LISTENING CLOSELY

January 8, 2023January 12, 2023 / janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

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.

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a funny incident

November 2, 2019November 2, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

My husband is one of those older men who have routines. One of Gary’s involves our walks on the beach, another is burning debris. He generally goes out very early in the morning to burn junk mail, rose clippings, and other papers and wood trash he can’t recycle—going to recycling is another of his routines. If the wind is blowing onshore, he can’t burn, but during an offshore breeze, he will dash out to get his job done.

The other day, a member of the crew putting a new roof on the house next door ran up to him and began yelling. “You should be composting—global warming—CO2!” Gary thought he was kidding at first, and then realized that he was being confronted by an angry young man waving a shovel. Gary listened and then walked away when he was through.

If you know Gary, you probably know he is a pretty even-tempered and completely non-confrontational man. He did tell another young man who was harassing me on the beach to “back off” last summer. He was determined and calm and the guy did back off, but generally Gary avoids trouble on principle. This incident troubled him more the more he thought about it.

He has been uneasy for two days since. He didn’t want to walk by the house after eight the next morning. And then . . .

And then this morning he found out who it was that had yelled at him. A former student of mine. I wrote that boy a letter of recommendation that helped him get in to Reed. Since then his mother blocked me on Facebook. I had written a post on my old blog that addressed the cost (actual dollars) for women trying to maintain the beauty expected of them. Cosmetics and hair care do not come cheap. She accused me of “hatin on folks.” (Yes, she spelled it that way.) It was one of those bizarre exchanges that has made me grateful I left that platform.

My computer won’t open that young man’s recommendation. It’s just as well. I recall him as a very intelligent student, creative but entitled. Anyway, apparently he graduated from Reed in order to invest energy in harassing 70-year-old men, and now Gary is chuckling about this and I am allowed to tell the tale. There is a great deal more, of course, which comes from living in a small community for 40 years and teaching entire generations of teenagers.

Had he come over and simply talked to Gary, my husband would have apologized and explained that we do have a compost heap, that we have been largely vegetarian for decades (wild seafood a few times each month) and that we absolutely support Greta and efforts to curb greenhouse gasses. The only packed foods I buy are small jars of avocado oil mayonnaise and the occasional bag of honey-dijon chips. We do drink bottled water when we can find it in glass, but that would not have mattered, I guess. We wrestle with long-cherished desires to visit sites in Europe, but flying . . . Barcelona and Crete have been on my wishlist since I was ten or eleven. But we respect that flying has a terrible impact on the environment. Gary points out that the young man wouldn’t have cared since “it was never about me [Gary], it was always about him.”

The sky is blue and I have a sinus infection so we missed our walk this morning. Yesterday, I made stock from vegetable trimmings (a weekly routine of mine) and I mean to make soup later this afternoon (another routine). I have completed 5644 words since yesterday morning for my NaNo challenge. If my head didn’t hurt, I’d be feeling pretty great about now. In fact I do.

WHAT WE WANT

July 26, 2019July 28, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

Headlines in the United States concern politics, specifically disappointment that Mueller testified exactly as he said he would. It’s all in his report. The man in the Oval Office is a liar and cheat and does not care what happens to anyone so long as he’s at the top of the news. The news in the United Kingdom is about their new Prime Minister and the record-breaking heat. A few headlines down find concerns about logging in Brazil:

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

—Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable ‘tipping point’, The Guardian

The photo above shows a vast area turned from forest to farmland. That forest feeds oxygen to the world, converts pollutants to pure cooler air. We need a stable climate, we need to preserve a livable world. The ocean of humanity needs the ocean’s temperature to stop rising. If humanity is to survive we need our appetites to cool. As Americans get fatter, farmland grows to feed our desires. This is not about need, it’s about what we want.

We know that plastic bags, meat production, air conditioning, driving, flying, use of fossil fuels in general contribute to global warming. Endangered tropical hardwood on the dining room floor. Some of these activities are more avoidable than others. Some of these activities are more damaging than others, but we don’t want to stop.

Assuming the plane is full, an individual’s share of a single one-way flight from coast to coast of the U.S. contributes greenhouse gases equivalent to driving a car for a year. We would still have to get home, so that’s another year. Airports and air travel have always been subsidized by our taxes. Like the tobacco industry, we aggressively protect the things we want, whether they are good for us or not.

Like our president, we want what we want and we do not want to hear the nay-sayers. We will contribute to the cause in some way that does not cost too much and make up for our use of endangered hardwoods or vacation to Europe or steak at dinner, the plastic bottles of fizzy water my husband is fond of. There are alternatives, there is sacrifice, but like most people, we don’t want to bother. We want what we want.

I wanted this little shell—delighted to find a whole snail shell. It is occupied by a hermit crab so I put it back into the water. You can just barely see its legs to the left of the shell. The little hermit crab just wants to live.