Thursday, August 11, 2022
Last night I wrote to my niece in France, Erica, asking if she'd like to do a collaborative sharing project. I don't even know exactly what I meant when I suggested it—I had my old 365 projects (photography, daily blog) in mind, but maybe more expansive? Here's how I described it: "It could be as simple as a daily photo, or a haiku, or an account of an outing, or a recipe you cooked, or something that caught your attention on TV, or the taste of a ripe peach. It could be a daily photo of Chloe [Erica's dog], for 365 days (or a month! let’s not get too ambitious). Or a daily slice of sky. There’s no parameters."
In any case, she liked the idea, and responded immediately, with the following YouTube video: "How to Cook Beans and Resist Dread," by John of the vlogbrothers.
This struck me as perfect! Something that's both amusing and reassuring ("You're basically an advanced squirrel"!), and something I would never have stumbled on on my own. It even looks like a darn good chili recipe.
In response, I sent her this photo of a watercolor my mother made, probably in the 1980s, of a weeping willow that lived in the backyard of our family home. I'm starting the Herculean task of cleaning out the garage. It is daunting, but I'm also hoping that I run across treasures that I'd forgotten about—just like this. Erica has several of my father's (her grandfather's) watercolors, so I figure she will find this of interest as well.
Anyway, let's see what happens. I will continue to post on this page as the week progresses.
Friday, August 12
From Erica:
I should know by now that any sentence that starts with "put your shoes on" rarely ends well. The baby swallows nesting in our barn - thankfully in the rafters - are beginning to poke their little heads up over the edge of their home. Today one of them (lets call him George) decided to take the Darwin Challenge in a fit of ambition, and is currently in the process of becoming a cat.
So, this photo is for George. His tiny life was filled with nonstop excitement and adventure, and I'd like to think he enjoyed every moment.
And from me:
This afternoon we went over to Salinas to do an "adventure lab" (a geocaching offshoot) based on John Steinbeck. Among other places, we visited the house he was born in in 1902 and his grave (he died in 1968). The person who created the lab punctuated it with various quotations from his books, including these:
"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last." —Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts (1941)
"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people." The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states." Travels with Charley (1962)
"I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like do it so that it would be the valley of the world." Letter to a friend, 1933 (this quote is actually carved on a rock in front of the National Steinbeck Center in downtown Salinas)
Here's a mural about Steinbeck at one of our stops:
Saturday, August 13
From me:
After my father, a devout atheist, died, my mother converted to Catholicism. She was in her mid-sixties, a little younger than I am now. She had been raised Methodist, and in her own adulthood had belonged to Westwood Hills Congregational Church. But she always remembered the Catholics in her small Midwestern town growing up as being kinder than the Protestants—kinder to her, specifically, as an adopted child. Newly widowed, she started going to a Paulist church in Los Angeles and having conversations with a priest whom she found sympathetic. He basically told her that she was an adult and if she embraced Catholicism, that didn’t mean she had to swallow Catholic dogma on such controversial social subjects as abortion. If she converted, it would simply be in order to celebrate God. And so she did. When she told me, I’m afraid I wasn’t especially understanding, which I have since regretted. That said, her romance with the Catholic faith never seemed to me to be especially serious. I think she mostly liked the music that was played at the Mass. Eventually, she pretty much stopped going to church. When she died, we asked the priest to say a few words and to play Mozart—which he did. I was not there, but Cathy [my sister-in-law, Erica's mother] and Susan [my mother's caregiver] went.
Anyway, in my garage undertaking, I came across a good-sized inlaid Indian box with some of Loraine’s jewelry (none of it of any value). One compartment holds a number of crucifixes. I don’t recall her ever wearing a cross around her neck, or handling a rosary, so I was surprised she had so many. Here’s a photo of a few of them.
From Erica:
First, her response to mine: "I remember having always found several rosaries in my mother's various jewelry boxes. Her mother was also a Catholic, but I wonder if a few may have been gifts from Lorraine. It was an interesting topic of conversation nonetheless. I always liked Catholicism, possibly due to my general distance from it. When I went to Mount St. Mary's College I found the nuns and 'true' catholics to be the most love-filled and accepting people. There's an odd practicality to old religions I find appealing."
Then, her daily offering, which she titled "Saviors amongst the killers":
[Beginning with the link to a Radiolab episode from July 29, "The Humpback and the Killer," which I proceeded to listen to on my afternoon walk]
A couple of weeks ago, one of our (me and Kim) favorite podcasts did a wonderful episode about a fascinating dynamic between humpback and killer whales. If a god exists, it might be one of them. This exercise has forced open my interest in writing as well, and I've started a little story on the theme of Water.
Lady had one recurring dream, and it was quite odd. She would often picture herself in her childhood home, at night, looking out the big front windows. This was a comfortable place for her, an odd setting for a nightmare. Nevertheless as she gazed into the hazy outside, she suddenly realized it wasn’t saturated air she was looking through, but water. Her house wasn’t sunken, but a tank had been constructed around it, like a snow globe.
Through the window she could see the most interesting and unexpected mammals. Manatees and whales swam together, twirling around, accentuating their quiet dance with ominous bubbles. Waves of seagrass swayed slowly, giving up the strength and depth of the current. Animals swam above and below her, demonstrating their quiet eminence, their ultimate prowess. Lady shook. She couldn't escape, there was nowhere to go. Each room had windows to the outside, and therefore the risk of witnessing her own mortality, a risk she could not take, not right now.
Sunday, August 14
From Erica (subject: 1971? Never heard of 'er)
No story today, just a clever website. What were the adults up to? ;-)
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
From me (subject: Open to interpretation)
A lazy Sunday share today: from the afternoon walk.
Your post [I replied to Erica], meanwhile, has me queuing up an old Ezra Klein Vox conversation about neoliberalism, but I think I'll save it for tomorrow and go ponder what's for dinner instead. ;-)
Monday, August 15
From Erica:
Why Does the IRS Need $80 Billion? Just Look at Its Cafeteria
I'm not sure about my feelings on this. I must admit I enjoy a country that doesn't care about collecting taxes.
To which I responded: "I’m of the social democratic persuasion that believes the government has a responsibility to its citizens (unlike those neolibs who’d just like to watch 'em all starve to death), so do believe in collecting taxes. If only they could get the megabillion/trillionaire corporations to pay their share… But I guess the recent climate and healthcare bill includes some provisions to this end. Now to see if they have any teeth."
From me:
I love August in part because it’s the month when naked ladies—aka Amaryllis belladonna, South African natives—bloom. They’re called that because the flowers grow atop a tall “naked” (leafless) stem. There’s a clump across the street from the Frog Pond. It’s in its glory now.
Tuesday, August 16
Today I posted a compilation video of Trevor Noah talking about accents and language (and at the end, about dual identity and nuance):
Wednesday, August 17
Well, this experiment lasted a few days—which was more than I anticipated. It was interesting. It's surprisingly difficult to come up with something to share with someone you don't know all that well. Will they be interested? Will they even care? Does it matter? In yesterday's message, in a P.S., I said, Let's just do this sporadically, as we stumble on something that we think the other might find interesting. So, we'll see how that goes. I certainly did enjoy each email I got from Erica, with the links and shares.
But to end this, I will include a link to a Vox podcast with Ezra Klein and his guests Wendy Brown, professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, and Noah Smith, an economist and Bloomberg contributor, called "Neoliberalism and Its Discontents." I called it up in response to Erica's post the other day about 1971. Graphs are all well and good, but graphs of a single year exist within a larger historical context—indeed, how far back can we go? Certainly WWI, the New Deal, WWII, the Civil Rights movement, etc. inform what started to happen in the 1970s politically. The conversation brings us squarely into the present day with its crises of climate and environment and the question of whether we can (capitalistically) continue to grow, grow, grow. Their answer is no. But how to do we turn this humongous ship of a planet, composed of multiple nations of multiple needs and goals, in a new direction? Is it even possible?
To which I always answer, "I'll be dead soon." But I'm really sorry I can't know what humanity has managed to achieve—or, maybe, completely lose—in the next hundred, two hundred, or more years. I wish the future generations the best. What more can I objectively do? I will be dead soon. But then, so will we all. It's just a matter of time.
8/29
Last week, Erica and I continue our sharings, with a couple of poems, an account of a weekend park fete and a couple of videos. It's just nice having started up this comfortable exchange in the first place. It doesn't have to be anything other than that. Just... connection.
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