Against the Wind

ManCub

I’m going to hope Sara sees this soon enough for me to get a name attached to the photo. 

Cousin Jim, who has probably had more than his fair share of bumps and bruises in his years, decided that getting close to retirement, having the sons mostly grown, he’s entitled to a new hobby.  He thought he’d like to take up photography, and asked me about cameras when I went to Tulsa for Mother’s last hospitalization.  So, I told him I don’t even know about the camera that I have, except that it is capable of more than I ask of it!  I don’t know whether more pixels is what you need (are you going to make  large prints?  you need lots of pixels.)  or heavy duty lenses?  (as long as it does a good job on auto focus… yeah as good a lens as you can affort)  Anyway, my non advice was, “here… try out my Nikkon and see what you see.  He bought a nice Cannon.   But from the photos he took, here is a picture of one of his grandsons.  

They boys were at his house, a bit off their feed, and the baby, fell fast asleep on the floor.  I call the shot “The Man Cub”   Sara is this Rylan?  I’ve forgotten the child’s name!  But they are some cute boys.  Jim fears he will end up supporting them as his son doesn’t look like manning up to the job.  Maybe he’ll see the light… maybe he already has.  I don’t know.  But the babies are to be loved in any case.   Jim (the patron saint of perpetual responsibility) will likely see to it they do alright.  Jim took the photo.  I cropped heavily.  Nita may have made the quilt.  I’m thinking with photo shop I can change the light source appearance, and get rid of the “flash effect” of dark background.  

For now, it’s off to Marianne’s.  She’s promised to trade me a good lunch for help figuring out the math and formulas from economics.  Sounds like math teacher fun to me.  

Semester is almost over.   Yeah!

Ephesians 6:1 - 3

Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;
That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

Christopher Buckley, son of William Buckley wrote a memoir of growing up with his famous parents which was at least exerpted in the NYT magazine. The danger of these pieces should sound a cautionary note to me.

Grieving Mother is not something that I quite know how to do. Thankfully she’s not famous. But it’s now two months after her death, and an long night’s vigil. I’m still standing there emotionally, unable to back away, unable to move forward. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could point to all the bad spots in our relationship and say, “her fault!” and be done with it. Yet for all the problems that I perceive in my upbringing, I’m pretty sure Mother did try to do the best she could with the resources she had. It’s very easy for me to find fault, you see, because *I* am a perfect parent, and my children will never have these issues!

Suffice it to say, this weekend has been a tough one. I’m emotionally “constipated.” I know… not a pretty description, but unfortunately totally accurate. I’m not sure where to go for an enema! I’m quite sure when the logjam breaks it’s going to be ugly.

More than enough about me.

More photos from the road back and forth to Tulsa.

Fallow fields were never so glorious

This one reminds me of nothing so much as the common injunction from “coondom” “As above, so below.” It’s as if we live in the reflection trying to put together the picture of the world we live in….

Somehow I’ll get this semester finished up. I think I can find some way to get the tears to flow and be over. I hope so anyway. Small progress on that front.

Where to start, where to start?   Sometimes the article that needs to be pointed to just jumps into your lap.   Since most of my five readers don’t have time to follow the link,  I’ll do some generous cutting and pasting. 

What do we lose by not being able to talk about race honestly?  What is the price of the so called political correct speech code?   How can we find truth when we cannot speak honestly? 

There are a few simple rules one must follow when talking about race.  One must carefully adhere to the position that any inequality between Whites and Asians in which Hispanics and Blacks et al fare poorly must be explained as caused by racism or the legacy of racism while any inequality that favors Blacks and Hispanics must be studiously ignored.

My mind traced similar paths driving to teach today.  Allow me to remind you, I’m an amazingly good teacher.  (I define good as being able to explain algebra, design exercises to get students to use algebra correctly, and survive whatever math requirements are ahead of them.)  But I work in a mine field of grade inflation, bloated academic requirements and very little concern for what we teach and why we teach it.  My issues are not ones that can be discussed in academia.  We teach algebra because it’s …. well it’s job security for a whole host of algebra teachers.  I can justify teaching algebra to accountants and scientists.  I cannnot justify the content of a reasonable algebra course for students getting an AA as a path to some trade.  It’s frustrating beyond belief that no one ever seemed to care about this but me.   It’s a similar dynamic to the non discussion of race.

Back to Shrink Wrapped. 

It’s much too late to try to write anything, though I depend on the chance to organize my head a bit by writing. No time in the morning, no time in the evening. Last week I had time, but couldn’t get the fire stoked.

The delta of southeastern Arkansas, Northwestern Louisiana and Mississippi near Greenburg is some geography to behold. The rice and cotton that comes out of those fields have kept the region going for many generations. Lately I’ve driven through the fields quite a lot. I suppose I’ll miss the chance to do that. I’ve got a lot of photos to share…and I’ll post many because I won’t be passing that way for a while now.

Here are fields of birds! Migrating geese pick the fields over.

Taught in Chalmette today, In the morning it’s off to Pearl River. The semester is not as close to finished as I thought. It’s three more weeks of classes, not two, but still not long. So the end of semester kick is on. I’m too old to enjoy these kicks.

Have I started with any of the Round Robin photos for this year?

Gail sent me a photo of how my center looked when it left her. I’ve got the photo from before she finished on my desk top. The angles and such were too much to work with on the bigger one.

The first piece I got, a medallion from C- N- in SLC gave me notice. I am dealing with the applique queen here. Her original piece is the center of this design. I scratched my head a good while on this one, but after trying many designs on EQ6, I came up with this addition. I was really happy with it. But.. I no more than got this one in the mail than the next one was on my doorstep… Deb’s center with a beautiful on point appliqued pieces all around it. I’m telling you it’s just one challenge after the next. I’m almost finished with the fourth and middle addition for the current project. C- continues to challenge me as with her striking designs. So far, I’m thinking I’m rising to the task.

Quilting is a lot of different things. I seem to like production work piecing as well as designing. The design challenges make me half crazy, but we started these projects knowing we were going to be pushed and pulled in a lot of new directions. Finishing the quilt? Well, not so much! If I had a sugar daddy, I’d pay someone else to finish all my quilts. No sugar and no daddy. Daaang! Last years RR is among my “finish it!” projects. It’s all pinned together. I’ve just got to harness myself at the sewing machine and get it done.

Politics and econ and opinions are so discouraging to read that I’ll just pass along a quick cut from Big Hollywood. This from a book written in 1910. The more things change…

Do not rage against corrupt politicians; if it were not for politicians we should fall into anarchy, and your opportunity will be wasted. God has worked a long time and very patiently to bring us up to where we are in industry and government, and He is going right on with His work. There is not the least doubt that He will do away with plutocrats, trust magnates, captains of industry, and politicians as soon as they can be spared; but in the meantime, behold they are all very good. – Wallace D. Wattles, “The Science Of Getting Rich”

A few randomish links here tonight. I finished my taxes…very improbable, but I did it. Next year will likely be even worse with an inheritance to worry about. For now, it’s done. (ok, I have another month to get the Lousiana return in so it’s not quite done.)

I drove past the local tea party. I couldn’t figure what I thought I wanted out of the exercise of getting out and joining in the fun in the sun, so I never parked. Looked like about 200 or so people milling about listening to someone who had a loud speaker… lots of balloons and flags, picnic atmosphere.

Health care, health care. How many ways is it broken? How are we to fix it? Everyone has a horror story or a reason we should do something differently. The rightosphere seems to want to shoot down every attempt at reworking the health care system through the government. I enjoyed this analysis of why we probably won’t get the same results with a single payer system in the Canadian style from Megan McArdle with The Atlantic. No need to follow the link, I’ve copied it all here.

Commenter Tom West writes:

Boy, the more I read, the guiltier I feel about living in Canada. We sort of have the ideal position

We’re large enough that most of us don’t see the direct comparison with the American system, (which is nice, but three times the price). America operates as our second tier which is close enough that the rich aren’t upset about going there for expensive health-care, but far enough away that the even the moderately well-to-do don’t look at it as a serious alternative.

We’re insulated enough so that when the doctor’s say “there’s nothing we can do”, you can believe it without feeling guilty about not destroying your family’s finances to pay for some sliver of hope. We benefit from the American innovations when they’re finally brought down to a cost that our bureaucrats consider acceptable. The doctors don’t have to cater to ridiculous demands for unnecessary tests, and have no incentive to give them.

We have a Corolla health-care system as opposed to the American Lexus, but it does a decent job for most of us, and ends up being an element of society that binds most Canadians together rather than becomes a source of resentment and distrust. (Tommy Douglas who introduced our health-care system was recently selected as Greatest Canadian ever by viewing audiences.)

That said, sadly for those few Americans that look at our health-care system as a model, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work for you. You’d be missing the one ingredient that helps it work as well as it does… You.

Water, Water… driving through the West a few years ago, I thought a good deal about water and how it shapes us. It seems the Colorado watershed is not going to keep the Californians wet enough much longer. The end of cheap water is coming?

Major water price increases and supply cuts are underway in southern California, both of which are long overdue. This part of the state is a desert, and yet too many people live there, and too many of them live their water consumption lives like they are somewhere with higher and much more predictable rainfall.

The end is here, or at least near. As one California water official put it today, “The era of cheap water is over”. Call it peak water, if you like, but the water calculus of California with respect to housing and economic development, long disconnected from reality, is finally on its way back to somewhere appropriate — if mostly because there is no choice.

There are two things underlying the new urgency. First, water supplies are declining because of a serially lower-than-normal (a dubious notion, but I digress) Sierra snowpack, which is the source of much California water. Second, and this is related, the Colorado river flows have been lower than normal (see above) for at least five years now.

The whole idea of “normal” is, in this context, nearly useless. With respect to Sierra snowpack, we don’t know what normal is, because we don’t have enough data, and, more importantly, whatever normal was, we are headed in a lower direction. At the same time…

Finally a day with no photo worth sharing. I took a picture of the morning sun hitting the table because it was colorful and cheerful. This is the sort of thing I do almost without thinking… which makes me think maybe quilting was a pretty good fit for me.

The original photo, if it had a point, other than, “Oh, pretty sunlight” was just really a dog, included in a set of nine other dogs. I share one in ten. Sometimes there just isn’t one to share! But I can play around with ‘em and make something anyway.

Ten years ago or more, I took a photo of a little sparrow on J– S–’s window ledge. Now I can’t say that my photography has improved a lick, as the photo is almost identical in quality to this one. So, it’ll suffice to just admit I’ve had a lot of fun trying to improve.

As I’ve already referenced a hymn, I guess I’ll return to Proverbs. There’s a structure to the first few Chapters of Proverbs which will be shortly abandoned for something more in the form of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Maybe not quite so homespun, but as I get there you’ll see, I suspect, what I mean.

Anyway, we’re close to winding up Proverb 8: (25 - 31)

Wisdom, personified as a woman speaks, though here she’s not so clearly feminine:

Before the mountains were settled into place, before the hills, I was brought forth;
While as yet the earth and the fields were not made, nor the first clods of the world.
“When he established the heavens I was there, when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep;
When he made firm the skies above, when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth;
When he set for the sea its limit, so that the waters should not transgress his command;
Then was I beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day, Playing before him all the while,
playing on the surface of his earth; and I found delight in the sons of men.

Shortly before Mother died, someone said that our lives seem to run in seven years cycles, so when I was trying to summarize Mother’s life, I did it in seven year bites. In our first seven years we learn a bit about what it is to be human, to be loved by our parents, and start getting some sense of being a separate individual.

The tragedy of my Mother’s life happened when she was about three. My grandparents first born child, a beloved son died. My Grandfather never got over the grief and despair. He had moved the family to a farmhouse not far outside Lawrence and he always felt that the cold drafty farmhouse had contributed to Charles’ premature death. Grandpa wanted a son. When his three girls married, did he carry pictures of his dauthers? No, he carried pictures of his sons-in-law. Mother knew early that her father would never have grieved as much had she died instead. She spent a good deal of the remainder of her life trying to live so as to be good enough, to deserve to have lived through that night, the first of her memory. She could never rebel or break away in a healthy manner from her father. Even as a daughter I could see echos of the competition she set up between her husband and her father. If only she could have said, “He was wrong to do that, to set me against a ghost” and rebelled just enough to break away from that sense of being the wrong survivor one night.

As she lay dying I wondered if she was reunited with Charles, and her Father, and knew, finally knew that she had been good enough all along. It was a psychology of guilt and blame that has played out through three generations of our family. It makes me heartily sad, alternating with some parts of anger that I wasn’t able to break clean from the sense of inadequacy. I know I’ve never had any but a sense that I wasn’t up to the standards of my grandparents, and not willing to play out the part she wanted me to play in reliving her life. The same infection came to rest in the bond between me and my daughters. None of them went easily though the adolescent years. I can only pray they know that I love them.

Yet, His eye is on the sparrow. The lilies! Never in all his glory was King Solomon arraigned so splendidly. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

So, here we are, setting out on the later chapters of my life.

Arrived home this evening, and still have a few pieces to unload from the van before I return it in the morning.

As I left, I was fighting the desire to somehow skip the trip. My back ached on and off all throughout the exercise. I’m glad to be home where I can pack it with ice after every hot shower and start the healing. The biggest clue that I was fighting myself on this one was that I drove home from Tara’s after leaving Tootie, and then when it was time to go, couldn’t find the keys to lock the house. (Since we were in a rented van, I didn’t need keys to drive.) On arriving home, I decided it was imperative that I find the keys. I tried to convince myself to just sit and relax and recall the departure. I’d probably have found them that way. But I prefered the more manic approach. I tore into this that and the other till they showed up. When I had them safely in my hand, I couldn’t but ask myself, “What was that about?” I still have had no need of the keys.

But, the storage locker is tamed. Dana has Mother’s oils, Robert has a revolving book case, a LOT of photos and not much else. I’ve got boxes of little piddly stuff, and some furniture for the girls and some for my house. Here’s something everyone should know about my Mother. She had more emory boards than you can imagine. She surely had the best filed nails of any woman you’d hope to find. She also had many bibles. For a woman living in two rooms, she had quite a collection of bibles. Daddy at one point bought a family bible and put a lot of family history notes in it. I now have that. Grandpa B. had his bible and a book of common prayer. I’ve got that.

There must have been at least three other bibles, of unknown provenence. Mother did a lot of Bible study, yet I’d not have considered her a terribly religious woman. Isn’t that odd? She was active in the church, yet seemed rather untouched by either the church or spiritual leanings. Or maybe she was quite private about her faith? I don’t really have any idea. My sense was that she was religious because she thought she should be. Her father required it… but she didn’t drop it when he was gone.

I still don’t understand the relationship between my Mother and me. I’m enjoined to “honor my father and my mother.” But even now, as she has passed, it’s an odd relationship. Hard to know how to honor… I hope I figure that out. I hope my children are not as ambivalent about me.

Anyway, driving home another time, on the path I’ve just completed, I stopped and took a picture of this church. It’s between Tallula and Lake Providence, La, and the dark lighting captures the mood of these trips very well.

This trip I spent time photographing Woodward park. That was an Easter experience of rebirth and growth. I believe there can still be healing of the rift between my parents and me.

I think my neice is getting ready to color easter eggs..Annie is fussing about wasting something… dye? Everyone is just a bit ragged.  Marianne and Robert are sleeping.  I wussed out of most of the heavy lifting of cleaning Mother’s storage locker though preexisting back ache.  To bed early, and off at 5:30 or so in the morning. 

We shovelled dirt over the box of ash and grit…surprisingly heavy that contained the last physical remains of my mother today.  But traveling down here I had my first dream with Mother.  She was the aged parent model, but driving and I was letting her, though she was obviously not up to the task.  Anyway, I have a truck load of odd furniture that was left after Mother had down sized and rearranged several times in her years at OMM.  We did establish that she moved in there in 2002.  Daddy died in 2001, so she didn’t live “alone” for long. 

When I get home I have got to do some serious house cleaning.  I have no place to put two occaisional tables, a chest of drawers, the gold chair and boxes and boxes of sundries.  Mother still had every emory board that she’d touched for the last 10 years.  It was amazing to find so many emory boards in the possession of one little old lady.  She had sewing machine needles by the ton.  She hadn’t sewn for more than 10 years, but quite a supply of elastic, hooks and eyes, binding and sewing kits.  I have knitting instructions for sweaters and socks and odd pieces of jewelry.  Never did find the ancient piece of glass from Jerusalem, though.   Robert located Daddy’s wedding ring, which he’s planning to mount with Mother’s in the matting of a photo we have called the Asokan Farewell, as it’s a picture of Mother and Daddy waving everyone off from Winfield circa 1995 

Giving up Winfield was the hardest!  Here’s collection of photos from Henry Lippincott of Mother’s last few years at Winfield.

Dying is about slowly giving things up.  Mother gave no ground without a full out fight.  Her world closed in, but she just wanted to finish her book.  I didn’t buy a flash drive to copy off the files of same, but maybe Dana can send them as an email attachement?  I did tell her I’d get them printed and distributed.  Anyway, it is what it is.  We’ve closed a chapter of our lives here.  I have no parents living, my children have no grandparents.  The torch is passed.   Happy Easter!

I like this global warming! We’re having the longest lingering spring I can remember. Today, I ventured into new areas of adventure.

When Frank and Pat gave us their symphony tickets, I told them I’d have them over for some dinner sometime. I’d been thinking I wanted to invite the new pastor at church as well. But the more I thought about entertaining the bigger the panic that was setting in! **!!Inspiration!!** I’ll ask Darryl to boil some crawfish and have as many folks as I can round up to eat some seriously good crawfish and fixings right out of the pot.

Darryl gave me a supply list and provided the boiling pot, the propane and a table to eat on outdoors along with all the entertainment of watching the crawfish go from muddy craydaddies to DINNER!

The preacher and her hubby were at some Presbytery function today, so they couldn’t come. But Carolyn, my walking buddy showed up as well as the Mosses, Darryl’s parents, Tara’s friends A– and A– with their two young kids and the weather was picture perfect for sitting out in the yard and eating and eating and talking and eating and passing a very nice day in the sun, or shade as the earth turned. My judgement is that the day was a grand success. Unlikely I’ll try to repeat again real soon, but it was a special time.

AND there are photos. About 30 or 40 of them. August, maybe. If we all live so long.

I went looking for great blog clips, and really didn’t spot anything. This is a couple days old and I may have pointed it out before. But the point is about the same. The power changed in Washington. The whining is just exactly the same, the lines have been exchanged. The takeaway is in the comments.

…partisans on both sides constantly accuse each other of hypocrisy, and they are both correct.

NOW the photo du jour. Driving back from Tulsa. There were so many trips back and forth that I don’t even remember which was which. Mother was in the hospital, but in the St. Francis geriatric ward. Had to be up to see Dr. Lade at 6:30 when he did rounds. She got on her feet enough to walk around the ward a bit and headed back to the OMM. I think I left before she headed back. Tania and Bartley made the trip to Tulsa a few weeks later.