Next month is our 48th wedding anniversary, but today is the 50th anniversary of living together. I announced our intention to my mother via a letter sent from Kansas where I was traveling with my step-grandmother. (It was cowardly. While I was old enough to move in with Gary, I was too young to tell Mom face to face.) I learned a lot about wool on that trip.
We could say we are looking for sea glass, but we never do. We could say we are looking for agates, which is also true, but what Gary tells people is: “Rocks.” This is also true, though not completely true.
This posting concerns gathering treasure from the beach, reviewing promises and lies, and a fictional story about “abused” kittens—no animals harmed in that story. Oh! And I will be selling my weaving at an event sponsored by the Cannon Beach Art Gallery. Note that I say “selling” but actually mean “offering for sale,” which is not the same thing. About ten skeins of hand dyed wool in each length…
She meant to help me be a kind person. As a child I went to Unitarian Sunday school. Later I attended worship at many churches and temples and houses of worship. Though not religious, I wanted to be a good person. I wanted a clean conscience and self respect. I think that’s what my mother hoped for. Mom meant for me to consider the struggles, trials, and pain of other people and how that influences their actions toward me. She did not mean that I should consider myself last, but thinking how others feel has helped me consider motivations and sometimes allowed me to be kinder to myself. It certainly has forced me, sometimes, to behave better.
I thought I was done posting. I hid my posts in April, then opened them again a month later. And now I try to post. Gary says it’s good that I post. This past week has been especially…. hard? painful? heartbreaking? Is there a word strong enough to explain? Lately, as I walk Portland streets and see someone smoking, I have said out loud: You have known your whole life that cigarettes are poison. These are times when saying anything to a stranger might result in being shot in the face. Safer to post here.
Throughout my life, I have been prone to periods of profound sadness. This is one of those times. I think it is a rational response to the situations just now.
The greatest advantage to living long is knowing things will be better, that I will feel better after a while. I know this, though I do not feel it. I know it’s true.
I will feel better. Maybe nothing will improve, but I will manage.
There are people in the world who built a cellphone large enough for a horse. They taught horses to use it to text messages. (There’s a video showing all this on the website.) The horses might not see the point, but horses play. I suspect most animals have a sense of humor.
We did not walk to the Portland Rose Garden today, as we often do, but I saw a huge cascading rose outside a flower shop. Flushed with tiny white single blossoms, it grew twelve or more feet up and arched over the door of the shop and the sidewalk. The owner of the shop had no idea what variety it was. “It’s a volunteer that’s come up through a crack in the pavement.” She says it sets hips, tiny and red. I will return to collect seeds.
Below, a poem.
BOTANY LAB by Jan Priddy A generation ago in my Botany lab, my partner bends over specimens, scalpel poised like a paintbrush. He slices flowers perfectly in half; my turn to peer through the microscope. I count stamens and ova. As I draw diagrams, search for proper names in the text, I do not notice silence until it’s broken. Someone, also hunched over high black counters and flower parts, asks the air, What sets human beings apart from the lower animals? Tools comes an answer from across the room. Aren’t we the only species which makes and uses tools? We decide not, since Goodall documented chimpanzees fishing for termites. Playing, I hear my partner assert. Man is the only animal that plays. I look up from the sexual organs of plants and smile. I think he’s wrong, though I am not the first to say it. My dog plays with me, says another Botany student. But my partner argues with pets. They are domestic animals, tainted by association. Fawns, we offer, adolescent lions. Juveniles, he shakes his head. Adult otters swim purely for fun, we counter. Porpoises leap in the wakes of ships, squirrels play tag in trees, foxes pounce on dandelions. His forehead puckers, scalpel painting the air. Really? Under my microscope, a five part flower, many stamens, fleshy calyx-tube. Family Rosaceae, genus Rosa, species multiflora, precisely like the illustration in my text— a local flower I see each day. “Botany Lab” was first published in StringTown, 2001
I think about color. I think about color often.
I am sitting up in bed as I write, and before me is an abstract expressionist painting by a friend of my aunt Marcie (Marcia Smith Aron). Marked 1959 and “Floral Growth” on the back, it is tied to memories from my aunt’s house in Berkeley when I was a young child, and later to her San Francisco house. Bright with egg yolk yellows and intense pastels. Mom said the painting had been held by her sister for safe keeping. After my aunt died and the painting came to me, I traced the artist. By then, she lived just a few blocks away from where Gary and I first lived in Big Pink in the U District of Seattle. She had turned to calligraphy, become famous for it. Midori Kono Thiel was sorry to hear my aunt had died, delighted her painting was still alive, but no, she didn’t want it back. So that colorful oil, flush with memory, hangs across from our bed in Portland.
How art travels when we are having fun.
Continue readingHardly anyone will recognize the letters I used to title my thoughts today. “Any Solid Color Other than Black” is a class in AKC shows for American Cocker Spaniels (ASCOB is pronounced ass’ cob). For the record, I have never owned or shown American Cocker Spaniels of any color, though I do have a scar on my upper lip from being bitten by one when I was a small child.
This is not a post about bites or even dogs. There are no assignments or exercises. A few crows. Trees. Our condo news.
Several recent attempts at reading have been… depressing? discouraging? demeaning? Delight might be what I am after. I am wide awake in the middle of the night. Eight hours last night, tonight just four? I don’t know, maybe it’s time for some serious funny.
Just now, our son Ian is making short films. (The ballet is at rest and he is between random gigs so keeping busy.) I came across this one almost by accident. He rarely tells us about shows he’s working on, and this video is delightful: “Harry Potter Can’t Blink.” (Honest, you want to see this.)
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
—Mary Oliver
I had to think hard about what happened in 2021. It was not a terrible year, not even a bad one. “Inconvenient”, as a friend suggested in 2020, a year that felt much worse. So goodbye to two years of pandemic and hello to a third. I have plans.
Continue readingI was writing a card to Bette and realized that most things do not matter… the passage of time, the work I still miss doing, the “accomplishments” I would like to detail—none of that really matters. What matters is beauty and people. People and beauty.
So here is beauty that I have seen in the past year.
I could have chosen photos of eagles or of highways or flowers. I could have chosen photos entirely of the people I love. I could have chosen other landscapes or birds. These images were chosen because they are what I have looked at early in the morning and thought: beautiful!
Thank you, John Keats. We only remember this stuff because it matters.
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1809)
by John Keats
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
—Nadine Gordimer
I don’t know if any of this is true—that beauty is truth or that an urn can speak to any truth—but it is beautiful. And we do hunger for both beauty and truth.
May your day be beautiful… a blessing on your house.
The sky was beautifully pink yesterday morning and after a mile of walking, I ran an unofficial 5k on sand without wetting my feet. I was out of breath but not breathless at the end of my run. I felt light-headed and bent over for a couple breaths. It is not the first time I have wondered if my blood pressure might have gone down closer to what it was when I began running in the 90s. Decades ago, when I told my mother my blood pressure was 90/60, she said, “That’s ridiculous. You would feel dizzy when you got out of bed. ” Well, yes I did. Often.
I submitted my “Butterfly Fontanelle” novella to a literary press a couple of days ago. It has remained untouched since January. I had hopes for it when I began four years ago, but then lost faith. Today I reread the beginning of a letter responding to that novella. One of my favorite writers wrote: “I really do love this story! The imagery throughout is gorgeous, and your conception of the Daughters, every detail of their lives, their behavior and appearance, their singing—all of it—feels startlingly original. Amazing, really.” That’s right at the beginning of her comments, and I cannot say how startling it was to read that, to find such words of praise. I knew if I continued to read the letter, I would find her suggestions and questions. I did revise in response, and revise yet again in a further draft. And again. I even tried changing the title. I submitted. Rejection without comment. There is no knowing if I improved the piece and evidence I didn’t, but I think it’s better even if I failed to take it where it needed to go. I did try.
Anyway, I sent it off, my first submission in ten months. I hadn’t intended to submit anywhere ever again. I posted that notice on my publications page and have only been writing here, in my blog, and a few scraps of poetry, or what might become poetry if I had stuck to the page. I haven’t. [“Seat in chair.”]
A lot has happened.
