Author: janpriddyoregon

ARE WE DOING ANYTHING IMPORTANT?

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This is a repost from my old blog, QUIET MINDS, in May 4, 2014. Issues with attendance have blown up recently, according to friends still in the classroom.

My elementary school friend Ann could not play with me when her father was home because he was a merchant seaman and gone for months at a time. On the day he came home, the family stayed together. I don’t recall Ann skipping school to extend this togetherness. I just recall that she wouldn’t come to my house and I couldn’t come play at her house when he first got home.

While my peers learned the alphabet song in First Grade I was sick at home. Was it in Fourth Grade that I had the flu for a week and missed learning how to count in Spanish? I eventually learned my ABCs, but I’m embarrassed to admit that of all the children at Echo Lake Elementary, I might be the only one who finally learned uno dos tres…  in college. 

I remember how hard it was to catch back up when I’d been absent. In retrospect, I realize I was lucky. My mother made me go to school. I was bullied and teased and sometimes lazy and prone to tonsillitis and chest colds and procrastination, but my mother never allowed me to make a habit of being absent. Too many missed days meant I would have no idea what was going on when I got back to school. A day here or there, a week when I was really sick were allowed, but she ignored my fake illnesses. My mother would look at me as I whined about not feeling well. “Do you have a temperature?” Usually I was shoved off to school.

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COWBOY MYTHOLOGY

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Since childhood I have read editorials and op-ed pieces on both sides of the political spectrum. Like conservative David Brooks of The New York Times once did, I also read William F. Buckley. As a result, I read newspaper pieces that make me a little crazy sometimes.

This morning David Brooks posted “How Trump Will Fail”. I’m glad to read his admission that Trump’s “ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.”

Denali, the highest mountain peak in north America at 20,310 feet (6,190 m). It was named Denali for centuries before a gold prospector named it after a politician in 1896. Alaska fought for decades to return the U.S. name back to what it had been (and remained in Alaska). Image in the Public Domain from Wikipedia: “The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain have for centuries referred to the peak as Dinale or Denali. The name is based on a Koyukon word for ‘high’ or ‘tall’. During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was Bolshaya Gora (Russian: Большая Гора; bolshaya ‘big’; gora ‘mountain’), which is the Russian translation of Denali. It was briefly called Densmore’s Mountain in the late 1880s and early 1890s after Frank Densmore, [another] gold prospector who was the first non-native Alaskan to reach the base of the mountain.

I laughed. Well, of course I did! But then all too soon, Brooks couldn’t help but unwittingly slip into fiction. I appreciate cowboy mythology as much as the next person, but let’s not mistake it for history.

I’m glad Brooks once had a Junior year history text*, but he might want to have another read. He makes this claim: “It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones.”

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AGING IN PLACE

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Zora Neale Hurston shaved ten years off her age early in her life, at least partly because circumstances made her entry into college late and she was embarrassed to be a decade older than her freshman peers. But she was also a woman who lived in a society used to women denying their age. She got away with her lie until long after she died.

THE SUN HAS SET, BUT WE’RE NOT NEARLY DONE.
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TIRED

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Twenty-twenty-four was a great year for finding my way in editing and understanding my own work on the page.

A story, two reviews, and a novel found homes. All of them needed revision after acceptance. It’s the way things work in publishing. I revised. I will be asked to approve edits on that short story. I’ll manage.

Seven drafts of the novel alone. I am so very tired of revision that I wrote in my secret revised 2025 Resolutions not to write or work on any fiction this entire year. Nothing. Make a quilt or knit a sweater or weave, I promised. Do all those things. Blog. Send emails. No work on fiction. Don’t try to revise anything old. Don’t look for anything new to write. No fiction for the duration! Just a month before, my goal had been to complete a new and polished draft of A SINGLE FACT, and now I can’t bear to think of doing that.

This is what I should be working on: something with these glorious greens and violets, or the Coral Sea warp, or the pink-striped sweater…
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SHARING

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David Brooks, as is typical, almost gets the point: “Poverty has been the norm through most of human history,” he wrote in The New York Times a few days ago. “

The question is not ‘Why is there poverty?’ but ‘Why is there wealth?’”

Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch with dancers and singers. Kwakwaka’wakw people in a wedding ceremony, bride in centre. Photo taken by Edward Curtis, 1914. Film footage of this same event was used in Curtis’ feature film In the Land of the Head Hunters [also called In the Land of War Canoes]. This image is in the public domain. Note: The film itself is infamous for inaccuracies. “Some aspects of the film do have documentary accuracy: the artwork, the ceremonial dances, the clothing, the architecture of the buildings, and the construction of the dugout, or a war canoe reflected Kwakwaka’wakw culture. Other aspects of the film were based on the Kwakwaka’wakw’s orally transmitted traditions or on aspects of other neighboring cultures. The film also accurately portrays Kwakwaka’wakw rituals that were, at the time, prohibited by Canada’s potlatch prohibition, enacted in 1884 and not rescinded until 1951.”
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2025 new year

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This is one of my favorite photos. It’s my desktop image just now.

Gary caught me working on this and when I told him it was a new blog post, he said, “Finally!” I had “resolutions” for 2024. Some of those plans fell apart and some went better than I dared hope and shifted my goals. Toward the end of the year I began making plans for 2025. Those have shifted too.

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AN ORDINARY PERSON

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My husband and I used to vote in person. After work, Gary and I would drive the curving Highway 101 north in the dark, six miles to the Chamber of Commerce or the City Hall or the Presbyterian church in Cannon Beach to vote. The location varied, the poll workers did not. Older women always worked the polls. We did this in the evening after my husband finished work in Tillamook County, which meant we arrived at the polling station just before eight, near the end of the day. 

I have taken a thousand photos, framed just like this.
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WHAT we think WE KNOW

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The conversation turned to Kurt Cobain, and someone claimed Cobain’s wife killed him like a “typical woman” does. He said it at least twice. Beside me, my husband says he thought, uh-oh.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The deadliest place for women is at home and 140 women and girls on average were killed by an intimate partner or family member per day last year, two U.N. agencies reported Monday.

Globally, an intimate partner or family member was responsible for the deaths of approximately 51,100 women and girls during 2023, an increase from an estimated 48,800 victims in 2022, UN Women and the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said. …

By contrast, the vast majority of male homicides take place outside homes and families, it said.

But set aside murder for a moment and consider that the comment by my friend suggests that women’s typical behavior is murderous when angry, that unlike men, this cruelty(?) or destructive tendency(?) is uniquely or particularly female. That it’s typical. Well.

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WRITING DOWN THE DAYS

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Consider this post my attempt to park the bike and watch the water.

I am nearly two thirds through NaNo month, and I have logged 100k words on the site. This was my 7th NaNo reaching fifty thousand words. I have written entire novels of 75k during NaNo in past years, usually beginning with a short story and then forging on.

When I first saw her on our way north, I disapproved. Surely, an electric bike was unnecessary on the flat sand. Surely, this young woman didn’t need electric-powered assistance, and it couldn’t be doing the bike any good. But on our way home there she was watching the waves, her bike parked well up on the shore. The next day, she was walking.
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