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
They used to say, Nice guys finish last. We may want to rethink not-nice as a way of life. Right about now, the world could use a dose of niceness.
My brother said our mother was the epitome of “nice,” and that is true. Mom always tried to be nice and sometimes she went above and beyond to be kind to other people just because. She once followed a car that had dangerously cut her off and ended by holding the poor driver while they sobbed out their entire life tragedies on her shoulder. Gary is like that too. Saturdays in the 1970s we walked through every pawn shop on First Avenue in Seattle looking at guitars. Homeless men would tell him their life story and he would hand them change and sometimes they cried too because someone cared enough to hear them out.
That is my model for decent behavior. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Where have I heard that before?
There’s a bald eagle in the snag near the top of this photo, but she’s often there in the higher branches. We suspect her favorite perch is rotting and that’s why she’s taken the lower branch. Anyway, that’s not the reason for this photo. At the bottom, this photo shows the drift of sand in front of a shallow cave we pass most every morning on our beach walks. It looks like kids piled that sand up more than three feet high, doesn’t it? But this is what the tide did a few days ago. There are four sandbars running along our shore, five if I count the one that came up this spring nearly to the green line—more sand than we have seen in 40 years or so. The dune grass that was introduced to Gearharrt a few lifetime ago, was also introduced here but has not thrived the way Siberian blackberries, montbrecia, and English ivy have.Continue reading →
When I cross the street I look both ways, even when I’m in a crosswalk, even with there is a light telling me I may, and I look both ways even at a crossing of two one-way streets where I shouldn’t have to look. Drivers in the early morning aren’t always paying attention to someone like me.
People like me are concerned about where our country is headed, but first: Safety while running.
On our way home from the Farmers’ Market,last Saturday morning, I noticed my favorite rose was already blooming. This pink climber is a “volunteer”—that is, no one deliberately planted it in the narrow crevice between sidewalk paving and concrete building. However it sprouted, it’s grown to be enormous! It is also gorgeous, as is the woman at right. Gary called out that I wasn’t taking a photo of her but the rose, and she laughed. She’d moved out of the frame by then, but I wish I had a photo of that grin!Continue reading →
“More than 3,200 events took place across the country on Saturday [March 28, 2026], from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in a state Trump carried with 66 percent of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 events. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah had events in the double digits. Rural communities that have never hosted a political protest before, from Seward, Alaska, to East Glacier Park, Montana, showed up for the first time. The protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, and in countries with constitutional monarchies, they called the protests ‘No Tyrants’.”
These allegorical figures hold dead babies. War always makes dead babies. I used to teach Mark Twain’s antiwar story, “The War Prayer” and ask my students to guess which war Twain was responding to. [The best answer: all of them.] The satire was tough for the high school juniors I was teaching; they almost never understood the story without help and maybe rarely guessed which war. (As a junior in high school, I would have got the satire—it was different war and I read newspapers, plus I’d been a solid fan of Twain since I was eight.) It was lies that took us to war in Twain’s time. It was lies that took us to war in my grandfather’s time, and in my time too. Over and over again… it is always lies that take us to war. Even the “righteous” wars begin with deceit.Continue reading →
It is a newer expression, “Read the room.” It suggests that a person should have the sense of where others are emotionally and intellectually, how they view what is said and seen, and more critically, whether they agree or are inclined to wrestle with your words and actions and very presence, to be annoyed or even angered.
The sky need not be blue or cloudless, the earth need not be subdued, our hopes need not be limited nor contained. It is in us to maintain faith a kindness, generosity and compassion. We might share; we might see our duty to others.
Reading the room when I’m not in the room isn’t a skill I often possess. I misunderstand or fail to appreciate the inclination of my audience. However did I manage a classroom? Zoom didn’t exist. Determination to do right, to accept that my understanding, experience, and knowledge might be shared.
“This is what makes the myth such a great lie!” Gary says. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. It’s always someone’s fault, not ours.
We tried to watch the right/left overview of the our political week on The New Hour on PBS. We’d previously vowed not to watch it anymore, but today I backslid, found it on my computer a day late, and was sorely disappointed. Two journalists talked about the Epstein files and decided that was a big nothing. [Really?] The more astonishing thing, to me, is that both Brooks and the democratic-journalist-of-the-week totally blamed the Democratic party for ending the shut-down. The Democrats should have stuck with it until they got subsidized healthcare, since it’s what people want. Brooks said that and the other person said it too. They were so disappointed.
I was thinking about a man, smiling and thankful for the gift of a few spoonfuls of honey.
It’s not my day to post, but this happened a few hours ago—the homeless vet and the arrogant journalists so sure about what others should have done.
Maybe I used this image already. It’s only a week or two old, and the rainbow on Castle Rock is such a hopeful thing. Continue reading →
Be aware, I’m going to write about firearms. It’s going to take a while, but I’ll get to it.
A tax code revision allows some teachers to deduct some [more] of their school supply purchases. In response, an engineer announced: “When I was a kid, we were responsible for our own school supplies and if you didn’t bring them to school, you did not participate in the activities.”
When I was a kid, learning disabled kids were left out of school entirely, and even then the wealthy sent their children to absurdly expensive private schools, most people could afford to live a one person’s salary, Russia’s Soviet Union was the ultimate enemy (okay, that hasn’t changed much), and we hadn’t put a man on the moon. Oh! And teachers could deduct everything, EVERYTHING! including travel, because travel is educational. Teachers were treated with respect, and though their pay was poor, the working conditions were better and the perks were substantial, and they were never sued. Most were overqualified first-generation college grads thanks to the GI bill or women with few employment options. Times change.
I took this photo thirteen years ago. Since then, the elk have gotten out of hand. A bull visits the local garden apple trees and then rubs his velvety antler on the Fatsia japonica across the street. There’s been a bull around since a town north of us (Gearhart) shot around eighty of them they considered a nuisance. There isn’t necessarily a connection between the shooting of all those cows and the wandering bulls (several) we have seen since. Just sayin’ this didn’t happen when I was a kid.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:
This is a 2016 post from my old college class blog:
I said [That is, me, Jan Priddy] the first few paragraphs of this op-ed twenty-seven times to you, one at a time. It took me four days of conferences to explain to each of you that the papers you are currently writing are not about proving how right you are, but about reviewing several reasonable and sincere concerns and finding a solution that is about doing the right thing, not finding a hero or taking sides.
We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force. Our founding fathers chose politics.
Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.
The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.
But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.
As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”
Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.
Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
This antipolitics tendency has had a wretched effect on our democracy. It has led to a series of overlapping downward spirals:
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience. That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.
The antipolitics people don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations. When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and, disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitics.
The antipolitics people refuse compromise and so block the legislative process. The absence of accomplishment destroys public trust. The decline in trust makes deal-making harder.
We’re now at a point where the Senate says it won’t even hold hearings on a presidential Supreme Court nominee, in clear defiance of custom and the Constitution. We’re now at a point in which politicians live in fear if they try to compromise and legislate. We’re now at a point in which normal political conversation has broken down. People feel unheard, which makes them shout even louder, which further destroys conversation…
—“The Governing Cancer of Our Time” by David Brooks, FEB. 26, 2016 in The New York Times
Nearly eight years ago. And, mind you, David Brooks is a Republican. (This is why Obama was not able to put a centrist on the Supreme Court and why we got that sniveling whiner instead nominated by Trump. Brooks doesn’t mention McConnell who really ramped up the crazy. Even McConnell must be sorry about this by now.) Brooks was scared even before the election. Is this a little scary, given what is happening in Congress today? It should be making us all worried.
As of a couple of hours ago, Margaret and Helen is back. I agree with a recent comment: “Welcome back. So sorry you need to be here.”
What the hell is wrong with the Republican Party? I mean, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for three indictments and 78 felony counts… and we haven’t even heard from the Georgia DA yet. Surely I am not the only fat lady dying to sing.
—MargaretandHelen.com
Helen Philpot is a determined old lady who won’t stand for nonsense. She’s funny, smart, and right. Today she explains why “Trump is a hemorrhoid.”
&PRIDE Press 