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
Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, celebrates the end of slavery in the United States.*
Years ago, our son’s orthodontist commented to me that our sons were similarly handicapped when applying to college because they were white boys. He smiled, a virtual nudge-nudge, we’re in this together, right? His son’s application to dental school had been denied, he said, to make room for Black students. So he said. I generally had walked away from such comments, and I didn’t want to annoy the man fixing Alan’s teeth, but I didn’t walk away that day. I turned back and told him off with calm reasoning. [Should his son be advantaged in admission to dental school because his father had gone? Because his father was white? Was my son unqualified as Salutatorian for undergraduate study? Had this man looked at the numbers? Who did he think he was? I was angry and it was a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly what we said to one another. I am angry thinking about it now.]
It’s true I am inclined to worry. My mother was a worrier and actively taught me all the tricks and habits of an active worrier. I worry about my husband dying, about the welfare of our sons and their eventual retirement, the grandchildren and other family members. I worry about friends living in red states and my friend who just sold her last floor loom because I have never known her not to have one. It worries me.
I didn’t bother this seal. We noticed one another almost simultaneously, and I was fully zoomed with an actual camera and fifty yards away to get this photo and then I backed right off out of this pup’s sight. Continue reading →
I have been thinking a lot about housing during the past twenty-five years. My husband and I moved to the family home in Oregon in 1979 and started a family. It was what my grandfather’s third wife and her second husband hoped we would do when they left the home to us. It was a two bedroom, one and a half bath retirement home when we got here. We removed the half bath and added a bedroom and second bath. Two sons and six hundred square feet. My husband worked long hours and I stayed home with our children while they were small, which was financially challenging but also temporary. [We lived below the poverty line for some of those years, and I will never recover the lost income from remaining out of the workforce for those years. That’s another issue—instead of “affordable daycare” how about making it possible for parents to parent their own children without taking a crippling and permanent financial hit?]
Then my mother began a downward decline, a process that went on for years. Her driving was dangerous, she couldn’t see to read, never did like cooking, and my husband stopped by every day on his way to work to make her coffee. [If she’d taken better care of herself with a healthy diet and exercise… well, she lived to be 82, and most young people would see that as a ripe old age.] She was in pain and unsteady on her feet, would not take the suggestions of various helpers, and was in and out of assisted living for those last five years. It was crushing for her to live with the assistance of cooks and nurses and others, but she could not live without it.
There should be no shame in accepting what we need. There is no honor in taking more than we need. Yet we judge others by their living situation. I admit I do it myself.
Gary misses caring for our garden when we’re in the city, but this is where we walk. We have the whole of Forest Park, the Portland Japanese Garden and the Rose Garden within a mile, and we walk miles most days. When we are no longer able to do that, there is a small courtyard garden and the local front yards to enjoy.Continue reading →
Yesterday, we marched with thousands locally, and with millions worldwide. I wish I could verify a number, but the government offices that used to do that aren’t allowed. There were babies strapped to a parent, children in strollers, others holding hands, young people and people with white hair. In the background of the photo is the Burnside Bridge. If you look closely, you can see it’s lined with more protesters waving and holding signs.
Idealism serves us now not in the achievement of it but in the striving toward it.
Most of the time, the crowd was too dense for me to take any photos at all. Some people turned their heads when I photographed their signs. I have protested every war since and including Viet Nam. I do believe I was photographed during those protests. Men in the iconic dark suits took my photo during the Seattle marches. But after Kent State, men in 3-piece suits and women in business attire and wearing heels walked out of downtown office buildings to join us.
This afternoon, we are having neighbors over for a meal. To that end, I started cream of mushroom soup yesterday (I still need to add the cream and maybe sour cream). First thing this morning there was a false fire alarm, probably someone burning sage? Not everyone evacuated. I’d done my Wordle and got “genius” on Spelling Bee with both pangrams [Wordpress thinks I’ve misspelled both focaccia and pangram—how to tell a computer to look the word up?], read an article about Beethoven’s aging genius, and searched without much luck for confirmation of number of the millions who protested yesterday. I got to pet the building Greyhound and talk to neighbors. Fire trucks came and then declared us okay to reenter. I have black olive focaccia in the oven.
I suspect the answer to that question is that too many of us want someone to blame. Someone who is lessor than ourselves. Someone to look down upon.
I found a meme on my Facebook feed claiming that LGBTQ+ people were asking that everyone else abandon their core values so that they can feel not alone. Nonsense! The purpose is not to force everyone to agree with a small group of people but to prevent a small group of people from forcing others to remain invisible. Some people seem to find the notion of allowing others to go their own way deeply offensive. Some seem to find shouting their bigotry as their god-given right.
Here’s what a former student had on his page. Some days I just feel like pissing some people off, but I hope you find this meme more ridiculous than offensive:
Most of the people I know are hanging on by the skin of their teeth, as my mother would say. We watch protective positions and entire systems being dismantled, people losing their jobs in a sluggish employment market, lies and more lies. And it’s probably just as well my mom is gone; this current situation would surely have killed her.
We have a few family members who supported the maniac destroying our country. One of them is a longtime supporter of Palestine, and he has gone quiet about his political views recently. Well. He would, wouldn’t he?
There is trouble brewing all over the world; I regret that my country is become a cause rather than a late-comer solution, as we were in two World Wars. Since then, we have gone to war in tiny countries where others had already withdrawn in defeat. I’m thinking of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Others have been trying to take over Afghanistan for a thousand years. Most recently Russia and the United States. We might ask what we thought we were doing and why.
We might ask what happens when we encourage people to fight a totalitarian regime, as we did with the Kurdish people in northern Iraq, and then failed to provide backup.
The more recent betrayal is Ukraine.
Why would anyone trust us?
Three creative works illustrate what is happening in the middle east.
2008 Israeli-Palestinian drama film describes the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop the Israeli Defense Minister, her next door neighbor, from destroying the lemon trees in her family farm. At the same time, she develops a human bond with the minister’s wife.
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In his new memoir, Omar El Akkad weaves his life experiences with the failure of Western liberalism to keep its promise.
“On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. [Despite his publisher’s promotion, that tweet was not the impetus for this book.]
“As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.”
“Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.”
Lemon Tree touched my heart long ago and Omar’s books—the best-selling novels American War and What Strange Paradise and this new work of nonfiction—are beautiful revelations. An Oscar-winner “Best Documentary” No Other Land is playing right around the corner, which is where my husband and I went to see it.
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.”
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.”Continue reading →
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.Continue reading →
