from 27 June 2020, The New York Times:
“It’s crazy. I’ve never been to a protest before — like, ever. I got inspired by what people were doing all across America, but there was no protest in Nashville at the time. I was like, why isn’t Tennessee doing anything? Why are they silent?”—Zee Thomas Continue reading
There are always left-behind poop bags on the shore. And while I am here, there is a lot of recent talk about the toilet plume. Consider that anything you can smell is the result of molecules of rose petals or vomit or yeast or alcohol or whatever inside your nose. That’s the only way you can smell it—it’s inside your nose.
All persons in my county must be masked when visiting any indoor public space, beginning 1 July 2020. The county itself requested this. As a friend said to me on the phone: we’re a tourist economy and people come here from everywhere. We need some protection.
from NPR “Masks And The Outdoor Exerciser: Advice For Runners, Bikers, Walkers, Hikers”:
When outdoors: “experts I spoke to all said wearing a mask is a good thing. Now you probably don’t think you have the coronavirus if you feel good enough to exercise. But some people are asymptomatic – they never show symptoms – or presymptomatic – sick but not yet feeling it. Continue reading
If it didn’t weigh hundreds of pounds, we’d have dragged this rope home. It has been in water a long time, is several inches across and perhaps ten or more meters in length, heavy with water, and loaded with tiny gooseneck barnacles.
Today is the 25th of June and I am struggling to keep track of time, especially because July Fourth is coming up fast. For most of my life payday was the 25th because I worked for a local public school district from 1979 to 2019 . . . or was that 2018? Everything, especially time, is becoming fluid and muddled. I seek markers for passage of time. Today is a Thursday and alternate Thursdays we have garbage pick-up. Today is Trash Day.
As a Thursday, today is also a Going-Out day where we head out for groceries in the nearest grocery store. Once a month we go further afield to Costco and Natural Grocers and Fred Meyer. We mask except on our beach walks where we try to keep fifty feet from others. Not all locals or businesses respect recommendations about distancing and masking, but we do. We planned to go to another food store today, but they do not mask their counter-help. Continue reading
animal vegetable mineral • mineral vegetable animal
winter spring summer fall
Our cat Leakey was named for the anthropologist. She arrived on our doorstep literally half-starved and Gary saw her first. When I got home, I picked her up and she purred like a motor boat. “Don’t touch it, don’t pick it up!” Gary said over and over, but who had fed her the can of tuna? I brought her into the house. She had fishhook claws and liked to tease the dog.
The other day when we came home from our morning walk, Gary did what he generally does and walked around the house. Just in case. That day he found a dead rat on the north side concrete walkway. No blood, no wound, an apparently sleek and healthy but certainly dead rat.
Bracken, the online journal from Washington, believes in hope to get us all by through with “love of the woods and its shadows.”
It is a beautiful magazine I’ve already recommended. Begin with Bracken’s main page because just now you do not want to miss another look at Amanda Greive’s art, and then click on “Coronavirus Hopelings” for a series of lovely offerings. I sincerely recommend the short piece from yesterday, called “Yellowing.” I’m there too.
P.S. I am a little embarrassed to ask, but I would be grateful if you “liked” my photo essay at Hopelings.
Gary “being silly” a couple years ago when he still had four hats.
My own father, Arthur Henry Priddy, kept “salmon” (orange) three by five cards in the breast pocket of his shirts and he wrote with a striped green fountain pen in blue-black ink. When I asked him questions as a child he always knew the answers. When I wanted to know about trade in the Minoan empire, he pulled out one of the cards and his pen and described their form with a few graceful sweeps of that coveted pen. He told me that Columbus did not discover America and that, in fact, he had not even been the first European to reach its shores. On separate cards he drew the vessels used by Chinese, Portuguese, and Viking explorers and fisherfolk. He always answered my questions. Sometimes he took a very long time answering and I was almost sorry I asked, but the answers always came.
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Our older son with his daughter.
My father had been a small, slender boy in a time of Clark Gable shoulders. He was an only child and when his parents divorced, he was raised in a household of three women—mother, aunt, and grandmother. Throughout his life he honored women, but aspired to the masculine pursuits available to his frame. He learned to target shoot and play chess, fly fish and take photographs. He set a record swimming the butterfly, played water polo, and raced bicycles in Los Angeles. He joined the Army in 1942, earned a purple cross and liberated a German concentration camp. He worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries until arthritis stopped him. Over the years he lost his childhood faith and many of his prejudices as he placed his life into the hands of people he’d been raised to distrust.
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Our younger son with his two.
When the arthritis began, my father hiked the Olympics alone or with his son. He slowed but kept moving, determined to find a way out of the pain. The jogs on the beach ended and the quick flip from prone to standing that made his children squeal with delight. He paced himself and dealt with the setbacks as they occurred. He might spend four days backpacking the High Divide and then pay for it with crippling pain. He might hike for a week, rest, and find he could not walk at all.
Most often, as the rheumatoid arthritis consumed him, he awakened resentfully, late, each stir in his narrow bed a difficulty. He felt the grind of bones on edge and he did not move without purpose, no wild thrashing in his sleep or cat stretches in the morning. He wore familiar clothing and slippers that knew the twists of his body. He sat on the edge of his bed and smoked Camels cigarettes and listened to the radio. He had surgeries to remove spurs of calcium but over the years illness robbed him blind, literally. But it was cigarettes and cancer that took him.
After two radiation treatments he refused to have tubes or a hospital gown, but only a sheet. The oncology nurse took my arm outside his door and told me he was dying. “If he’s trying to leave us, we don’t want to call him back.” She stopped another nurse from turning him and the blood cart from taking tests, until she could find a doctor to cancel them. She darkened the room, drew the curtain halfway to shelter him from the hall, and held my hand for moment.
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Daddy while at UC Berkeley in the 40s.
My father’s ashes were mailed to me in a little cardboard box and I placed them behind a door in my desk until the other members of my family were ready to deal with them. But one day I opened the door and took out the box, looked at the postmark and realized years had passed. My father had asked that his ashes be scattered on a rock in the ocean in front of my Oregon home, but I would wait no longer for my family to hire a plane and so one morning my husband and young sons and I walked down the beach and let the water take his ashes to the rock in the sea.
I did not cry that day. I had not cried on the day he died, or even on the day, some time before his heart stopped, when I knew he was already gone. But sometimes, even so many years later, I want to ask him a question, and I imagine his fingers holding a green fountain pen, drawing sailing ships on three by five cards, and the tears come.
Thank you to good fathers everywhere today and tomorrow and the days after that.
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Her mother’s “writing represented both financial and emotional survival. For money, she edited a small newspaper and freelanced articles. For solace, she wrote stories at dawn. Some were published, and some weren’t. Publishing wasn’t the point.”
Melissa Hart is the author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019).
Go here to read the whole of it: Why We Write: On Pandemics, Heat Waves, Police Brutality, and Resiliency
Acceptance is a multilayered thing that means different things to different people. It can even mean different things to the same people at different times. Case in point— Continue reading
The 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Protecting our thoughts, our expression, our access to the news, our right to disagree. These came first.
You might appreciate reading Solnit’s take on what looks to some like an overnight change: “The death of George Floyd was a match that lit a bonfire, and how the fuel for the bonfire piled up is worth studying. That is, for a national and international uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence to achieve such scale and power, many must have been ready for it, whether they knew it or not. Not in the sense of planning it or expecting these events, but by having changed their minds and committed their hearts beforehand. . . . You can point to specifics about this moment . . . But none of these would have signified if the smallest thing hadn’t happened millions of times over: people changed their minds.”
I used to say to my students every time I introduced the persuasive essay, that the most impressive thing they could accomplish while researching and arguing their thesis was if they changed their minds about an issue.
It rarely happened, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, but it was a beautiful thing when it did.
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 