Month: June 2020

HALFWAY

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments
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Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.

Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.

We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.

At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.

The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.

In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.

Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .

One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.

My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh

Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.

This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?

I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.

Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.

This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.

At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.

I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.

The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.

There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.

My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.

We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.

How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?

 

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SPEAKING UP

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

from 27 June 2020, The New York Times:

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“It’s crazy. I’ve never been to a protest before — like, ever. I got inspired by what people were doing all across America, but there was no protest in Nashville at the time. I was like, why isn’t Tennessee doing anything? Why are they silent?”—Zee Thomas Continue reading →

MASK

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There are always left-behind poop bags on the shore. And while I am here, there is a lot of recent talk about the toilet plume. Consider that anything you can smell is the result of molecules of rose petals or vomit or yeast or alcohol or whatever inside your nose. That’s the only way you can smell it—it’s inside your nose.

All persons in my county must be masked when visiting any indoor public space, beginning 1 July 2020. The county itself requested this. As a friend said to me on the phone: we’re a tourist economy and people come here from everywhere. We need some protection.

from NPR “Masks And The Outdoor Exerciser: Advice For Runners, Bikers, Walkers, Hikers”:

When outdoors: “experts I spoke to all said wearing a mask is a good thing. Now you probably don’t think you have the coronavirus if you feel good enough to exercise. But some people are asymptomatic – they never show symptoms – or presymptomatic – sick but not yet feeling it. Continue reading →

PUBLIC ACCESS

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If it didn’t weigh hundreds of pounds, we’d have dragged this rope home. It has been in water a long time, is several inches across and perhaps ten or more meters in length, heavy with water, and loaded with tiny gooseneck barnacles.

Today is the 25th of June and I am struggling to keep track of time, especially because July Fourth is coming up fast. For most of my life payday was the 25th because I worked for a local public school district from 1979 to 2019 . . . or was that 2018? Everything, especially time, is becoming fluid and muddled. I seek markers for passage of time. Today is a Thursday and alternate Thursdays we have garbage pick-up. Today is Trash Day.

As a Thursday, today is also a Going-Out day where we head out for groceries in the nearest grocery store. Once a month we go further afield to Costco and Natural Grocers and Fred Meyer. We mask except on our beach walks where we try to keep fifty feet from others. Not all locals or businesses respect recommendations about distancing and masking, but we do. We planned to go to another food store today, but they do not mask their counter-help.  Continue reading →

DEAR RAT

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Our cat Leakey was named for the anthropologist. She arrived on our doorstep literally half-starved and Gary saw her first. When I got home, I picked her up and she purred like a motor boat. “Don’t touch it, don’t pick it up!” Gary said over and over, but who had fed her the can of tuna? I brought her into the house. She had fishhook claws and liked to tease the dog.

The other day when we came home from our morning walk, Gary did what he generally does and walked around the house. Just in case. That day he found a dead rat on the north side concrete walkway. No blood, no wound, an apparently sleek and healthy but certainly dead rat.

Continue reading →

HOPELINGS

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

header+logo+2Bracken, the online journal from Washington, believes in hope to get us all by through with “love of the woods and its shadows.”

It is a beautiful magazine I’ve already recommended. Begin with Bracken’s main page because just now you do not want to miss another look at Amanda Greive’s art, and then click on “Coronavirus Hopelings” for a series of lovely offerings. I sincerely recommend the short piece from yesterday, called “Yellowing.” I’m there too.

P.S. I am a little embarrassed to ask, but I would be grateful if you “liked” my photo essay at Hopelings.

FATHER OF MINE

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Gary “being silly” a couple years ago when he still had four hats.

My own father, Arthur Henry Priddy, kept “salmon” (orange) three by five cards in the breast pocket of his shirts and he wrote with a striped green fountain pen in blue-black ink. When I asked him questions as a child he always knew the answers. When I wanted to know about trade in the Minoan empire, he pulled out one of the cards and his pen and described their form with a few graceful sweeps of that coveted pen. He told me that Columbus did not discover America and that, in fact, he had not even been the first European to reach its shores. On separate cards he drew the vessels used by Chinese, Portuguese, and Viking explorers and fisherfolk. He always answered my questions. Sometimes he took a very long time answering and I was almost sorry I asked, but the answers always came.

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Our older son with his daughter.

My father had been a small, slender boy in a time of Clark Gable shoulders. He was an only child and when his parents divorced, he was raised in a household of three women—mother, aunt, and grandmother. Throughout his life he honored women, but aspired to the masculine pursuits available to his frame. He learned to target shoot and play chess, fly fish and take photographs. He set a record swimming the butterfly, played water polo, and raced bicycles in Los Angeles. He joined the Army in 1942, earned a purple cross and liberated a German concentration camp. He worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries until arthritis stopped him. Over the years he lost his childhood faith and many of his prejudices as he placed his life into the hands of people he’d been raised to distrust.

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Our younger son with his two.

When the arthritis began, my father hiked the Olympics alone or with his son. He slowed but kept moving, determined to find a way out of the pain. The jogs on the beach ended and the quick flip from prone to standing that made his children squeal with delight. He paced himself and dealt with the setbacks as they occurred. He might spend four days backpacking the High Divide and then pay for it with crippling pain. He might hike for a week, rest, and find he could not walk at all.

Most often, as the rheumatoid arthritis consumed him, he awakened resentfully, late, each stir in his narrow bed a difficulty. He felt the grind of bones on edge and he did not move without purpose, no wild thrashing in his sleep or cat stretches in the morning. He wore familiar clothing and slippers that knew the twists of his body. He sat on the edge of his bed and smoked Camels cigarettes and listened to the radio. He had surgeries to remove spurs of calcium but over the years illness robbed him blind, literally. But it was cigarettes and cancer that took him. 

After two radiation treatments he refused to have tubes or a hospital gown, but only a sheet. The oncology nurse took my arm outside his door and told me he was dying. “If he’s trying to leave us, we don’t want to call him back.” She stopped another nurse from turning him and the blood cart from taking tests, until she could find a doctor to cancel them. She darkened the room, drew the curtain halfway to shelter him from the hall, and held my hand for moment. 

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Daddy while at UC Berkeley in the 40s.

My father’s ashes were mailed to me in a little cardboard box and I placed them behind a door in my desk until the other members of my family were ready to deal with them. But one day I opened the door and took out the box, looked at the postmark and realized years had passed. My father had asked that his ashes be scattered on a rock in the ocean in front of my Oregon home, but I would wait no longer for my family to hire a plane and so one morning my husband and young sons and I walked down the beach and let the water take his ashes to the rock in the sea. 

I did not cry that day. I had not cried on the day he died, or even on the day, some time before his heart stopped, when I knew he was already gone. But sometimes, even so many years later, I want to ask him a question, and I imagine his fingers holding a green fountain pen, drawing sailing ships on three by five cards, and the tears come. 

Thank you to good fathers everywhere today and tomorrow and the days after that.

 

 

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Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency

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Melissa HartHer mother’s “writing represented both financial and emotional survival. For money, she edited a small newspaper and freelanced articles. For solace, she wrote stories at dawn. Some were published, and some weren’t. Publishing wasn’t the point.”

Melissa Hart is the author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019).

Go here to read the whole of it: Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency