Befowled

 

My husband’s dream chicken coop is finished and the first three residents have arrived. Here’s a photo of him contemplating his new flock:

I assume this photo is a fairly accurate representation of is what he sees when he looks at them:

 

These photos come close to illustrating what I see:

 

But it gets worse. Some of you may remember that when I green-lighted this whole dubious project, there was a condition. I specifically vetoed any poodle chickens. Well, it turns out that there are even more objectionable breeds than the (accurately named) “Silkie”. Check out the yellow comb-over on this “Sulmtaler”:

Now we are trying to figure out what to call these new. . . pets? . . . and I’ve discovered that it is harder to name chickens  than dogs or cats. When it comes to the Sulmtaler, I can’t decide between “The Donald” and “Lunch”.

 

 

Dam Cracked

 

Not to diminish the insult or pain caused by Confederate statues, but it strikes me that discussions around them take our attention away from the true horror of Charlottesville. There were Nazi’s and KKK people marching proudly and openly in front of live cameras!  With guns and torches. Quoting first Hitler and then Donald Trump. In an American city.

Take a moment and really consider that.

It demands a response from every thinking person with a conscience. But what can possibly be written that hasn’t been said already by 1000 talking heads and one or two Republican senators?

As my subconscious gnawed on these recent events, a childhood story popped into my head. The one about the little boy who plugs a hole in a dike with his finger and saves the town (or was it the whole country?) I guess I thought of this story because it was somehow the metaphorical opposite of what I want to see happen.

In my three weeks in the States, I detected changes in the vocabulary people used to discuss the latest daily Twump farce. Way back during the campaign we had heard tentative expressions about “false statements”, “untruths”, “misrepresentations” and “distortions” – now people were saying straight out “he lied again”. An earlier “unprecedented outrage” was now yet another “idiotic” stunt. Words like “narcissist”, “pathological”, “obsession”, “unhinged”, etc. were now being thrown around with impunity. Newscasters began to smirk when saying the words “The president tweeted today that . . . .”  and no one talked about his brilliance in business or deal making anymore. And yet, everyone still danced on tiptoes around two topics. The first was his mental state. The second was fascism. Any remark comparing Trump’s playbook to that of historical fascist regimes was immediately pronounced “out of bounds”.

Still, it seemed to me that the vocabulary of dissent was growing in volume and intensity. I discussed this with my sister many times to make sure it was not just wishful thinking or me hearing what I wanted to hear. I was sure this drip drip had turned into a trickle at least. I wondered what it would take to turn this dribble into a stream and then, finally, maybe a torrent. What would make the dam break? Access Hollywood didn’t do it. Nor did the Comey firing. None of his many nasty attacks got his party members running, nor did the fact that he lied five times a day on average since taking office. Could Charlottesville be the thing? – the one that finally could not be simply waited out? When an important senator openly questioned the pwesident’s mental fitness for office and CNN started debating the question the next day, I thought this might really be it. The three words “on many sides” would open the flood gates. I braced myself and . . .

dribble . . . dribble . . . dribble . . .

I should have known that the senator’s words would not equate with metaphorically unplugging the hole in the dike. (His name was “Corker”. It was a sign.)

I googled the story anyway (search terms: boy finger dike) and discovered a lot of confusion. No one seems to know the origins of the story, but it was made famous by an American woman in the 19^th century when she included it in her book about life in Holland: “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates”. This woman had never been to Holland when she wrote it and apparently most Dutch people were not and are not familiar with the story. (This detail doesn’t surprise me at all. I have met literally thousands of Austrians and can only name three who have seen “The Sound of Music”.) Even so, there are (erroneously named) “Hans Brinker” statues in many cities in the Netherlands today. Wikipedia suggests they were put up for the benefit of American tourists.

And now I am back to statues.

It seems our objectionable statues have about as much true connection to our country’s heritage and traditions as the Hans Brinker ones do to Holland’s. Who believes that these ugly monuments, put up during Jim Crow, were meant to glorify a bunch of 19^th century generals fighting a lost and immoral cause or the man who occupied a short-lived and illegitimate presidency? No, they had a different purpose and it surely wasn’t to attract tourists. And who believes that the present day defenders of these pieces of concrete are there to honor history? If anything, it is a bunch of 21^st century generals fighting a different lost cause they are chanting for, along with the current man occupying a (short-lived?) and illegitimate presidency. The man whose words encouraged them to creep out of the closets and remove the hoods. These people clearly have an affinity to and recognize a common cause with the pwesident.

So . . . it seems that self proclaimed neo-nazi’s can say publicly that “he is one of us” but the rest of us are still not allowed to say “he is one of you”.

I am almost desperate in my need to hear Washington lawmakers and serious news people start openly discussing this man’s true political leanings as well as his mental capacity and health. He keeps going lower and he’s taking the country down with him.

There were Nazi’s and KKK people marching proudly and openly in front of live cameras!  With guns and torches. Quoting first Hitler and then Donald Trump. In an American city.

Take a moment and really consider that.

From Night Owl to Early Bird

 

Speaking as a confirmed Night Owl, I’ve got a bone to pick (or as German speakers would say “a chicken to pluck”) with all the Early Birds out there. It is so unfair that you get to decide the timetable of the school day – and therefore my professional life, now that I have a day job. I didn’t notice this during the first 35 years of teaching because I almost exclusively had afternoon and evening courses. But then I switched to teaching at an elementary/middle school and – BAM! – I was confronted with the 6:00 am alarm clock alarm (which –after 6 years, I still find alarming). It was cruel and unusual. (Yeah, yeah, I know the cliché about he who “gets the worm”, but, honestly, who wants to get worms?)

My summer vacation has been long and relaxing and regenerating, and yet I am staring down the reality of the coming upheaval with a certain amount of trepidation. I have three more evenings/nights to enjoy my natural rhythm – that means going to bed when I feel like it and getting up when I wake up. That means being somewhat slow and lethargic during the Peak Sun hours and then being energetic and creative and productive after sunset.

Then it will be Sunday. I will try to force myself to be in bed by 11:00 pm, alarm set for 6:00 am. I will lie there, tossing and turning, eyes sending signals to my brain that they would prefer to be open, feet playing patty-cake of their own accord, various spots on my body alternately itching or aching, requiring me to scratch or adjust my position continually . . .

. . . and all this for at least three hours, possibly more, before I finally drift off . . .

. . . and then there will be the alarming start to a new school year.

 

Each year in fall, articles appear in newspapers or online about some initiative or another to change the school day to 9-3 rather than the current 7:30- 1:30. These articles make salient, pedagogically sound arguments about the futility of trying to teach teenage brains who are too tired to be receptive in the wee hours of the first period. Each time I read one of these, I feel a tiny glimmer of hope.

These hopes are then quickly dashed – usually by some Early Bird who is happy to be home from work in the afternoon, in time to partake in the last bits of Peak Sun. “It will never happen,” they tell me. “Too many lives would be thrown into chaos and stress. People have to get to work, and they have to have their kids safely sent off beforehand. Everything would have to change – store opening hours, factory shift hours, bus and train schedules – the list is endless!”

So, (sigh), no, this is not likely to change in the next and last five years of my career. We all will continue to conform to a 19^th century farmer’s pre-electricity daily schedule, requiring us all to get up when the sun does and to go down a candle’s-length after twilight.

And I will force my body and mind to do the same. Resistance is futile.

 

The Path of Totality

 

With all of America being in Solar Eclipse Fever, I was reminded of my own past luck to find myself in “the path of totality” for one of these. Austria, August 11^th, 1999. My husband (of ten years at the time) and I decided to throw a garden party for the occasion.

It took me a while to locate these pictures in my many photo albums. I had started with the 2001 book because I was convinced that my elder daughter was a baby in attendance; I could picture the buggy standing in the shade and her sleeping peacefully inside. But it turns out that I must have conflated this party with my husband’s 40^th birthday bash two years later – the one with the “End of the World” theme. I found those pictures in a later album and there was a baby in a buggy with shades on, it just wasn’t ours. And he had the sunglasses because of eye troubles, not because of an eclipse. While looking through those pictures, I couldn’t find the crazy invitation we had made for this party and started getting suspicious again . . .

More foraging through photo albums revealed that my memory was conflating this second party with his 50^th Birthday Bash (also a garden party). That was the one that coincided with some religious prophecy about the coming of Judgment Day – May 21^st, 2011. Our invitations for that party read:

(That party was a really good time!)

Now, after all sorts of rummaging through albums and the recesses of my brain, I have it all straightened out. So back to the Solar Eclipse Party . . .

We had a perfect cloudless day and as you can see, being in the shadow of the moon really makes day turn into night. The later pictures in the album show bright sunshine again. This being the days before digital cameras and the internet, I didn’t get a good shot of the ring, but I did look at it for a few seconds with my own eyes.

    

As I look at these pictures, the ugliness of our house and general lack of foliage in our garden at that time strikes me. It is also strange to realize my elder daughter wouldn’t be born until a full year later, and that, at this time, I had no idea we would even be adopting a child. Then I look at all the people in attendance and see her two godfathers. I see the two couples who I later helped with the paperwork so that they could secretly  get married in Las Vegas. One of these two also later asked for our advice about adopting and now are deliriously happy with their permanent foster daughter. I see another woman who would become my daughter’s singing teacher. She and her husband together celebrated their “100^th” birthday just two days ago and I was in attendance. My daughter sang there. I see pictures of babies who will be graduating from high school this year, young kids who are now done with university. And of all these people, I see only a handful that I have lost contact with.

I had no idea at the time that these people would stay a big part of my life over the next two decades and most likely beyond. That they would be the same crowd pictured at that 40^th bash and the 50^th ten years later, and presumably the 60^th just a few years from now.

– – – – – – – – – – –

I didn’t see the eclipse today because I was a third of the way around the world from the path of totality. Instead I took a jog down Memory Lane and then livestreamed NASA coverage via NPR. And because the experience wasn’t exactly action packed, I played some Solitaire at the same time while trying to get my head around time differences and where the sun was compared to here and why the moon path went from west to east:

  

 

I was lucky to get these screenshots  – right after the second one, my crappy wifi broke down and the stream was interrupted.

I got up and went out onto my porch just in time to catch the sunset. Ten seconds earlier I had been tracking the sun’s path over Oregon en route to my family and friends in Wisconsin. And here it was, by me, the way it always is.

Things suddenly reset and were back to normal. To the way they should be. There was a feeling. And I want to remember it.

Back to Bragging

 

There will be some posts coming about our three weeks in the States and our day in Chicago, but for now only one story is relevant.

Two days before leaving, my daughter had an appointment in a hair salon to get extensions braided in professionally. She had found the salon on the internet and the pictures made it seem like quite a nice place. My sister and I drove her to the salon’s address, intending to get her started and then leave, returning 5 or 6 hours later to pick her up. But on reaching our destination, we found ourselves in front of an apartment building. It all seemed a bit dubious to us, as we entered the building on the off chance that a hair salon could be found inside. We saw the front office and its busy receptionist. (Do normal apartment buildings have receptionists?) We saw quite a few people with walkers and wheelchairs. We saw what looked like a gymnasium where two young women were studying at one of the card tables with folding chairs set up in there. On the back wall there were benches and a youngish man sat on one, directly under a large American flag, staring blankly ahead of him. A dashing elderly African American couple – she in her colorful head scarf and he in his royal blue suit with matching hat –  walked past us and left the building. They were in high spirits as if on their way to the speakeasy.

As the receptionist was clearly ignoring us, my daughter called the number of the salon again and reached the same woman she had talked to before. It seemed we were in the right place and we should go down to the end of the hall where she would meet us.

En route, my sister and I made it clear that if this was not a salon in a public area then we were all leaving. We weren’t going to simply leave my daughter in some stranger’s apartment.

A stairwell door opened and a middle-aged woman dressed in something reminiscent of pajamas appeared.  She ordered us to follow her up the stairs. An awkward conversation ensued. (Thanks again, sis, for doing all the work!) We left again and I dealt with a daughter who was relieved and disappointed in equal measures. It was too late to try and find another salon, so I said,

“Well I watched Lila braiding in your extensions last time, maybe I can just do it myself when we get back home.” That made my daughter happy again.

That statement also had unexpected consequences – one of which is that of the eight days we have been back home, I have spent the better part of four as a hairdresser.

With Daughter One I began with a sense of desperation and the feeling of having too many thumbs. I quickly wished I had paid better attention to Lila. A few YouTube videos and a lot of trial and error later, I started to find my groove. By the time we were done, I had gotten pretty good at it.

Daughter Two looked at the results and envied the way these braids stayed so straight. (She has so much hair, that I have been able to micro-braid it without any extra artificial hair – but her braids then coil up afterward.) We mused about the possibility of doing extensions on her hair too, just as a means of keeping it straight.

Those musings cost me the entirety of yesterday and 3/4ths of today.

BUT!! . . .

I can now show off my masterpiece.

              

Statistics:

Number of braids: One hundred and ten

Extension color match: 9.9 on a scale of 10

Partitioning noticeability: very low (and low is good!)

Time spent: 11 episodes of the Gilmore Girls

Average number of braids per episode: 10

Reward: three hugs, two kitchen cleanings, three volunteered dog walks, no more hairdressing sessions until November, bragging rights.

Goodbye, Tree

 

As many of you already know, I’m not exactly Nature Girl. I have an extremely limited vocabulary to describe the natural world, mostly due to  . . . let’s face it, not really caring. I divide the green stuff I see around me into the loose genres (is that the right word?) of “grassy”, “bushy”, “flowery”, “treelike”, and “snack”. Within these groups I can identify a handful of individual specimens. For instance, I know a rose when I see one. Also a dandelion.  I can correctly name a weeping willow, a maple tree (thanks to the Canadian flag) and staghorn sumac (gardenworld’s “Walking Dead”). In the “Snack” genre, I can recognize a cornstalk and several types of berries (assuming they are ripe and ready to pick). But that’s about it.

So I am at a loss to identify the tree in our garden that was destroyed in last week’s wildly raging storm. It was our biggest tree and a rare type – or so I was told by a visiting botanist about 15 years ago. I immediately forgot what he said the tree was and have been meaning to find out. It was very shapely and tall. It was very good at providing shade and privacy to my favorite spot on the screen porch. But half of its huge branches (– tree-sized themselves) were lying on the ground after the storm and the remaining half of the tree threatened to fall on our neighbor’s roof. It had to go.

Before After the Storm:                      After the Chainsaw:

               

I spent a good ten minutes today on the internet trying to identify the tree based on its leaf. The closest matches were “Norway Maple” and “Canadian Hawthorn” – both of which can’t be right. The tree has no flowers or nuts or four-inch, fatal-looking thorns. I was sort of hoping one of my many greenthumbed blog people could identify it. Thanks in advance! And while you are at your research, I will be out on the porch with my Kindle and glass of Coke, feeling ever-so-slightly more exposed.

A Round Dance

I should probably do something to make up for my last post. During my three weeks in the States, most of the conversation and the ENTIRETY of the news revolved around the antics of the pwesident and his circular firing squad of cronies. It was “All Twump, All the Time”. He eventually wheedled his way into my blog. But now I am home again and after stumbling through two days of jetlag, I am ready to write about something that has nothing to do with American politics – maybe something European and cultured . . . sophisticated . . . snooty, even.

Luckily, it just so happens that I went to the opera yesterday. “Rigoletto” by Giuseppe Verdi. And not just in any ol’ opera house – but one that had been built outdoors inside a huge stone quarry:

As we took the roundabout walkway that descended into the quarry, the impressive stage slowly came into sight. And when we took our seats, I was happy to see that the ones directly in front of mine were empty for four rows – leaving me a perfect view. The stage itself was at least four times the size of a normal one, and having no ceiling, it allowed for dramatically large objects in the stage design.  The natural rock wall behind it was integrated into the backdrop and light show. The sound system surrounding us would put us deep inside of the music:

 

 

The sun set and the opera began. The sheer enormity of the stage props made the players seem tiny at first – but that might fit well with one theme of the opera – the general smallness of people. They scurried around the stage like insects while huge projected images loomed over them. (Only their singing voices were large enough in dimension to compete.)

For those that don’t know the story (as I myself didn’t until reading up on it during the two hour drive to the quarry), Rigoletto is a court jester serving a womanizing Duke whose most profound statement is that love must be free (and apparently, fleeting). He then proceeds to seduce (ruin) one girl after another with Rigoletto’s help. The jester’s reward is the kick he gets out of ridiculing the girls’ husbands and fathers once the deed has been done. However, when one of these offended men puts a curse on Rigoletto, it begins to haunt him obsessively – to the point where he considers paying to have this father killed. It is a glimpse that somewhere inside him, there might be something like a conscience. Why else would this curse get to him so badly? For one brief moment, he seems to realize that as a person, he is not much better than a hired assassin. He uses his tongue as his sword while aiding and abetting the juvenile, narcissist/playboy in charge, possibly against his own character. I couldn’t help but think of all those rep . . . (nope, no, not going to go there, back to the plot . . .)

Rigoletto’s most human quality is the love he has for his daughter whose existence he has kept a secret from everyone. (You see where this is going now, don’t you?) Oddly enough, he also keeps his real name and what he does for a living a secret from her – as if he asked himself “How could I look my daughter in the eye and say I support this man?” (Oops, darn it! back to the opera.)  Of course, he wouldn’t want his own daughter anywhere near the Duke, much less, god forbid, alone with him.

 In a Shakespearean-style, implausible mix-up, Rigoletto ends up unwittingly helping in the kidnapping of – you guessed it – his own daughter who then becomes the Duke’s next conquest. Enraged, Rigoletto returns to the assassin and this time goes through with the deal – but with a new target: the Duke. When his daughter tells him that she still loves the man, he forces her to watch the Duke go after his next conquest and then sends her away. She sneaks back and sacrifices herself to save the Duke. She manages to stay alive just long enough to be discovered by her father, sing a (fairly long!) aria and apologize, as if it were her own actions and not her father’s that brought all this about. Then she dies.

Things never seem to go well for the female characters in operas.

But that is not quite the end. Rigoletto holds his dead daughter and screams out something about “The Curse!!”  In other words, “look what has been done to me!” rather than “look what I have done!”

Aahhh, 19^th Century morality. Gotta love it. Those were the days. So great. Wish we could be (made) so great again . . . (oops, sorry!) . . .

No, I did not think about Twump and his minions all through the opera. In fact I didn’t give them a second thought. They came slinking back today as I wrote this post. Thankfully, last night the music and singing and stagecraft were so wonderful, that they allowed me to suspend the present and shake off my modern feminist and political sensibilities for three straight hours (which went by in a flash!) I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of this horrible horrible story.

 

PS. The cool fireworks afterward helped too. You don’t get those in a dumb ol’ opera house.

      

Letter to the Editor

 

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to express my deep disdain for the completely inappropriate image you chose to display on the front cover of your publication. It is inflammatory, unfair, and quite frankly, a disservice to anyone who calls him/herself an American. It is a cheap shot – especially considering the contributions made by the subject of your ridicule to make not only America, but Life itself, great again.

Cheetos deserve the respect of every American. They are our Number One source of riboflavin. I resent the fact that you have chosen to display them in this way. It is a disgrace.

Sincerely,                                                                                     Circumstance227

 

I’ve Missed You

I should probably start by apologizing for being unsupportive and absent to my blog bff’s (whom I love dearly and truly!) I could then follow it up with my reasons for neglecting you, which would really be excuses, which would then negate the sincerity of the original apology.

One of those excuses could be that I have been busy meeting up with old high school friends – another set of people that I have been absent from, neglectful of, unsupportive to, uncommunicative with, etc. etc. – and that for more than 37 years now (“Go Raiders! Yeay, Class of 1980!!”) And yet, every two years when I come home to Milwaukee, we somehow manage to meet up.

In the first few minutes of our biannual reunions, we peer intensely at one another to assess the advancement of our own aging process. This gets confusing because the one or the other looks exactly the same despite laugh wrinkles around the eyes and graying hair. Each time, we also suddenly panic about all the details we really should know but don’t, or have forgotten. (You had six siblings?! Did I ever know that? You lived in California?! Did I know that? You were an English major too?! Did I know that?) Slowly but surely, the skeletal frames of life highlights spanning the past 37 years are reconstructed. Marriages, kids, professional moves, travels, parental concerns . . .  We all silently vow to commit these facts to memory in preparation for the next reunion, but know somewhere inside that two years from now, the same conversations and surprises will happen again.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because with old friends, like old habits, once you pick them up again, you simply take off from where you left off. You tell and retell the same old stories that somehow seem familiar and new at the same time. Meanwhile, long neglected, dusty old details of your life as a teenager resurface in your mind. Names of classmates you have not had a second thought about in decades are suddenly accessible. You start sorting these names into categories like “popular” or “cool” or “dweeb” or “wild” – all with the understanding that it is your 16 year old selves doing the sorting because you gave up on this kind of immature labeling long ago. At the same time, it becomes clear to you why exactly these people and not ones with newly re-remembered names and labels are here around the table. You realize how much you share with these people and that it goes deep.

And you laugh a lot.

And you make plans for a longer, cooler reunion in 2019. Before saying goodbye and returning to your current life, you take pictures.

And then you post one of them on your blog.

And you say, “I’ve missed you.”