An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
Eagles are doing well. We see the mated pair that live on the cape nearly every morning.
Gary complained I had not posted. It is barely raining a little drizzle, there is sand, and we will have our walk. Lately, we find we cannot get more than a mile north because Shark Creek’s runoff is too high for us to cross, but we will go out as soon as there is light. Gary is dressing in the dark, and I will have a last sip of coffee. Neither of us have yet been vaccinated and we miss our family.
In the mean time, like so many others, we listen to music and hope for comfort, conversation, and more communal days.
Today is a bread-baking day. I will make two loaves and a few savory rolls, I think. Usually I start first thing in the morning in order to have bread for lunch, but today I am still winding a warp and typing away.
Pussywillows are out but the place where I have been picking them the last few years was pruned back hard last fall. There are other places.
The daffodils are in bloom too. In our yard, “February Gold” is a small, early variety. They are only about eight inches tall and ours have been blooming their fool heads off for most of the month. The escalonia has given up its last carmine blooms, but rosemary is all over tiny blue-violet flowers, the rhubarb is coming up, and the primroses never stopped.
Waves were sweeping up over a hundred feet across the sand to break finally in the basalt rock. Every few minutes a wave will rush in, putting the place where that child is walking several feet under water.
We like to be among the first out on the beach. Sometimes in summer than means walking out by 6am. This week low tide is after noon and we began our morning walk on the road, the last half mile north on the rocky shore and then home. We note how the sand moves, the gravel shifts into rolls and then is buried under larger stones, the new and broader rivulets of runoff, the places where shoreline vegetation is undermined, and where high banks have failed entirely this winter in the unrelenting wet.
“Of course, resilience matters. But given the dearth of practical support, ‘we need to understand that emotional resilience might not be enough,’ said Brian Hughes, a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, who specializes in the psychology of stress and crisis.”—from the In Her Words series of The New York Times, 18 February 2021 by Corinne Purtill
Purtill and Hughes are not talking about writing at all, but genuine hardship. Pandemic, hunger, unpaid bills. All I have to complain of just now is disappointment. A story rejection arrived via email the other day. I’d had hopes for the particular story and for publication in this particular journal, but no. I should be used to this by now. I tried taking it as a matter of course, but I really wanted to crawl under the bed and suck dust bunnies.
Until last March, Gary and I picked up trash during our daily walks. In 2018 and 2019 we gathered about a ton of garbage, mostly tiny pieces or broken plastic and bottle caps, but also entire bottles, fishing tackle, toothbrushes, take-out containers, candy wrappers, toys, commercial and sport fishing gear, lengths of plastic rope a few inches or many yards long, and as you might guess from the photo below, polystyrene foam. We both seem to collect.
Yes, that’s just the way the beach foam was. Gary told me I should take a photo.
From romance to plastic trash to how we can all be in this together. I’ll try to explain.
When I was a graduate student studying literature, I first heard the theory that romantic love was an invention of European novelists. People felt lust and loyalty, but actual love between two people—sexual and romantic love—was a figment of playwrights’ imagination. (It’s a silly theory.) Canadian psychologist Nathaniel Brandon claims that “in primitive cultures the idea of romantic love did not exist at all.” Even Margaret Mead declared: “Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa.” Freemason Lewis H. Morgan proposed the concept that marriage was the earliest human domestic institution but also judged “the passion of love was unknown among the barbarians. They are below the sentiment, which is the offspring of civilization and super added refinement of love was unknown among the barbarians.”
[Gary argues that most of what we have assumed about physical and cultural anthropology and archeology has been turned on its head in this century.]
However, a few decades ago this idea that romance was an invention of Western culture was taken seriously enough by an anthropologist that he decided to construct a research project. He used the archetypal story of star-crossed lovers—two people who abandon convention and family in order to be together. We might argue that such passion does not necessarily lead to a golden anniversary. Even Shakespeare, after all, was poking holes in the relationship between R & J. Nevertheless, the star-crossed lover story is not merely the story of lust or friendship, but of a passionate devotion that creates more than inconvenience, where two people defy their community, faith, and family to be together. He considered such stories might provide a warning, but their existence also demonstrated emotions that most of us would not hesitate to describe as romantic love. He searched for traditional stories and folktales from all over the world. Surprise! The star-crossed lovers story exists everywhere. In ancient Greece and the forests of Brazil and Madagascar and India, China, Europe, the Middle East, and the South Seas, such traditional stories exist everywhere. Individuals do fall in love and occasionally make enormous sacrifices, even of their lives, in order to be together. They fall in love and sacrifice for their devotion. The story exists in non-literate and literate cultures in every inhabited continent and within island cultures all around the world, even in cultures that otherwise seem to have no “romantic” tradition.
It’s possible that people lied. Maybe anthropologists, like everyone, found what they wanted and expected to find. More likely, love exists.
We are human beings and part of our shared humanity is that some stories persist in all cultures, in every corner of the world, and throughout time. Like the hero’s journey, the star-crossed lovers is likely a universal narrative. Lovers who defy convention and are willing to sacrifice safety and comfort in order to be together might be one of them.
Did I need an anthropologist to prove that to me? No, I actually did not. It is what I want and expect to find is true. It is Eurocentric hubris that inspired some foolish English-speaking academic to claim that romance was invented in Northern Europe. It is shallow to assume that the only way couples stay together is reproduction, envy, jealousy, rivalry, habit, boredom, or convention. Romance lives!
So. Take-out food.
“Few of us are equipped or inclined to cook three meals a day for ourselves.”
—Tom Sietsema, food critic for The Washington Post
Tom Sietsema wrote about his discovery that the take-out food he was eating during the pandemic creates a lot of trash. He was shocked, shocked to discover how much plastic his food required.
The article was titled “All my takeout has delivered a mountain of trash. So I asked experts how to minimize it.” Apparently he had not noticed how much trash his occupation as a food critic created until he was personally responsible for disposing of it. “For three weeks this summer, I saved every scrap of takeout packaging… The cups from cold-brew breaks and the cartons from sushi and burrito runs that used to be tossed out at the office and forgotten about are now our responsibility, up close and personal — in our faces. The problem is literally knocking at our door. We have to answer it.” (I want to know where he found grass to spread out his trash in Manhattan?)
How he had not known this already?
Soda and milk products came in glass when I was a girl. But the oil industry looked for a larger market and chose plastics, spending millions to convince us of a lie—that plastic was safe, cheap, and recyclable. Ultimately it is none of those things. The lesson here? Distrust the profit motive?
People were particularly irritated by this line: “Few of us are equipped or inclined to cook three meals a day for ourselves.” Commenters pointed out that preparing three meals was exactly what they did every day. We do not need to actually cook three meals because what about cold cereal and leftovers? A survey conducted in 2019 found that only 6% of Americans eat out daily. Gallup found that dining habits have been stable between 2003 and 2016 and close to 40% of those surveyed had not eaten out for even one meal in the previous week. Apparently even Sietsema’s readers don’t all eat the way he does. We should use containers made of materials that break down completely and quickly, he says. We should use our own flatware and reusable shopping bags.
Romantic love and plastic take-out containers—we assume that others’ habits and passions are just like ours. Maybe a literary critic had a bad break-up that lead to his cynicism about romantic love. A food critic assumed most everyone ate the way he does. We assume that what we do and value and desire is the same for everyone.
When I was in college, all shopping bags were still paper and the world did not come to a screaming halt because there were no plastic bags. The produce at Safeway was not continually misted with water and I put my veggies in paper bags. Milk only came in glass or waxed paper cartons. And in 1973, I carried my groceries home in a cotton canvas shopping bag imprinted with “Save a Tree.” I used that bag for years.
Today is Valentine’s Day and my husband is downstairs making coffee as I type. How we care for and feel about one another is not like anyone else. But love and passion, friendship and simple affection, loyalty and kindness, compassion and decency are all human emotions. We are all capable of changing our minds. We are all capable of fairness and altruism. We can figure things out. Maybe we fail sometimes. Perhaps all those good things are not functioning fully all the time or for everyone. But our best can be very fine indeed. We do not need to become a culture of outrage. Anger can drive needed change, but as a steady diet, love is healthier.
Take it easy on yourself today. Everyone needs a break sometimes. The human heart is vast; it contains multitudes.
Yeah, we knew it was coming. Despite the videos, the creepy calling after Nancy, the threats and racist catcalls that began years ago. Despite the ridicule of a disabled reporter, the ridicule of a Gold Star family, the infidelity during three marriages, the threats and bullying, we had every right to expect Congress, the Republicans in Congress to do the right thing. Gary likes to say: Didn’t they ever go to Sunday School?
Apparently all they learned was they were chosen.
Against the courage of Officer Goodman are the doors and windows broken, the officers who were broken, the oaths of office broken, the trust broken. The news has reported from the beginning that Republicans in Congress would never vote to convict. And those national media outlets were correct. Republicans in Congress chose party and power over people, party and power over the Constitution they swore to defend, party and power over morality and justice. It is unconscionable. The next time someone complains about partisan politics, look right.
To paraphrase Fiddler on the Roof:
"Rabbi, if there's a blessing for everything, is there a blessing for Trump?"
"Of course. May the good Lord bless and keep Trump . . . far away from us."
Or to quote Jesus Christ Superstar: "Could we start again, please?"
Some deep housecleaning is called for. As The New York Times reports:
“Forty-three Republicans voted to acquit Mr. Trump of inciting an insurrection against the United States—more than enough to prevent the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. Mr. Trump was found not guilty, a verdict he immediately celebrated.
“And yet seven Republicans voted to convict him, making this by far the most bipartisan impeachment effort in American history. It is worth remembering that until a year ago, when Mr. Romney cast the lone Republican ‘guilty’ vote in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, no senators had ever voted to convict a president from their own party.”
“Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, an impeachment manager, put it bluntly: ‘If we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past. The past will become our future,’ she said in closing arguments. ‘Senators, we are in a dialogue with history.’ ”
“ ‘The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,’ Mr. McConnell said, ‘and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet earth.’ ”
Mitch McConnell voted to acquit. History will judge their failure.
We’ve been talking about moving. To be candid, we’ve talked about moving on and off ever since we moved to my family’s home on the Oregon coast in 1979. We missed family and friends. Now it’s the non-stop stream of tourists in a residential neighborhood that used to house people who actually lived here. The truth is, however, that we like the climate, the weather, and our permanent neighbors. We raised our children here, wetsuits dripping over the tub. They moved off but we stayed. We love our daily walks on the shore, even when our fingers and toes go numb in winter. We are accustomed to the continual roar of ocean and water shifting stone. We are used to silence.
We are used to seeing sky, to watching the storms roll in, the sea go high, the gulls and black oystercatchers and broken shells in the rocks. We enjoy finding the shoreline changed every day. This past year has not been easy for most people. The weather alone has been, as they say, interesting.
You can see the two fallen-over trees on the cape are still hanging on. So are we.Continue reading →
Since the beginning of the pandemic, and setting aside art purchases, our most expensive budgetary item for the past year has been food. This has been the case throughout most of human history. Food first, but the animals and manner of raising crops changed dramatically. We have eaten organic for years just like my grandparents would have. We prefer fresh or frozen food, strong flavors, and I am a good cook willing to try things.
I began baking bread as a child with my mother. I baked bread in college even as a full time student and working 18-30 hours a week. My studio classes did not meet on Fridays and I usually had that day off. I have always baked bread on occasion, but in the past year I bake weekly, usually sourdough, half whole wheat flour, and no sugar in my bread at all. It takes most of the day to bake sourdough, though less than an hour of actual work. The house smells of healthy yeast and the loaves that come out of the oven are tastier than anything I could buy. It is even convenient to bake it.
Americans eat badly because we have failed to start at the beginning by teaching children to cook.
My most recent loaves just out of the oven: Sourdough raisin bread made with AP, whole wheat and einkorn flours, eggs, salt, and sunflower oil.
Many women of my generation were resistant to learning to cook because they were understandably resistant to a sexist notion of a housewife’s destiny. They saw cooking and cleaning as Erma Bombeck did, as a trap for women. My own mother loved Bombeck’s humor (If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? etc.), but she knew how to do all those chores of canning and cooking and baking bread. She didn’t like doing any of them.
I laid different shawls/scarves out on the bed yesterday afternoon, and then another row on the cedar chest (above), but already the light was too dim in this north and east facing bedroom. Ten stretch out full length over the bed, and another eight are folded at the foot. The photos are from this morning. Still not much light, but I’ve made no attempt to “correct” anything as the colors look accurate on my screen. (The greens suffered a bit.)
&PRIDE Press 