PASSPORTS + FIELD TRIALS

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Gary with his dog, “Manny.” He’s clipped down after we moved to the beach in 1979. Manny was an American and Canadian Field Champion.

We went to Canada last month for two nights. It was a lovely time, made lovelier, I suspect, because we took no photos and accomplished nothing but rest of the best sort: we ate well, walked, napped, and read.

The point was to use our passports, that were a week or two shy of expiration and had never been used.

Gary and I used to travel to Canada often, back in the days when all we needed was a rabies certificate to bring the dogs we were showing back into the US. I showed our Afghan Hounds in dog shows and judged field trials and the dogs ran in them. For a time in the 1970s and 80s, our dogs were well known by the running crowd.

Gary was known.

Some terminology: Sighthounds are dogs that hunt primarily by sight—they chase what they see moving. Greyhounds are the sighthound most people know, but recent genetic testing finds that Afghan Hounds and Salukis are among the oldest dog breeds, existing for thousands of years in the Middle East. Lure coursing allows a formalized “hunt” of a shredded white plastic garbage bag. The dogs are smart enough to know it’s a lure, but most enter fully into the game.

The sport of lure coursing began with the American Sighthound Field Association which probably owed its existence to Lyle Gillette, a dog fancier best known for his Rancho Gabrielle Borzoi, the hounds also know as Russian wolfhounds, which were actually used in packs to hunt wolves in the Steppes. Lyle was a sweet man and I stayed with him while I was participating in a field trial in northern California. I was traveling with my friend Heather Loube, a citizen of Canada. This was the early 70s.

The previous year, I had traveled with Heather and her husband Jeffrey and assorted dogs to Colorado for the inaugural Colorado Grand National. One hundred and four dogs of various breeds ran that day. I slipped Wielki Sezlem of Nightwatch who was a show and field champion. I yanked the slip collar toward me when I released him (a mistake), the heavy brass ring hit me in the face, and a hour or so later I had eight stitches in my upper lip. I could show you the scar.

The upshot was that when Gary picked me up from the airport, he was tall enough to look right down under my bandage and see my stitches, and he about freaked out right there in the airport. I had not warned him.

This was not the first time I’d had an injury to the face. One of Heather Loube’s dogs had jumped up to kiss my face, while I was backing up and Heather was trying to pull him away. His tooth met my tooth and my tooth lost. Heather’s dentist came into the office on his day off, treated me gently and at no cost.

[Don’t ever tell me that the Canadian health care system is inferior to ours. Years later our youngest son, then not four years old, had an abscessed tooth and our dentist would not come into the office to treat him. He had no emergency care referral in place, and I called every dentist in the county before I found one willing to see my sobbing child. I got better care from a Canadian who owed me nothing.]

Heather and Jeff Loube founded the Canadian Sighthound Field Association with help from a few other early enthusiasts, including Gary and me. Gary and I were ourselves instrumental in starting field trials in the Pacific NW.

All of this to get to Gary mowing an eight acre field with a push mower.

We liked running hounds on rough ground, but grass approaching two feet made visibility of the lure near impossible. The field in a local park had to be mowed. No one in our breed club would help or even offer equipment. After the first day, word got around, and Denny showed up. Whippet and Borzoi and Deerhound fanciers showed up. Five or six people with gas-powered mowers. Eventually someone got ahold of the parks people and the park manager came out to see what was happening, shook his head, and lent us the sitting mower, and the mowing was completed in no time. Four days of hard labor and then no time at all.

That first meet used a drag machine. The lure was attached to the end of 100-pound braided dacron fishing line, which was connected to a spool that wound up the line. The course made a huge S shape with a long straightaway in the middle, cornering on pulleys set flat on the ground, over a total distance of about 900 yards. That course was strung by hand. Someone took the lure in hand and ran around the huge S, catching the line on the cornering pulleys. That someone was also Gary.

Most clubs used a motorbike to string the lure. Later, continuous loop machines ran the line with one end of the S joining up to the other in one continuous loop. (I was present at the first use of a continuous loop machine, also in California. My girl, Onika, skinned the inside of leg running right along the line—a rubbed patch the size of my palm inside her stifle. We learned to keep a continuous loop tacked down close to the ground to avoid these injuries.) Some courses were different shapes of course. I designed many.

Gary ran the lure around for each course at our first meet. Three dogs running in each and wearing identifiable jackets in yellow, pink, or blue. (We used red, black, and white, in early courses, but this caused confusion—was it the red dog in the black jacket? or the black dog in the red jacket?)

Gary ran many miles. The Canadians brought beer for after.

Over the years, we met semi-pet raccoons, rare sighthound breeds, people from all over the world, because of our dogs. I went into labor the first time while on Vancouver Island BC, judging a field trial. I drove all the way home and was in the hospital a few hours later. You might not believe it, but that is one of my favorite memories.

I miss the dogs terribly sometimes. We had sighthounds and were active showing and running for decades. Gary still misses Manny.

We traveled across the U.S. and to Canada for dog shows and the far more entertaining field trials. You can guess which events the dogs preferred.

 

THRASHED

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments
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This is Gary’s dog, Manny, as a puppy in 1976. He was the first Afghan Hound we bred, shown in puppy coat. We kept him all his life. He was a smart boy.

I thrashed the kitchen the other day and Gary had to clean it. It’s what he does most days. It had been hard that day. His brother called to complain and then hung up on him. This brother doesn’t like Oregon’s Governor Brown and believes Hitler went to Brazil, and worries that Gary is “leftwing.” Gary told him we like Governor Brown (the brother is a resident of Washington) and Hitler is dead. Yeah, and we’re leftwing. My husband’s brother was diagnosed schizophrenic when he was fifteen.

He is at the age where the general mental health of some schizophrenics improves. This has not happened for him. He is not worse than he was as a teenager, but he is not better. He still tends to rant about things a good deal, has no interest in anyone’s opinion unless they are agreeing with him, and he hangs up on people if they disagree, or might have taps on their lines, or for other reasons too convoluted and absurd to go into. He has never been on meds, has never been institutionalized, is sometimes banned from call-in radio shows, but otherwise does not cause trouble. He argues with people but has not spent time in jail that I know of.

On the other hand, another relative has been arrested and convicted of abusing his spouse, began court-ordered therapy in his late forties, and with good behavior had that conviction wiped from his record. He is not schizophrenic but has anxiety and phobias and perhaps borderline personality disorder, which is not nice, but he can be charming and he is very smart. He has been institutionalized only briefly, and has been on meds and in therapy for many years. He is also not better. He is, some might judge, worse.

He is depressed and rarely leaves his home and is lonely and claims he has driven away all his friends. He is angry and blames people for failing to behave better. All this is likely true, though I have not spoken to him in a long time.

I was reminded of this just the other day when I called to make a reservation at a charming coastal hotel. There was some confusion about who I was. And the story came out about repeated reservation cancelations. The person I talked to was charmed, but anxious herself about those cancellations. I promised I would not cancel.

So. A cake, some sadness about our family members, and a clean kitchen.

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COLOR BLIND

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

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The online test was supposed to diagnose my ability to see colors. I stared at the screen and searched for the number hidden in a forest of little circles. I passed that one. I am not color blind. Then, a few days ago I took one that was supposed to identify a minority of humans who can see colors that almost no one else can see. Another test offered to determine whether my eyesight is acute enough for a military pilot. I would feel enormous pride if I were found to possess exceptional perception of color. I do not. I am deeply disappointed when I fail such evaluations. In a rainbow, I see colors from the violet through red, and the ordinary hues between that most people see. I easily distinguish between red and green—the most common form of color blindness. I can nearly always detect subtle variation in color. My perception of the color red fades first in waning daylight, just as it does for all humans.

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My eyesight is normal, at least insofar as what colors I see. The rods in the back of my eyes which distinguish light and darkness are likely fading as I age so that my vision at dusk is less clear than it was when I was a girl. Most people lose some degree of night vision as they age. It is why my husband Gary still does not like to drive in the dark. It is another reason why the elderly are more at risk to stumble on their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And it is also a contributor to older people giving up reading. They cannot see as well without brighter task lighting, but they fail to connect their struggles reading with poor lighting in their homes.

The loss of rods in the retina can be addressed with a lamp. The loss or lack of cones, the light-sensitive cells that read colors, is more problematic. Cones allow people to distinguish between the three colors of light: red, green, and blue. Some color vision, like light vision, is lost with age, and the ability to see color accurately may be lost due to trauma or illnesses such as leukemia or Parkinson’s. Cataracts, for example, impact color perception, turning skies pallid and strange. (The sky turned back to sky blue after Gary’s cataract surgery.) When cataracts are surgically corrected, color vision returns to normal, but most color blind people are born with a lifelong handicap. And for about one in twelve men in the world but only about one in two hundred women, it is genetic.

An adaptation of our diurnal ancestors was color vision. Scientists assume that early lifeforms were nocturnal and completely color blind. As we woke to the day, our senses included color. Birds have a rich range of perceived colors and perhaps that is understandable in species that rely on color to navigate, eat, and find mates. This makes me wonder about owls. As nocturnal birds, do they lack color vision? The cone cells that detect color are blind in low light.

Among people of color, especially from sub-Saharan Africa, color blindness is uncommon, while among white people, especially from Scandinavia, the incidence is higher, especially among men. About nine million British citizens have some degree of color blindness and nearly all of those people are men who inherited the condition from their parents. Men are at a disadvantage because, while blue is inherited on a non-sexual chromosome, the red and green color-perceiving cones are carried only on the X chromosome, and thus men have only one shot at inheriting what they need to see what I can still see quite clearly. Christmas colors.

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Ordinary color blindness limits a human’s ability to see one or more of the three colors of light—red, green, and blue. Most people who suffer from color blindness are blind to two of these colors, but only half are moderately or severely color blind. The most extreme color blindness, no color vision at all, is extremely rare. In my county in northwest Oregon of less than forty thousand people, almost two thousand are likely to be color blind. These people are not truly blind to color, instead they have some impairment of their ability to see the full range of colors. With an overwhelmingly white (90%) and significant Scandinavian population, this is not surprising. The defect is most common in people with European ancestry.

About half of these local citizens, shy of 2000 people, color blindness is moderate to severe—they do not see a particular color well or at all. Of the people likely to be colorblind in my county, 250 would have some level of the most common form of red-green color blindness that confuses those colors (deuteranomaly), about 50 would lack some degree of red perception (protanopia), 50 would lack blue (tritanopia), and in our richly wet and verdant landscape, 50 would see green trees as washed out, yellow, or gray (deuteranopia). Perhaps in my state of almost 4 million people, about 180,000 people have some degree of color blindness. More significant. 120 people might have true color blindness (rod monochromacy) and are unable to distinguish any color at all.

Does color blindness make a difference day to day? A fair percentage of people even in first world countries survive youth completely unaware that they see less than their peers. I recall a television show I was invited to participate in as a teenager. One of the other teen panelists announced just before we went on the air that he had enlisted that day and discovered he was color blind. “I didn’t even know,” he said. I asked him the color of the dress I was wearing. He looked it over carefully and replied, “Sort of beige?”  All these years later, I can guess he had protanopia, the form of color blindness that limits perception of red and would have made my bright orange-juice-colored dress appear pale muddy yellow.

Most color blindness is a mild inconvenience. Even with his limitation, the new recruit had learned the light at the top of the signal indicated he needed to stop. And then at eighteen he understood he would struggle forever to determine whether a steak was raw or cooked, whether a Marine uniform was merely dirty or smeared in blood.

That boy had gone through most of his teens unaware that the rest of the world saw something different from what he saw.

This is not unusual. Researchers find that many children fail to notice that their vision is hindered, and those children who do are most likely to disguise their handicap. Parents may note their child making unusual, perhaps creative color choices with paint sets, and these children may struggle to identify colors. The child may complain of headaches or smell his food because he cannot tell from color what he is offered on his plate.

The conversation with my colorblind peer must have had an impact on me, because it was about that time that I was first tested for color blindness myself. I had not shown any symptoms of limited perception. I think I asked for the test. The doctor brought out a series of cards with variously sized and colored dots, one similar to the original Ishihara test invented in 1917. Slight color differences revealed numbers on each card. I was shown only a few out of the stack—Do you see a number? I did. This one? Another? Then the doctor declared my vision normal and put the cards back into their folder. I recall being disappointed that I was not allowed to look at all of the cards. Such tests are still used today to identify color perception.

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Color blindness can create challenges in reading a map or recognizing whether someone is sunburned in time to warn them; they may not see the difference between a blue-eyed dark blonde and a green-eyed redhead, or be able to use color-coded test strips for water quality. A salad might have the appetizing hue of shredded cardboard. Most people cope, but how would I have placed my crayons in rainbow order without normal color perception? This distresses me. Did I embarrass some grade school boy by pointing out his colors were out of order, when he was himself unable to see that order? Worse, how would a colorblind person distinguish red lights or others warnings if there were not additional cues such as words or location. LEDs might all look the same. A red warning light might look identical to the green one assuring that everything it fine.

Physical capacity to see color is at the basis of much of what I do each day. I am deeply invested in color—the colors I paint my walls, the clothes I choose to wear, the play of hue and value in patterns, the way daylight alters everything. I enjoy subtleties of the jar of hundreds of agates plucked from the shore, the bright Sharpies in an orange tea mug on my desk, the handpainted yarn I weave. I would miss color. My world would be immeasurably impoverished without it.

For my entire childhood, my family’s only television was black and white. I did not miss color then, and indeed films were still made in black and white. We went to a family friend’s house to watch The Wizard of Oz in color, and the instant Dorothy opens the door, I noted the technical flaw. The door itself turns from gray to muddy brown. How old would I have been? Seven, eight? I understood immediately how the trick was done—it is not that everything past the door is in color, but that everything is abruptly filmed in color—maybe that is why there was nothing overwhelmingly magical in my memory of that experience. I went home to watch our black and white set without feeling deprived. Color was everywhere: in the carpet, my mother’s glass mosaics and enamels on copper, and just outside our door, the world was always in color.

But I do not see everything there is to see. What colors I can see comprise only a narrow band in the entire range of the colors that exist. Insects see a far broader range of colors invisible to my eyes, and though dogs are famously colorblind, my dog can see in the dark while I am tripping over furniture.

Still.

What I see is not all that I receive. My connections to colors are more complicated. Pale blue and and green and gray and glowing white are the colors of my sky and the sea outside my window, a soothing mix of gentle hues sometimes at war with the weather, with wind and lightning and raging surf. Green is the color of trees and growing things, and I see it wherever I look, because this is the coast of Oregon. The sun might be yellow, but I do not see it up in my sky today. Sunsets are most often glistering orange, while a sunrise wraps pink a full circle around my horizon. Violet is fading bruises and the yarn under my hands.

What I see is what is there to my human eyes, and also everything else I have ever seen that shares the scent, shape, texture, and color of that surface.

Red is the color of blood and lipstick and Oklahoma roses. My own blood dripping down from my knee to white ankle socks, my grandmother’s thick red lipstick, the roses Papa planted along the driveway. When I see a octagon sign, I don’t need red or even to see the letters to know I must stop. Green is home, the long-sleeved dress I loved as a child, trees, and tight furls of opening pine needles. My vision is not special, not rare or strange. A tiny percentage or perhaps even most other women may have, along with their double dose of X chromosomes, the extra ability to perceive colors no man can.

Recent studies find some women expand the seven hues most people identify in a rainbow to include dozens more. These colors are mostly a conflagration of greens—green is go—and that would be something to see.

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PUBLIC COMMENT

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment
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We found a 10-day-old parking ticket from Portland the other day. Often the plastic trash we find has baby barnacles. It’s been out in the water a long time before we collect it.

It’s not the only thing and west is not the only direction.

We get our water from the Coast Range. “Here’s another map showing the area at the Arch Cape Creek headwaters that will be arial sprayed. There is a comment period that will end May 6 or 9th.

“If you want to comment email: jasen.r.mccoy@oregon.gov” 

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They are, essentially, spraying my backyard.

The goal of spraying is to prevent plant growth. They do not want weeds or natural forest succession to begin—from shrubs, then hardwood (alder), to conifers (spruce and hemlock). They want a marketable crop as soon as possible. To achieve that goal they spray chemicals closely related to Agent Orange. On land where I have walked, land rinsed by our future drinking water.

This is my public comment: My family has summered in Arch Cape since 1911. We have lived here year around since the 1940s. I moved to Arch Cape in 1979 with my husband Gary C. Anderson just after the last clearcut, and I recall saying to him that there would not be another for at least 30 years. I knew what they had been spraying up in those hills. And I knew that rain would flush some it it down into local drinking water.

My husband and I have lived here for 39 years and raised our children here. My husband worked in local businesses and I taught in the Seaside School District. Each morning since our retirement we walk the beach and pick up trash from the shore. I can see the plastic bottles and broken toothbrushes, the bottle caps and nylon rope, the plastic foam and cigarette lighters. We see the trash and we can walk by or carry it home to put in the trash.

We cannot see the toxins deliberately introduced into our ecosystem.

It is criminal that this still happens at a time when so many people have become ill and even died from the impact of deliberate human action.

Please do not poison our watershed. Again.

THE GRIEF EXCEPTION

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

First, a confession. I am moody. I sometimes suffer from sadness and depression and anxiety. I have, as an example, seriously worried about overpopulation as if it were my personal problem to solve. I can recall lying awake at night, stewing about starvation and disease and the loss of wild places. I can recall standing in the shower arguing aloud with myself about what should be done to save our planet from overpopulation. I might have been ten years old. I was also unpopular at school, had few friends, my mother was seriously ill, and my father smoked too much. I had been molested on the playground. I worried about overpopulation because I was precocious and smart and all around me my favorite places to play were being turned into housing developments. My worry was a response to my environment and real life experiences.

When I was a child, I was terrified about what the world would be like if the growth of world population continued to grow and double. It did more than double, of course, growing from 3.1 billion to an estimated 7.6 billion today. I was not worried for nothing, and all the woodlands and swamps and cow fields I recall in my old neighborhood north of Seattle are long drowned under pavement and 3-bedroom homes. So, sometimes I was worried or anxious. Sad. I dealt with it as best I could, sometimes better than others. As an adult I am generally determined to find that illusive silver lining in any dark cloud.

It might be raining over my head, but focussing on how wet I felt, decades ago, brought me close to death. I looked for brightness then and still do now, not because everything is perfect in my life, but because I am determined to live.

While my mother was dying and I was also working 60-70 hours a week and driving home from work in tears, feeling overwhelmed, useless, and unfocused, I gained pounds. After my mother died, I lost 40 pounds in a few weeks. One day a colleague asked me how I’d managed to lose so much. I looked at her and said, “Grief.” Pills would not have made any of that situation better, would not have helped me cope better, would not have made my mother come back to life. I needed time. I needed to find my own way back. And I did.

Sometimes I read a good book—proven to improve mood—and I avoided the genuine downers (three novels by Cormac McCarthy were enough for me.) I sleep too little and eat too much when I am depressed. Improving both habits helps. Running used to be essential, but even walking now is good. I do things for other people. I commit random acts of kindness. I contact a friend. I listen to music that stirs my heart. It would be easier to take a pill—don’t think I haven’t thought of it—but my reading and research has convinced me that pills are mostly a false promise of an easy fix. For most people, and certainly for long term, drugs profit Big Pharma, not people. My research revealed we have been sold a bill of goods.

I recently read Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari. Hari reviews the story he was taught about his brain as a teenager, and which remained his truth for more than a decade afterward: depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your brain and this can be corrected with medication.

The trouble was that while medication provided him with some relief for a while, that relief did not last. It did not make him feel good, only “better” for a short time before he was back in his doctor’s office looking for something better. That might be because no one has proven there is any chemical imbalance in the brains of depressed people, medication fails to “cure” depression in the vast majority of people, and could not cure his own depression. (He was prescribed Paxil, a medication that the company had already proven did not work for teens.) As ineffective as antidepressants are in curing depression they have very real and potentially catastrophic side effects. Big Pharma sold a story that we wanted to hear: The problem is personal, out of the control of the individual, and can only be addressed with pills.

This is mostly a lie.

Instead, most scientists agree, depression and anxiety are related, on a continuum with ordinary sadness—they are actually the same thing—and they are normal, reasonable, and sometimes even healthy emotional responses to our lives. Our emotions slide along a scale that runs from dancing with joy to standing on the edge of a cliff. Fortunately, most of the time, most of us are closer to dancing than jumping off the edge, but there is no medical truth to the story we have been told.

It’s not our brains that are broken, it’s our lives.

When Margaret Thatcher declared: “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families” she denied the truth of our species. We are social animals. We want connections with others, we want our lives to contribute and to have meaning to others. We need this as surely as we need food and water. People are not isolated individuals, we are social beings starved for community.

One “symptom” of clinical depression is isolation. “Have you stopped meeting with family or friends?” Hari documents how isolation is not a symptom of depression. Depression is a symptom of isolation. The entire checklist for depression reads like an indictment of modern life.

When we do meaningless work and feel no connection to others, when we feel powerless over our life choices, when we embrace possessions rather than people, we become sad, anxious, and ultimately “clinically depressed.” Pills will not fix this feeling. We must repair the damage to our communal self-worth. Our depression is not the disease, it is a symptom of a more complex issue that has resulted in millions of people being diagnosed and treated for a disease that interferes with daily function.

The popular definition of depression as a disease over which individuals have no control actually feeds the beast. Taking control and making choices is within our power. While we are not to blame for all our circumstances, it is sometimes within our power to change them. We can choose to be active participants in our mental health instead of powerless victims.

Consider just this one fact: One in six Americans (the French are worse off, and so are the English) is on psychotropic medication, some sort of drug to treat the brain. If we are inherently this sick, how did we ever manage to survive as a species? If it is our brains that need fixing and the drugs fix the problem in our brains, shouldn’t we be healthier now than we were before these drugs existed? Shouldn’t suicide rates gone down instead of up in the last few decades? Look it up.

I was familiar with much of the research Hari cites. I knew that depression was not caused by a chemical imbalance and that pharmaceutical companies had rigged trials in order to pretend drugs could address depression far more effectively than they do, and made $200 billions in profit as a result.

I already knew from the studies he cites and earlier ones, that it is ordinary working people who feel anxiety and stress and depression most profoundly. Those at the top have choices that those in the middle and bottom seldom have. A sense of agency, of the ability to make decisions, and options that make living worthwhile.

I already knew about the “grief exception.” Grieving the death of a loved one causes all the “symptoms” associated with depression—why would this surprise anyone?—but the grieving are not sick and do not require medication. They need time.

The medical community accepted that grieving is natural and human . . . so long as those grieving do not feel “depressed” for too long. If your daughter is abducted and burned alive, how long are you allowed to feel bad? If your baby is stillborn, how long? What about the death of a parent? The medical community allowed a year, but then you are supposed to push that pain out of your life and be . . . fine! Or at least functional. Because if that grief lasts longer than medically necessary, you must be depressed. So you have a year to get on with your life. Except that the medical community shortened that understandable year of grief to a few months, then weeks, and then eliminated it entirely. You are grieving a death? Get over it, and right now!

I have advocated for years that people socialize, sleep and eat better, be creative, and exercise. These DO have a bigger impact on depression than meds for almost everyone. Whenever I suggest this, I have been thoroughly thrashed. If you are too depressed to get out of bed, how can you be expected to take a walk? I am told I am unwittingly and unkindly telling people to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” (I do not dare point out that they managed to get to a doctor, to the pharmacist, and to take their little pills.) The story is that this is not our fault and not within our power to control.

Hari explains how our attachment to this story we have about depression makes it difficult or impossible for us to hear another. It is frightening to challenge the narrative we have taken into our most vulnerable psyche. Yet, we need a more truthful story. While he confirms my faith in healthy habits, he advocates something beyond that.

His new story goes like this: We must collectively and for the good of all reconnect to other people, find work that allows us purpose and potential for growth and meaning, and stop blaming our brains for a society gone awry. We must hold hands and do this together. Yes, we will feel sad from time to time. We may sob and lie awake and cry when something terrible happens to us or the people we do care about. We are allowed. It is normal and a symptom not of brain disfunction but of emotional pain in our lives. Our father died. We did not get the job. Go ahead and feel bad about that. Take a friend out for a healthy meal, go for a walk, read a funny novel. Take all the time you need. We get better.

We must not look always inside, but sometimes do our individual best to look out, and look to others and connect to them to find the way out of our personal pain.

His book has its corny moments—even Hari admits this—and I was familiar with most of the research he cites and his narrative began to fall into a pattern I could predict. I wanted some things that I did not find here. I don’t think the author has written a perfect book or the one I would have written, but I do think he’s right.

We are not broken.

We need to find a better story to explain our distress.

The book includes copious endnotes and online links to additional source material. He’s done his research, and the book itself is well documented. He offers true stories to illustrate his points. There is a great deal of science, but very little that is too complicated for the average reader.

If I had read this book when I was ten (and it is the sort of thing I was reading at that age) I would have felt a lot better about myself and my mental state. I would have recognized the impact events had on my ability to feel good. Instead, I needed most of my life to figure it out.

POETRY + 10

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

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Sojourner Truth

A friend has posted news of a Texas charter middle school that asked students to brainstorm a “balanced” list of the pros and cons of slavery. This is what is meant by “false equivalency”. All I can think of on the pro side? I am not on that side. On the con side, slave owners sacrificed their souls. On the con side is a lengthy list. There is no balance possible, it is a demented assignment.

April is National Poetry Month, and my students and I have been stealing 20-minutes out of our class to write bad poem drafts. They are only bad because they are so young. (The poems, not the poets.) Twenty minutes might get something started, but after we complete several such drafts we will revise just one. Maybe that one will break our hearts.

This is also Confederate History Month in five U.S. states. (There used to be six.) I refuse to go look up which ones still celebrate the most deadly conflict in the history of my country, and I do not want to guess. I can only assume that the legislators of these states have so little to be proud of now that they must perpetuate a fictional glory in the past.

Why is this a problem? Let me count the ways.

  1. The Constitution was ratified over a four year period. Delaware was first in 1787. Southern states ratified in 1788, except for North Carolina in 1789, the year before Rhode Island, which was last in 1790.
  2. Southerners were notable authors of our Constitution, and states’ ratification means each state agreed to the terms outlined therein.
  3. The Constitution of the United States makes no provision for state succession.
  4. The most notable feature of the Confederacy was its support of slavery. (Seriously, if you didn’t learn that in school, consider that the textbook that taught you about the Civil War was produced by white apologists in Texas, not people with actual history foremost in the sights. When I was a girl, the books still insisted on calling it “The War Between the States.” My father would roll his eyes, take a deep breath, and correct what they were teaching me in school. I am sorry he was not there to do that for you.)
  5. The Confederacy was in open rebellion against our nation—treason anyone?
  6. Men from my husband’s family, like so many, fought on opposing sides.
  7. The south lost.
  8. Why not Civil War Month?
  9. I am so heartily sick of hearing about how monuments to southern generals need to remain standing in order that we not forget our past.
  10. Remind me, what past are we trying to remember?

My husband and I each have relatives who fought with the South in that war. We imagine they were honorable men and believed in their cause. We also accept that they were wrong, terribly wrong in that choice. However badly the North behaved after the war, they did win it. And slavery, well, there is no supporting a government determined to preserve a bald, unwarrantable usurpation of human rights, and long after most of the Western world was busy outlawing the practice.

It is a paradox for us, of course, but not really a challenging one. We can both feel interest and connection to our past, and yet recognize the abomination of the system they struggled to uphold. We feel no guilt for slavery. We were not born then. No one we have ever met was alive then. our personal identities are reliant on our own actions, not the actions of relatives who are mere photograph and documents. There is no need to belabor one of the uglier passages of our nations’ and families’ history.

It’s called letting things go.

Go write a poem. Consider the words, the verbs and intentions; couch ideas in concrete images. We are a proud country, but what should we be most proud of? Surely not open family discord, bomb blasts, and butchery. Choose something that saved lives, choose what preserved natural landscape. Hold out a hand and pull someone out of despair.

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PLOVERS, WHITE CLAY, AND SAND

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We drove down the coast, past the place where, last summer, we watched the equinox spread waves of chasing light across the ground. It was a privilege for us to get away, we who rarely vacation and have generally been extravagant only about music and books and art. We drove south to have a night in a hotel, a bed and breakfast.

This is the Sylvia Beach Hotel. A rickety, somewhat cattywampus structure overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There is a cat, too. Our room was the Jane Austen, the third and fourth windows east of the ocean front and facing north on the top floor. I could watch the sky and sea from the bed. We had a beautiful view. Most of the rooms do. It is not expensive to stay in the off-season and a Sunday, and the breakfast is good.

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The Sylvia Beach Hotel was built over a hundred years ago and eventually named for the founder of Shakespeare & Co. in 1987 with author-themed rooms. A fire escape on the east side is gone, but all the rooms have baths and sprinklers. In most other ways it remains what it always was: a Victorian boarding house.

The decks on the ocean side are recently rebuilt and much of the shingle siding has been repaired and replaced. When the work is done, it will be painted dark blue-green again.

We decided to have the dinner, served in five courses with several choices of entrée. The food was wonderful, but too much food for us. The company was marvelous and entertaining, the best part of the evening.

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At first the semipalmated plovers (I think) were nearly invisible until they moved. There were a half dozen or so just a few feet away as we made our way south on the sand. They scooted along the windblown beach, but eventually lifted and joined a larger group.

The flock of dozens of birds would rush cover together and then fly straight up all at once, turning instantly north, west, east, north again, and land. On the ground they rushed about, spacing themselves several feet apart and peck at the sand, turn, move back closer together again, and then all back up to begin again their collective dance in the air.

I watched the plovers do this once, twice, again and again, the landing, the expansion of their range, as if released from a leash connecting them to the flock, a moment of business, then back toward their center, and flight!

When we walked at home, we saw plovers again, not the same birds, perhaps not the same species. Pretty sure they are plovers.

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White clay and a trickling of sand. The pattern of trickled sand below is a mere inch tall.

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HOUSE OF ORANGE

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My friend is mourning a cedar tree she passes each day on her way to work. The droopy foliage has abruptly turned orange, an indication the tree has died, perhaps of infection with cedar apple rust or another disease or just due to a peculiarly hot and dry summer. I don’t know the tree she is describing. It is likely the native western red cedar, Thuja plicata, and named for the color of the lumber harvested from the tree, or it could be an introduced cultivar such as arborvitae. What is not in doubt is that the tree has died and it is bright orange. Orange is not a color most people would associate with death. It is a juicy hue.

Orange as a color name entered English in the sixteenth century but the color had always existed, of course, and had previously been called “yellow-red,” ġeolurēad in Old English. The word itself traces its lineage from fourteenth century English, back to Old French or perhaps Spanish through the Arabic nāranj, the Persian nārang, and eventually to the Sanskrit nāranga, meaning orange tree, a word that might derive from an even earlier word meaning fragrant. Our word for the color orange and the fruit have an ancient co-existence, but the citrus fruit came first.

There are synthetic citrus flavors and scents. In fact, lemon and lime and orange are among the easiest flavors and scents to synthesize. What is complicated and thus wonderful about the real orange is the cut wedge of fruit, pockets of juice sliced through and dripping, teeth biting into those tapered slices of juice, the flavor running across the tongue, down the throat and chin. The sticky, flavorful residue, then taking a strip of orange peel and folding it inside out to rupture the cells in the peel, and the mist of orange oil visible in the air. No chemical creation matches that experience, and no synthetic scent lasts as long as the real thing.

The citrus family includes limes, lemons, mandarins, pomelos, grapefruit, as well as oranges. The actual colors or peel and pulp range from the green of limes to the ruddy maroon of blood oranges. I am a fan of all these fruits. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s much-lauded bio-punk science fiction novel, The Windup Girl, the entire family of citrus fruit trees have been killed off by a virus and the younger generation has no idea what they are missing. This was one of the most striking images I found early in the novel. Imagine all the citrus in the world gone, never to return! How would I explain to my grandchildren the taste of an orange, what one was like? Describe eating the pulp out of a quartered orange and how I placed the emptied peel in my mouth to make an orange smile when I was nine. Imagine generations of children never able to do that in real life.

I could not explain that.

The orange fruit is a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and of weddings in many cultures.. The House of Orange, Huis van Oranje-Nassau of Netherlands was founded in the sixteenth century by William the Silent or William of Orange. But the color does not appear on the royal coats of arms, which shows blue, red and yellow. None of those old royal coats of arms include orange, though many use its components, red and yellow—no mixing of those primaries allowed. Orange is a secondary color on the painter’s palette, primary only in flames.

Orange is the color of settled-down-for-the-evening driftwood fires and of sunsets over the sea. Unlike sunrises which most often tint clouds pink, the sunsets in my sky are livid orange, glowing coals settled along the horizon. “Red” hair is orange. Orange is the color of many flowers such as the the six-petaled Montbretia and the darker orange crocosmia, a variety named “Lucifer,” that naturalize locally, and the many-petaled daisy-like British Calendula, used since the middle ages to control fever and heal wounds. There is the dust of burned ferrous oxide, oxidized iron, what we call rust, FeO. Gone with the Wind’s “red earth of Tara” is not red, but ruddy orange from iron oxide in the soil. The first time I visited Georgia, I was thrilled to see this orange-blushed soil.

An article in Forbes cites research suggesting that warm colors such as orange can create an illusion of physical warmth, and that orange in particular is associated with good value—not moral values, but monetary ones. Maybe that’s why so many sale stickers are orange. It is also likely that orange is one of the more striking colors, a noticeable color, unlike green or blue or neutrals that might fade into the background. Orange is the color of warning signs and labels. A color we might find untrustworthy. Orange is often called bright. Add white to it and orange becomes a tender different fruit: peach or apricot. Orange darkened with black morphs into a shade we label brown, but few people associate pale peach and brown with orange in the same way they recognize sky and navy as a tint and shade of the same blue.

A little smoke and some white turns orange into a discontinued Pratt and Larson paint color called Caravan. We painted a bedroom in Seattle that color and then our bedroom in Oregon the same hue. This pastel owed nothing to baby shades, more to stucco walls, tropical fruit, pale carnelian, the bottoms of baby feet. A paler tint of flicker’s flight feathers, life rafts, sweet and sour sauce, colors screaming for attention. Caravan lifts the eye without compelling attention.

I feel juice sliding down my chin from a slice of peach pie—I think more often of food than of warning when I think of orange.

A name for the color orange does not even exist in many languages. All languages identify the sky as blue, blood as read, but like the red-yellow of Old English, orange is the least likely hie to have its own label in hundreds of languages around the world. But oranges! Those luscious fruits dripping across my tongue—the flavor and scent is unmistakable. The tongue and eye know orange even without words. Orange as a name comes from flavor.

The cliché of orange is Halloween pumpkins and autumn leaves. But pumpkins, born in Mexico not in New England, come in many shades. And the maple trees we watch for on our morning drive turn pale yellow in the fall or maroon if the nights are cold. The colors we might expect are oranges I find in agates and scallop shells, daylight in the late afternoon shining through ears, the wooden beads on my son’s camp necklace, the teacup filled with markers, my favorite handknit sweater. the spines of Penguin Books, cantaloupe flesh and copper wire, a spool of thread, chrysanthemums and bittersweet and witch hazel blossoms, the inner bark of alder trees cleaved by an ax, Chantrelle mushrooms I find in the duff of spruce glades and the bright shade of salmon eggs further upstream, ground chili and turmeric, carrots and caution signs, traffic cones, a dying leaf. The death of a cedar tree. The famous cedar tree, “Quinault Lake Redcedar” that lived due north of us, was killed recently in a series of winter storms. Less than two hundred feet tall, the was impressive for its nineteen foot girth rather than more unexceptional height. Maybe it turned orange as it died, but I did not witness that warning.

Orange may be a sign of trouble, but I prefer its more common role: the sweet, sharp, sticky, sour, succulent, salty sweetness of day’s end cry of joy.

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NOSTALGIA

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

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[CLICK TITLE TO READ MORE] I made my youngest grandchild a birthday cake for her party today. She is two years old. I also made a 2-year-old quilt, something I also did for each of her cousins. Pink is her favorite color. For now.

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EV’s quilt, completely pieced but before it was quilted.

The quilt is cotton with a cotton filling and a pieced backing that is partially pink with metallic gold dots. The cake is yellow, some of it tinted pink from the addition of black Oregon huckleberries. I made lemon curd and raspberry jam for the fillings, and a huge batch of blackberry buttercream for the frosting. It is the most incredible pink. I knew this trick with blackberry juice in buttercream from a previous series of cake made to please my oldest grandchild, who turned six last fall. Fresh organic raspberries. Organic everything, because we do not like to take chances with toxins.

Two cake batches, blackberry syrup to flavor and color the double batch of buttercream, and lemon curd. I completely thrashed the kitchen. Powdered sugar everywhere. Crumbs. Gary was cleaning my mess for me as I began typing this.

Gary is good to do this cleaning, but he reminds me that I was in the kitchen all day. He had a hard day himself. We had to make a correction to our taxes, he cleaned the walkway and trimmed shrubs on the north side of the house, and his brother called to complain and then hung up on him. This brother is afraid of all sorts of things that might not worry me in the slightest. That’s because he is mentally ill and unable to step away from himself long enough to think about others. Others are always dangerous to his mind.

Years ago I heard the poet Naomi Shihab Nye say that even as a child she felt this strange homesickness for a place she’d never been. She realized that what she missed was the place where poetry resides. At least, that is what I remember her saying.

Another poet, the marvelous Tracy Smith, recently discussed the terrible hunger she sees for literature: “I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We’re reminded of these real parts of ourselves.” Perhaps it is that willingness to be vulnerable, that we pursue. It is some vestige of glory in our souls—not paychecks or adoring crowds or battlefields, but something more like what e’re inclined to term humanity.

Some see vulnerability as weakness, when it is actually strength. To be open and accepting requires that we have the strength to remain standing under the weight of chance, of betrayal and error. Not everyone can manage that.

The alternative is continual anger and fear. No one is wise while continually angry and fearful.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes: “All old people are nostalgic for certain things they knew that are gone, but I live in the past very little. So why am I feeling like an exile?” No time to lose—yes, that’s it exactly.

I willingly call myself old and I am grateful to Le Guin for reinforcing my sense that aging is inevitable, but has its perks. I will die, but I have lived long enough to know what might be missed if I fail to pay attention.

The past is not my usual space to dwell, though I fret over lost friends and family. I fret over misunderstandings concerning recent history and that my students do not know the parts of speech or how to construct a formal outline. I am nostalgic for my own excellent education. More often, I look ahead to what I might still accomplish. Most often I am here and now, figuring out my life one step forward at a time.

I have thought about my place in time often over the years. Just now, reading Le Guin’s last book, I am thinking a good deal about what I might do with whatever time I have left. I might have as many years as Ursula. She was younger than I am now when I first met her, and her lifespan suggests I might still be living and writing sensibly into my 80s. I hope during this time to find the poetry in myself.

More of us might seek that strength that risks communion, that loves and forgives, that locates the heart of our hearts. I think, at least, that I might have time to do that, to continue looking forward. To open myself. To hear. And to give voice without fear.

And pink cakes.

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THE LAST CHANCE

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

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[CLICK TITLE TO READ MORE] Just now, sitting up in bed, I have already updated my progress on Ursula K. Le Guin’s last book No Time to Spare. Le Guin ruminates about, among other things such as her cat and overpopulation, the meaning of spare time. Here I have to stop for a moment.

Through my email inbox, The Literary Hub offers links to various articles and I read one or two of those. The New Yorkers sends me the frequent Borowitz Report. I read the headline and kicker, but I do not click through.

The New Yorker wants me to subscribe. This is my “last chance.”

I read a good deal every day. I read stories from three newspapers (I subscribe online to two of them) and some days I read stories on NPR or The Atlantic. I read Brevity—both the blog and the magazine. I read short fiction on four SF/fantasy websites. I receive daily posts from three poetry websites, and occasional ones from a poet and an educator, plus a handful of others. Sometimes I even read whatever book I am carrying around. In the school library I look over a magazines.

I do not read The New Yorker cover to cover, though I have a friend who has been doing that since we were both in high school, going on 50 years ago. I have an attitude about The New Yorker. I am not their target demographic.

Even when Jamaica Kincaid was writing Talk of the Town, I found the magazine elitist and representative of a view from, as Walter Lee Younger declared, “a bunch of hustling people all squeezed together being Eastern.” Richer than me, too. It is one of the magazines I find in the library. I enjoyed Zadie Smith’s essay about (finally) discovering Joni Mitchell. I sometimes read the fiction, which used to be common in magazines and is still featured there. I routinely urged students to check it out for full length literary analysis essays, another increasing rarity in mainstream magazines. I do not subscribe.

These days, I subscribe to Poets & Writers, which I fail to read, and occasional other literary journals, which I also fail to read. This failure to subscribe has not always been my practice. There were years when I subscribed to many journals and read each one cover to cover, particularly making note of fiction. One year, when The Best American Short Stories (BASS) came out, I had already read all but two of the award-winning stories.

Then my thesis adviser, as I was completing my MFA, asked: “Why bother to submit to journals? No one reads them.”

And I realized that I didn’t read them anymore either. It was the most depressing thing anyone had said to me since my mother began dying. I felt that my literary goals had been shot dead on the spot. Certainly this was not the intention of my mentor, but it bit deep, even so.

The New Yorker wants me to subscribe, and I am a reader. But no. I will read in the library and I will read periodicals online and save the paper.

I will not be subscribing. It is not my last chance. I receive such emails at least once a week. The New Yorker will offer many others.

In the mean time, I am not done myself. This is not my last chance. I will go for a walk this morning once it is light enough to see. I was asked to bake a birthday cake for our youngest grandchild’s 2nd birthday party. EV just turned two. She likes pink and she like berries so there will be wild huckleberries in the cake, blackberries tinting the buttercream pink, and raspberries on top. I will be busy today making lemon curd, a layer cake, and buttercream. There is a lot to get done and I have only an outline of my day. I have not yet begun.

At 65, I accept that some things are pretty much over for me. No plans to run another 10k. I will not be teaching full time again. Not ever. But I am still doing most things I love. I am writing every day. This is not my last chance.

What I do now is not my last chance, but I have no time to spare.

 

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