Crochety Old Broad

Maybe I will be a crochety old broad after all!

My knitting group has been invited to help out a church member who's recovering from breast cancer surgery. Cathy wants to complete a Granny Square Quilt before daughter Elizabeth's trip across country to attend her first year of college. 

We knitters all agreed. We'll show up next Thursday at our mentor's home with yarn, hooks and embroidery needles to get this project in hand while Cathy tends to her healing. 

There's something so satisfying about picking up the pieces that necessarily drop out of a friend's hand because s/he's trying to fend off one of Life's Curve Balls. It's almost as if we're thumbing our noses at the hubris of Life to think it could thwart one human's dreams. Strength in numbers.

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Many grocery stores used to accept clean plastic bags and send them to recyclers who then had them shipped in BULK to China.  Evidently, China got tired of taking the plethora of plastic from the teeming shores of the US of A, and is no longer admitting our refuse to spill over onto their shores. Neither is Safeway taking them elsewhere.

What if...

We shred the plastic film bags, twist the strips into "yarn" and crochet colorful windshield shades? They can be held up with hooks sit into silicone suction cups stuck to the windshield. I think it could be a win-win situation. 

Inhabitants of a warming climate need shades for their gas guzzling cars! We can use them forever, because - HEY! Plastic does NOT bio-degrade! Once made, it lasts FOREVER!  But cars don't, so we will continue to need new shades for quite some time. 

Hmmmm.... What ELSE might we crochet out of plastic bags?? 

Earth Day Blues

Inhabitants of Beautiful Blue Third Planet from the Sun blew it!

They fouled their nest to the point of no return causing the slow and painful demise of species after species, as they died out until the last man standing on the spot labeled "North Pole" took his last breath.

From the colonized moon, we looked down at the spectacle in disgust and disbelief.

Able to save some of the species - at least two hundred humans, several plants and a couple of remaining critters before rocketing off for lunar landing number one hundred and eight in 2052, we felt relief at being "saved," deep grief at the loss of unparalleled magnitude, and disbelief at human's stupidity and hubris.

No other animal fouls its own nest. No other animal puts on blinders so as not to see danger rising around it. No other animal willfully destroys its own home just to gather unto itself more of a cache - in this case "cash." You can't take it with you!

Coal, oil, the blood of the Mother, when burned sullies her delicate breath - turning the sun into a magnified heater. 

One side of the moon used to be ever dark, but we found a way to set it spinning so night and day can happen here, in short cycles, but at least they happen. At one-quarter the diameter of Earth, now a dead marble spinning below us, Luna has six hours of daylight and the same amount of dark, before the sun rises again. It has been quite an adjustment under the dome where oxygen is manufactured by plants for all of us to breathe. We haven't got the ratio quite right yet. Gravity boosters keep us from going osteoporotic, but our existence is nearly as precarious on Luna as it was on Earth. We hope the dead planet Gaia will rise again to the task of supporting life once the pollution and toxicity diminish.

Meanwhile, we've learned to overlook petty differences among all species and all people here on Luna and to recognize we're all made of the same stuff.

Tragically, no people with white skin or light eyes survived the Heat Blast of 2034, only those humans with darker skin tones. There was an automatic bonding - trauma bonding, to be sure, because of what darker toned people endured for millennia at the hands of their lighter skinned brothers and sisters, but bonding happened nonetheless.

We here on Luna are grateful for life itself and watch with horror and fascination as Earth seems to grow more and more dead before what we hope will be full resurrection... before it's too late for all her children. 

Meanwhile there's a certain beauty in seeing Luna reflected back to us from the black-tides which cover more than fifty percent of the formerly Blue Planet's surface. Is there life beneath those black-tides? We can only hope.

Modernity Leave

I want Modernity Leave. Could I simply take time off from the scuttle and warp-speed techno catapult called daily life as we know it?

I want modernity leave. I want to wake up with the sun rise, not with an alarm clock. I want to go to sleep with the moon rise, not with electric lights lengthening my days for hours on end. 

I want modernity leave to experience the sound of tree roots moving downward through the earth, sucking up the rains deposited directly into the water table rather than running off our asphalt roads and concrete patios straight into the ocean.

I want modernity leave to walk to places of beauty I may be able to reach on foot or on scooter. (Bicycles seem too tall for me at this time of life when the ground is farther away from my head than it was when I was a kid, and I don't want an ambulance to wail its way toward my limp body should I fall off the damn bike!)

I want a modernity break so I may putter around and make things of beauty and utility. A friend recently took a workshop at The Crucible - a place for hot art: Kiln work and copper enamel. She fired tiles and used them to make mosaic stepping stones. Her garden is criss-crossed with these beautiful mosaic-lined pathways lacing together rows upon rows of pots holding vegetables from Artichokes and Zucchini, and flowers as perennial as asters, buttercups, and zinnias. I love that you can wander on any of the paths and come back to where you began having seen bees at work, wind whipping vines, and sunlight dancing on leaves of every size and shape. Fragrant flowers festoon the fences, activating the senses.

Modernity leave sounds juicy... like something creative and ultimately productive. 

Modernity leave sounds doable, where maternity leave would be ridiculous at seventy. 

Modernity leave sounds implausible but not impossible. But modernity leave also sounds idealistic and not intrinsic to how enmeshed my life has become with techno gadgets. 

Speaking with a client today, I told her I don't use an electronic calendar, because I don't like it beeping at me when I forget to look at it. I use a pencil and a paper calendar with pretty photos of animals and landscapes from snow-covered mountains to deep green algae ponds. The client and I set an appointment. When I remember where I set it down, I can always find what I'm doing for the day/week/month -- simply by looking at it. Silently.

I appreciate that some folks have immaculate desks where they can see the wood gleaming or formica shining - free of clutter. I appreciate that electronic devices save trees from being chewed up to make paper. I appreciate that 'smarter-than-I- am-phones' can do the work of several people in keeping track of my mileage, maps, money, and managing my time, calendar, phone messages and more. I'm just not equipped to handle the noise of the digital world. I don't like things beeping, buzzing, boring into my head space with reminders and updates.  I have lots of little slips of paper always giving me the slip... where DID I write that address? But then, I find it amidst the piles on the desk and find something else I was looking for weeks ago, and all's well with the world. Hidden surprises!

I want modernity leave so I may commune with the grasses, birds, trees, and flowers. I want modernity leave so I may sit down to tea with a friend and look her in the eyes and have a real conversation. No phones ringing for an hour will allow that conversation to run along smoothly, coherently, without hiccups caused by someone excusing herself to return an important call or an email because goddess forbid there should be a delay in responding to someone who isn't even in the same state, let alone the same city as oneself, leaving the tea partner feeling like chopped liver!

Modernity leave would allow me to walk instead of drive to the store. Of course, where I live that would be a day's journey there and back. As my husband jokes, we could walk downhill to the store just fine. The return trip uphill would be so much faster because the ambulance would put its siren on to get us home quickly!

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In 1929 my grand parents had one car and two children. The work they shared was caring for the kids and a chicken ranch in San Bernardino -- until the crash left them ranchless, but still with four mouths wanting food. They moved into Los Angeles and a small bungalow owned by Grammy's sister Mary Polly and her husband Jack. My mother was then ten years of age, and Uncle Larry six. Gramps sought work building airplanes for McDonnell Douglas. Back to his roots in early aircraft. He began with Glenn L. Martin, building airplanes in Seattle, 1910, just thee years after the Wright Brothers' first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

When she was small and still living on the chicken ranch, my mother tied turkey feathers to her belt and jumped off the barn roof, knowing, thinking, believing she could fly. From that jump forward, until she died and was cremated at nearly ninety-three years of age, she had a metal rod in her right arm that kept her bones straight after the fall when she didn't fly off the roof after all. Gravity sucked. I wonder if they used the Model T to drive little Barbara to the hospital for doctoring up, or if the country doctor made a house call? I'll never know. Still, I dream of flying. Modern times give me different images of flying from turkey feathers tied to my waist and shoulders. 

Gimme that olde time volare-ing any time over modernity... that's good enough for me. Maybe I could do with Selecto-Techno? Have my convection-oven baked cake and eat antibiotics with robotic arms when needed too? 

I Have One Word for You, Benjamin...

Plastics

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was so mad that people were being unkind to the earth that she stopped people on the street and in the supermarket and told them how bad plastic was for the creatures of the world and did they know that sea turtles were dying because of our ignorance and selfishness and stupidity? Did they know that every time they bought something in a plastic container it was ending up on Midway and other islands in the Pacific Ocean and creating a giant gyre that keeps spinning around and spinning around out there and the birds dive into it and think the red floating things are food and they eat them and when their bellies are full of plastic, they cannot fit their accustomed diet of fish into their bellies and so they die of starvation. This little girl was so mad that she stomped around and stomped around being angry all the time at the stupidity of her fellow humans. 

Then she got an idea to use her anger as energy. She began to hand out postcards addressed to the plastic manufacturers and manufacturers of goods that got bottled in plastic and she asked the people she met to send the postcards to the companies to say they thought it was a very bad idea to sell their products in plastic containers that had only one use and then were tossed. She worded the postcards so politely that no one could refuse to help out the cause of reducing plastic streams from ending up in the ocean. Pretty soon, people stopped using plastic soda straws and one-time-only-use bottles and containers and pretty soon after that, people started taking their glass bottles to the bulk section, getting them weighed, filling them up with what they wanted to buy, and not long after, that became habit!  Not quite soon enough, but soon, the stream of plastic slowed and grew smaller and finally diminished so much that the people who cared enough to save the whales, dolphins, albatrosses and other sea birds and animals that were still alive, were able to dismantle the plastic mass out there in the pacific ocean little by little until it was all taken back to the mainland and awaited being eaten by mushroom spores or some other innovative natural reversal of turning the whole world into plastic. 

The next thing that made the little girl really mad was the globe getting warmer and warmer and she knew that it was due to carbon emissions mostly coming from cars burning fossil fuels, so again, she planned a postcard campaign and ...

Not Again!

Skunk scent wafts again! 

Oh, NO! Not THAT!

We've been through this, Skunkie, dear, you may have the North side of the yard and leave well enough alone the South side where you wanted to build a nest under the outside stairs a few months back. No nests on the foundation please!!  My streaming eyes won't tolerate it! My tender nose rebels even now, as your essence wafts through the window newly opened to this warm spring night.

May you find a sweet new home, Skunkie. May the Earth Goddess Bless you and keep you...
FAR away from us! (The Rabbi, in Fiddler on the Roof, when asked if there is a blessing for the Czar, responds, "A blessing for the Czar? Yes! God Bless and keep the Czar... far away from us.")

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Reading a sweet book right now called Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Such a compendium of ways to honor the earth and live in harmony with our mother. 

Dr. Kimmerer is a botanist but comes from the heart of the Anishinaabe Peoples in the North East, and her perspective is much broader, deeper and wiser than pure science can comprehend. I'm moved to tears at the end of nearly every chapter. Tears of joy, tears of WTF have we done?, tears of  recognition that she captures my sentiments so succinctly. We all belong to the mother of us all. We all have lost our manners and knowledge of reciprocity.

Never take more than half of what is offered. Always say thank you and act as if you're grateful, for cryin' out loud! 

There's an entire chapter dedicated to The Honorable Harvest. Kimmerer says the guidelines are not written down, but she offers up how they might appear if they were written down... right there on page 183! I won't plagiarize here, but invite you to go look up the tenets of how to receive the gifts Earth has to give us and how to support Her to keep on giving, instead of us raping, pillaging, thieving, and poisoning Her.

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I found out Friday that my Cousin Eric died. His sister, my cousin Deb called me to say she saw an OBIT in the newspaper from the tiny town where he had lived that was dated August 21, 2017. He's been dead a year and a half and we're only just now hearing of it. On FaceBook, she found it.

The dream I had of him, about four days before  Deb called me with the news, had him flying on the ceiling much like some of the papier mâché angels  he began making and hanging from my Auntie's ceiling shortly after he had a bad Acid Trip. Nearly life-size, these pastel colored ladies were not unlike the carved wood Indonesian angels I've seen that are much smaller. Both Eric's angels and the Indonesian stylized ones have beatific smiles. I don't remember if Eric was smiling in the dream. I hope he was and is now, wherever he may be. He had such a different drummer. His mama and all the rest of the family cut ties with him. He went off to live in the woods.

May his offspring think lovingly of him and may he be at peace. 

Now, my dear cousin Deb is the sole survivor of her family of origin. That's an unwieldy status. 

I wrote to remind her the reason our mamas took us to the beach all those years, ALL those years, was so when their footprints were washed away, and life served up hard lessons, we'd know to go sit on the sandy thigh of THE Mother and let her salt wind kiss our tears, caress our cheeks, and tousle our hair when our tears were spent or dropped into Her infinite depths, as if to say, now go play. 

Turns out, Mama Earth has many thighs to choose from. Picnic benches in pine forests will do just fine... or a log or a patch of moss... or chair near a windowsill with one scraggly geranium in a pot. She'll listen to us pour out our hearts and not judge the sobbing or snot, but give us a sign that she heard and absorbed the hurt and tell us, when we're ready, to go play again. 

Everything in its own time.

Belmont Beauties

Belmont Beauties is my name for the gal pals I knew at Belmont High School from 1963 through 1966. How lucky we were to be together at an inner-city school where the mix of Asians, Africans, Hispanics and Anglos was more balanced than other schools surrounding our Second Street Campus very near downtown. 

Annet and I met in Mrs. Perry's Girl's Foods class in seventh grade at Thomas Starr King Junior High School. We learned to “make” fruit cocktail and leaden biscuits, which, if dropped on the floor could've surely broken a hole through to let us see the guys one floor below, working on projects in Metal Shop, taught by Mr. Merril, where I would much rather have been. Annet made it possible for me to continue with the inanity of opening a can of fruit cocktail and spooning equal portions into ceramic bowls. She's a no-nonsense kind of gal who is a master gardener and currently watches her twenty month old grandson while her daughter and son-in-love teach school.

I met Judy in one of my classes, Cheryl in Drill Team, and Patsy in another class.

Cherry was in some of my classes too, and active in the service organization groups at Belmont as were Cheryl and Patsy. I was not involved with Maydens, Ladyes, or Chatelaines, which is what the girl's service organizations were called.

It wasn't until the second part of tenth grade that I was bumped up to the AE (Academically Enriched) course load where I met some of these gals who, except for Annet and I, all went to the same Junior High School.

It's not that King Jr. High was inferior to Virgil Jr. High or at fault for my lack of the usual knowledge, but rather I was out to lunch for a lot of my middle school years due to family disruption. Mom remarried. My little brother was born when I was fourteen. I got ulcers for some reason and missed a lot of school because of huge swollen tonsils and strep throat. Then, during the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade, my father died. 

There was a sixth Belmont Beauty, Wendy, who, with her partner Anne, used to come to some of the gatherings we'd hold - just to stay in touch with and add to our enjoyment of one another's company. Wendy was with us only for our junior year at Belmont. Her home was in Yellow Springs, Ohio and she came to spend a year across the way from my house in Echo Park with friends of her father's - just to see what Los Angeles was like. We immediately became besties. We took our driving tests together at age sixteen. She'd gotten to be in New York City also for a year during middle school. We used to call her our "Worldly Girl."

This past weekend, I hosted a slumber party for the four who could make it to Oakland. They came from Santa Rosa, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. We had a blast. We ate, drank, laughed and recollected those who were dear to us in school and who are now trying to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Ernie is recovering from a stroke. Other class mates have triumphed over cancer. Some have died. We lost so many during the Viet Nam conflict.

Our dear Wendy started showing signs of dementia about seven years ago and slipped down hill so fast her partner Anne couldn't care for her in home, so Wendy's in a memory care facility in LA. 

Cherry is on a tour of China with her husband, celebrating her retirement from the editorial staff of The Los Angeles Times newspaper where she worked for more than thirty years. She had to research, verify and sometimes contextualize "facts" shared in some of the editorials. Brilliant mind with a memory to hold all the random facts and fill in parts of stories we might never have known. We wish the timing worked better so she could have come this past weekend. I look forward to hearing her travel adventures when she returns.

Cheryl has stayed in our home from time to time as she made her transition from Southern California to Northern California where she has two grandsons. Her third grandson is in Idaho. She's as at home here as we are with her. She's settled in Sacramento and commutes to care for the grandies here in Oakland and occasionally to Idaho to see the oldest boy.

Judy moved to Santa Rosa about six years ago for a job at Sonoma State Hospital from which she is now retired, because the entire Developmental Center has been emptied of what used to be 1500 clients. I wonder what they'll do with the immense expanse of acreage and historic buildings that was SSH's campus for decades. 

Judy, Wendy and I  formed Triumvirate  a sometimes rocky shape for relationships when two got together and the third was unavailable. We maintained the three-way friendship - even after Wendy moved back to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Judy and I traveled by Greyhound Bus to Dayton and spent two weeks with Wendy in her iconic Antioch College town of Yellow Springs. Our Wordly Girl also introduced three of us to Hawaii when her dad, head of the Drama Department at Antioch took a sabbatical to travel to Japan, China, and Greece to study Theater and taking his family. We went as far as Honolulu with Wendy who then flew solo to Tokyo.  It is very sad to see our dear Wendy so at the effect of this mental affliction. 

Judy and I traveled to Ireland and Italy in 2001. We trauma bonded when we couldn't get home in a timely way after September 11 - the day we landed in Rome. We saw all the sacred sights in Umbria thanks to a Benedictine Monk from India who took us under his wing to show us all the churches and to ply us with Grappa.

Patsy and I were quite close during those formative High School years, making huge memorabilia scrap books for other class mate's birthdays. We lost touch when she married and moved to Canada and eventually to Santa Rosa where she and Judy are unlikely neighbors but geographically close. Patsy is a teacher and heavily involved with her church. As she was leaving Saturday evening, not wanting to stay for the slumber part of the party, I noted how perky and bright she still is in her white hat and white cardigan sweater. Judy went through some rough patches and had been known to drink heavily in the past, be gruff and tell it like it is, sometimes stepping on nerves that were shattered on the floor as she spoke. As friendly as they are, they are opposites on the scale of how they present themselves. We three have met for lunch on occasion because we're only an hour's drive apart and still enjoy "cultural outings" to Sausalito and the like.

Each one of us has let our hair grow its own sweet version of gray/silver/white. Cheryl keeps her tight curls close cropped; Judy's hair is completely white and beautifully frames her face which is set with sapphire blue eyes. Annet is letting her hair grow longer, as am I. We all complain about chin whiskers, but can let our hair(s) down together - no matter the length. 

The length of friendship makes it safe to be who we are and still fit together like old slippers on older feet. Comfy.

Having the occasional gathering to re-cement friendships and celebrate our aliveness feels like a privilege and I cherish the opportunities to do so.