Emergency parking

I’m back from a few days book-ended by to and fro on the interstate highways of Ohio. Here and elsewhere, I’ve noticed small pull-out areas with signs reading, “Emergency Parking  2 hour limit.”

That strikes me as amusing (but then, what doesn’t?). Seems to me that if your emergency has continued for as long as two hours without an EMS wagon showing up, you’re in deep difficulty. Or maybe not.

Once upon a time (I was all of nineteen years old), in a land far away (on the PA turnpike somewhere between Pittsburgh and the Breezewood exit), I pulled off on the side of the road.

A trooper stopped behind me and walked up to my car, a homely Rambler passed on to me by my grandmother, a car my friends somewhat unkindly nicknamed “the bathtub.” 

“Is everything OK, Miss?” he asked, bending over to peer into my low-to-the-ground window.

“I’m fine,” I answered, scribbling away on a sheet of staff paper.

He paused. “You can’t stop on the shoulder except in an emergency.”

“This IS an emergency,” I said, no doubt with some degree of adolescent drama. “Something was playing in my head and I had to get it down before I forgot it!” 

I continued to write. “You know,” he said, both elbows still on the door frame, “I could give you a ticket.”

“I’m almost finished,” I said. “Really, I’m just about done.”

He sighed and straightened up for a moment. He bent back down to my window. “Don’t . . . ever . . . do this again,” he said, then walked back to his car and drove off.

It was a different age. Today he’d have run my license and registration through his computer and probably told me to step out of the car. And he probably would have given me a ticket. Unless, of course, I parked in one of those emergency parking places. Then, I would’ve had two long legal hours to work. I might have finished the whole piece right there.

Take my card . . . please

I met my friend Kathy for lunch today. No mere social outing, this. We had serious work to do. She had a short story she wanted me to pick over, and I needed help deciding what to put on my business card.

Not that I have a business. That would imply regular, gainful employment by self or other, but “business card” is a shorthand that everyone understands: a  2" x 3.5" printed piece with my name and contact information on it.  Plus, some hint as to who I am and what I do. Therein lies my difficulty.

What DO I do? Well, I do write choral music. I’ve had some pieces published, gotten several commissions over the years (money for art - what a concept!) and my work has been programed in more than a few places. I have some cards that cover that. I had them printed when I was headed for a choral music conference and needed something to hand out that made me look like a grownup. It reads, “Jan C. Snow, Music for Voices,” followed by my phone number and email address.  

But that really doesn’t do the job. Are we to identify ourselves only by what earns us money? Or by how we spend our time? How about by what gives us joy? I’ve made my living, for the most part, in journalism. “Writer” is what the occupation spot on my IRS form reads. And although it doesn’t say anything about teaching, I’ve wrestled down more than my share of writing workshops and classes. 

But I’ve also taught paper making and book making. (The journal-of-your-own kind, not the horse-racing kind.) The bottom of my refrigerator is home to plastic vats of paper pulp. And squeeze bottles of dye. I mess around with a variety of fiber arts, particularly shibori, a Japanese version of resist dyeing. Think tie-dyeing but somewhat more organized.

I’ve played piano all my life (well, minus three years) and two decades ago I added hammering a dulcimer to my skill set. I'd like to play my grandfather's fiddle but I keep forgetting to practice. I also draw. I make no claim to professionalism, whatever that means, but more to the point, I love to draw. I don't even care how it turns out; I just like doing it. And I think I’d like to try painting.

So you see my problem. Who we are beyond the pigeon-holes of endeavor? My late friend Jeffrey was fond of reminding me when I bemoaned my perceived lack of productivity that we of our species are dubbed “human beings,” not “human doings.” Jeffrey would listen to me whine for just so long;  then he’d tell me to go take a hike -  preferably through the park or to the lake.

So, besides, my email, phone number and the address of this blog, here’s what I’ve decided to put on my card:

     Jan C. Snow

        ink-stained wretch

                 multi-arts maven

                 mostly fabulous person

I think that about covers it. 

The answer is, “Are these people on drugs?”

The clue, my friends, is “Wheel of Fortune contestants.”

Yes, it’s true. I have a TV. I got the set - and cable service - a few years ago so I could watch Cavaliers’ b-ball. (We will not discuss that period of my life. It’s just too pathetic.) I’ve since cancelled the cable. I can get PBS, plus four broadcast stations, and on evenings that I find myself at home, I’m likely to watch “Jeopardy” on one of them.

In this market, “Wheel” immediately precedes Alex and his blue-screen categories. If I’m a little too quick in switching over at the end of the sober PBS “News Hour,” I catch Vanna, the ultimate Stepford wife, turning over some letters. 

Not that I mind Vanna. She does her job well. In addition, she crochets afghans and lends her name to a line of inexpensive acrylic yarn. Who could harbor ill will toward anyone who crochets afghans? And smiles all the time. (OK, that part is a little creepy.)

I do find Pat Sajak kind of unsettling. His mostly blank eyes seem just a bit too close together. Or maybe slightly crossed. I’m not sure. Then again, that set resembles a Japanese pachinko machine, all flashing lights, crayon colors and manic movement. Imagine working in that environment day after day. It would make anyone’s glazed-over eyes cross. 

But the contestants on this show? These people clap like crazed seals and jump up and down like five-year-olds who need to go to the bathroom. (From the looks of things, they’re screaming as well, but I can’t be sure since I keep my thumb on the mute button.) The only explanation is massive doses of stimulants. Some assistant producer, one of those under-paid young women carrying a clip board, probably force-feeds them espresso shots for a good twenty minutes before they go on. 

What bothers me most about “Wheel of Fortune,” though, is not the totally cheesy set or Vanna’s frozen face with its forever smile. I don’t even mind the somewhat odd host that much. What really bugs me about “Wheel” is that I can almost never figure out the puzzles. How in the world these people manage to do so while clapping and jumping up and down ( and possibly screaming) is completely beyond me.

Ideas of Heaven (the poem)

(One amongst you heard me read this in some art gallery some years ago, and asked for it, spurred no doubt by the end of the world post. Here it is.)

Ideas of Heaven

My knees don't hurt, there's no opera or chewing gum
no one wears fur or smells of mothballs and nothing
makes me sneeze but
here's the thing - it's not crowded -
you can always find a parking space
even though everyone is here
all my friends, with banjos and dulcimers, not just harps
and no one sings off-key, not even
Amelia Earhart, who was excused from the training because
she already knew how to fly.

Dante and his surfeit of circles?
We are having a much better time. Of course
Mozart is here and Dr. Seuss
Michelangelo, even if (or maybe because) he was gay
Joan of Arc, Catherine, St. Francis with all his little birds
the usual suspects, but also - get this -
Hamen, Quisling, Stalin, Machiavelli
the whole constellation of one-name villains
and Svengali, just because I like to say it
even . . . yes . . . wait for it . . . Saddam.
And the fat boy who jumped me at recess
every damn day in the third grade because
in my heaven, everyone is redeemable.
Everyone. That's what makes it heaven.

Oh, and the hot tub.
Don't forget the hot tub.

It's not the end of the world . . . but it might be heaven

Still here. The world as we know it did not end, as far as I can tell. (This is the second time that Family Radio's Harold Camping has specified a date for our collective demise: May 21, 2011, and yesterday, Oct. 21, 2011. Let's hope that the third time is not the charm.)

If the world did end yesterday, then heaven - or hell if Camping was right about the prospects of us nonbelievers - today looks a lot like my street in Lakewood, this one block of bumpy brick pavement lined with porch-wealthy homes of a certain age, most approaching centenary status.  They regard one another through half-shuttered eyes across a mini-veldt of bedsheet-sized lawns edged with bright flowers.

We like it here. We are a sidewalk neighborhood with the library at one end of the street, the bus line at the other, a heaven of small children with harried parents, dog-walking seniors and inveterate putterers, some out of ambition, most out of necessity given the vintage of our homes. (The possibility that heaven might be different for each of us has been explored in at least two contemporary novels - very sweetly in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and rudely but humorously in Daniel Pinkwater's The Afterlife Diet.  Who am I to argue?)

I will admit, sometimes life here is hellish, like a recent summer when virtually every home in our closely-packed enclave was being re-roofed after a punishing hailstorm. Or the year the aging water main broke repeatedly and we took to showering at the Y and setting aside jugs of water to be sure we could make morning coffee.

Right now, it's a nice time to be here, no longer so hot as to drive us into the air-conditioning and still warm enough to gossip on the front steps. (Once winter arrives, we'll wave to one another with mittened hands as we clear the snow from our blessedly short driveways and may not actually speak again until spring.) But pleasant though it may be, this lovely place is not paradise. Heaven, perhaps, but not paradise. If it were, my basement would be drier.

The name's not the same, but the face is familiar

My GP's ever-pleasant physician's assistant called. "Doctor wanted me to let you know your X-ray results," she said. My left knee, which has been complaining about something, had posed for pictures a few days earlier. "The radiologist saw some loose floating bodies."

Of course I laughed. "Sounds like the Chicago River to me," I said. Of course the ever-pleasant PA did not laugh. She must not read classic crime fiction or stay up late watching old gangster movies. But then, I think she's only twelve years old, thirteen at the most, so she needs her sleep.

E-P PA gave me the orthopedic clinic's phone number. "Doctor wants you to make an appointment." (Not the doctor, or Dr. Whatziname but "Doctor," like it's his first name or something. I hate that.)

So here I am, waiting to see the orthopedic guy. My name is called and I'm escorted into a rabbit warren of hallways and little rooms. "You've been here before, right?" asks the nurse. His name is Rocky (yes, really). No, I tell him, first time. "Are you sure? You look so familiar. I'm sure I've seen you before."

Rocky looks familiar to me, too, but we leave that and move on to matters medical. I do not favor him with my belief that by the time you reach a certain age, everyone you meet looks like somebody you used to know, or reminds you of somebody you still know. I think there's a finite number of faces and by some point you've seen them all, so everybody reminds you of somebody else. It can get confusing.

I figure out quickly why Rocky looks familiar. He doesn't exactly look like him but reminds me of the actor who played Sal on "Mad Men" (or maybe still plays Sal on "Mad Men." I don't know - I'm only up to season three).  It's not always that easy, though. Sometimes I'll see someone who looks familiar and though I know s/he is not the person I'm reminded of, I beat my head against a mental brick wall until I figure out why this person looks familiar. It drives me nuts.

It happened to me again this morning. The person in my bathroom mirror seemed vaguely familiar. I was into my second cup of coffee when I realized who she reminds me of  - it's my mother.

Homeland insecurity

I've spent every possible minute outside these last few weeks. Now that the sunny-and-clear postcard weather has given way to more seasonally appropriate fallishness, I have no excuse not to face up to the inside chores.

My goal today is merely to reach "drop-in clean": dishes washed (maybe even put away), horizontal surfaces decluttered, the Goodwill boxes I've been tripping over out to the car, my tent - still in the dining room - into the closet.  Drop-in clean, except perhaps for the muddy tracks by the back door and the beet soup splashes on the stove (I really should wipe those up), is more about tidy than about actual clean. It's a level of surface acceptability that allows you to open the front door if a friend stops by rather than hiding behind the curtains until she goes away.

Looming ahead like a grey storm front is the necessity of reaching "houseguest clean." A friend will be overnighting four weeks from now. This requires not only an orderly first floor, but clean bathrooms upstairs and down, and an inhabitable guest room. (The rest of the upstairs? Please, this is one reason bedrooms have doors. Doors that can be shut.)

Because my houseguest might wake up before me and decide to help herself to a glass of juice, I'd better mop up the hoison sauce that dribbled on the top shelf of the refrigerator - it's really sticky - and throw out the dried-up green onions that are in the vegetable drawer. Maybe I should clean out the whole refrigerator in case she goes looking for the milk. I never have any, which means she's going to go through the whole refrigerator before giving up. I should clean it. Or maybe it would be easier to just buy some milk . . .

I ought to dust off the piano, the coffee table and the guest room dresser. And Swiffer all the floors in case she walks around the house in her socks. I do that all the time, and you don't want to see what the bottom of my socks look like at the end of the day. It's all too much. (Too late - I already said she could stay here and she's not even coming to visit me; she's coming to town to see her nephew in a college play.)

I used to have a gauge by the front door with a sliding arrow on it that I moved up or down to indicate the Squalor Threat Level within. I adopted one of the TSA's slightly scrambled rainbows - green at the bottom for "no threat," rising through blue to yellow toward orange and the frightening red of "extreme threat."

Things rarely get that bad at my house but there are times when keeping conditions in the orange range is a mighty challenge. Most of the time, the squalor level here hovers somewhere in the yellow zone. On good days it slides down toward the blue, on more usual days it creeps up in the direction of the orange.
I know I have next to no hope of ever achieving the clear green of "zero threat"at the good end of the scale but I like to think that the blue of "very low threat" might someday be attainable.

I find the blue zone more desirable than the green, anyway. Not perfectly safe, mind you, but safe enough, with just a bit of an edge. We all need a touch of excitement in our lives.

Paddling the Pokamoke, and more

Been on vacation . . . and I have the laundry to prove it. I have kayaked and driven the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, bits and pieces of Maryland and Virginia on the way to and from. The boat is back in the garage, the unpacking is mostly done and I have sand in my shoes.

The highest of the highlights, as promised -

Best paddle:
The Pokamoke River, a twisty-turny waterway through the country's northern-most cypress swamp, from Snow Hill (yes) to Pokamoke City. The water is extremely tannic - looks like cafeteria coffee - which means mosquito larvae can't live in it. NO MOSQUITOS! Bald eagle, other birds, turtles, and lots of tree knees. Cool.

Best road surprise:
Driving up the skinny finger of VA that isn't attached to anything but the MD border, from Cape Charles to Chincoteague in the company of 370 motorcyclists. (There really is only one road - US 13.) I started out before they did, they passed me, I passed them, etc. Kind of a day-long do-si-do on wheels. It was an annual rally, a fundraiser for some Christmas-gifts-for-kids project.

Best off-road surprise:
An installation by sculptor Patrick Dougherty at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond. A collection of hidey holes, a walk-through labyrinth of playrooms crafted of saplings. Titled "Meadowmorphosis." A little punny but I like the piece. See it on the front page of http://www.stickwork.net/

Best dinner:
Bill's, one door from the corner of Main Street and Cleveland (yes) in Chincoteague. Eight broiled, couldn't-be-fresher, cooked-just-right, plump and velvety sea scallops; red skin potatoes cooked with ham hocks and mashed with smoked cheddar; and Granny Smith apple cole slaw. No need for dessert.

Best motel:
Rittenhouse Motor Lodge. Tucked in the piney woods off Rt. 13 near Cape Charles. Big room, clean-to-a-fault old tile bathroom, two chairs in front of every door. Classical music, stacks of books and antiques in the office and an utterly charming 83-yr-old host. Well, and coffee, of course.

Best campsite:
not this time

Best sign seen:
50% off fudge jewelry (for lack of a comma, blessed amusement.) Hoping the 50% they took off was the sticky part. (Says my friend Karen, "Everybody knows you don't wear fudge after Labor Day.")

Best wildlife encounter:
a red fox on a sand bar in the marsh near Jane's Island State Park (MD). OK, I was amazed by the up-close-and-almost-too-personal fox sighting but it's a sand bar - where were the daiquiris??

Best beach:
a tie  - Assateague National Seashore for the breakers and one amazing sand castle; the Atlantic side of the NASA site onWallop's Island because it's not open to the public so nobody else was there except me and the 10 people I was with. And I found a perfect moon snail shell.

Totally unclassifiable:
the giant signboard (somewhere in Maryland, I think) on Perdue Stadium - Chickenstock LIVE. What? Are they racing chickens? Is this avian NASCAR? Or are they making soup? Out of LIVE chickens?? I wonder if the PETA folks know about this . . .

Scientist create real invisibility shield

Looking through the chaos I laughingly refer to as my files (I was searching for my poetic license - I think it expired), I came upon a newspaper clipping from October 2006 with this headline:
Scientists create real invisibility shield.


And I quote: " . . . researchers at Duke University have developed  . . .  a primitive device that hides objects by bending electromagnetic waves so that they flow around the object . . . (I seem already to have something in my house that hides objects, especially my cell phone.) Because none of the waves is reflected back at the observer, the object is invisible . . . "

Holy Harry Potter, Batman! OK, so you can't exactly walk into Target and buy an invisibility cloak just yet (and if you could, they'd doubtless be out of my size), but it sets me to thinking what I might do if I could walk around completely unseen. What kindnesses or good deeds might I perform in my ultimate anonymity?

To be honest, I'd probably just do some serious eavesdropping. Not very noble, I know, but there are many domestic scenes, meetings and backstage situations where I would just LOVE to know what goes on when I'm not around.

Or, I could sneak into people's homes to see what the house looks like when company isn't expected. Not naming names here, but it seems that everybody I know has a nicer, better kept house than I do. I'm betting that if I could see what the place looks like on an ordinary day, I might get over that. Of course, sneaking around in my invisibility shield, I'd have to avoid klutz moves like cracking my shins on the coffee table or catching the corner of a cabinet with my hip, the kind of thing I do on a regular basis even in my own home.

Apparently that would not be my only difficulty.  " . . . cloaking a Romulan spaceship, a tank or even a human would produce a serious limitation," the piece goes on to say. "Because all the incoming light is bent around the cloaked object, anyone inside would be left, quite literally in the dark . . .   Any device used to provide vision for the occupant would itself be visible . . "

Well,  I'm in the dark most of the time, but if I can't see the house I'm sneaking around in, the whole thing definitely loses some of its cool, don't you think?

That's the trouble with life. There's always a catch.

Reason enough

"Walk with your eyes down and you will be less likely to stub your toe, but you will have no reason to go anywhere."

My reason to go somewhere was simply a relatively cool and comfortable morning. I did not stub my toe, but I kicked a metal trash can lid. I caught the edge of it with my foot because I was walking not with my eyes down but sideways. I was looking at the flower boxes on a nearby porch railing instead of watching where I was going.

The boxes were filed with the ubiquitous impatiens, unremarkable except for their particularly deep shade of pink. In among the impatiens were equally unremarkable geraniums but geraniums of an even deeper edging-toward-fuchsia pink.  I was marveling at the colors when the trash can lid and my sneaker connected.

The lid landed on the sidewalk, clanging like a Chinese gong. At least twenty kids from all parts of the block turned and stared at me. They were out in force, playing away one of the last days before school starts again. I walked on, pretending I had no connection with the noise.

My friend Glenn once told me that when you stub your toe, trip over something or bump into anything, you are supposed to pointedly look back at it as if questioning its right to be in your way. This advice was gleaned from an intro-to-acting class he took in college. I'm guessing that more than anything else, it's a technique to get a small laugh out of a klutz move. I don't know, but I did not look back.

I just kept walking, walking through a morning that was reason enough to go anywhere, walking, walking and turning the great ball of the earth around and around with my feet.

Seven going on 32

Stories about one's grandkids tend to be a bloody bore. I rarely regale folks with such. Neither do I whip out a supersized accordion of kiddie pics at every turn. I don't need to do that; I have enough other ways to annoy people. But these anecdotes are about someone else's granddaughter, which I have decided is allowable. Plus, this child is just such a hoot, I must share just a few of many, many Sophia stories.

As Sophia (the child in question) was playing with a toy cell phone, my friend (this child's grandmother) tried to play along, asking "Sophia, who are you calling?" The kid rolled her eyes and said with great exasperation, "Grandma, I'm not calling anyone. I'm texting my boyfriend!"

Same Grandma was down for the count with a back injury. Her daughter and the kids came over to see how she was doing. Ever solicitous, Sophia cooed, "Oh, Grandma, is there anything I can do for you?" Jean, aka Grandma, asked for a glass of water, just to give the kid something to do. Sophia fetched it, brought it to the living room and handed it to Jean. Then striking a superhero pose, one hand on her hip, the other raised in the air, Sophia proclaimed, "My work here is done!" You could almost see her cape streaming behind her in the wind.

Sophia was four and five, respectively, in those scenes. She is now a sophisticated seven. Eating lunch at Panera (her favorite - she always orders the Greek salad and green tea), Sophia, her older brother and grandmother were discussing what movie to go see. Smurfs, the current kid flick, was quickly dismissed as too immature. "How about the Harry Potter," her brother suggested?

"Forget it," Sophia said. "My boat doesn't even leave the dock for Harry Potter."

Makes me wonder how she feels about George Clooney.

Optimistic pessimism

Picture an 8 oz. glass containing 4 oz. of liquid. (My 4 oz. is red wine. Yours can be whatever you like - your choice.) Now, to an optimist, that glass is half full, to a pessimist, it's half empty. You know that. To an engineer the glass is twice as big as it needs to be but, as usual, I digress.

Pessimism gets a bad rap. I mean, nobody ever wrote a best-seller titled The Power of Negative Thinking. Maybe that's because optimism gets all the theme songs - "Keep On the Sunny Side," "Whistle a Happy Tune," "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Lousy advice, I say.

Optimists expect everything to go right. They believe projects will come in on time and on budget. They expect decent weather when on vacation. They even believe contractors' estimates and airline schedules, poor dears. Naturally, they're almost always disappointed.

Whatever the circumstance or endeavor, rarely does everything go right. Optimism just sets you up to have your hopes dashed.

On the other hand, rarely does absolutely everything go wrong. If you expect the worst, even if 97% of your day tanks, the 3% that turns out OK will come as a pleasant surprise. Cultivating total gloom and doom leaves you the possibility of a better outcome than anticipated every single time. See how it works? Obviously, of the two, pessimism is the saner choice.

Of course, I don't expect any of you to share my opinion. In fact, if I get even one comment or email agreeing with me on this, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Between July and September

OK, It’s hardly perfect, but of the selection of months currently in stock, August is one of the better models.

August weather, for example, is a paragon of reliability. Unlike such fickle months as April and November, August offers consistency. It’s hot. Sometimes hot and dry, more often hot and humid, but predictably hot. This provides an excuse for lethargy that at other times of the year would be taken for mere sloth.

A late entry in the annual lineup, August didn’t join the calendar club until 46 B.C. I figure it arrived several centuries after the other months because, like us during August, it just didn’t move very fast.

Along with July, August nestled in at the end of the summer. Before everything was settled, Augustus, with typical imperiousness, swiped a day from poor February and tacked it on the end of his namesake so as not to be out-done by the other Caesar’s month.

August is a gift of time. It’s too late to initiate more plans for the summer and too early to adopt autumnal hyperactivity. Every second person is on vacation and organizational wheels roll at a more leisurely pace.

By August, the garden is pretty much a given. Most everything that’s going to die has done so and, as long as you remember to water, the rest grows so rampantly that it would be hard to stop it, even if you tried. 

But why would you? August yields a feast for the body and fine food for the eye: vermilion tomatoes, emerald peppers, amethyst eggplants. What other month is so unabashedly voluptuous?

August’s most sterling quality, however, is the absence of holidays within its bounds. There is in August not a single officially ordained celebration of any magnitude. There are no obligatory rituals to endure, no traditions to defend. August requires no greeting cards, no tinsel or flags, no boxes of candy, plastic pumpkins or green beer. And not once in all of August are we forced by governmental decree to survive our Monday on a Tuesday.

August is as it is with good design. Without the relatively uncluttered weeks of early August, we could not face the frenzied rigors to come. As the days shorten, we redeem these unstructured hours, fuel to power us up and over the summit of Labor Day and on to all that lies ahead. 

Sheer dumb luck

I have no idea who's in charge, but I know I'm not.

Flashback #1 - Weary of the demands of an older home, I decided to make the condo move. My hunt for just the right space met with success. Then my bank guy called. "I can't approve you for this," he said. What?! My credit report was showing a five-figure debt, a loan that absolutely was not mine. Eventually it got sorted out, but in the six weeks (yes, six weeks) that it took to correct the mistake, the housing bubble burst, the stock market tanked . . . and I breathed a deep sigh of relief that I wasn't stuck with a new mortgage on top of diminished investments and a big house that would take too long to sell for too little.

Flashback #2 - I was all set to commune with the loons. I planned to camp around Lake Superior and  venture into the wilderness of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. A fifth eye surgery (yes, a fifth) forced a postponement. As a result, instead of being beyond pavement and out of cell phone reach in northern Minnesota, I was at home when the warranty ran out on my appendix. The EMS wagon was in my driveway almost before I finished reciting my address. Six days (yes, six days) in the hospital was not the vacation I had in mind, but I lived to gripe about it. Which would not have been the case if I'd had my way.

A sixth ophthalmological procedure is now on my calendar. This one is no big deal, barely a blip compared to two transplanted corneas. (Yes, I look at the world through other people's eyes.) That I can see at all, that I live with these challenges in this rich place at this amazing time instead of ending up as some tiger's lunch, is no minor miracle. Just sheer dumb luck, eh?

A passing

I write this to mark the recent passing of a woman I barely knew. We may actually have met a few times - I’m not sure - but through my decades as a radio commentator/ reviewer/ columnist/ feature writer and all-purpose ink-stained wretch, this woman would drop a note or phone me about something I had written. 

People will fall all over themselves to call attention to an error or verbally thrash the living daylights out of you for your wrong-headed views but when you hear nothing . . . well, the piece must have been O.K.


This gracious woman took time to let me know when something I had written made her laugh or made her think. She kept an eye out for my by-line and let me know that she enjoyed reading my work. You cannot imagine how much that could mean sometimes. She was thoughtful and witty and oh-so rare, and, of course, I will miss her.

Book review - more weeds

Great review by Kristen O. of Richard Mabey's new book, Weeds. Link is below. Read it.

http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2011/07/post_27.html

Rethinking weeds

As noted a few posts back, weedness is strictly a matter of context. "Weed" is not a botanical classification. Weed-itude - or weed-osity, if you prefer - has to do only with the undesirability of a given plant in a given place at a given time. Like crab grass in my perennial bed. Now, that's a weed. At any time.

My friend Lissy once shared her philosophy of gardening with me. It has at its heart the idea of offensive rather than defensive gardening. Offensive gardening, according to Lissy, is the planting and/or nurturing of plants you want in your garden, instead of forever being on the defensive and spending all your time pulling out the plants that you don't want, i.e., weeding. I would add, along with planting and/or nurturing, tolerating.

All it takes is a bit of rethinking. Cleome was a weed last year. I pulled out dozens of them in the back garden. This year, after seeing it for sale at Pettiti's  (forgive me - I hope I have the correct number of Ts in Pettiti's), I decided to amend its status. After all, it does have very pretty pink and white blooms. So this year - ta-da! - Cleome is a flowering perennial.  And I didn't have to buy it at Pettiti's. It was a volunteer.

I've also determined that bugle weed, a tenacious little plant that has spread all around in back, is no longer a weed. I'm never going to get all of it out of there so it's now a ground cover, at least in the back garden. It's still a weed if it shows up in the front yard. Of course I let it bloom so I can enjoy its nice blue flowers along with the cheery dandelions. Then I chop their flowery little heads off when I mow the lawn. (I don't want to think too much about the satisfaction this seems to give me. Some aspects of our personalities are better left unexplored.)

I have milkweed in my garden, too, and lots of Queen Ann's lace. I got the seeds last fall from some plants by the Drug Mart parking lot. Queen Ann's lace is a weed there, but in my garden, it's a flower. So are goldenrod and yarrow.  They're all flowers.

Remember, acceptance is the key to better mental health. (Works for me.)

My father's gambling career

I know, Father's Day was several days ago. But I miss my dad every day, not just on Father's Day. Besides, I had no working computer last weekend, so I'm writing this now.

Last week, Governor Kasich announced the details of the revenue sharing agreement (read: shakedown ) between the state and Dan Gilbert, et. al., so construction of Ohio's casinos can now go forward. That brought to mind one of my favorite Dad stories.

We Snows are not a gambling clan. No particular reason - it just doesn't seem to be something we do. One notable exception is the time my father, waiting for my mom and my younger brother to come out of a store somewhere in Nevada, dropped a nickel in a sidewalk slot machine. He pulled the lever and out poured $20 in nickels. Being Dad, he didn't play the machine again, and walked away $19.95 to the good.

I've known about this for years. The story is embedded in the family canon. But not until he was 85 years old did my dad reveal to me the full extent of his sordid past.

Once, while in college, Dad admitted to me, he went to the races.  My father, Charles D. Snow, went to the track!  It's hard to picture, but while there he bet $2 on a horse to show. (Someone told me that betting on a horse to show is the most conservative thing you can do, horse-betting-wise. That would be as characteristic of Dad as going to the track was not.)

"So," I asked, "did your horse win?"

"No," said Dad. "He didn't win." Of course there was more to the story and, of course, if I wanted to hear it, I had to ask.

"Well, what happened?"

"My horse died," he said. "Dropped dead in the back stretch. They tied some rope around him and pulled him away with a tractor."

"The horse died . . . "

"Yep," Dad answered. "My horse died."

I waited. Finally I said, "O.K., Dad. I give. What's the rest of it?"

He smiled his Dad smile, already amused by what he was about to tell me. "The horse's name, "he said, pausing for emphasis, "was Charlie's Choice."

I've yet to go to a racetrack, but I think I should sometime. When I do, I'll look for a horse with Charles, Charlie or Chuck in its name and bet the smallest permissible amount on that horse to show. Whether my horse wins or not, I'll think of my dad. And hope the poor horse doesn't have to be hauled off by a tractor.

A new state slogan for Ohio

          I live in Ohio, the southern-most northern state, the northern edge of the Appalachians, the eastern-most midwestern state and the western reach of the east, a state that is everywhere and nowhere all at once.   

Specifically, I live in the north-east corner of Ohio, a.k.a. the Western Reserve. We were once a branch office of Connecticut. Scattered about our region are white-spired churches and village greens that would make you swear you’re in New England.

          But you’re not. You’re in Ohio, “the heart of it all.” Somebody told me that’s no longer our state slogan. I hadn’t heard, but if we need a new one, I’m suggesting, “Ohio: a mostly disaster-free zone.”

We get winds high enough to knock down some trees and take the power out for a bit, but we never have hurricanes. No tsunamis, either, and rarely a tornado like the one that chewed up and spit out Joplin, Missouri. Downstate may get a twister from time to time but this definitely isn’t Kansas, Toto.

 Hundreds of acres along the Mississippi were flooded out this spring. Yes, we had some high water and a few folks ended up with mud in their basements – no fun, I’ll admit - but we’ve yet to lose a whole town.

A Lake Erie wind farm may be in our future but as far as I know, there’s no oil to be drilled or spilled, just salt being quietly mined far beneath the water.

California has wildfires and mudslides, neither of which plague beautiful Ohio. We get a baby tremor now and again, but a full-grown Big Daddy earthquake could drop Los Angeles into the ocean at any moment. (This would not necessarily be all bad; I’ve been to Los Angeles.)

Right this minute, huge wildfires are burning in eastern Arizona. Earlier this spring, wildfire took as many as 40 homes around Fort Davis, Texas. That’s a lot for grief for a community of 1050 souls in a county of just 2200 residents.

No hurricanes, no mudslides. No tsunamis or wildfires. No major flooding, no oil spills. Rarely a big tornado and almost never an earthquake. So, how’s this for a state slogan? “Ohio: nothing much happens here, and that’s a good thing.”

Double-barreled budget balancing

This spring I’ve spent more time on our state’s roadways than is usual for me. It seems I have driven here, there, everywhere. Several times. In the rain. Other than wearing out a set of windshield wiper blades, my journeys have been uneventful. As I traveled I noted that the distinctive features of Ohio motoring remain as in past years: pot holes, of course, and slow-downs due to lane closures, marked by long lines of orange barrels.

Sometimes there are signs announcing ‘Road Work Ahead’ but often not. And when there are such signs, it’s likely to be false advertising. Again and again, I encountered lane closures with long, long lines of orange barrels but no road work (or road workers) to be seen.

This puzzled me. Why would all these orange barrels be arranged single file on our highways if not to mark construction zones? I pondered, but remained clueless. Then, driving back from Kent one afternoon, it hit me: these barrel queues are evidence of not one but two of Governor Kasich’s brilliant budget balancing measures!

It’s elegantly simple. Put all the orange barrels out on the roads, and you can sell off whatever facilities normally house the barrels when they’re not in use. (Cha-ching!)

Too, given the sheer number of orange barrels out there, it’s hard to believe that the impoverished State of Ohio actually owns them all. I’ll bet we clever Buckeyes are picking up a little extra revenue by providing orange barrel accommodations for someplace that has actually repaired its roads and is done with them for the year: Ontario, maybe (cha-ching, again!).

Those lane closures with their miles of orderly orange barrels? Those aren’t construction zones - they’re storage areas. Way to go, John!

A person's a person . . .

To paraphrase Marcus Welby, M.D. (aka actor Robert Young), I am not a Presbyterian but I do play one on Sunday mornings. I sing in the local Presby church choir not for reasons of theology but simply because I like the director.

Since I am Presbyterian in robe only, I had no say in the matter, but I was pleased when recently the denomination lifted its ban on gay and lesbian clerics. (My opinion was not solicited but if it were, I’d ask, “What took you so long?”)

A century ago, the country was going to crumble if women got the vote. Well, we did, and it didn’t. Later, our military and our schools were racially integrated without the predicted apocalyptic results. Despite our bigoted little minds, bit by bit, our humanity catches up with us, and we take one more baby step toward full and equal civil rights for all.

We will get there. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Today’s news is that, according to the latest Gallop poll, more of us support marriage equality than oppose it.

Our most astute contemporary philosopher wrote in Horton Hears a Who, “A person’s a person no matter how small.” I say we go Dr. Seuss one better and make it, “A person’s a person no matter _________.” Fill in the blank, or maybe just leave it at “a person’s a person.”

Come on, people. Get over it. We have real problems to solve.

Selective biomass removal

There are no weeds. There are only plants flourishing where we do not want them. Weedness is entirely a matter of context.

          I’m pretty sure most of my neighbors consider dandelions to be weeds, while I welcome them in my yard as wildflowers. I find their smiley-face yellow heads cheery. Plus, their presence shows that I don’t poison my yard, a point of pride for me. Of course, I do decapitate the dandelions when eventually I mow the lawn, but they don’t seem to mind – they always come back.

I once had some morning glories climbing up the south side of my porch. Blue ones. Pretty, I thought. When a friend from Nebraska visited, he gaped at them in horror. “You planted these,” he said? “On purpose?” Turns out he and his brothers spent years of after-school hours and sweaty summer days yanking morning glories out of their family’s soybean fields. Context again.

My friend Joan calls weeding “plant killing.” I think that’s optimistic. At best, we discourage them temporarily. I don’t believe anything short of all-out chemical warfare will actually kill the hearty buggers, and even that ultimately proves to be temporary. (Recall the movie Jurassic Park – Nature will find a way.)

Still, I persist in the Sisyphean exercise of extracting timothy grass, bugleweed and purslane from my back garden. It gets me outside, and I can always use the exercise. But I know the task for what it really is: selective biomass removal. And temporary. 

The world is ending again?

An engineer named Harold Camping has determined that the world will end this Saturday. I don’t recall if he has mentioned the exact time. (Neal Conan’s comment on NPR this afternoon was, “Drink the good wine.” I’m thinking we should pop those corks on Friday night just in case the world ends at 12:01 Saturday morning.)

Camping has arrived at this through a Byzantine labyrinth of mathematical calculations that I clearly am not equipped to follow. It all somehow rests on the date of the flood  - not the one that’s in my backyard right now, but the one with Noah and the ark and the animals two by two – which he has pinpointed as occurring in 4990 BC.  (I don’t understand how he got that, either.) From there Camping cites Biblical references at every twist and turn, and ends up at May 21, 2011.

I’m tempted to toss a monkey wrench into this elaborate mechanism, like the irregularities of lunar months that Noah’s Daytimer would have reflected (we have to assume Noah was on the Hebrew calendar), or our switch here in the Colonies from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.  But Camping’s an engineer. I’m sure he’s accounted for these kinds of things; engineers are so precise about everything.

So, here I am once again in the same old quandary – should I live as if this Friday is my last day on earth? (See the May 4 blog post for details re: first-class air travel, chocolate and kayaking.) And if I take him at his word and he’s mistaken? We’re left with the depressing consequences contemplated in that same post.

What to do, what to do? Surely not the dishes. Some would say I'll have to wrestle with this problem again in December 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out, but if you ask me, they just got tired of all that chiseling and decided to let it ride until someone invented a copy machine. 

Browsing the classifieds

Every now and then I browse through the classified ads. (I’m not looking for a job or a new house. I think it’s just an excuse to sit with another cup of coffee.) These expeditions beyond the borders of my own little life inevitably prove that there is no available job for which I’m qualified, and no real estate I can afford, at least not anywhere I’m willing to live.

Today I took it a step further and leafed through an ad supplement that was tucked in with the morning paper. A thorough perusal of those shiny pages reassured me that not only is there nothing I need, there’s nothing (no thing) that I want, at least not from that store.

A career in the arts rarely leads to fortune or, for that matter,  more than moderate fame. If I worked in another field – you know, like if I had a real job - I might have more money. But I have enough money, so what would be the point? I am what I want to be when I grow up, with sufficient music and writing projects to keep me busy for at least another lifetime.

Looking past the obvious - that I have no marketable skills and not a ton of money -  I take these periodic revelations as evidence that, despite repeated attempts to sabotage my own life, I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. (I know, that sounds kind of new-agey but it does seem to be the case.)

As for a house, I have one. There’s a roof over my head and a floor under my feet.  It’s no mansion but it’s mine.  And I am living exactly where I’m supposed to be living.  If I ever moved, I’d have to clean.

yet more signage

I spent the weekend with a group of music friends (more on that later). A few additional contributions to the growing collection of dubiously worded signs:
Spotted on the east side of Cleveland - "Free Art for Sale."
From a joint on the eastern shore of Maryland - "Crabs and Oysters Dance Tonight." I'd pay real money to see that, wouldn't you? (I wonder if the legless oysters just sort of act as castanets, a sort of  rhythm section for the dancing crabs . . )

(if youdidn't see it, back up to the post that started it all - "Say What?"  posted April 28)

Live as if today were your last?

In the whole self-helping, psychobabbling, Dr. Philosophizing of our pop culture, the worst piece of advice I've ever heard is, "Live each day as if it were your last." This is not a good plan, people.

What would I do if I knew today to be my last day in this life? Well, I can tell you what I wouldn't do. The dishes. Or the laundry. Why bother? I'm not going to the gym either. Or shopping, even though I'm out of coffee. I loathe shopping every bit as much as I loathe going to the gym. And I could just skip getting yet another estimate for the repair of my car's rattling exhaust system. Passing the E-check would fall right off the "important stuff to do" list, if, indeed, this were the last day of my life.

So what would I do? I think I'd fly - first class, of course - to someplace where the water is clear and warm, and kayak in and out of the mangroves until sunset. (I'd take as many friends and family members as care to come along. So what if I max out my credit cards?) After a good day's paddle, I'd dine on vast quantities of perfectly prepared, well-buttered seafood, drink too much wine, and eat as many chocolate desserts as possible. (Of course I'd pick up the tab for everyone. As noted, so what if I explode the plastic?)

Right. But what if  today is not the last day of my life, which it likely is not? I'd wake up tomorrow hung over, in debt, out of clean socks and a good bit closer to a coronary. With a muffler that still rattles. I told you, people, this just is not a good plan. Oh yeah . . .  and I'd have to face a dirty kitchen first thing in the morning with no coffee. Now there's a recipe for a mental health crisis.

Eating for two

Yesterday eve, four bitchin' babes - that would be me and three of my babe friends - went to see and hear the Four Bitchin' Babes, the uppercase FBBs. From "Oh, no . . .I'm looking for my glasses again . ." to an impassioned musical ode to chocolate, there was much to relate to. Somewhere between the beginning and the end of the show, one of the uppercase FBBs stated, "I'm eating for two. No, I'm not pregnant - I'm just eating for two. I have no idea who this other person is but we're going to have words."

I understand. I've been eating for two for decades but recently that other person, whoever she is, stopped picking up her share of the tab, leaving me to metabolize all of her calories along with my own. Somewhere around the start of the new millennium I noticed she was slacking off a bit. But about four or five years ago, she simply plopped her backside into a recliner somewhere and has flatly refused to burn up even one bit of the ice cream, almond croissants or tater tots that we've been eating. I don't know how I'm going to get  her up and doing her part again. Seems to be no matter what I do, she will not budge. I'm on my own here, people.

more signage

From the east side of town, a friend reports an establishment advertising "wood burning pizzas." And I recall a restaurant in Rocky River with "No shoes. No shirt. No tank top. No service" emphatically posted at the door. I am sure that I was served there any number of times when I was not wearing a tank top . . . 'tis a puzzlement.

Say what?

A few days ago I went to the UPS store to ship a package. While standing around waiting for the clerk to figure out what size box he needed, I read the list of services offered, posted high on the wall opposite the counter like a fast food menu. The options beneath “packaging services” included “crating” and “cartonizing.” Cartonizing – so maybe that’s what was taking the kid so long; he was looking for a box . . .

At my Y there is a sign by the drinking fountain that reads, “Please do not spit in the water fountain.” (No, I am not making this up.) The assumption here is that someone who would spit in a drinking fountain can read. I think that’s a pretty big leap. On the bulletin board in the hallway are listed “upcoming events.” As opposed to what? Downcoming events? Why not just “coming events?”

Among my favorite repetitive redundancies, a category of language abuse dear to my heart, is “free gift.” Well, yeah  . . .  if you had to pay for it, it wouldn’t be a gift. Another big DUH is “supplies are limited.” Of course they are. We live in a finite world, people.

Turning to entertainment, I remember when an R in a TV listing let you know that the episode was a rerun. Now, we assume the program’s been aired before unless there’s an N there. As for on-air promotion, why do the networks trumpet a coming show as “all-new”? Next week! All-new NCIS! I find this totally bizarre. Are they implying that they sometimes air a “part-new” episode? Maybe they occasionally rewrite just half the script and hope people won’t notice.

Among my favorite signs is one I saw on the door of a shop in Aukland, New Zealand: “No children without parents.” Eh? In the west of  Ireland, I spotted a notice stating, “Opening hours: 10-5 daily, except when not.” I love that one. But the most succinct and best-ever business sign I’ve seen was right here in my own neighborhood, a hand-lettered signboard propped in front of a near-by tavern - “Open ‘til closed.” I’m so glad they clarified that.

My beautiful friend calls

My beautiful friend calls late in the evening. Her voice tells me from the first word that something is wrong. Her father died. This passing is a relief. He's been very ill for some time. Still, even when it's expected, even when death puts suffering to rest, it upends us.

When it is a parent who dies, the very earth shifts and you no longer stand where you were. The death of a parent irrevocably alters a key part of who you are, of who you have been your entire life. Until now. Whether you register it consciously or not, you know this to be a marker. You know this to be the end of yet another phase of your life. And you grieve that loss as well.

Fifty-two do-overs

Monday - life's start-again day. Whether you've trashed your house or crashed your diet over the weekend, stayed out too late, maybe drank one more glass of wine than you meant to - whatever - when Monday comes around you get back on track. Mondays are like having a New Year's Day once a week.

Except for the absolute minimum required to keep body and soul together, I did nothing last week but work on a music project, letting all else fall down around my ears. I finished the score, wrestling as always with the music-writing software, printed it out and mailed it off Saturday. I plowed through Sunday, which often starts too early and usually gets me home around time to collapse and watch "60 Minutes." Yesterday, Monday, I set about what my friend Karen terms "exerting control over my domestic environment."

The underwear alarm went off so I really had to do laundry. I seem to have a lot of laundry. I can't decide if this means I'm a very clean person or a very grubby one. I do know that every time I'm just about done with the laundry I do something rash - like get out a clean towel or change my socks - and before I even get the last load of the day folded and put away, I already have the beginnings of the next pile of laundry. It makes me think of that sour dough starter some people use to make bread; they always save a bit to start the next batch.

Cleaning up the rest of the house was - still is - a bit like mucking out the Aegean stables. The Squalor Alert Level had been hovering around orange, threatening to escalate to red in some corners of the house. I'm progressing toward yellow, aiming to bring it down around green by tomorrow . . . well, maybe Thursday. There's no hope of ever reaching the all-clear blue zone. I may be a nut case, but I'm a realistic one. My office always looks as if somebody has picked it up and shaken it.

I still haven't washed the kitchen floor or cleaned the stove, and I have a bunch of recycling to drop off, but I seem to have done enough to keep the Health Department (or the TSA) from showing up at my door. At least for now, I can live with that.

Falling into a book

I have fallen in love again. Last week it was a tree, a modest young river birch with curls of creamy bark. I visited it at least once a day, took photos of it, watched it in the rain. This week, or at least today, it is a book, though sometimes it is music or the rainbows on my wall. (I am easily amused.)
One week driving back and forth to the other side of town for a school residency, it was a song by the Wailin' Jennies. I played the track, singing along to add an additional harmony that is, to my ear, absolutely essential, then pushed the 'back' button on the CD player to do it over again. For ten 40" trips between home and school, I lived in that song.
Now, as I said, it is a book,  The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartok. A memoir of life as the daughter of a schizophrenic, it is sometimes dark but never dreary, and written in such luminous language that I cannot stop reading it. I read last night until I fell asleep and picked it up again when I woke, still in my pajamas when a friend stops at 10am. I am living in this book instead of writing or cleaning or seeing to the laundry or other chores. I cannot wait to finish this book and I never want it to end. So it goes.

Walking on water

Forget that lion and lamb stuff - this March flew in like a puddle-loving duck and toddled away in weather only a penguin could love. Now April, my yard is again afloat and falling temps tonight could lay a thin lid of ice on my pond. Oh - and then we are expecting rain every day for the rest of the week.
Besides the pond, which is supposed to be there, I have a great lake wannabe under the mulberry tree and a growing body of muddy water near the patio behind the garage. I'm expecting migrating geese to land any time now. My plan is to declare my back garden a wetlands and apply for a Federal grant. After that, all I need is signage.
Shopping for a pontoon boat,
Jancy

The Question Was, Where Have You Been?

New York, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio
dozens of places that seem
like a good idea at the time.

well, that's the beginning of an old answer (to read the whole poem, click on http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org/archive/vol5no1/where.htm)

As for more recently, the answer is here, there and Puerto Rico. (More on that later.) Not a post to be seen since the first of the year, and one quarter of the year gone.
Resolving on this first of April to do better, JanC