I live to serve

I mean to be a regular contributor to my own blog, but I can think of nothing to write about. Some book that I have on my shelf advises:
“If you want to write, write! Just sit down and start writing.” I have been feeling crabby all day. I have been unproductive and uninspired and I have not been feeling the love. I am annoyed by complainers.
“My this or that hurts.”
“I’m so lonely . . . but I can’t stand to be around anybody I know.”
“Big Brother tells us when to go to the bathroom these days!”

Therefore, be forewarned: This will not be the kind of floaty positive isn’t Life grand entry to which I aspire.

Lemme tell y'about working for Big Brother’s tiniest little brother, the municipal government.

People call all day long for telephone numbers that they could look up in their own telephone books. Not even government numbers. They call for the phone number of the newspaper, or of the gas company, or of the attorney who handled the closing on their house.

One man regularly calls our office to rant about the neighbor who, on garbage day, puts his garbage four inches too close to the man’s lawn. Not on his lawn; the garbage is at the curb. But this man has to look at those garbage containers for as long as it takes for the trash collector to get there and pick it up.

One woman calls every spring because twenty years ago her neighbor paved his back driveway and the water runoff makes her back yard soggy. Every year, she calls to tell us that her back yard is wet.
It’s spring. Things are wet.

Another woman, voice like a knife, calls to see if it is legal for her neighbor to put up a clothesline in his back yard. She thinks it’s unsightly.
Yes, a clothesline is permitted.

Somebody calls because his electricity is out: Do we know why?
No. We don’t. Have you called the power company?
Well, no. He thought he’d call the village office instead. (Probably knows the phone number by heart; he’d have to actually look up the power company’s number.)

I expect that soon we will begin receiving complaints that the full moon is too bright and the weather forecast was wrong.

We receive near-daily faxes from a local attorney: He thinks the streets are dirty.
“Now that the snow is gone, you can really see how dirty Main Street is. Why isn’t the street department sweeping? Is the village too broke to fix the machine?”
In twenty-five years the street department has never run the street sweeper before Memorial Day, but this year the guy wore them down and they got out there and swept up all the dirt and gravel that they had put down all winter to keep people from complaining that the village streets were slippery.

The same attorney faxes us to let us know that there’s litter on somebody’s lawn.
Not piles of trash we’re talking; the codes officer went out and inspected and found that it was a couple of Kleenexes that had offended the barrister's sensibilities.

Our building houses the municipal court.
Directions to the court are posted: on the exterior entrance door to the building; on the interior entrance door; on a big red sign on the door to the court itself, directly in front of anyone entering the main hall. The court's office hours are posted on the door to the court.
Twenty times every day somebody shambles into the clerk’s office or the planning office asking us to take their payment of court fines.
We direct them to the proper door.
They plod off and two minutes later, return: “There’s nobody in there.”
We direct them to the sign on the court door that explains the days and times that fines can be paid.
They plod off and two minutes later, come back.

They explain to us all the circumstances of how they got their ticket and why they didn’t find out about the ticket until two weeks later because they’d been driving their uncle’s or brother’s or neighbor’s car. We stop in the middle of some complicated accounting process or in the middle of explaining an application to somebody, listen sympathetically and tell them to come back when the court’s open. After long blank looks, they shuffle out.
I guess if they could read and follow directions they wouldn’t be going to court.

Somebody’s store window got broken. It’s a local outrage: “Main Street looks like a slum!” The village takes the [uninsured] store owner to court for not repairing his window. The local paper reports the event and a week later steams with indignant letter writers’ castigation of the village’s spending tax dollars to enforce the law. “Why doesn’t the village just replace the windows for him?”

Whaddayakiddnme?

The mayor, paid a whopping fifty bucks a week for his part-time position, is not in his office every day. Constituents demand of us to know his whereabouts and when he will be in. We don’t know but we’ll certainly leave a message for him. They want to know when he’ll get the message. Well, I guess that depends on when he’s next in the office. And . . . we don’t know.

Listen. I try to keep a positive attitude. My years of waitressing provided me with skills to remain outwardly patient and pleasant and soft-voiced to all these hoo-hahs.

But I gotta tell you: When browsing through blogs and answering comments, I see “Big Brother tells us when to go to the bathroom these days!” I want to respond, “If that’s the case, maybe it’s because you wouldn’t know when to do it!”

I’ll just put this soap box back in the closet now.

Thanks for dropping by and, hey! Have a nice day!

Backyard spring evening

It is just warm enough to sit outside with my book, the dogs having their supper picnic-style on the patio. It's useless to try to read; I'm surrounded by a bird Tower of Babel, each species enthusiastically calling in its own language.


The blackbirds are burring from every direction: Borrr-geeeek! Borrr-geeek! Less often, the jittery aggressive kihkihkihkihkih of the robins. The crows, who a few weeks ago were the only birds I heard, laughing like loud old whiskey drunks, are much less noticeable now.

The sun slanting across the lawn sparkles on the fine threads of the tiny spiders that hatch and launch themselves onto the breeze . . . the single strand of silk their only tether to what they know of the universe.

The hearty buzz of a passing fly.

The breeze brings the perfume of a flower I cannot yet identify. I will, in a minute. It is sweet, would be cloying if it had not passed with the air. It is the plum tree. The fruit, fresh from the branch, will be sour and inedible.


The bees are a warm hum in the blossoms. Our own hives have been abandoned and I wonder if these are relatives of the bees that we nurtured for a few years. I hope that in this wild and sacred place they will escape the virus that is wiping out honeybees elsewhere.


Down toward the woods, the lower brush has begun to glow Crayola spring green.


The fresh bright yellow-white wounds of the trees that were torn and broken in last December’s ice storm soon will be covered with greedy new growth and it will all become part of the familiar view.

Far down the field I hear a turkey clucking. This morning Husband attracted a hen, calling her across the field toward him where he sat on the patio with his coffee. When he called to me to see her, thirty feet from him, she turned and ran, waddling rapidly as turkeys do (they avoid taking flight in all but the greatest emergencies), directly back along the path she had come.

There are wispy clouds stretched along the horizon and the sun’s warmth is diminishing now.

In this light the topography of the surrounding hills becomes clearer….the main ridges still standing up in full light and the smaller ridges and clefts becoming defined by shadow.





A blackbird lands on a branch near me. He pushes out his call, his entire body and breast swelling with effort, wings strained out and back with the force of his enthusiasm.

There. The turkey again…..a real gubblegubblegubble this time; and again.

A redheaded woodpecker lands in the plum tree, just far enough behind a branch that I cannot see him clearly. He shakes his head quickly several times from side to side and then is gone.

Mourning doves, and a bird I don’t know with a Belafonte-like double-layered voice whistles a two-note song.

A bluebird has been sitting on the peach tree, which is, so far, bare of blossoms. Teasing me, showing me his buff parts but neither his bright breast nor his brilliant back. I give up and put down the camera and he swoops past me fifteen feet away, heading for one of the houses erected for his use.

The breeze has come up as the sun has gone down. It's time to go indoors and leave the show for tonight. The warmth held in the house will feel good.

Spring Sunday

The trees here were still mostly leafless yesterday morning when I went out with the dogs. All but these brushy little red buds.
By last night, after an 87' day, it seemed as if everything was popping. But these are special: the first sign that spring is truly here.

Thursday thirteen

asks, "...what you think is important in a marriage…"

1. Hold on loosely.
2. Remain your own person with your own interests and your own friends.
3. Forgiving transgressions is good; forgetting is of paramount importance.
4. Always encourage even if you need to temper the encouragement with calm and practical advice.
5. Work together when you can. If you don’t work well together on projects, see #4.
6. Remember that the wedding day is one day. Consider the real importance of momentary problems in the face of the fact that you’ll still be married tomorrow, and a year from now, and five years from now.
7. Institute a daily habit of thinking of your spouse’s good attributes.
8. Know when to talk and when to shut up.
9. Don’t listen to or repeat gossip about other people’s marriages.
10. Don’t spend all the money you have.
11. Know that being married is different from living together.
12. If he doesn’t take out the garbage, put down the toilet seat, put his dirty laundry in the hamper, just quietly do it yourself. There are things he does for you that you don’t even know about.
13. Let everyone know how glad you are you married him. Always.

Push

this week invites interpretations of Push.




Push! Push! Push! (Lamaze)
Push fluids. (Marly in her last day)
Push-tish. Oh. Never mind. That’s pish-tush.
Push me, pull you.
Pushy. (A man who arrived with his business application and simultaneous announcements of all the municipalities he had successfully sued when they failed to give him what he wanted.)

Some people push as a way of life. They are human bulldogs who carry on through the death of siblings while taking over the running of the dead sibling’s household in addition to their own toddler-filled lives while organizing fiftieth anniversary parties for parents while preparing other people’s taxes three days prior to tax day. I don’t know how those people do it. Do they never take time to absorb the impacts? Do all the blows simply bounce off their personal armor as they surge ever forward? I, being me, hold my breath waiting to hear, six months after all of it, that they’ve driven off a cliff somewhere. That doesn’t indicate that I think that’s what should happen; it indicates my complete awe.

I’m tired of “push.” I have pushed myself for the last six months, from the time the village board candidates announced, through the threat of complete removal of my employment, through the interpersonal upheaval and intellectual stress attendant upon the change to my daily job, through the death of a necessary pet, and through the death of a significant personal relationship.

My emotional constitution is different from those bulldogs’. I can take emotional battering from just so many quarters for just so long and then my batteries run low and need to recharge. I need to fold up in a quiet corner for a while, like an injured wild animal.

Push doesn’t agree with me.

Every question has an answer

I had this conversation with someone today:

“You should be like a good attorney: never ask a question unless you know the answer.”
“Some questions have no answers.”
“Every question has an answer.”

The opening and closing lines were mine.
I believe there is an answer to any question.
The answer might not yet be known, or the answer might be unpalatable. But there is an answer to every question.

I'm going to think on this for a while.
I might have more to say on the subject.

I'm falling in love again

Since Marly's demise, I've rediscovered my affection for the two little poodle boyz. The disappearance of their pack leader has left me in charge, and they're calm and quiet and quite tractable. Imagine that.

Max, in particular, is revealing his sweet nature once again. When they were tiny puppies, Husband used to say, "We have to give Angus lots of lovin' to bring him back from his wildness. Max has to have lots of lovin' because he needs it."

The day we picked them out at the breeder, we chose Max from the five apricot poodle puffs for one reason, and one reason only: When I picked him up to cuddle him against my chest, he plastered his cheek against my shoulder and moved only his eyes to look at his new daddy. He needed those cuddles. Something about the whites of his Hershey's kiss eyes with a little eye-rolly white showing really grabbed me.

You see why.
Not just a pretty face, Max is quite a little athlete too. At heart, he is a retriever. A good game of fetch with a tennis ball is the best part of his day. In the winter, he requires no special equipment: snow's just fine for chasing and catching.

Sometimes it's hard to tell eggzackly where the snowball landed.

He's a wildman!

He gets a little impatient sometimes.

"Hurry UP with that snowball!"

See the "too-happy tail"? Not a good show poodle.

Mostly, he's just cute.
If he ever gets tired of the country life, he might have a great career as a Boyd's Bear.

A green-eyed remembrance

Sunday Scribblings' prompt this week is Language.
I determined to skip SS this week and wrote this instead. Re-reading it, I see that there is some relation here to "language," if only by way of drawwwwlllll.

We met Jeannie when she came to visit with Husband's childhood friend Tony. Husband and I had been married five years or so, and Tony, who had taken his Louisiana offshore diver money and had earned his engineering degree from that big Texas university, had been visiting us every year or so, a few weeks at a time. He was a wonderful guy: funny, down-to-earth, good-looking, smart. I loved it when he visited because I was the princess with two princes. The three of us would hang out together, go out to dinner, and always have a terrific time.

The time came for his annual visit, and he called and said he was bringing a girl along. "Great!" I thought, and I wondered what kind of girl she would be. It was the first time Tony had ever had a girl that I'd met. He'd been too busy making money and then going to school to have had any relationships.

In honor of Tony's arrival I baked a huge pan of lasagna. Tony, being single, always appreciated the Real Food I cooked for him. We laid in a supply of beer and wine, and anxiously awaited The Arrival. I had made up my mind that this girl would be brunette, about my height (5'6"), probably athletic in some fashion, and a pretty natural kind of person. After all, that's what Tony was like. I looked forward to having a New Friend.

They arrived.

Tony came in first, entering the kitchen to our anticipation-filled grinning faces.
A few minutes later, timing it for an Entrance, in came Jeannie. Five two, tan and curvaceous in her little sleeveless short white sweater and khaki short shorts, naturally curly blond hair, a Miss America smile, and vivid red long fake fingernails . . . with a crystal embedded in one pinky nail.

I thought, "This woman and I will never be friends."
I sucked it up, grinned. "HI!"
Husband saw her and flushed, and I thought, "This woman and I will never ever be friends."
Jeannie widened her smiling cranberry-stained lips and squealed, "Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, y'all! I'm JEANNNiiiieeeeee."

Nobody from Virginia has a southern accent that pronounced.

Seeing instantly that this evening would be The Jeannie Show, I shifted into Earth Mother mode. "Are you hungry? I've got this huge pan of lasagna for you!"

Tony said, “Yeah, I'll have a little. We stopped to eat a couple hours ago, so I'm not real hungry."
Jeannie whined, “Oooooooooooooooo. Tooooooneeeeeeeeee, do yew think Ah should have any?"
Just the week before, she'd had to rush to the hospital because she'd eaten some of “that romonnnnno cheeeeez," and “Well Ah just must be alLERRRRRgic to it! Ahhhhm sooo sorry yew went to ahhhlllll thaaat trubble! I'll just have some of my little snaaaaak that I brawwwt alawwwwng. Toooooneeeee, would yew mahnd gettin' my little saaaak out of the caaaaaw? I fawgott to brang it in with meeeeeeee."

Tooooneeee trotted off back outside to fetch her little snaaaaaak...a bag of sliced cucumbers with some lowfat ranch dressing. "It keeeeeps me the sahhhhhhhhz I wannnna beeeeee," she confided to us when her retriever returned.

Earth Mother was havin’ an awful hard time hangin' on.

On into the family room, Tony with a small serving of lasagna, Scarlett with her bag of low-cal treats. Beers all 'round except for Scarlett, who opted for "wahhhhn, if yew wooden mahnd."
The mood of the evening felt unnatural to me. Tony wasn't even Tony; he was Tooooonnnneeeee, with the limpet hanging on his and Husband’s every word, "ooooooohhhhhh-ing" at them. Multiple adoring, purse-lipped-perplexed, and awestruck expressions played over her features.

I could feel myself becoming knotty-pine color, indistinguishable from the paneling; no more than a friendly smile on the rare occasions when a word or glance was thrown in my direction. Since I was no longer part of the company, I began my examination of her styhhhhhhhhhhhhhlll.
Yew knooowww...her mooooduss operannnndeye.

Tony and Husband went into another room for a few minutes, and an enraptured Jeannie was telling me about her family: “Daaadddy’s a careeeah naval man, we lived alllll ovahhh.” And about her daddy’s “backyahhhhhd and allll the shadetreeeeez.”
Just when Tony and Husband returned to the room, I was asking, in my version of her drawl, “Did you come ahhhhhout?”

A twinkly sideways look at the Man of Her Dreams, “Well this is somethin’ Tooony doesn’ know about meeee.”
Tony’s face lit up with a big grin.
He turned to Husband, “I got me a DEB-u-tante!”

My conclusion that first evening would never be shaken. She was either a completely manufactured personality, or a Gen-U-wine Real Southern Belle. The body and hair were natural enough (damn her eyes!) but the accent, the whole "oh Rhhhettttttttt, what'll Ah dewwwwwwwwwww?" persona just couldn't be sustained. I just knew Tony would wake up and see her for what she was, especially surrounded by his good ol' friends, including me. And I would have my two princes back.

They got married two years later.

Keeping an open mind

This started out as a response to David Marshall's I Only Know I’m Crazy, but I got excessively interested in my (his) subject, and it grew to post length.

First, David, I would say to you: There is nothing wrong with perpetual confusion if you enjoy the intellectual exercise of turning ideas over and over to see what might happen if this . . . or if that…

I take as flawed your conclusion that students have healthier minds simply because they consider and discard ideas based their youthful intellect and limited experience. Jane Addams was right: Those students feel nice and warm and emotionally comfy with capitalism. It is, after all, working for them, so far. People who embrace any ideology, across the board, hands-down, case closed, aren’t facing reality any more than is someone who continues to do the very same things over and over again, expecting a different result. I count neither group admirable.

What you see as the “shadowy gap between ‘ought’ and ‘is,’” I see as a wide and bottomless chasm. Hungry people ought to get enough to eat, but they don’t. Pets ought not to be abandoned on the sides of roads, but they are. Drunks ought never to drive and cause bodily injury and death and property damage, but they do and do and do and do, and the successful capitalists can hire better attorneys and suffer less onerous punishment. Everybody ought to be educated enough to afford a comfortable lifestyle, but then, I believe one's comfort depends on one’s attitude more than any other factor.

Every system works some of the time, and for a while. And then times change, and something else works for a time. The pendulum swings from one side to the other in political and economic systems as well as in personal lives. What I see as impediments to Utopia includes at least the following two Truths as I see them:

1. The problem of who gets to say how anybody’s life “ought” to be. Marx said:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Who decides how much somebody needs . . . to . . . what? Survive physically? Feel emotionally secure? Be happy? And what do you do with those people who don’t learn to want Life as Labor, an end in itself?

I had a childhood friend who swore he would sire nine offspring, as had his grandfather, and he, his wife and the entire family would do things together every weekend . . . picnics and outings, tra-la, tra-la. I doubted out loud whether or not nine siblings would be happy to be stuck with Family all weekend long, and he said, with great conviction: “They’ll want to!”
Right.

2. Nature is nature and people are animals. Highly evolved [perhaps, and some more than others, and in different areas], but there is always, still, that pesky factor of inborn differences in appetites and abilities and interests and energy.

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Try to teach him to fish, and maybe he still won’t get up early enough to get his meal. Par example: I was a member of Mensa for years, and didn’t get past the third semester of college because I never learned how to study.

Well, I did do a trifle more than my share of partying, too . . . nevertheless... If the educational tuning fork resonated at a frequency that was audible to me, I succeeded. If it didn’t I might as well have been stone deaf and took in nothing.

A while back, you wrote that you had stopped growing up and I believe that was erroneous. I think you are still growing up. People who do no slamming of doors, no rebuffing, no discounting, no discrediting, no swallowing of unmasticated ideas move on, too. They keep moving forward, or sideways, or on occasion backward, but always adjusting as needed to changing realities.

They keep growing up.
Anybody who’s stopped growing up is either Peter Pan, or dead.

Scary

This week Sunday Scribblings wants to know what scares me.

I have some young friends who enjoy sending me those twenty-questions emails that often include the question: What do you fear most? My response is always "abandonment." My meaning is not the joyful reckless abandon meaning; it is being left that I fear.

Real disaster is not fearsome to me. When disaster is a fait accompli
I know how to divorce my feelings of fright from the need to handle things to make them as right as they can be under the circumstances.

Failing scares me.
Appearing stupid scares me.

The things that scare me are based on the recurring fallacious belief that I am in control of events and other people's attitudes and actions.

Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. ~Chapter 5

Mmmhmmm. That's me in those moments of Scared.

You would think that I would be able to let go of that once and for all: that kind of fear is no longer appropriate to my life. It doesn't happen that way, though; it takes that daily vigilance and forgiving self-examination to make it stay gone.

Since I have those tools now, I'll need to think of something new that scares me.
...or perhaps not.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~Bill Cosby

Sunday Stills

The Color Red
April 6, 2009 by Ed
...something to please the city folk...

Free at last!

First thing this morning Jane told me that I could go ahead and enter the payroll without her sitting next to me.

Oh, the joy of independence!

She had done some prep work before I started...things that I don't quite know how to do . . . but I did the payroll entry, and the payroll summary, and moved the money around from all the accounts to the one that the pay comes out of . . . with only a couple of minor foul-ups.

And then I got to enter thousands of dollars of water/sewer payments and the prepare the deposit for them.

My relief comes from feeling as if I am useful instead of an additional stressor and a drag! ...and also from not having her hanging over me, while I checked and doublechecked and counted and recounted and made SURE I was doing it right.

At noon-fifteen when I had finished all that, I left saying, "See you later." Then I went back and thanked her for letting me do all that.
"Oh, you're welcome!" she said.

I feel as if I've climbed a mountain and tobogganed down to the peaceful valley. If you're having a windy night where you are, it's the gusts of my hefty sighs of relief!

Why Can't Junie Learn?

This new job I have . . . the one that saved my full-time employment . . . the one that I work at in the mornings before my afternoon escape back into my Known Job . . .is going reasonably well. It is not going beautifully, and I finally figured out why.
My teacher/boss/friend Jane and I have different learning styles.

The way we've been approaching my training has been for Jane to sit next to me.

Very close next to me.
Sort of behind my left shoulder.
We follow the 6-point typewritten list of step-by-step instructions, removing and replacing a tiny post-it note, line by line, as we complete each step of a process.


I feel like a rabbit quivering in the shadow of a hawk.


Jane is a spreadsheet-cell-to-cell, step 1, step 2, step 3 person.

I'm a Leave Me Alone And Let Me Look At The Whole Thing And See What Parts Look The Same And What Parts Look Different And Then Find Out Why And Then I'll Check With You person.
I remember, with fond nostalgia, my kindergarten exercises of "circle the object that doesn't belong." (I think that sort of thing has become Politically Incorrect as exclusionary and therefore socially undesirable in the public school system.)

At the end of the first month I didn't even know what the name of the spreadsheet was that I had been working on. She asked me to print out the water/sewer account receivables and I looked blank-faced at her, mortified to say, "I don't know what that is." I had been entering figures on that spreadsheet every morning for thirty days.

Three days ago, I was brave enough to try to skip around the spreadsheet to see if this cell matched that cell (as it should if I was on the right track), and Jane said, "Now, let's finish this part of it, Miss Jump Around."

She's very patient, Jane is. It is in her nature to approach what she probably sees as my learning disability as a problem to be solved in a step by step way.

Jane and I are both intelligent women, and we do share a quality of logic, but even logic has different styles. In school she loved math and science: I did not. Jane approaches dieting and losing weight as a scientific experiment to see how her body responds if she does this and that. She has a carefully calibrated pedometer and she uses it regularly. I walk on sunny days and look at the pretty stuff. The only science I liked was earth science and I clearly remember my mental picture of the temperature being lowest just after sunrise. It made sense to me. I had felt it, so the logic of it for me came from my senses. Whether or not that is truly logic might be another question.

My effort at solving my problem with learning this job well enough to feel comfortable includes having taken a quiz to learn my Memletic Learning Style.

This is what the resulting graph of my learning style looks like:













Just to see what Jane's graph would look like, I went through the questionnaire again, answering it as I thought she would, and the second graph is what came up.











That little problem with Jane sitting next to me, telling me where to click next, moving of the post-it-note is pretty well illustrated. She's all northwest-pointy up in "Logical," and wide open toward "Social," and I'm wandering around alone muttering to myself and looking at tadpoles down in the southwest swamp.

That understanding would have gone some little way toward easing my initial frustration of asking what the plan was for this change in my daily work, and Jane's repeated response that there was no plan.

She knows that if she follows the steps, she'll get where she's going.

I want to know where I'm going so I can follow the steps.

Junie the Poop and the Blustery Day

It's a windy rain-spittery day, and it suits me perfectly.


I met a friend for breakfast at the local greasy spoon, and then we browsed at a local gifty shop for a long time. Soy candles in delicious flavors (Gardenia, Vanilla Coffee, Clean Laundry) and marked-down-to-two-dollars earrings.

I am a Happy Woman.

When I returned home the one Adirondack chair, taken out of storage as a sign of faith that lawn chair season will return, was nowhere in sight. I scanned the medium distance and saw it, blown a thousand feet upfield, and I trudged out over the hummocky ground to retrieve it.





The unwieldy chair and I became a catboat, beating back downfield to home port.

I had a thrilling moment or two of near-parasailing.


Our windblown outing satisfied the dogs' requirement for an afternoon walk and we are settled with our small fire in the woodstove and a sweet book, The Daily Coyote, at hand. I foresee imminent reading/nappytime.

I've been waiting . . . tap tap tap (foot) for the Sunday Scribblings prompt and it hasn't appeared. I could probably just pick a word at random and blather on about it and maybe if I feel like working a little harder later, I will.

Ketubah

Weekend Wordsmith's prompt this week is Contract.

Beginnings Ketubah by Artist Howard Fox

Jewish marriages include a Ketubah, a Marriage Contract, the purpose of which is:

To separate the betrothal blessings from the marriage blessings (Sheva Berachot), the "Ketubah" (marriage contract) is read aloud. The "Ketubah" is a binding document of confidence and trust which details the husband's obligations to his wife. Therein, the Chatan (groom) pledges to "work for you, honor, provide for and support you, in accordance with the practices of Jewish husbands who work for their wives' honor, provide and support them in truth."
The signing of the Ketubah shows that the bride and groom do not see marriage as only a physical and emotional union, but also as a legal and moral commitment which delineates the human and financial obligations of the husband to his wife according to Jewish law and customs.
Its basic aim is to strengthen and affirm the wife's dignified status, as well as to confer a number of special privileges on her. The Ketubah also contains stipulations of financial settlement in case of, G-d forbid, divorce. Following the reading of this contract, the Ketubah is handed over to the Kallah (bride). Should this document be lost, the couple may not live together until a new contract is drawn up.

(I doubt that last line is often invoked.)


When my friend Ellen enlightened WASP me about the Ketubah I was, despite my having been a wife for sixteen years, still in my Devoted To My Marriage Above All mindset, and I was dismayed to think that Romantic Love would not be the sole and overriding reason for a wedding, and marriage's continuation. How childlike I was. I think now that it is very wise of Judaism to acknowledge that a marriage is a deal, an agreement of exchange.


When I was in college, posters of The Gestalt Prayer were all over dorm rooms.

(Fritz Perls, 1969)

I guess the last line "If not, it can't be helped" would have ruined the mood, so all the posters omitted it. I believed the "It's beautiful" part and completely overlooked the "I am I and you are you" part. It would have eliminated some turmoil and black spaces in our twenty-nine years together had we known that we had entered into a contract . . . and had I been equipped to be an I before I became part of a we.


It's been a long time since our marriage's sticky new bud of admiring each other's eyebrows. I like my husband. I respect him. I enjoy knowing he is there . . . someplace. On days when I know he'll be away overnight, I look forward to my Alone Time. As the subsequent evening draws out long, I wonder what I was so anticipating; I do the same things in my evenings whether or not he is present.


I sometimes contemplate Life Without Husband. I look at nest-like little houses perfect for single old women; I think about not having to turn sleeves right-side-out before I do laundry. And then I think about: his unrequested delivery of medication when I was sick in bed; his starting my car on cold winter mornings; my setting up the coffeemaker because it makes him happy to simply push a button in the morning; our telling each other our dreams when we wake up in the morning.


I used to think that without Husband I would die.
I know now that I could live without him, and I choose not to.
It makes the whole thing a little more valuable.

Ineffable

Just last week I noticed that a neighbor on our backwoods dirt road has hung an eight-foot-long burnt-wood sign, "QUIETUDE," at the end of her driveway. She is a psychologist who lives here part-time and hosts country retreat weekends for city people who pay a lot of money to sit in a field and do role plays.

When we finally moved here, after years of owning the land and traveling here just to walk in the fields, I suggested to Husband that we name the place. I thought it might be triumphant to call our long-awaited residence by some name, like a country estate. Like Scarlett O'Hara's Tara, Wright's Fallingwater, Daniel Chester French's Chesterwood, or Millay's Steepletop. Or even something more humble. I recognized a sign on another nearby property, "The Land," for what it was: simple identification. We had for so long referred to this acreage as "the land," ("This weekend, let's go out and walk around the land.") that I knew those people must have been doing the same thing.

Husband was derisive. His joy in living out here on the country hill derived from the anonymity it offered. Our mailbox, a third of a mile from the house, carries only our box number, not even our house number, and not our name. He didn't want relatives, of whom he considered himself well rid, to be taking Sunday drives and finding us. Fair enough. I didn't want them dropping in on us either.

We remain unnamed, and now it seems silly to me to call this place by a name. It is its own wild place, grand and unrestrained. Sometimes I feel as if we don't even own it, that it cannot be owned, that it is only loaned to us; it has that strong an identity of its own. Were I to try name it, I would never be able to discern what that name should be.

It is ineffable.

Shorthand

A dear friend, who is usually a great devotee of Real Words, recently signed off on an email with "tnt." I sat looking at "tnt" for a few minutes, trying to translate it into a phrase that I might recognize.

talk 'n' talk?

take no tschotchkes?

thanks 'n' ta?

The last came closest to making sense, but I had done nothing to justify an expression of gratitude. SWAK must have been around practically since the first loveletter, and everybody knows TGIF. I recall KISS from a Dale Carnegie course I took once. After having seen the thousandth repetition of some television commercial featuring an insolent preadolescent girl, I finally was able to remember that bff meant Best Friend Forever. But for tnt I needed interpretative assistance, and after a short search I found The NetLingo List of Acronyms & Text Message Shorthand, and learned that tnt is shorthand for Til Next Time.

Okay. I can live with that.

But who on God's green earth would bother with WDYMBT when "huh?" would be clear enough?

If not whispered into a beloved ear, shouldn't BTWITIAILW/U or IWALU rate complete written sentences? Do the expressions' brevity indicate the depth of the sentiment? How sincere is FTBOMH? Imagine Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning exchanging the passion of LYWAMH!

Is AGB in danger of becoming a road sign? Might I pass a warning, "AGB" just prior to my car's plunge through rotted planking into cold rushing water? Or is written on dental charts all over the United States, and of immeasurable use to DDSs?

Honestly, what need is there for "BJJDI"? Is Billy Joel wandering around the countryside, dropping in on people at random?

The whole thing makes me feel curmudgeonly.

GMAB. BHIMBGO, because it all looks like a CWOT and ITIGBS. IOH.

Sunday Scribblings: Aging

Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "Aging."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, under the headline "Healthy Aging for Older Adults," says:

"The United States is on the brink of a longevity revolution. By 2030, the proportion of the U.S. population aged 65 and older will double to about 71 million older adults, or one in every five Americans. The far-reaching implications of the increasing number of older Americans and their growing diversity will include unprecedented demands on public health, aging services, and the nation’s health care system.”

My God, that sounds discouraging. It gives me a mental picture of slack-jawed, empty-eyed, ungroomed old people in wheelchairs parked in filthy institutional corridors. That vision could menace my mind like Poe’s raven if I allowed it.

We baby boomers are an Aging Population.
Well. Everybody’s aging.
As soon as a baby’s born, he begins aging.
Aging is simply living.

Sales and marketing industries, thriving on fear of infirmity and poverty, would go belly up without products purporting to control and reverse the signs of aging in everything from fingernails to brain function. Advertising for anti-aging cosmetics features airbrushed photographs of twenty-two-year-olds. No sign anywhere of a pore or the tiniest facial hair.
Not so long ago, women were the target market, but now more of that appeal is targeted toward men. Men with gray hair: won’t get jobs; won’t get women; are consigned to sitting in easy chairs reading newspapers.
Horrors.
Once they become restored to the youthful look of full-color hair, their social and economic prospects instantly improve. Presumably, they will never again have inclination or time to read the news.

I have never truly feared growing older; I have always been only too happy to move onward.

When I was contemplating one of the early “zero” birthdays, a friend tried to relieve my momentary flutter of apprehension, telling me, “You might be halfway through your life, but you get to live the second half the way you want to.” Still mid-apprehensive flutter, I looked at him askance. It sounded like good propaganda, but I knew him to be not excessively wise. He was right, though.

When I was twenty-five I knew several women who all happened to be forty-two. They seemed far more comfortable than I. They seemed to be having fun. They seemed to know who they were, to have formed a life matrix to which they could, if they chose, add new experiences. Forty-two was a great year for me. So good, in fact, that I looked forward to forty-three. I still know people far older than I who are comfortable with their lives and themselves. I think there is a leveling at some point in life, at which the chronological age matters not at all in how much enjoyment can be achieved and shared.

The mechanics and the chemistry of my body are slowing down: There’s that. My eyeglass prescription grows stronger with each examination. If I eat pizza, I'm puffy a little longer than I used to be.

A few years ago, after a wonderful long dinner at a fine local restaurant, a friend and I stood up slowly and creakily. “We’re like two old wooden lawn chairs unfolding!” she muttered, and the aptness of the image sent us into gales of helpless laughter. We would have laughed longer, but we both had to progress expeditiously to the ladies' room.

I think I will continue to be comfortable with the gradual physical changes of aging. I know people, some far younger than I, who attend to each ache and pain and assiduously seek medical attention at astonishingly short intervals.
If you think too much about how you feel, you’ll never feel good.

I’ve benefited so much from growing older that I can hardly imagine that continuing that process will be a negative experience.
Aging suits me, I think.

The only part of aging that concerns me is something that has begun already. My linguistic mental rolodex cards are becoming a little slower to flip, and I find that I need to ponder a little longer to avoid repetition when I want a different verbal nuance. Still, it’s nothing to the repetition I hear in people still at Aging Denial stage: Consider the frequency of “Awesome!”

I'll keep my slow rolodex, thanks.

Roots and Shadows

Roots and Shadows borrowed from

calicogreen's Colorado road trip 2005 album

I was born in the same county as were my father and his siblings, his parents, and his grandparents. For the first several years of my life, everybody knew me as part of that big extended family: "Oh, you're S's girl! Sure, I know S! I went to school with his brother!" My father had a reputation as a hardworking, friendly and quick-witted man. My mother was a talented artist and gardener, a skilled seamstress and a snappy dresser.

Everybody I knew in my first years of school had grown up the same way I had. All the generations knew all the other generations. Birthday parties were populated by cousins and perhaps a friend or two. More likely the "friend" party would be a secondary, separate and smaller affair.

All our neighboring households had, at least, a few cows, and some had whole herds. One of the rituals of late summer was that in the early mornings all the men from five or six households would walk over the hills to each other's fields and spend several days cutting, baling and pitching hay. I was too young to understand the work they were doing, but I knew that it was an annual event when methigulum was the end-of-the-day beverage, and that my father would come home pleasantly tired and sunburned, redolent of fresh cut dry grasses, ebullient from the company of other men. It wasn't ten years after the end of WWII: The shared memories of their war service days and the shared work of farming bonded men in a different way, I think, than men's work bonds them now.

My mother had grown up on a farm too, in a county miles away. She enjoyed sitting on the back step in the afternoon sun, pinging freshly picked peas into the old metal dishpan and she knew how to pluck and clean a fresh-killed hen. Her enjoyment of farm life was shadowed and haunted, though, by memories of being sent out with her five siblings every election day to cull, with cold-stiffened fingers, the last of the potatoes from half-frozen fields.

Farm life and farm work hadn't changed much from the families' yeoman roots in 15th century Europe.

Before I reached adolescence my father died and our family moved to a small village far from my birthplace. There were farms out beyond the village, but having no Man, our family was no longer part of the camaraderie and the rhythm of farm work. The village men seemed to me a different species; they went to work in shortsleeved shirts and finished work at five o'clock. They never smelled of mingled hay and sunshine or of clean hard-work sweat. The children I met in my new home all had known each other since babyhood. To them, and suddenly to myself as well, I had no history, no context. For years I missed being a recognizable piece of a larger known entity.

I live and work now in yet another community where everyone I meet has local roots like the ones I used to have. Everybody has known everybody else since kindergarten. They know each other's family histories, each other's quirks, each other's family tragedies, scandals, successes. I take care of whom I speak and what I say because everybody I talk to is somebody's else's cousin by blood or marriage.

Being surrounded by a community that has known you all your life has reassuring advantages. If you have famous uncles you can reflect a faint glow of their eminence. If you were always the Smart Kid or the Strong Kid you hold onto the peer respect you earned at the age of ten.

Now, though, I see the drawbacks of one's history dragging around behind like a shadow. I've grown accustomed to standing shadowless in a noonday sun, and I have come to be grateful that no one knows everything about my history. They don't know that I am S and E's daughter, and that's too bad. But they don't know, either, about my crazy aunt who set fire to the barn, or that one day in kindergarten I threw up right on the floor after lunch, or that my junior choir surplice was bathed by tears for the duration of a church service because my boyfriend had given his ring to some other girl. If I choose to tell my acquaintances those things I can couch them in hilarious stories or surround them with an aura of hard-earned wisdom: I can shape my shadow as I wish.

This post inspired by Sunday Scribblings prompt #155 - "I come from..."

Departures and Arrivals

“How are you doing today?” I asked him.
“Well, I’m not eating much,” George said. “I feel weaker, but I went out for a ride in the garden in my wheelchair, and the pain’s not bothering me. But I can’t find my passport. Do you know where my ticket is?”
“It sounds like you’re planning to go somewhere, “I answered. George nodded.
“Are you going on a journey?”
Nodding again, George said, “I don’t have my papers.”
“Are you talking about a different sort of journey?” I asked. “Maybe about leaving here? Maybe about dying?”
George responded to this suggestion with relief. He nodded, opened his mouth as if to speak, then shrugged.
“If you’re talking about that journey, you don’t need a passport and tickets,” I said.

--from Final Gifts, by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley

Less than ten, more than five, years ago I held my mother’s hand while she died in the downstairs bedroom here. She had been ill for a long time, but the diagnosis preceded her death by only seven weeks. Both of us intuitive, sensitive, and high-strung, she and I understood each other. During most of my life, we were not comfortable with each other, despite, or perhaps due to, the similarity in our natures.

We never spoke of exactly what was happening. I never brought it up and when Mom would mention it, it was always, “This.” On her final trip to my house, knowing that she would not be going home again, she remarked, surprised, “This isn’t so terrible.”

“What?” I asked.

“This!” she said, making a small wave around herself with one graceful fine-boned small hand.

In the evenings the first few weeks, we would enjoy a nightly treat of ice cream. One night, Mom happily exclaimed, “This isn’t like being sick; it’s like a party!”

During the weeks that hospice nurses and I cared for her, with the calm, desperate, undiscussed knowledge that time was short, I finally came to see her as someone other than my mother . . . as a person in her own right. I saw the positive side of our similarity in her sense of humor at the ridiculous indignities of the failure of a human body. She demonstrated “It is what it is” to me before the phrase became a part of my customary lexicon. I felt her disgust with her brain when it lost the ability to follow a game of five-hundred rummy.

One day she told me about a dream she’d had. She’d been on an elevator, going up. The doors opened and some people got off, but she wasn’t meant to get off and was sent back down. Another dream was about her visit to a restaurant where the chef was famous for a magnificent sauce of his own invention. She waited in line, she told me, and then was told she wasn’t yet allowed to taste the exquisite sauce. There were other dreams about maps and driving and the time of her arrival being something she need not worry about.

I hadn’t yet read Final Gifts, but it was clear to me that she was on the verge of a not necessarily unpleasant change.

After Mom’s death I dreamt that I saw a group of older ladies in an anteroom somewhere. They were dressed to the nines, and having a grand time. I asked if my mother was there and they said oh yes, she's in at the party, but you can’t see her yet . . . it isn’t time.

I don’t know what dreams Marly had in the days and hours before she left me. I would not be surprised to know that they were of sunny fields full of voles and squirrels who could be hunted and caught over and over again . . . of running running running, her legs strong and no pain in her belly. I sat outdoors with her two days before she went and watched her as she listened to the calling and singing of the birds that have finally returned. I saw her ears prick and swivel at the sound of her dog friend calling hello to her from up the road.

She was ready to go. She looked reproachfully over her shoulder at me when I didn’t take off the leash and let her go off on down the field, regretful that I understood her purpose and that our record of perfect accord would be marred at this time. On St. Patrick’s Day evening, alone in a clinic kennel, free of my unwillingness, she went on her journey to those endless sunny fields.

No, I will go alone.

I will come back when it's over.

Yes, of course I love you.

No, it will not be long.

Why may you not come with me?—

You are too much my lover.

You would put yourself

Between me and song.

***

Come now, be content.

I will come back to you, I swear I will;

And you will know me still.

I shall be only a little taller

Than when I went.

--From The Concert, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Last night I fell asleep over my book. Sleeping, I looked up to see Marly on the other side of our glass front doors, wagging and smiling at me. She wasn’t asking to come in, she was at the door that we never open to come in and go out. She was just letting me know that she had arrived at the other end of her journey . . . and she is having a great time at the party.

Marly is a Good Dog.

Weekend Wordsmith's suggestion this week is "Passport."

recluse/cajole/temper

I have always enjoyed my own company, to the point that I could easily become a recluse. The necessity of having to go out among other people to earn a living saves me from my proclivity for a completely hermitical existence.

In addition to the financial incentive, there is the Get Me Away From My Pets factor.

I love them; I love them.

But the two small poodles, whom I acquired in their adorable tiny, weak, chrysanthemum-headed puppyhood, have somehow learned the value of a persistent

bark................................. bark.................................. bark

It is an aural equivalent of Chinese water torture.
I don't know who taught them that: Surely it was not I.
Someone must have come into my home during my absence (if I had been at home, all hermity, I would have barred the door) and trained them to interrupt any activity at regular one-minute intervals. Like circus poodles doing syncopated jumps on and off trotting ponies, they can even do the

bark.................................. bark.................................... bark

in alternating rhythm, like a round of Row Row Row Your Boat, so that the interval is diminished from one minute to thirty seconds.

Or less.

If you knew how many times, just during the writing of this small piece, I have been required to inquire as to their needs, to cajole them to ..."get up here!" ...to "eat that!" ...to "go out!" ...to "come inside!" without losing my temper and twisting their noisy tiny heads from their bouncy little bodies, you would more greatly appreciate the fact that some of these words are strung together in a way that makes any sense at all, never mind that I'm half a week late with a "Wednesday" post.

These three factors...

1. need for lucre, filthy or not
2. one poodle
3. the other poodle

...account for the reality than I am at this time in my life unable to pursue my natural inclination for a life in solitude.

I might soon look into investing in a sensory deprivation tank as the only means to save what is left of my sanity. Maybe it would help get rid of this pesky twitch, too.

Thanks to 3-Word Wednesday for the goad resulting in the creation of this vent.

Little June, Old June

How timely I find Sunday Scribblings' suggestion for this week:
Dear Past Me, Dear Future Me .

Dear Little June,

You don't know me yet, but in time you will. I am you almost fifty years from the time you're reading this! I know how afraid you are of so many things, but you know what? The fear that freezes you in your tracks now will make you courageous and strong.

I know that: It is true.

I know how you tremble at new things . . . remember when you thought you would be the only one in your class who never would be able to do the Australian crawl? Remember the night you went to bed and thought through how this arm moved and your head turned one way and then that arm, and your head turned the other way, and your legs kicked all the time? ...and the next morning at your swimming lesson, you did it!

You're going to have sad things happen to you that will be beyond your control. You will feel lost and alone. But from here I can see how, in time, you lifted your chin and figured out how to carry on.

I see how courageous you are, even if you don't yet know your strength.

Courage isn't not being afraid, you know. Courage is putting one foot in front of the other despite being so afraid that you tremble and cry. Your courage is going to be your Very Greatest Strength in life.

I love you, and I am very very proud of you.

Big June

*****************************************************

Dear Old June,

I wish I knew how you see me, with one foot poised to step into old age, and the other foot with the toe of its shoe still dragging in barely-attained adulthood. I hope you're looking at me and nodding and smiling, approving of my late attainment of the knowledge that my life is not in my hands, but my happiness is.

I hope you're a wise and wry funny old lady.

I have a feeling that you will look back at Little June and me and think of the last stanza of the Millay poem, "To A Young Girl":

For there came into my mind, as I watched you winking the tears down,

Laughing faces, blown from the west and the east,

Faces lovely and proud that I have prized and cherished;

Nor were the loveliest among them those that had wept the least.

Sometimes I think I can feel your comforting hand on my shoulder, telling me that I am okay, and that it will be all right. I know you're right: I've said the same to Little June. I've learned that all those things that I thought would bring the sky crashing down were simply temporary discomforts. I've learned so much, and only in the past few years.

I hope my acquisition of wisdom accelerates at the same pace as the seasons are beginning to pass. We aren't that far apart, you and I, after all, and if you're going to be a funny and wise old lady, I need to get a move on.

My most fervent hope is that you will be proud that I finally saw the worthiness of me, just as I am.

With love,

June, Aging Gratefully

Tragedy averted

The Divine Miss M has been uncomfortable in a nearly indefinable way for weeks. A lot of stretching as if she had a stomachache.... much-reduced appetite (although a butter paper to be licked is irresistible) ....and a great lessening of her joie de vivre (although a walk with Mom and her pack has set her bouncing and prancing along in her usual way).

We tested her for worms, found and got rid of roundworms. She seemed to feel better, and I tried to feed her up so she could gain back the weight she had lost.

A couple of weeks later, same ol' same ol'. Back to the doctor.

Got antibiotics and some medication to soothe her gut.

She seemed to feel better and then a couple of days ago, downhill again.

11:15 to 12:45 yesterday I was with her at the clinic. I was prepared to hear that her dining-out habits had caught up with her and that we would be finding pieces of deer bone in her innards.

I was prepared for a surgical necessity.

Tested for Lyme disease: negative.

X-rays: No bone fragments, but something that worried the vet.

It appeared either that the intestines were piled up on each other or there was a mass there just inside her lowest rib, where a full tummy would press on it.

The vet told me that I could wait until next Tuesday and have an ultrasound . . . and I could wait until her blood had gone to the lab to see if M was in good enough shape metabolically to withstand surgery.

I listened carefully and told the doctor to go ahead and do exploratory surgery . . . with the sobering understanding that if the mass had its teeth into other places enough that it could not be removed without too much peripheral damage for life, the doctor would call me and I would have to decide if I wanted M sewn back up and sent home . . . or euthanized on the table. I would never see my M alive again.

In the car on the way from the vet's back to the office, I was thinking about what my decision would be if the mass couldn't be removed. I was trying not to think about what her loss would mean to my life, but considering the situation as a problem to be solved. I had short thoughts (I couldn't stand long ones) of what a good life she's had with us, and how happy and doggy-fulfilled she has been. I had pretty much [intellectually] decided that a slow "managed" death would not be superior to euthanizing her. There was no happy solution except the one that happened.

The doctor found a 3"-5" mass inside Marly's small intestine. Lymph nodes not enlarged, and no apparent tendrils reaching into other parts of her intestine or her pancreas. It appears that the entire mass has been removed. Next week we'll learn more from the biopsy.

When the little dogs went out last night I had to put on shoes and coat and do M Duty. I depend absolutely on her good judgment and her faithfulness to her pack.

She's my little helper, my nanny dog, my buddy, my little girl.

The Divine Miss M is A Good Dog.

I'm glad that we get to keep her a while longer.

A public servant speaks

In response to Sunday Scribblings prompt, "Listen up because this is important!"

A few years ago Prince, an acquaintance of mine, and I held an email discussion about economy, government, political correctness, et al. I saved the email because I found it an interesting exchange of ideas with someone who is intelligent and advances his points cogently, not to mention passionately. I knew that his business was in a privately-held heavy industry company, so I knew how that colored his view.

This is part of what he wrote:

"Given that 'heavy' industry is the engine of our economy, I find it disturbing that jobs created in these businesses are so callously discarded. First, who decides what is and isn't acceptable? I would argue that the PC crowd is a very vocal minority. Second, if every community bans these politically incorrect industries, then how are the needs of society to be met? Every resource that we utilize comes from two (and only two) sources: 1) It is grown or 2) it is mined."

The reason it's on my mind today is that Prince is one of the Big Fish in the Small Pond in which I am employed, and he has twice voted to abolish my position.

Prince also has said that "government employees are a net loss to society" since any income we get is a handout from honest hard-working taxpayers, and any money we put back into the economy could just as easily go from his hand to the hardware store. My admiration for his ideas, with which I intellectually agree to an extent, is now colored by the emotions of fear and anger, and I am thinking over the idea of public service.

I live near our state capitol and an oft-repeated wry joke is that there are no state workers, only state employees. Until I was forty-two, I worked in private business. I worked for automobile dealerships, and insurance companies and agencies, and many of my private-industry working years were spent as a waitress in restaurants where there were no busboys, no dishwashers with their arms sunk deep in pots, no cleaning crew that came in after hours to vacuum. I know how hard it is to work in private industry. I remember hearing, in the 1990s, that the economic wave coming in this country would be in the service industries. It wasn't good news, but it turned out to be accurate, partially because of the truth of Prince's arguments.

I probably would have kept waitressing had I not broken my ankle, spent six months in a cast, and been unable to pick up my aging pace to get back into the rhythm of the job. I took a civil service exam and went to work in a state office doing data entry. My private industry work ethic served me well, and three years later I was working for the general counsel in the state agency.

During those three years I had moved to Small Pond, far away from my state job, and was hired by the municipal government, where I made the acquaintance of Prince.

In a 1997 speech, Reflections on the Role of Public Service, then Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, said,

"I know it is fashionable to decry government, but I don't think I would want to live in or under a government marked by mediocrity.
People often say to me, 'Just get government off my back.' They say that-until a child dies from eating a tainted hamburger, or the earth cracks open and wreaks chaos, or until they want a bridge built, or the education of their children improved, or their
country defended.
Just think what we depend on the government to do: to keep us safe in a dangerous world; to secure justice and domestic order; to maintain infrastructure and social services; to educate our children; to provide health care to a large segment of our population; and to solve a whole host of problems pressing upon us, such as drug abuse or the diminishing ozone layer.
I don't want second-rate people dealing with those problems. "

The principle of caveat emptor would seem to figure prominently in the logic of someone who disdains public service and public servants. If Prince's son were swimming in a neighbor's pool and if he were electrocuted because no inspector checked to see if the installation was in compliance with the state electrical code, I wonder if Prince would blame himself. But then, why would his kid swim in another's pool when the kid has an indoor Olympic size pool of his own?



Prince complied with the law by getting a permit to build the addition to his house. The cost of this project, he said, would be $10,000, and he paid the required application fee for a $10,000 project. It was a great deal for him, considering that his addition is a couple of thousand square feet, is enclosed by glass, has a roof that rolls back during good weather, two fireplaces and a wet bar. The assessor sees a $10,000 building project and looks no further in his assessment of Prince's property.
Prince has arranged for several acres adjacent to his village home to be forever wild. He will never be bothered by his neighbor's outdoor lights or hear their radios or hear children's skateboards bang-slapping on parking lot pavement because he has insulated himself from the zoning-law-free market development that he propounds.
Lee Hamilton, whom I'm beginning to see as my new hero, is quoted elsewhere (Why political virtue matters in the voting booth) as follows:

"Voters today might think of virtue in any number of ways: as moral probity, honesty, self-discipline, a sense of responsibility, and, of course, integrity. These are all qualities that citizens look for in their candidates, and understandably so. Yet the Founders had something even larger and more encompassing in mind when they talked about virtue. They were looking for a sense of civic self-sacrifice - the ability to overcome self-interest and act for the benefit of the broader community.
"There is nothing old-fashioned about 'virtue' when seen in that light. Our Republic functions best when it generates political leaders who are capable of setting aside their own desires for power or partisan domination or pecuniary self-interest. It suffers when our politicians are incapable of doing so."

So.
We have a man who lies to avoid paying his fair share toward the support of his community, and we have a woman whose paycheck and job performance are public record, both of which have lately been hung on the community clothesline for wide and lengthy viewing.

Part of the earlier-quoted email exchange included this from Prince:

"I believe strongly that those who can must help those who can't. That does not mean that someone physically and mentally capable of working has the right to sit on their lazy ass, drinking beer, procreating with another lazy SOB breeding other lazy SOB's on mine or any other taxpayers' nickel."

A public servant’s job might or might not consist of moving piles of rocks from one place to another all day. A public servant’s job is to be available when the public needs him. Sometimes many people need him for several days in a row. Sometimes nobody needs him but they know where to find him. I am "physically and mentally capable of working," but Prince wants my income to go away. He disdains unemployed people, yet he advocates my unemployment. Do I not have the same right as he to honor my obligations to my family, my creditors, and my community by remaining employed?

Prince's income derives from state contracts. I pay the state taxes that pay the man who wants me unemployed. I feel unfortunate that I, his employer, cannot affect his income in as direct a way as he can affect mine.

Late winter evening

We're going to have another six weeks of uncomfortable weather here. Even when daffodils are blooming in the valley at the bottom of our hill, up here we still need to look carefully for the first green leaf-haze in the trees.

Today we're buffeted by a storm that is more wind than snow, but there's enough of both for the police to have blocked the interstate eastbound beyond my home exit.

I have just time enough to get the soapstone stove heated through and then I'll turn it down and turn myself back toward work for an evening meeting. It would be a good night to curl up with a book and listen to the wind howling around the eaves, and I will do that as soon as I get home again.

I'll enjoy that coziness more now than I would have a week ago: a few days ago I heard and saw the first redwing blackbird of the season.

New Anger is Killing Civil Discourse

Image copied from The Other Me

Years ago, a passionate and intelligent dear friend railed against our coworkers who would not express any political opinion; she believed that everybody should have an opinion. It was hard for me then, and it's impossible for me now, to argue against that point. What frustrated me then and still rubs my fur the wrong way, is not that people don't have opinions; it is that some people form opinions based on intentionally limited information and express the results with vitriol.

Peter Wood, in A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, according to reviews I have read (I had not heard of the book until this morning, although it was published a couple of years ago) describes such expression as New Anger. Stanley Kurtz' review of the book says, "America's New Anger exchanges the modest heroism of Gary Cooper's Sargent York for something much closer to the Incredible Hulk." Another review (sorry, I didn't save the particular link, but it's a common sentiment among the book's reviewers) says that New Anger makes people feel that if they are Angry, they are Important.

I'm tired of New Anger. It wears me out.
I'd be grateful for a little bit of informed and civil Old Anger.