the mushrooms in the fridge had gone a little funky, so they happily went to the compost today. Each day, I carry a shovel and the steel bowl of food remnants to small boundaried areas of the yard. I dig a shallow depression, deposit the coffee grounds, egg shells, sour milk, and peels and stems of cucumbers, strawberries, bananas, onions, apples, collards and the like into the hole, cover with an inch of earth and leaves and twigs. I then add a cup or two of water and leave it alone. That's it; nature swiftly goes to work.

my first compost project ended a few weeks ago. The depleted soil responded to the kitchen debris and to the rain (and perhaps to some gentle encouragement); there are tomatoes on the vines.

as long as the drummer
maintains the beat
its all alright
its alright
nothing will drop
through the bottomless chute
its alright if nothing rhymes
the birds will continue to fly

The Society for Creative Anachronism consists of a group of people who congregate to live out their favorite aspects life in Medieval Europe before 1700. Some exist mainly to bash and clash with each other in public melees; others might embrace some aspect of medieval life as specific as the arts of illumination or medieval dance.

The Society first occurred as a backyard party of costumed participants in Berkeley, California, protesting 'against the 20th century'. It has grown into an international living history organization with chapters erupting sporadically. A Wikipedia article notes there has even been a group on the nuclear-powered Naval aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, which is a rather striking juxtaposition of past and modern existence.

the brothers
threw a football
back and forth
back and forth
up on the empty street
above the house
seasons floating by
like afternoon clouds.
one passed a ball
that sailed so far
into the brush
by the time the other
brought it back
the brothers
had grown up

Here is a crazy puzzle I've pondered off and on these past several years. On the most tangible level, it involves point-of-focus. Point-of-focus for the eyes, and point-of focus for a camera. This is the first time I've mapped it out in writing, and it's hard to describe the variables clearly, but here goes.

Let's say in this puzzle, there is a flower precisely 8 inches away, and a tree precisely 80 yards away.

The healthy human eye automatically adjusts its focal point, the 8 inches away object is near, the 80 yards is far. Both are seen in sharp detail, neither is blurred because the eyes adjust to the different distances. If you manually focused your camera, the flower would require a near setting, the tree a more distant setting.

Now, let's say there is a painting hanging on a wall 3 feet away where the artist has produced a true-to-life reproduction of a flower 8 inches away and a tree 80 yards away. The healthy human eyes no longer focus at 8 inches or at 80 yards. They focus on the distance of the painting. They focus on the surface of the canvas. The tree and flower are paint on a flat surface, and the focal point is the distance of that flat surface, 3 feet, not the original distances of the flower and the tree. If you were to manually focus your camera lens, it would be at 3 feet, whether you aimed toward the tree or the flower part of the painting.

Now here's the puzzle: Let's say you are facing a mirror, the tree 80 yards away. You gaze at the reflection of the tree. Do your eyes adjust to 80 yards, or to the glass up close to you where you could touch the reflection of the distant tree with your fingertips? You and the flower are 8 inches away from the mirror. How far is the focal point when you gaze at the reflection of the flower?

Now you have your camera in hand. You face the mirror and take a photo of the reflection of the flower, and of the tree 80 yards back, visible on the glass surface of the mirror. At what focal setting is the flower clear? the tree? You turn around and face the tree. At what distance does the camera focus then? You take a picture.

Now you've made a poster of each of the images you took. You have them on a wall, again, 3 feet away. You look at the poster of the mirror reflection of the flower and tree. You look at the poster of the flower and tree. At what distance do the eyes focus? (and the camera?)

I've been thinking about this a long time, and probably have the answers to these questions. But my last questions would be Why? and How is this important?

There have been dogs and cats throughout my life, and they brought me and my family great joy and companionship, entertainment and comfort. Nearly all were spayed or neutered, most of which occurred before I knew the animals. There were a couple of pets, though, where we followed the message of the 80s and 90s that the world was overrun by cats and dogs, that thousands were exterminated in shelters because of lack of homes to care for them, and that the only responsible thing to do given these conditions was spay! neuter! And, on automatic pilot, that's what we did.

Then, with the last cat, a child cried to discover there would be no kittens. 'Not ever?'

This got through to me. I knew lots of the reasons to neuter and spay. Now I got to thinking about the other side of the course we were following. We'd denied some of our most loved pets the chance to experience the reproductive and parental aspects of life. My family lost an opportunity to see our pets as parents, to see how animals nurture and feed their young, to watch kittens grow from blind, helpless little creatures to playful juveniles. And we put an end to the gene pool of some of our best friends! We made life so neat and tidy, and could it be perhaps, most essentially, wrong?

How I'd love to know a descendent of one of my beautiful, quirky, long-ago companions - but there are none.

Ma, May, and Golden Spike Day

in looking up 'May', I ended up in 'Ma', and came upon this intriguing passage in Wikipedia:

'In his 2001 book The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher discusses the importance of exemplifying "space" as a substance:

Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form"... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.'

I like the Isaac Stern quote, 'that little bit between each note - silences which give the form'.

When I finally got to 'May', I learned that today, May 10th, is Golden Spike Day celebrating the 1869 completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

Officials from the east and west took their respective trains to meet in Utah (Promontory Summit) where the link connecting the two sides occurred. The meeting was celebrated with the installation of ceremonial spikes, thus, Golden Spike Day.

(I assume this 'first' is for the entire continent of North America. I was unable to locate [brief search] the date the Canadian transcontinental railroad was completed. Mexico's railroads tend to run more north-south.)



This image is of a 1944 US postage stamp celebrating the 75th anniversary of Golden Spike Day, is a part of the public domain, and is provided by Wikimedia Commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Spike




This image of a US 2007 Utah Quarter is in the public domain, provided by Wikimedia Commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2007_UT_Proof_Rev.png

(1896 is the year that Utah became a state.)