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
Three months ago a nine year old girl, a Fourth Grader wearing pink glasses and named Bobbie Wilson was collecting Spotted Lanternflies. She’d learned about the dangerous-to-trees invasive species and how important it was to stomp them out. That’s what she was doing on the sidewalk where she’d lived since she was a baby: stomping on huge flies. The man who lived across the street watched her out his window and became frightened. He called the police to report her.
“There’s a little Black woman walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees on Elizabeth and Florence,” Lawshe told the dispatcher, according to a call obtained by CNN.
“I don’t know what the hell she’s doing. Scares me, though,” Lawshe added.
NPR, 3 February 2023
I feel certain that there is more brownish beer bottle glass on the beach than any other color, but we don’t often find it. Beer bottles are thin and their color is harder to spot, easily mistaken for rock, wood, or other debris. Old glass is thick. That big green piece is exceptional and probably from the base of a bottle.
Want to guess the race of the two people in this news story?
Gary has heard this story too many times: It’s from years ago at one of our holiday Open House events to which we invited neighbors and co-workers and hosted forty or so. I was teaching, so for a few weeks before, I came home from school and made small savory pastries and baked cakes and cookies and stashed them in the freezer. We cleaned the house, me down on my hands and knees to scrub the floors. The party began at 2pm and ended two hours later. It was a great deal of work, but cleanup after the party took only minutes, not hours, no messes, no fights. We served only sparkling non-alcoholic apple juice. That might be why people only chatted, ate, and then went home without hard feelings.
One year, a co-worker went off on me about people who claimed everything was a matter of opinion. “You English teachers want everything to be a matter of opinion. Some things are not opinion. There are such things as facts!” He raised his voice, not quite yelling, went on for a bit, the closest to an argument we ever experienced at our parties. He was also talking at me.
For the record, I have never claimed that everything was subject to opinion. Nevertheless, I heard what he said. That uncomfortable moment impacted me and my teaching. I was careful to make that distinction with my students: fact and opinion are not the same thing. Some accepted truths are subject to interpretation and opinion. Some facts are indisputable. Know the difference.
The rewards of listening closely to someone who is not you.
—Scott Korb in his craft talk at the Pacific University MFA residency in Seaside, Oregon on 7 January 2023
Our window in Portland with Gary’s dinosaur. We have suffered power outages and internet outages at the coast, avoided ice storms in Portland, and walked in the rain and terrific winds. The beach house shook from 75mph wind gusts, and I have learned to make better use of my cell phone. The cell phone itself is an accomplishment I failed to note in my review of 2022. Ian helped get us started.Continue reading →
A friend of mine, someone I know only through our mutual blog posts and a handful of emails, the exchanges of notebooks and weaving… lives in a deeply red community of a deeply red southern state, the one blue dot in a red sea. She has found herself in situations where people say what seem such outrageous things that she is too flabbergasted to respond and in situations where she knows she is being deliberately baited. Walking around blue becomes an act of courage.
I get that.
This is probably not the best way to come back from a month of silence. I meant to write about wood carving and jam jars and a train ride, our bivalent booster and books. I’ve started that post. Instead…
Since I began weaving in earnest, I’ve been rewatching television online, shows I’ve already seen, or tried to see, when they first aired. Monk. Psych.
Just now, it’s Grey’s Anatomy.
How this tree had grown. Sometimes a log drifts onshore and is just too incredible to ignore.
But I’m not really all that interested in these shows or even in telling about the weaving I am getting done, though that will surely be part of my post today. I’m interested to see what else…
Blue skies and pouring rain have alternated all day today so we did not get our walk. We were too busy yesterday and needed a break that not involve wind-driven rain. It was meant to be a peaceful day. Driving rain and sunshine pouring past my window at the same time. And then… the news.
Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder’s most famous book Mountains Beyond Mountains, has died. I taught that book for years, linking it to the Pacifica Projects that all students at my high school were required to complete for graduation. Service and research were significant aspects of that project.
Dr. Paul Farmer grew up in poverty with a huge family and bullying father. Nevertheless, he attended and graduated from top universities, slept on a cot until he married, became a world renowned disease specialist, and devoted his life to serving the “least of these.” He was a good man.Continue reading →
2. The monster sentence. Begin with a simple short sentence—“I baked bread”—subject verb object—and then turn it into a “monster sentence” of at least 100 words. This exercise is straight out of Stanley Fish's playbook. Use every trick you know to ensure that the sentence is grammatically correct and not a run-on, use long dashes (em-dashes), semicolons, lists. Then explain what you’ve created, reviewing what you’ve written, phrase by phrase. NOTE: The explanation should be longer than the original sentence. Write nonfiction, then explain your work.
My assignment grew long, I mean reeeeealy long. I only needed 100 words and I have considerably more words… and that’s after I edited and carved it back a little. Then I revised and cut it back into shorter (but still with monster) sentences. And that’s when I found the point of it all.
In Seattle, especially while I was a student at the UW, people would ask, “Is the mountain out?” They meant, could you see Mount Rainier? Locally, it’s Castle Rock, 0.6 nautical miles offshore, that sometimes disappears behind a cloud bank or fog.Continue reading →
Despite my better judgement, I have been reading The Washington Post news articles and comments about the shooting in Michigan. People keep asking why the school didn’t do more. I wish the answers were simple. This is not a day I am supposed to post, and you probably do not want to know.
I figured we all deserve a pretty picture in “challenging” times.
My husband has repeatedly commented that I “dodged a bullet” when I retired in 2019, months before the pandemic. I wish it had been that clearcut: good then bad, Before then After. I wish that before the pandemic, my duties as a high school teacher had never required actions I found awkward or dangerous.
Students threw chairs at the wall (twice) and a padlock at me (once), they yelled at me and at classmates, fell asleep in their chair from lack of sleep and drug overdose. Kids worked long and often illegal hours to support family or pay their own dental bills, and parents called them from school to put in a shift during school hours, which violates state laws. Poverty was the overarching threat to their education, but there was no escape for kids from more affluent homes: One boy put hashmarks on my whiteboard for six weeks. I did not ask him why until he came in one morning and gravely erased them all: six weeks sober. A homeless girl who was welcome elsewhere was sleeping on dirt in a backyard shed in order to protect her mentally ill mother she refused to leave alone. It was a bad choice, but a compassionate and loving one.
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.
This was not the photo I was looking to put here, but it’s pretty and in seasonal colors. Two of these weavings went to a dear friend on the birth of her baby. One is at home here in Portland. It’s significant that the warp included skeins of lovely Koigu merino wool in day-go “mistake” colors I had not meant to order. Goodness come sometimes, not because we planned for it or earned it or even necessarily deserved it, but just because. Continue reading →
I received a recruitment email for a teaching position in another state, which shall remain nameless. I nearly tapped the link. I would love to visit that state and I miss teaching and I enjoy working. But no. The public schools in that state are in bad shape. To establish myself in a new place would take tremendous energy. At one time in my life I might have been up for that struggle, but 70-hour work weeks are behind me.
What we see entering our newer home. Yes, it is “real city living” where we are walking distance to everything we need. Work, for me, might be one of those needs.Continue reading →
The package contained only the book and the note. It’s true that my classroom Bible had vanished, a New International Version, but that would have been at least six years ago before I retired from teaching full time and had to clear my classroom book shelves. I usually kept a Qur’an on my shelves too. I am interested in scripture. I am respectful of sacred text.
Left to right: the carpet on the painted floor, and on the table is the returned NIV Bible, the note quoting a blog post, the postcard from Toni with a bit of Dorothy West showing, and my current journal with a pen.Continue reading →
