I was reading an article about why older people need more friends and suggestions about how to find them (do something different, take up a hobby or join a club) when a woman we met on the beach a couple of times this week and chatted to, rang our garage doorbell and offered her contact information.
Life is wonderful that way sometimes. Full up with wonder.
When I was showing dogs back in the 1970s, we had an unpopular bloodline, an unpopular “type” of Afghan Hound. Our dogs were descended from early imports out of Afghanistan and specifically from a Dutch kennel, van de Orange Menage of Eta Pauptit who was a horsewoman to start with. She cared about soundness. She insisted that her dogs be functional. Their feet and frame, the musculature and minds of dogs from the vdOM kennel were consistently tough. They were smart during a period when Afghans were being bred to be flashy. Sturdy when during a period where breeders were choosing fine bones and narrow heads, what a local breeder bragged was “swan”-like.
Our dogs were strong.
I took guitar lessons in my teens, and that was a long time ago. The late 60s. I still have the guitar, an unusually sweet Aria nylon-string that I haven’t played in fifty years. Gary cares for it. My lessons from Cathy Mack at Shoreline Music focussed on Childe ballads that Joan Baez was singing. I could finger-pick along with singing “The Trees They Do Grow High” and “The Cherry Tree Carole.” Anyone could play “the House of the Rising Sun” and pretty much every garage band of the day covered that one, though it really only made sense with a woman singing it.
Somehow, that brings me to “Jolene.”
I witnessed a baby seal playing in a tide pool. I was too close when it came to the surface from swimming in forward rolls. I backed away fast as I could. Mamma would be out fishing. A while back a woman refused to put her dog on leash. The dog chased a baby seal and I couldn’t stop it. There are federal laws protecting marine mammals from any direct or indirect interference —“including harassment, hunting, capturing, collecting, or killing”. “You’re too close if an animal starts to stare, fidget, or flee into the water. Even if you don’t see these reactions, keep yourself and your pets at least 50 yards away (1/2 a football field). Keep your dog on a leash around seals or sea lions to prevent bites to the dog and the seals or sea lions. And never feed or attempt to feed a seal or sea lion—it’s harmful and illegal.”
During my next-to-lastone of my MFA residencies an Advisor commented, to me and another student, that he thought people who believed in the Bible were “stupid”. Though I am not a literal believer, I was both shocked and offended. “It is a beautiful and important book,” I think I said, though this was seventeen years ago, “it contains wisdom. Have you even read it?” Religions always reflect wisdom, definitions of right and wrong, warnings and promises. There is ample evidence that most people and in all times have believed in truths beyond themselves and personal experience. It is not the only reason most of the characters in my novel are clearly people of faith.
When I was a girl and at least into my teens the conventional wisdom and current science contended that only “man is the toolmaker” and this capacity distinguishes human being from the “lower animals.”
That definition changed. Wikipedia: “Nearly all chimpanzee populations have been recorded using tools, modifying sticks, rocks, grass and leaves and using them for hunting and acquiring honey, termites, ants, nuts and water.” Awareness of that toolmaking ability among chimpanzees was demonstrated in work of primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, a fact Wikipedia notably fails to note. She corrected what we thought we knew about humanity.
Continue readingI had thought I would stop running after last year’s Bridge run—a 10k over the Columbia River. But even before I completed that run, slower than I’d hoped, I knew I wouldn’t stop. I love running and I’ve missed it terribly in the past when injury kept me walking. Then, after nearly four years of perfect health, Gary and I went to a movie in a theater last month and caught Covid. Coming back has been tough. So I began to wonder if quitting was coming up on me, like it or not.
I got my regular 2-mile Friday run last week in Portland. More than half that run is downhill, but though my route varies it generally begins and ends on an uphill slope. That was the second time a homeless Black man has paused long enough to tell me “good job!” He said he’d run marathons and missed running but had injured out and most recently been told he would be able to run again. I hope he does.
The poet William Stafford made a 3-mile run part of his morning writing routine. He’d run, come home to write, including an aphorism and a new poem every morning, and then use the rest of the day to revise and do whatever we people do all day. I used to hold out his example to myself. Stafford didn’t write a good poem every day of the year, but by the end he had 365 drafts to choose from and the odds were in his favor that he’d find good ones worth revising. It’s one reason he was as productive as he was with 20,000 words of daily writing and a truly astonishing list of publications. Wikipedia: “The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, ‘ “You don’t have to / prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready / for what God sends.” ‘ ” Have a look at his book about writing, Writing the Australian Crawl. I have it somewhere here or there and first read it in 1990, three years before his death, which reminds we that I wasn’t yet running in those days.
Running is easier than waiting, and right now I am waiting to hear about my novel submissions. I reordered and revised that novel three weeks ago, six years on since I began writing it. I informed two presses that I had a new and better draft to share. One promptly wrote back: Yes, please! Then I withdrew all the submissions I could find a way to withdraw. A handful are still out there. I have a half dozen presses on my to-submit list when they open to submissions. One of those opens in January of 2025 and it is a favorite small press from way back. Another closed to submissions for this entire year and I don’t know when or if they will reopen next year. A friend in Seattle is a few months behind me in the same process.
It all takes time.
On April 1st, a crew is coming to tear out a wall of our bedroom condo as part of the process of repiping our entire building. The work won’t be completed before summer. In the mean time I should be knitting but I have recently spent hours completing the “Dusk” warp in two distinctive shawls.
The truth is, I do not want to sell my family home on the coast. The truth is, this would feel like the failure of a lifetime.
Depending on when they went to school, elementary teachers were taught different methods of teaching reading. The approach they choose in their classrooms and the terminology defining it keeps changing. They are given a package to teach, proscribed minutes to devote to this effort, and schools often pay a lot of money to provide direction in the manner and method of delivering reading instruction. Every new packaging of education receives a new name. Often the new name describes something that’s been common practice in the past.
I used to call the affection education academics have for recreating terminology every few years “educationalese.” I created a satirical glossary as part of my term project for an Ed Psych class decades ago. [Persuasive writing has had several names over the years: persuasion, argumentative, position paper, essay, etc. It’s all the same thing. You’ll find my glossary below.] Since I mostly have taught high school students, my focus was on writing. In elementary school there is open warfare about how to teach children to read.
Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness.
—KQED
I recently read an insightful article about what can be learned from regret. Before I started reading, I thought of past regrets and how they informed future actions: failing to respond to the cruelty on the bus, failing to confront racism, as a teacher teasing without malice but also without sensitivity. Each of those events taught me to be better next time. There have been next times to be better. Lucky.
There are the once-only times where I made a choice that stuck, the repeated events where I learned to make better choices, the examples that taught me how to move courageously and generously through my life, and the examples that showed me what not to do. In growing from those opportunities: lucky.
I could credit myself with avoiding the worst of the drug scene, the fraught romantic relationships, the dangling desires that might have lead me astray. I could say I turned away in time, credit myself for having better sense than others, boast of my foresight. The truth is mostly about luck.
Continue readingEverything I know about promotion, bias, and lies I learned from television ads. The pain reliever that claims to alleviate most headaches when taken with a glass of water? My dad pointed out way back in the 1950s that most headaches are caused by dehydration. They only needed the water. My dad taught me habits of skepticism that have served me well throughout my life. I question everything, consider the angles of possible deception, and sometimes I see right through the pitch while only half trying.
Found on my first run since Covid, the day before yesterday: It’s not your imagination. The base of this tree has grown right around the fire hydrant, which is still seems usable.
Years ago, an educator handed me the new biography, Three Cups of Tea, and assured me it was better than Mountains Beyond Mountains. I had been teaching Pulitzer-winner Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer’s campaign to serve the poor in Haiti and elsewhere. Could this memoir be better?
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