room in their desperate world for curiosity and wonder. And the child world of today, even among the less fortunate, is quite different than it was.

So we garden ladies are addressing these issues. Yes! The garden will be spectacular, and when the harvest is coming in, those kids will have some tools of competence and cooperation. No more chaos, just conversation about the tasks at hand.

It is way easier to just press the Donate Now button to give to one's causes. It's harder to be out there on the line doing community clean up projects, hosting a community coffee shop, constructing a garden, reading to kids in a classroom, working on a food line and in a food bank. It's harder to make  commitment to deliver meals on wheels.

But everything philanthropic is part of making the world better. The Gates Foundation, Doctors without Borders, Heifer, and so many other megabuck outfits are out to change our world for the better. But, drop by drop, those of us who are "there" in our communities make a difference.

Credo

The assignment in our printmaking class was to choose something that had meaning for us and make a 'broadside' of it. Of course, this was not something one could do in an evening or a week or even a month. We were young! Who knew what would have meaning for us? Professor Feldman told us that this major work could be an etching, a monotype, or any other kind of medium in the printmaking range.

I chose to make mine as a woodcut, so tedious and time-consuming to do, so fraught with the possibility of cutting oneself with the tools. I chose a large three by five foot board and for many weeks I thought and lived with mirror writing as I carved out those words and image and the curls of displaced wood fell to the floor.

My quotation was from Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass':

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, and the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand and the egg of a wren and the tree toad is a chez d'oeuvre for the highest and the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, and the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, and the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, and a mouse is enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

To this day, more than fifty years later, this woodcut hangs on the wall in my studio and I see it every day and wonder afresh. This quotation has more meaning for me now than it did then as a newly aware person beginning to understand how important in my life these ideas would be.

What I would add to this Credo now would be: I believe that all children born are perfect, and have the right to become healthy people of dignity and opportunity. This I believe.

Getting old and staying spry and sharp as a tack

Here I am on our annual houseboat trip on the Swanee River last year. We hope to do it again this fall when the six of us old friends heave off and slowly wend our way north on the river. This four or five day time is amazingly peaceful and slow. We inspect the banks of this pristine Florida place and we have a good time cooking and eating, reading, fishing, doing puzzles and games, swimming and visiting springs. In a small boat we explore the tributaries of the Swanee.

At night I love to go up on the top deck with my head phones and iPod and dance by the light of the moon. No one sees my wrinkles then.

All of us love the tradition (and each other). This is something we all treasure as a tiny piece out of time without any relatives.

The annual houseboat trip is emblematic of retirement for me.

I know I am getting old and wrinkled and it takes me half an hour after I get out of bed to stop feeling creaky. But then I am purposeful and get to work in the new vegetable garden here or I go to the community garden at the local school.

And then I spend a few hours in my studio making quilts or painting.

This morning I rode twenty miles on a recumbent trike with a friend along a great rails-to-bike trail and it was just such a meditative kind of physical activity. I am thinking of getting such a bike for me.

In retirement, I think that each year, or lump of time, I must do something new. I have written a book, learned a new language, begun another, struggled with the digital world, spearheaded a community garden, worked for community development, made many new friends in this community. We have traveled to many countries.

I love the place we live now and it takes a lot of energy to keep it current. Our surrounding gardens are wonderful and they take enormous amounts of energy.

We have many social evenings when my husband cooks wonderful meals for friends, and we often have our grandson for weekends or longer days. We are blessed.

We rejoice every day in the beauty of the surroundings we have created. We are pleased to be able to give back to this community.

It is amazing to me that others think of me as OLD! I think of my physical self as the ten year old I was. I see the wrinkles everywhere on my body. I am as slim as I was at eighteen- but everything is differently configured!

The kids at school love me no matter what wrinkles I have. They know I am a fun person and sharp as a tack, I know each of those hundreds of kids by name.

We are both depressed by the situation in Syria and the dreck that is Florida. I cannot imagine that going into Syria with bombs will have any good outcome.

Thinking Family Reunions

For my sixtieth birthday, more than a decade ago, I decided to have a blow out birthday and invite the whole family to join me at a manor house in the English countryside south of London. I planned it, we paid for all the airfares and all the food. I arranged all of it on line. I found a lovely place - one of those immense semi palaces that had fallen into desperate financial straits so their owners had to rent out to tourists.

I made charts and lists of who would be arriving when and where they would stay and where they would get their rental cars. There were over twenty people.  And I was flying blind. At the time my spouse was at the peak of prosperity, we were both still working, and I thought "If not now, when??" So we did it, and I will never regret it.

M y husband and I and a nephew were the first to get there, needing a couple of days to get the lay of the land. From the first moment we saw this immense stone mansion we knew that even with some glitches, this would be one of the most memorable and fun events of our lives, definitely furniture for the mind.

There were a dozen huge bedrooms for us, each with involved (dusty and lumpy) canopy beds and ensuite bathrooms with ancient plumbing. There were HUGE portraits of the royal family on the walls, tapestries, rose garden, tennis court, swimming pool and croquet court. There were so many cupboards and closets full of linens and dishes. The huge public rooms were covered with antique oriental carpets and the lamps had amazing fringe. Such a fantasy!

All this was set in the countryside not far from a perfect English village. To walk to the train station to go to London we had to dodge many sheep and their pies. But this place was kind of funky in a way. And it pleased us immensely.

We loved exploring the manor. We loved a secret sliding panel in one of the sitting rooms from which a 'servant' sometimes appeared to tell us not to do something we were doing. We loved it one night when one of the immense grandfather clocks kept on chiming and chiming and eventually all twenty-five of us gathered in the great hall to investigate and finally figure out how to silence it.

The kitchen was pretty minimal for such a large and grand place. I was expecting something from the likes of "Upstairs, Downstairs'. There were so many sets of china and glassware it made our heads spin. Each evening, when we sat down with twenty plus of us, in the formal dining room, we had a different set of dishes! It was actually fun setting the table.

Everyone helped, everyone shopped and cooked under the direction of my spouse. In the evenings, after our daily croquet match, and then dinner, we gathered in the most comfortable sitting room and read Harry Potter out loud to the kids (and the adults, too).

During the days of our two weeks together there, different configurations of family went on the train to explore London, or the Downs, or Bath, or other destinations. I remember taking young grandsons to the Battle of Hastings site.

It was interesting to get all these relatives together. Of course I remember the rough spots and the insights I had about my children and grandchildren and other relatives.

Since that trip the configurations of our family have changed. New members have been born, new spouses have been enfolded. parents have split up. But for that amazing couple of weeks, for whoever was there, it was a memorable time.

Would I do this again? Definitely not. It was a once in a lifetime thing and I loved it!

NYT today reports that a major proportion of folks are negative about family reunions. Hey, just do ONE and make it the best!