Walking at dusk a couple of days ago in the suburban Louisiana neighborhood where I reside, I came upon a sign. No, not an ethereal sign but a sturdy sign stuck into a mound of earth perhaps six feet high. The sign read: Free Dirt.

What a gift! I'd been thinking of mounding dirt at the base of a couple of fragile trees in our yard, to help insulate and nourish the roots. Here it was, dirt for the taking.

I walked home, fetched my shiny steel pail and a hand spade, and returned to the hill of dirt. Six trips, six buckets of dirt later, the job was complete.

I'm not a gardener, yet I'm learning that plants respond to gentle attention of almost any kind. And I'm grateful for the neighbor's gift.

Now, it's 5:21 AM, just before dawn. It's dark out and the streetlights make bright yellow globes in the fog.

We had family visiting today, and the TV was on 'mute' as images of an old episode of The Brady Bunch flashed on the screen. This led to talk about family television shows from the 1960s - such as The Partridge Family. We could have talked about Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver, and The Ozzie and Harriet Show but came up with two other programs. One was My Three Sons, a show with a dad, grandfather, and three boys. The other was Family Affair about a wealthy civil engineer (Uncle Bill) and his valet (Mr. French) who took in two nieces and a nephew after the kids' parents were lost in a car accident. Both shows were popular and survived many seasons. The characters were household names; the actors received many accolades.

Tonight I watched YouTube clips from My Three Sons and Family Affair, at times funny and touching. I thought about what we call traditional families today - the mom, the dad, and the children. It's a relatively new and constricting concept. I look back at stories from my parents' family trees. In some cases (we're talking 1920s through 1940s here) stray aunts, uncles or cousins were patched into the nuclear families, or they filled in as caretakers, rearing kids when families were hobbled by illness, death, war, jobs requiring long absences, or emotional/mental issues. Kids were raised by the family community, and this wasn't out of the ordinary and it was not frowned upon, but was accepted, expected, and respected. The family - in its larger definition - was providing for the kids. Uncle Bill and Mr. French reluctantly filled a great need taking responsibility for three kids. The three kids in turn transformed the lives of their new parents.


This photo was a publicity shot for My Three Sons circa 1962, and was available through Wikimedia Commons : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962_My_Three_Sons.jpg

I look at this picture, and try to imagine an ethical justification for our man-made creation, and nothing, nothing comes to mind.

Photo taken 1994
USAF
wikimedia commons image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B-2_spirit_bombing.jpg

Cenacolo di Fuligno, fresco, in Florence, Italy
painted 1493-1496
image taken 2006
wikimedia commons image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper_in_Christian_art

Jerry says, 'There is something about baseball that the other sports lack.'


(Wrigley Field, Chicago, Illinois, 7-30-2004 image by Rick Dikeman
From Wikimedia Commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wrigley_field_720.jpg )

I thought about that - could it be the complexity of the shared awareness among team members?
the clockwork elegance of the unfolding of the innings?
the pleasure of being in the stands? (comaraderie, hot dogs, and beer...)
the passion of the fans across distances and decades? (Well - there are other sports that do have this quality.)

There are a number of references to baseball in the novel The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway. A boy and an aging fisherman in Cuba follow the US teams by listening to games on the radio and discussing the plays and the histories and character of the teams. The conversations of these two humble people echo outward from the island, from the book, and leave an enduring impression.

'Sleeping Princess'
by Victor M. Vasnetsov
(Wiktor Michajlowitsch Wassnezow 1848-1926)
Wikimedia Commons image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%A1%D0%BF%D1%8F%D1%89%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%86%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0.jpg

I planted four tomato plants. Two of them are Creoles, and two are Better Boys. Before I bought them, I made sure the fuzzy leaves smelled like a tomato plant. (There was one variety whose scent I couldn't smell at all. That ruled it out.)

There's peace in the labor of the body. Shoveling the earth or walking to the bus stop; sweeping overnight debris from the doorstep or wiping down the car. The mind empties, and the circulation of oxygen throughout the body hastens. We lose some of our anxieties, and others are diminished. Sleep comes more swiftly, and we sleep more deeply.

The scent of leaves of a tomato vine warmed in the sunlight is sensual and bright. I'll rest better for having breathed their pungent earthiness. I'll dream of butterflies, and bees humming in the garden.

Today I finished knitting a nearly perfect scarf.

Now I'm cheerfully knitting a scarf full of errors and experiments.

Sometimes, I'm steady and patient. When I make a mistake, I pause and carefully consider how to remedy the dropped or double stitch.

Most of the time I'm lazy. I just keep moving forward.

Maybe it's not that I'm lazy, but that there is a certain tempo, and once I've caught the tempo, I really don't want to lose it. Keep those needles glinting.

Musicians understand this. If you are performing on stage and hit an off note, you may not want to back up and play it right. A song flows forward. You keep the beat.

Knitting a scarf can be a song, flowing forward, errors and all.

A scarf can be a carefully crafted strand of perfection, with pauses, curses, and untangling the knotted skein of yarn a valuable part of the process, not visible in the final product.

The cotton fabrics of the nineteen-sixties (and before) appeal to me in ways the prints of subsequent decades don't quite match. I wrote last week of the blouse with the little pears. A couple of summers later, my mother came home with shifts (a waistless dress) made of cotton fabric with rows of little terriers carrying black and white little newspapers. That fabric has come to mind at least four times in the last week. My sewing skills are limited, and I don't work much with cloth, but there's this wistfulness about the cotton prints with the homey details.

Tonight, I've been thinking of the Beatles song, 'Blackbird', and its gentle sound. I can imagine a fabric with rows of little blackbirds, black on red. (Or a fabric of red birds, red on black.) I knew a little girl who wore a cotton shirt with a pattern like you might see on men's shirts or dress socks, vertical rectangular shapes that might remind one of the little crystals that once hung off of crystal lamps. These were a red and green and black on white background. The shirt was worn every day, not out of necessity, but out of love, familiarity, comfort, and stubbornness.

I've spent half an hour trying to find the names of the old prints. Paisley and plaid come up, but nothing about the one I inadequately described above. However, I did find a very cool list of 269 types of fabric. You've likely heard of burlap and cambric, but did you know about harn and gulix? I'm typing in the link. Or you can copy and paste: http://phrontistery.info/fabric.html

the first day of spring
she wrote her happy memories
of kissing,
then picked up
her knitting.
One scarf and another
red scarf and blue
striped and fringed
one after the other.
The needles quiver
above a soft and winding
unending strand
of scarves... .

I was perhaps four years old. The lady who took care of us sliced an orange in half. She heaped sugar on top, gave each of us half, and sent us outside the kitchen screen door. I can see the bright sugared orange in my hands, glowing in the daylight. The taste was a kind of glowing, juicy, in my mouth and on my lips. That's my first memory of fruit.

I loved both the lectures and the labs for the three physics courses I took in the 1970s - all in astrophysics - and am so very grateful to have had the good fortune to learn from excellent teachers.

The first object I learned to identify with the naked eye was Deneb, a bright star which in Denver in mid-September early evening was at zenith - straight above.

There was a small observatory near the college. Although we were in the middle of the city, we still got a good enough view of the night sky for students to see various wonders of the universe and to witness their apparent motion across the sky. The telescope was attached to a clock drive so that its aim traveled at the same rate as the rotation of the earth. This way, the teaching assistant could aim the scope at the Beehive cluster, or a planet, and not have to reset it as each student filed through to take a look. Even though the object had moved slightly in the sky, the telescope moved with it.

The teaching assistant scheduled an extra lab one night for those who wanted to take photos through the telescope. He showed us how to attach a single lens reflex camera to the scope, and take a timed exposure. There was some guesswork to how long to leave your shutter open, so you took several shots, and hoped that one would work out. Using black and white film in my secondhand Miranda, I photographed a globular cluster. A week later, after getting the film developed, I was holding a piece of paper with information - a pattern of light - that had physically traveled from thousands of light years away to the film in my camera. Even though the stars came out a bit blurred, it was mind-blowing to have a photograph of something so distant and beautiful. The photo wasn't nearly as good as the pictures in the textbooks, but it was so real, the burst of white stars on the glossy black background. The distant globular galaxy sending out a moment of light that originated millenia before I was born was connected to a cold dry night in Observatory Park on Earth in the 1970s was connected to me at any moment I looked at the photo, wherever I was standing - a kind of multidimensional triangulation of space and time and mind.

The only activity that bugged me in the three courses occurred in an early lab where we each measured with a regular ruler the images of spectra from several different stars. Each spectrum - that rainbow of fractured light through a crystal or prism - was printed in strips divided by naturally occurring vertical lines. The distance between the lines was related to different elements. The activity of measuring the distances between the lines was matter-of-fact, but it still stands out that something simple that could have been pleasurable felt uncomfortable.

For a long time, I had a small basket made of pine needles. It was a souvenir from a 1960s Girl Scout field trip to an American Indian reservation that was secluded within a Louisiana forest of very tall pines. (The tribe may have been the Chitimacha.) The basket was coiled, using tightly bundled needles, so tidy and airtight that it gave me great pleasure to handle and look at. It was very light of weight and yet firm and sturdy, the surface even and textured by the edges of the brown needles. For years after, I'd pick up handsful of dried out pine needles from the yard, and toy with making something, but my attempts fell apart. Each needle is so fragile, they break easily, and yet bundled, they are so strong. I admire the knowledge and skill that went into objects that were useful, made of natural, local material, and so very beautiful.

Taken February 25, 2012, in Austin, Texas.

3.1416

paint yellow
the
distant heart

Sneezes are a little grosser and more complex to read about than yawns.

Reading about sneezing hasn't caused me to sneeze, not even once - sneezing doesn't seem to be instantaneously contagious. (However, I've yawned about ten times. Why would the word sneeze trigger yawning? and nose blowing????)

There's a really gross photo in Wiki of a guy sneezing, a few hundred droplets of mucus etc hanging in mid-air. The article speaks of sneezing contributing to the spread of disease, which I wouldn't argue. However, on the bright side, one might consider sneezing a way of spreading immunizations. More pleasant to inhale that flu vaccine than to receive it by needle. And you know the sneeze immunization is for the local, current virus, whereas the injected vaccine may be defending against last month's flu in Buson, South Korea.

The article also mentions sneezing can occur with sudden exposure to bright light. My father-in-law was a physician, and he called this phenomenon 'sun allergy'. He stated 'some people have sun allergies' which would seem to suggest that some don't.

Too bad there aren't Guiness World Record staff around when you need them. I think my dad could win the record for the largest number of consecutive sneezes, like a full half hour of non-stop sneezing. I read in the paper once that women are more likely to experience solitary sneezes, while men are more likely to sneeze several times in a row. Since I read that, I've noticed it to be generally true.

The Wiki article lists lots of stories and superstitions about sneezing. It also gives a fancy word for sneezing called sternutation. (Does anyone remember the fancy word for yawning? Tsk! Pandiculation. I had to look for it just now in last night's post.) However, I just found the Merriam-Webster.com definition of pandiculation: 'a stretching and stiffening especially of the trunk and extremities (as when fatigued and drowsy or after waking from sleep).' It doesn't mention yawning. Thefreedictionary.com does, though.

By the way, the Blogger spell check does not like sternutation. Merriam-Webster.com does.

I just yawned all the way through the wikipedia article on yawning. Pandiculation (a fancy term for yawning) is so infectious that it was triggered just by seeing the word repeated again and again on my laptop screen. What good is yawning? Legend has it that it could be that a possessive spirit is exiting the host it is occupying, or science suggests it could be that this is cooling my brain and helping me to become more alert. Seagulls, owls, ponies and wolves yawn. There are photos to illustrate this. How many times did you pandiculate reading this brief paragraph? And does the word pandiculate trigger as much gaping as the word yawn does? Enquiring minds want to know.

what is the sound
of the heartbeat of the universe?
a woodpecker's syncopated patter against
the hollow tree trunk?
the slow rhythm of waves
rolling onto the shore?
the hiccups of a kid
running around the dusty playground?
the escalating sighing of lovers
on a spring night?
a basketball dribbled
before and behind defenders,
then across the length of the hardwood court?
The cicada calls out -
whirring
speeding up
and winding down -
the living percussion
of spiraling galaxies.

a candle flame is dancing
on the windowsill -
its partner
a reflection in the glass.
raindrops burn in the dark grass
like threads of diamonds.
a burst of thunder
grumbles and retreats
into the black of night.

Modern technology comes to us with a price: we may buy it and believe it is ours, but it's not exactly ours. It's our computer, but what we do and look at while on our computers is constantly being shared as - there's a friendly sounding word for it - cookies. It's our phone, but when and how many minutes we spend, what phone numbers we call, what phone numbers call us, the voices of callers on our voicemail, the websites we visit, the text messages we send and receive are not only stored on the phone itself. It's your electronic book, but info on what you are reading and what you have read is available to others. Images taken by many digital cameras, especially those on computers and cell phones, are available to others. And all of these devices send out information regarding the precise location of the device, and the precise location of you if you happen to have the device with you.

I'm not saying some specific individual is following the minutiae of your life. This info can be used for marketing purposes, or service improvements, etc. However, it is possible for persons to access your individual data and follow the minutiae of your life. It is possible for persons to reorganize your data, and alter how you may access it. It is possible for your data to no longer be accessible to you, even though you are holding the cell phone you purchased in your own hand.

Lynn Johnston is the cartoonist who created For Better or For Worse. There were a number of family cartoons in the Sunday funnies before she showed up: Blondie, Peanuts, The Family Circus to name a few. But Johnston's syndicated strips, first appearing in the late 1970s, boasted a realistic mother character and was by a woman cartoonist. This was new territory. Many cartoons that followed adapted Johnston's pioneering style, and built upon it.

For Better or For Worse has been brave, funny, and genuine for over forty years. Like with the other entertaining and familiar stalwarts of North American cartoons, the network of people it has reached must be enormous. Ms. Johnston has faithfully brought these newspaper neighbors to us, rain or shine, some 16,000 times! There's something touching and wondrous about that.

We were inside Abdalla's in downtown Lafayette in 1961. My mother and I were looking at blouses and shorts folded on a table because it was near my 8th birthday. There was a drab, sleeveless cotton blouse. The pattern of the fabric consisted of little brownish-yellow pears, with leaves near the stems. I don't know why my heart leapt out, and I don't know why I have remembered that moment so often during my life, and, why again now? I wore that blouse over and over till the cloth was tattered, and thin as paper.

the water flowing from the faucet was just a little hotter than warm. she held the soft soft cloth under the spigot until it was drenched, then wrung it with her hands. her toddler was no longer eating, but waving his spoon above his head like a sparkler and shouting 'da! da!'

she brought the cloth to his face, and swabbed the bits of food from his eyebrows, the arch of his nose, the palms of his hands, the back of his neck. his complaint sounded more like cooing. she pressed the cloth to his cheek, and for just a fragment of a moment, he leaned his face into her hand.

he might, someday, grown up and far away, remember, yes, this is how love feels.

'...Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won't shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source–
clumsy and earth-covered–
of grace.'


excerpt from 'For the New Year, 1981'
by Denise Levertov

First there is a mountain
then there is no mountain
then there is.

Donovan

1984 was an auspicious year. That was the year the Austin, Texas band EPS produced their first album (well, cassette tape); a year or two later, they took on the name Poor Yorick and continued on their way. Many of the band's first songs had their roots in the mental asylum where they worked. Life was rewarding, but with a high rate of dark moments; many of those who ended up at this hospital came with painful histories.

The music was disrespectful and irreverently funny. It was also musically satisfying, teetering on the border of maniacal genius. Who would guess songs about pharmaceutical strait jackets could bring such pleasure? Melody, creative beat, ingenious lyrics, and inventive guitar magic was flowing from a group with full-time jobs and young families.


Poor Yorick is still alive and well in 2013, belting out funky, objectionable music, the kind of stuff that makes the dark side of life not only bearable, but contrarily joyful. This band's a long-distance runner. Muy kudos!

How did we get here?

Some helpful questions come to mind as I read about pajamas, termites, and weeds.

How and when did the western image of Persia change from one of romance, spices, exotic stories and fabrics to that of threatening foreigners?

How and when did the war against termites begin?

Here is a link to a list published by University of California as part of a program to manage weeds. How and when did blackberries, bluegrass, and cattails become 'pests'?

How do we move forward?

Ecclesiates
3:19
For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them; as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity.

3:20
All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all return to dust.