Categories
Just Shelley

Lighter than air

I arrived at LA yesterday at 11AM and California threw a party. Lots of rattling and rolling. Drive to San Francisco was rush hour the entire distance between the two cities. I cancelled my plans to drive 101 tomorrow due to the quake – so it’s the I5 corridor and LA–again.

Yesterday I also delivered my mineral collection to a very, very nice lady, and today the contents of the storage unit. I’m now sitting at the hotel in the business center using the unbelievably crappy Windows98 machine to write this, trying to decide if dropping all my anchors leaves me feeling incredibly free, or cast adrift and lost.

Tomorrow I head back taking a very southerly route into new territory, but first– a favor. I am so exhausted, mentally and physically. Need a little Christmas cheer, so if you have a spare cycle, a spare penny or two, and a moment, give me a call on my cell, tell me what pics you want me to take on ride home. I found an extraordinary one that I want to print and frame for AKMA and Margaret, and a couple of others I wish I could upload for you.

Cellphone number is (removed). If you’re a psycho crazy man with a lust filled heart, please don’t call.

Well, okay – Chris Locke, you can call.

Categories
Just Shelley

Houses Dark and Shuttered

Out on errands tonight I noticed how few homes decorated for Christmas this year. Last year at this time, you would know you were in the midst of a town that took Christmas seriously. This year, most of the homes seem dark and shuttered.

Rather than going straight home after shopping I decided to visit some of the neighborhoods I know to be good Christmas decorators, looking for a little Christmas color.

Several families in St. Louis have members who are serving overseas, some in Iraq, others in Afghanistan. There is usually a story in the news once per week or so about another Missouri or Kansas or Iowa or Kentucky youth killed overseas and honored with a military funeral.

One of the neighborhoods on the other side of the Seminary from us is an old established neighborhood, filled for the most part with working families who are moderately comfortable income-wise. Most also have kids and this is a prime incentive to decorate—for the children, if no one else.

But I would go for blocks with at most a small strand of lights around a bush here and there, some lights around the roofs. Passing tree lots along the way, I was surprised at how full they were. A week before Christmas, they should be half empty.

Missouri and Kansas layoff rates have been less in 2003 than in 2002 — only 12 mass layoffs this year compared to 24 mass layoffs last year. The report is that the unemployment claims are down, too.

But then, the joke goes, 50,000 people have left the area in the last year.

I went to the library to re-check out some books I’ve had for a long time — Let Us Now Praise Famous Men among them, and until someone reserves it from the Stacks, I’ll just keep it. It’s not in general circulation anyway, only available to those people who specifically request it. I’m not depriving a casual wanderer through the aisles.

Across the street I was attracted by a bit of bright color. It was the house with the lady that has three dogs, all of whom bark at one when one goes to the library. All of whom sound fierce, but are friendly buggers; except on Friday, which is bath day.

I think I spend a lot of time at the Library.

Today’s newspaper headline read that the President’s approval rating is at a six-month high. This following on weeks of petty, back-handed squabbling among the Democratic candidates that more closely resembles a pack of junk yard dogs fighting over a bone that’s been picked too clean in previous fights.

One block did have three homes, one after the other, quite nicely decorated and I stopped in the street to appreciate the color and the light against the darkness.

In times past, though, the effort on these three homes would barely have rated a second look. This year, they rated a good long stare. When I saw the headlights of another car in my rearview mirror, I reluctantly moved along; then I noticed that the driver of the other car also stopped in front of the three houses.

When I visited my father last week, I asked him what happened with his bird, Mrs. Murgatroid. He didn’t remember ever having a bird, and became confused at the question. I asked my brother about the bird and he said that before Dad moved in with him, he’d let the bird out of the cage and it flew out the door.

Now, he doesn’t remember a bird he had for twenty years. But he does remember me — he calls me Rae. That’s my mother’s name.

My father served in World War II, then as a State Patrolman for twenty years, followed by being an advisor for the military police in Vietnam, and finally an investigator for Welfare fraud. He was injured in war, had best friends killed in the line of duty, and was poisoned by Agent Orange, suffering cancer after cancer — and he doesn’t have enough money to cover the cost of assisted living so he lives with my brother. My brother is afraid to leave him alone because he forgets things, like turning off burners.

I picked up one prescription for my Dad while I was there. It cost $127.00. He has six of these that need filling every month, and his supplemental medical insurance plan was just cancelled because the “Prescription costs were too high”.

Okay, I was now very determined to find some serious Christmas action, so I pulled out the big guns, driving over to Webster Groves. This college town has Money — if they didn’t have a load of lights, no one would.

Lights I found, but they were subdued: mainly some white lights around the eaves, a few around the bushes by the front door. Elegant little expensive wreathes with big red bows covered the doors and everything was tasteful and restrained on the big white houses with the Mercedes and Audi cars out front.

The little kid in me doesn’t like tasteful and restrained. I want gaudy and blinking and mismatched and yes, even cheesy cardboard cutouts in the yard. This is what I grew up with, where we would have a tradition every year of going for a ride to look at the lights and then come home to have cocoa and pretty decorated sugar cookies.

Where are the young and young at heart?

A very big financial corporation with offices in St. Louis sent out a company memo to its employees. ‘Great news’, it read. ‘This year was the best ever for the company!’

The company then gave the employees, those not impacted by the wholesale move of the company’s call center to India, a $50.00 gift certificate to local grocery stores, and a 2% raise for the year.

The Cost of Living increase nationally for 2003 was 3%.

I stopped by the drugstore on the way back home. Coming out, I put a dollar in the bell ringer’s bright red pail.

“I used to know a bell ringer that would get so cold, he’d hold the bell between his teeth”, he said.

I stopped, surprised, because the bell ringers normally only say Thank You and Merry Christmas.

“Yes,” he continued. “I can’t remember his name, but his face sure rings a bell.”

He then gave me a huge smile, winked, and said “Merry Christmas!”

I love the people of this country.

Merry Christmas, and see you when your journey meets up with mine, again, underneath the mistletoe.

Page and comments are archived at the Wayback Machine

Categories
Just Shelley

Houses dark and shuttered

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Out on errands tonight I noticed how few lights there were about this year, how few homes seem decorated for the Christmas season. Last year at this time, you could easily know you were in the midst of a town that celebrated Christmas seriously. This year, most of the homes seem dark and shuttered.

Rather than going straight home after shopping I decided to visit some of the neighborhoods I know to be good Christmas decorators, looking for a little Christmas color.

 

Several families in St. Louis have members who are serving overseas, some in Iraq, others in Afghanistan. There is usually a story in the news once per week or so about another Missouri or Kansas or Iowa or Kentucky youth killed overseas and honored with a military funeral.

One of the neighborhoods on the other side of the Seminary from us is an old established neighborhood, filled for the most part with working families who are moderately comfortable income-wise. Most also have kids and this is a prime incentive to decorate – for the children, if no one else.

But I would go for blocks with at most a small strand of lights around a bush here and there, some lights around the roofs. Passing tree lots along the way, I was surprised at how full they were. A week before Christmas, they should be half empty.

 

Missouri and Kansas layoff rates have been less in 2003 than in 2002 – only 12 mass layoffs this year compared to 24 mass layoffs last year. The report is that the unemployment claims are down, too.

But then, the joke goes, 50,000 people have left the area in the last year.

I went to the library to re-check out some books I’ve had for a long time – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men among them, and until someone reserves it from the Stacks, I’ll just keep it. It’s not in general circulation anyway, only available to those people who specifically request it. I’m not depriving a casual wanderer through the aisles.

Across the street I was attracted by a bit of bright color. It was the house with the lady that has three dogs, all of whom bark at one when one goes to the library. All of whom sound fierce, but are friendly buggers; except on Friday, which is bath day.

I think I spend a lot of time at the Library.

 

Today’s newspaper headline read that the President’s approval rating is at a six-month high. This following on weeks of petty, back-handed squabbling among the Democratic candidates that more closely resembles a pack of junk yard dogs fighting over a bone that’s been picked too clean in previous fights.

One block did have three homes, one after the other, quite nicely decorated and I stopped in the street to appreciate the color and the light against the darkness.

In times past, though, the effort on these three homes would barely have rated a second look. This year, they rated a good long stare. When I saw the headlights of another car in my rearview mirror, I reluctantly moved along; then I noticed that the driver of the other car also stopped in front of the three houses.

 

When I visited my father last week, I asked him what happened with his bird, Mrs. Murgatroid. He didn’t remember ever having a bird, and became confused at the question. I asked my brother about the bird and he said that before Dad moved in with him, he’d let the bird out of the cage and it flew out the door.

Now, he doesn’t remember a bird he had for twenty years. But he does remember me – he calls me Rae. That’s my mother’s name.

My father served in World War II, then as a State Patrolman for twenty years, followed by being an advisor for the military police in Vietnam, and finally an investigator for Welfare fraud. He was injured in war, had best friends killed in the line of duty, and was poisoned by Agent Orange, suffering cancer after cancer – and he doesn’t have enough money to cover the cost of assisted living so he lives with my brother. My brother is afraid to leave him alone because he forgets things, like turning off burners.

I picked up one prescription for my Dad while I was there. It cost $127.00. He has six of these that need filling every month, and his supplemental medical insurance plan was just cancelled because the “Prescription costs were too high”.

Okay, I was now very determined to find some serious Christmas action, so I pulled out the big guns, driving over to Webster Groves. This college town has Money – if they didn’t have a load of lights, no one would.

Lights I found, but they were subdued: mainly some white lights around the eaves, a few around the bushes by the front door. Elegant little expensive wreathes with big red bows covered the doors and everything was tasteful and restrained on the big white houses with the Mercedes and Audi cars out front.

The little kid in me doesn’t like tasteful and restrained. I want gaudy and blinking and mismatched and yes, even cheesy cardboard cutouts in the yard. This is what I grew up with, where we would have a tradition every year of going for a ride to look at the lights and then come home to have cocoa and pretty decorated sugar cookies.

Where are the young and young at heart?

 

A very big financial corporation with offices in St. Louis sent out a company memo to its employees. ‘Great news’, it read. ‘This year was the best ever for the company!’

The company then gave the employees, those not impacted by the wholesale move of the company’s call center to India, a $50.00 gift certificate to local grocery stores, and a 2% raise for the year.

The Cost of Living increase nationally for 2003 was 3%.

I stopped by the drugstore on the way back home. Coming out, I put a dollar in the bell ringer’s bright red pail.

“I used to know a bell ringer that would get so cold, he’d hold the bell between his teeth”, he said.

I stopped, surprised, because the bell ringers normally only say Thank You and Merry Christmas.

“Yes,” he continued. “I can’t remember his name, but his face sure rings a bell.”

He then gave me a huge smile, winked, and said “Merry Christmas!”

 

I love the people of this country.

Merry Christmas, and see you when your journey meets up with mine, again, underneath the mistletoe.

skaters.jpg

Categories
Photography Writing

It’s not a doorway but…

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I have been reading about the snowstorm in New England, and hearing about snowfalls of several feet, which can take forever to recover from in cities; especially Boston with its narrow streets and parked cars. However, Boston is only three miles long and unless you’re heading across the river to Harvard, you can walk to work. In a couple of hours or so.

The snowstorm that struck the Midwest and the Northeast passed us by and we’ve had mild temperatures. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we get hit, but we’ll take the mild weather and the beautiful sunsets for now.

However, we can’t have snow without a little poetry, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow agrees with me:

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

“Snow-Flakes”

decsunset1.jpg

Easier to find poetry about snow than about sunsets, as I found when I looked about. Other than:

Red sky in the morning,
sailor take warning.
Red sky at night,
sailor’s delight.

I think its because sunsets have their own beauty and anything to do with them – poetry, painting, or photography – is a given and a bit of a cheat. But I’ll take the cheat for now.

decsunset2.jpg

Of course, the sunset figures prominently into our fiction, particularly westerns. Cowboys would always ride off into the sunset when they’ve saved the day, which I thought was stupid.

I mean think about it: they ride in, get shot up, go against the bad guys 2 to 1, overcome against all odds, and just when the farmer’s daughter cries out, “My hero”, and we presume is feeling mighty grateful, the idiots ride off into the sunset.

I bet the horse had more sex. No wonder there’s no poetry about sunsets.

decsunset7.jpg

That’s not completely true, there are poems about sunsets. Emily Dickinson wrote a couple – she wrote on everything it seems – and I rather liked, “The Sunset Stopped on Cottages”:

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Sunset hence must be
For treason not of His, but Life’s,
Gone Westerly, Today –

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Morning just begun –
What difference, after all, Thou mak’st
Thou supercilious Sun?

decsunset5.jpg

Tired of sunsets yet? Just be glad I didn’t publish the other ten photos I took tonight, because the sky did put on a lovely show. I grabbed my camera and ran down outside, fighting my cat at the door – me out, her in – before standing out on the deck in bare feet snapping pictures.

The neighbors are used to it: they think I’m nuts, and maybe I am. Am I of age to be eccentric yet?

Oh who cares. I spend too much time worrying about what people think of me when they see me puttering about, and most likely they don’t think of me at all (which is very liberating, let me say).

decsunset9.jpg

The sky is pretty and so are the trees, but yes I do need new subjects, which means I’ll have to go look for them. New things to write about, too. Good.

And on that note, I’ll end with JRR Tolkien:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

decsunset6.jpg

Categories
Books

The seductiveness of books

Mike Golby and I have known each other online for such a long time – I can’t even remember when I first read him, and he first read me. The similarities we share make a piquant counter-point to the differences.

We don’t always agree, but among the many topics we do agree on is our love of books, and the importance of access to them. Mike recently talked about Blog Africa and this organizations efforts to increase Internet access across Africa, something to be applauded. But both he and I would rather see more of a global effort to provide open and adequate libraries than free email:

Many will tell you Africa needs books a damned side more than it needs a Net unable to do more than carry e-mail. Our libraries, where they exist (and this is locally), are under funded. Their budgets are non-existent. New books? Fuggedaboudit. In countries where books – of any kind – are considered a luxury, what chance connectivity? The cost of books is my chief expense for spending so much on being linked to the Web.

It’s in the nature of our new global economy that we foster illiteracy and ignorance. In a world run by technology, the less people know of the cause of their poverty, the better. Institutional economics is, by nature, a conservative discipline. Managed and promoted by conservative ideologues, it’s better served by people incapable of thinking for themselves. Books and the education they give are known for the trouble they bring.

I wrote in comments at Mike’s that if everyone had access to an open and well stocked library and the ability to read, most of the world’s problems would go away. But then I look at my own stack of books that I’ve gathered together to spend December reading (or re-reading in the case of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”):

  • “Unless”, by Carol Sheilds, recommended by Yule Heibel
  • “Moral politics : what conservatives know that liberals don’t “, by George Lakoff, recommended in comments
  • “Metaphors we Live By”, also by George Lakoff, mentioned by Joe Duemer
  • “The Floating Girl”, by Sujata Massey, mentioned at a weblog (can’t remember where)
  • “The Dark Valley: A Panorma of the 1930’s” by Brendon Piers, mentioned in a weblog posting by Jonathon Delacour
  • “Stranger Shores” and “White Writing” by J.M. Coetzee, author recommended by Farrago and Mike Golby
  • “Let us Now Praise Famous Men”, James Agee and Walker Evans, recommended by Jonathon, as well as Sheila Lennon
  • “The Secret Life of Bees”, by Sue Monk Kidd, recommended by Elaine, I believe
    and 
  • “Barran Ground” and “The Woman Within”, by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, pointed out by link in an email.

My reading for the last year has been someone mentioning a book and me using my Library’s online system to have it pulled from whatever branch and sent to mine. And if I can’t find a book in the city library system, I also have a card for the County library system, and all of these libraries have inter-library loan access to other systems. I have free and easy access to virtually most books I could ever want to read.

(Except for Dorothea Brande’s, Becoming a Writer. I’ve been looking for this in library systems for months.)

Now let’s look at some of the dates these books were last checked out. Oh, not the popular current ones such as “Unless”, “Secret Life of Bees”, and “The Floating Girl” – but the less famous ones, the quiet ones.

The last time “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” was checked out was December of last year. I was the person who checked it out. “The Dark Valley”? That goes back to May of 2002. Now Coetzee just won the Nobel Prize in Literature and you would think his work would be in demand, but “White Writing” was last checked out in 2001, and “Stranger Shores”, had never been checked out by anyone until me.

A well stocked library won’t make a bit of difference if people don’t or won’t take the time to read. According to Dave Rogers even if they did, it may not make a difference. Daring to “poke the dog” by quoting him:

Never before have we had the ready, easy access to the thoughts of great minds that we do today. Presumably, people even read it! Yet we still bicker about the “anger industry” and mock the people we disagree with, and justify ourselves and demonize our opponents. If all we needed to do was “read” to “learn,” shouldn’t we be living in Utopia about now? Why are there so many different self-help books out there?

I absolutely and unequivocally despise self-help books, so I can’t answer Dave’s question, but me thinks it’s rhetorical anyway.

Having access to libraries and reading important books by great writers is not going to result in change in our society if all we do is ‘read’ and then not respond differently in how we live our life, based on that reading. Consuming all those books on my list won’t do me a bit of good other than to perhaps impress people with how ‘well-read’ I am, unless I come away from the reading a different, hopefully better, person and act accordingly.

Good writing entertains, enlightens, enriches us, and brings us closer to (pick one) a) God, b) ourselves, c) our significant others, d) our foes, or or e) all of the above. But great writing in the hands of an open mind partnered with an active spirit, well, it’s better than a kick in the butt.

If I’ve read Dave correctly, we have to act on what we read; we have to work to make the world better, we can’t just read about it and congratulate ourselves on our literary achievements. Additionally, we can’t depend on technology to make the difference for us, either:

My point is, by focusing any attention on technology as some means of facilitating learning, or “changing everything” as some answer to anything, simply continues to obscure the real goddamn point. It’s as if we seem to think that once we have achieved the right technology, somehow our minds will be liberated and we’ll be able to “know” all these great things. When it has absolutely, positively, without question, NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with TECHNOLOGY. You need exactly NO technology to start asking yourself the kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself.

WHEN, in God’s name, are you going to start? When you’ve perfected your technology? When you’ve read enough weblogs? When your bandwidth is wider? When gender bias goes away? When a democrat is back in the White House? When you’ve “simplified” your life? What life? You think you’re alive? How do you friggin’ well know?

I could be flippant and say I know I’m alive because I wouldn’t dream up this sore mouth, but Dave’s point is extremely well made – we could wait for external events to happen from now until the dawn of time, and read every book written, and make sure everyone in the world has a blog and an RSS feed – but change begins within.

Trust me, I know these things.

(And now I’ve managed to bring the views of three passionate writers into one essay. This page will self-destruct in a ball of fire in five minutes.)