Protection, Part One

When I was five years old, my folks put up a double wide garage door to shade the patio at the back of our house. It attached to the retaining wall that kept Jo Bartz’s hillside front yard from falling into ours when it rained, and was held up in front by two four by fours.

It was coolest at the back of that shady place, right next to the wall, where were two iron-framed canvas-seated butterfly chairs and a small table made it the perfect place to curl up and read. In those hills of Echo Park, there was usually a small breeze and the deep shade became a perfect cozy corner of my life.

Sometime after Dad left, Mom designed and had her father help build an addendum to the garage door shade. With turn buckles and guy wire, they strapped up big flat colorful geometric shapes between the house and garage door. They cast lovely shadows of triangles, squares and circles onto the red cement below. Gramps Stern used old nose-cone material from McDonnell Douglas where he worked until 1964. By then, my step-dad Leo lived with my mom and me, and my little brother Steven had been born.

The new addition to the shade cover worked wonderfully. My grandfather was a natural born engineer who worked in the aircraft industry from 1910 until he retired. He designed the tools to build the tools that built airplanes. Even in the stiffest Santa Ana winds and winter storms, the shade cover held up. Mom painted the cinderblock wall in colors to echo the shapes above. 

Being a fair-skinned freckled red-head, I should have appreciated the shady efforts. But I knew everything there was to know about sun tanning, and spoke hubris fluently. I attended inner-city schools where the majority of my classmates had lovely yellow, brown or black skin. From Junior High right through my senior year in High School, I cheered my freckles on… “get together, get together, give me a tan!” Alas, I was melanin deficient, so all I ever got was lobster red and spotted. While I peeled, it was not very appealing.

One season, when I was cheerleader, I resorted to Coppertone’s Quick Tanning Lotion in order not to stand out as blue-white alongside my melanin abundant friends. QT Lotion smelled of popcorn and left my arms, legs and face looking more like a Fifty/Fifty Bar, than tanned. I was striped orange and white for the big game, yet the show went on. And I smelled like popcorn for several days. 

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if I had someone to protect me from myself and my misguided efforts to be more colorful?

In the Shadows

In the shadow of the eclipse, August 21, 2017, what dark things may slip out?

What heinous crimes may be committed by those who hurt and want to share the pain?

As the dark side of our moon shows itself to the sun, and slips between it and our mud ball spinning, momentarily bringing night at mid-morning, will ghosts and ghouls be lifted from the primordial ooze to wreak havoc on humanity? 

Oh, no, wait... that's already happened. We're on our own, folks. Shadowy figures are at the helm way before the eclipse, steering us into dark murky waters with treacherous shoals. 

We've got a lot at stake in our country. A second (un)civil war is brewing beneath the surface where reason has been eclipsed by unreasoned dogma done up in huge brush strokes across mammoth swathes of the United (becoming Untied) States.

A friend says she'll grant all the white supremacists one state: Texas. They can have Texas, she says. They'll be happy. Segregation may work for 'em. I don't think I'll miss them.

May you relish the thought, if not the actuality, of a total eclipse of the sun... just so you can say, "I saw it!" And may you enjoy the experience and make your own story about it and all it represents, or could represent if you were inclined to give meaning to the event.

As for me, I'll be under cloud cover and have to rely on the vicarious thrill of a live youtube or news station coverage on my phone. Clearly, the shadowy aspects have captured my imagination.

Let's reconvene and swap stories.

Open Heart Purgery

  ·.¸¸..><((((º>.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>`·.¸¸.·   *

I hold open my heart to the possibility that my Father’s testimony to us was born of love and his keen sense of drama. He had a preference and flare for creating fanciful truths, rather than sticking within bounds of what most people consider “actual reality.”

Were we descended from James Clerk Maxwell, originator of electro-magnetic theorems? That’s what he told us. Was Grammy Florence Whitehead Maxwell truly a full-blood member of the Cherokee Nation? Did she and her brother, my Great Uncle Ed, really survive removal from their land, a brutal orphanage experience, and mission schools? Or were these dreams of my father born of wishes for a more flamboyant ancestral stock?

A simple check of Wikipedia shows that James Clerk Maxwell and his wife Katherine Mary Dewar Maxwell had no children. The lineage stops there… unless there were wild seeds sown. My father may have known something about such matters in his own life, but I doubt he had clairvoyance about J.C. Maxwell’s carnal history. 

I share my father’s enthusiasm for fantastical flights of fancy. I just don't claim them as real. In profiles of J.C. Maxwell and my father, I see the same high forehead and Roman nose. While experimenting with light, heat, electro-magnetism, and the physical world might he also have experimented with his own physicality? Likely not, but it is a convenient explanation of my own quest to understand how things work in the world and my fascination with all science. Could the genes have come through some imprint running down the branches of our family tree?

Perhaps ancestors.com or twenty-three and me could tell. Someday… 

Open-Hearted Plagiarism

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. (Truisms R Us.)

I attended a “Death Cafe” coffee and conversation with friends recently and we each told the other five women at our tables about one death related experience we’d had or heard about that impacted us.  The last woman of six at our table to tell her tale mentioned a book called “Parting Gifts.” It’s a children’s book about the gifts that our dying loved ones give us during or after their leave-taking. I remember shaking my head quickly - like a double take - when I heard that. Years ago, I wrote a piece called Parting Gifts about some of the many things I learned from people and critters I loved who died. 

Spontaneous combustion, I call it, when two or more have the same idea in relatively similar time frames but disparate locations. No looking on our neighbor’s test papers involved. 

In his book, How to Fly a Horse,Kevin Ashton tells stories of inventors and scientists whose work built on specific work of folks before them. Not one of us pulls a unique idea out of the ethers that isn't linked to other ideas.

I have a heart full of gratitude for so many humans whose thoughts and inquiries have influenced my thinking process and prompted generation of my own ideas.

In this time of a Bully in the Pulpit, heading our country, troubled souls are emulating the bully's hit-and-run tactics. Emboldened by the Alt Right at the helm, they think they can act with impunity. 

I'm betting we common citizens will start to show our better nature coming forward from a long lineage of folk doing the right thing. Even his own party is complaining about the Trumpeter's lack of firm boundary against racial hate crimes.

Standing up and being counted makes sense. 

May peace prevail. May cool-headedness prevail. May de-escalation reign. May we cultivate compassion, a plan, and fierce watchfulness.

* Fishies whole-heartedly copied from Lori G. from an email with same. Sweet, huh?

Stealthy Healthy Chess Berries and Leftovers

Blackberries require concentration.

Sharp! 

Barbs grab and stab. Go in easy, come out hard. They don't like to let go.

Clothing snags. Skin bleeds

You've got to think several moves ahead. Winds shift, blowing a vine to imbed one fine needle in the hem of your shirt. Or, your attention wanders and you forget to think three dimensionally about how you're going to bring your curled fingers, that are now holding a fat sweet berry, out from the small space you successfully navigated into the bramble when it was a long, slim-as-a-banana, empty hand. And, when those stickers prick your flesh, you might react and drop the sweetest gem you just selected into the sprawling underbrush of thorns. Rats! Another one for a passing bird, mouse, or resident skunk.

Mindful. Slow. Peripheral and focused vision - each a requisite. Oh, and close-fitting clothes and sturdy non-slip shoes, on account of the hill. Cover your toes.

Early in the season, when some berries are deep purple to black and oh so ripe, others red, hard, and sour, and still others sweet little white blossoms, bees are a factor as well. There are plenty of plant parts to share. I love the bees, and they seem to know it. We don't bother each other, but if you're not used to it, and a bee lands on you, you might react in your distraction and move suddenly, colliding with a waiting prickly stem. Cunning. Hungry. These blackberry bushes plan to devour you. Gleaming swords sharpen themselves in the sunlight, like a willful opponent with a cartoon star shining brazenly on one too white tooth.

You've got to watch every move. Yours, and your opponent's.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Queen of Katwe, last year's docudrama about ten-year-old Phiona Mutesi's stunning rise from an illiterate girl from Katwe, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, to international chess master, lays out her innate ability to think eight moves ahead. I loved watching this feel-good movie, and I'll betcha she also would be really stealthy at picking blackberries.

Both sports, if we can call them that, require the ability to think in three-dimensional space. I wish I had taken up chess. I know the basics, but marvel at those who can hold the whole board, the other player's style, and the move of the moment in her mind.

But at the end of the game, there's only the satisfaction of having won. At the end of picking berries, you've got a bowl or more full of deliciousness... true, too soon they're gone, but what a way to go! No left-overs.

Pass the bandaids, please.