This is not a cheery post. I am going to rant about health care. A bit. You don’t want to read my complaints. It’s what old people do, complain about their health. Except I’m not going to complain about my health; this is about my health care. In the mean time, enjoy the herons on the shore.
Our Zora used to lick the butter. If we left it uncovered we’d come down in the morning to find tiny grooves in butter from her cat tongue.
When Gary or I confront something neither of us is willing to admit we did, we say, “The cat did it.” It is a none-too-subtle admission of fault. Sometimes we don’t remember breaking a glass (nearly always Gary) or losing track of something (mostly me), or which of us cut a sandwich on the baking cabinet (me again), or we’d like to blame our children or housebreakers. It was me or it was Gary who did whatever it was because we are the only two living in our house. But even when we are certain who “done it”, we might say: The cat did it. Mind you, we were saying this when we had one or the other cat, and we’ve not stopped saying it merely because our last cat left the planet some years ago. We could have blamed our dog Yeti, but she would have been offended. The cats did not care.
If I stood close to the window of my classroom and looked hard west, I saw the estuary and beyond was the Pacific Ocean. The waves seemed to march endlessly to shore, but after the Alaska earthquake in 1964, a friend of mine saw water draw back below any low tide he’d ever seen, the seabed exposed before the tsunami pushed east and took out bridges and houses.
The last “great quake” in the Cascadia subduction zone, a magnitude of at least 9, took place more than three hundred years ago. It’s likely that most every human soul on what would later be called the Oregon coast drowned.
Continue readingI pledge on Goodreads to read 52 books each year but generally read more. (I actually read 33 from TNYT list, but I didn’t like them all.) My list of “bests” is almost entirely different.
For years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.
“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”
—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)
I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.
All sympathy with their youngest daughter.
Okay, “hate” is too strong. We have mixed feelings for a holiday we both loved as kids. Now we are aware of dangers to our health, sleep, and wildlife. We have legitimate concerns about injuries and the risk to property. We won’t even pretend that the people making all this noise care what they are doing or know how to do it safely.
Gary set up a decoy fort on the sand out front (we don’t go out on the 4th anymore) in order to, hopefully, discourage tourists from building a fire against a new huge drift log. (It’s illegal to burn drift logs, illegal to burn a fire bigger than a beach chair, and illegal to leave a fire unattended, but that doesn’t stop it happening.) This morning the robins sang, the seagulls returned, and we hope our local bats are okay.
&PRIDE Press 