Queenjulia's September 2004 Blog

29.September.04 Twenty-one.

As part of our program to Corrupt the Young, we played cards last night. David won $823.

Progress on the Homeless musical proceeds in fits and starts. Some days, the Scrabble game is the most productive event. Today, though, we spent an entertaining time with the Gospel of Matthew, trying to find a suitable quote about the homeless in The Sermon on the Mount, or maybe the "lilies of the field" remark. Instead, we came away a bit disturbed about where you could go with the stories in Matthew, if you were so inclined.

In Matthew, Jesus talks about the Law. It seems pretty clear that he's saying, not only should you keep to the original Mosaic laws and not change one jot and tittle of them, but you should get pretty sincere about understanding what the spirit of those laws are and go further. If the law says don't kill, then not only should you not physically kill people, you shouldn't be angry at them, and if you are, you should make it up to them at once. He goes on in this vein throughout several chapters. So, how can Fundamentalists manage to ignore this? And why don't they keep Kosher? Or refuse to shake hands with women lest they be menstruating? Don't change one jot of the law!

In the matter of not being angry at people, I recognize the value of forgiveness but I also think that when you try to deny your dark side before you are ready to forgive it, it comes around and bites you. People who are too ready to forgive by pretending to themselves that they're not angry are likely to end up being even more angry, but in a destructive twisted way. Better to freely admit your feelings and live with them for a bit, and heal them just as soon as you genuinely can.

But I'm not a fundamentalist. If I were, I'd be honor bound, faith bound to never listen approvingly to Rush Limbaugh, for one. And I'd have to back off talking about "family values," in the face of Jesus saying so frequently that your spiritual life should come way before your brother, mother, and spouse. And there's a passage about eunuchs that I read as a way of saying that each person's sexuality leads them to God in a different way.

I think I'd enjoy being a hellfire prophetess.

27.September.04 Dinghy work.

Started the morning with coffee and Rush Limbaugh. I've seen him quoted and read a couple of his books, but, thank God, have never heard him before today. He seemed to be a classic bully: drunk with his power and unwilling to stop to see where it is taking him. In the course of this morning's program, he asked his viewers to overload a "liberal" website, which they obediently did; he critiqued Kerry because 1. his complexion seems to be getting redder, especially in comparison to people from Wisconsin, and 2. his campaigners spoke against Bush instead of outlining Kerry's own position; and he talked about four special education students who were strip-searched because they were accused of stealing a teacher's ring. Limbaugh said that the crucial point there was, "Did they, in fact, steal the ring?"

Okay, here are my gripes with the three points I heard him make: First, the very first Amendment of the Constitution promises freedom of speech. My gut reaction to Limbaugh is to gag him until he grows up, but my principled reaction is to be glad that I live in a country where people can particpate in political discussions without being shot. It is disingenuous of him to claim to be a patriot while at the same time working against the First Amendment.

Second, indeed it is frustrating when a candidate speaks against the opponent without explaining his own plans. How does discussing Kerry's complexion further the political debate? And how does discussing Kerry's faults without explaining Bush's virtues illustrate Limbaugh's point, exactly?

Third, the crucial point with the special ed kids is not whether they stole the ring. It's constitutional again; the amendment protecting people against illegal search and seizure. If the kids did not take the ring, anyone would agree that their accuser overstepped his authority. If they were guilty (and presumably, only one of the four was), well, the whole point of the constitutional amendment is the presumption of innocence until the proper legal channels have been followed. The reasons are obvious. Yes, you want the ring to be found and returned. But not at the expense of basic constitutional rights.

Limbaugh is angry at people who act like he does.

Shortly afterwards, a friend remarked how difficult it was to deal with people who know themselves so little that you can't take them as they present themselves. You have to interpret and second-guess or you will get bitten.

27.September.04

Went for a jog at 4 in the morning. The full moon was just about where the sun is at 5 in the afternoon. Dogs didn't bark, bats didn't twit. Just the heartbeat of feet on gravel.

The schoolkids are learning constellations. Knowing this, last night a neighbor asked me about a brilliant star near the northeastern horizon. "Maybe Capella?" I hazarded.

"No," said the neighbor. "That can't be. Where is the North Star?"

"Up there," I said, pointing. You could use a protractor to find Polaris, or follow the direction that the Dipper's outer ladle points.

"No," she said firmly. "That's not north from the Dipper, that's up. North is that way. So this new star could be the North Star. Or maybe it's Venus."

"Well, you would look for Venus somewhere near the path of the sun," I said carefully.

"But, it could be Venus," she said. "Venus is bright."

I have this kind of conversation now and then. I'm a fairly logical thinker, with very little understanding for emotional or intuitive approaches. The night sky to me is full of the laws of physics, and I can locate various things that illustrate them by thinking of the sky in terms of a grid, or as polar coordinates. The constellations are useful as mnemonic devices. I would not be ready to accept a shift in the earth's orbit without some other evidence, such as catastrophic temperature changes, the Moon crashing into the sea, or other signs and portents.

But there are other ways of looking at the universe which I can't grasp. In fields where I'm skilled, I can see the flaws in other ways, because they're not designed for what logic is designed for. For example, as I said in an earlier entry, I'm perfectly satisfied that astrology is not a science (though it may, like Tarot, be a useful path to the unconscious). However, there are whole fields of being where my logical, sequential, rules-oriented way of perceiving isn't useful. I can imagine people like my neighbor, when she is in her element, having the same feeling of frustrated bafflement that I felt while discussing astronomy with her.

The fun is to expand the fields where I'm comfortable. It's excruciating to poke around in the fields where I'm an idiot.

26.September.04

Juan Cole has an interesting take on our progress in Iraq. Check out"If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?"

The day started with far off dinosaur mating calls. We bicycled over to the beach. Something about the dinosaurs had caused a thick fog to form which blew around in a Jurassic way. Spiderwebs were outlined in dew. A flock of highly evolved Bonaparte's gulls rose up gleaming white against the grey, and when they circled around, seemed to vanish.

Inappropriately, I expressed concern for a kid I care about. "If he's screwing up, then he should be kicked out. That's the way it is," my scolder said.

I think a common approach to problems is to restate them so that they can be solved quickly. You know what things should be like, and you don't want to waste time getting from here to there, or even worrying about whether it's in human nature to get there at all. We work from assumptions about what things should be like. It's a legitimate way to make progress, but it's easy to confuse setting goals with assessing the current situation. When things aren't as you think they ought to be, it's easier to throw up your hands and blame somebody than it is to recognize that you haven't gotten there yet. That's when you get comments like, "He should just get a job," or, "It's her own fault for getting pregnant in the first place." Not that the comments aren't justified, but that they're lame. Things are as they are, not as they're not. We're here now. Let's decide on the best thing to do given where we are now, not on where we should have gotten to instead.

People are pretty flexible and they often fix their problems when goaded by any sort of input, helpful or not. But most of the time, a more nuanced approach gets better results. If you step back and think about where you want to be in ten years, or five, you'll probably be better off than if you react to the irritation of the hour. This is particularly true when dealing with children, who are hard-wired to absorb culture. If I were to kick a student out when he became a problem, he might change his wicked ways, but he certainly would learn that you kick people out when they become a problem.

The Spink and I ended up at the school, where David Albert gave a talk on homeschooling. The thing I found most interesting was the idea that we need to determine our governance. Who is responsible for setting educational goals and implementing them? We get funding from the District, and the reality is that that's where the legal responsibility lies. But as a school community, we can decide whether we want parents, staff, students, Site Council, or a partnership to determine philosophy. As it is, it's driven by the fact that education is mandatory and the staff is paid. School will go on regardless of how much thought we put into it. Our parent group wants a bit more intentionality. I'm curious to see if we can also work out a governance protocol whilst doing the easier stuff about how to make a good environment for learning.

25.September.04 The worst of it is, she knows she's cute. You can see why she's the Spink's friend.

Thrashed around with Chapter 5. The idea is the hero's journey. The person - Inanna, Orpheus, Hercules, Bilbo, yourself - goes on a quest for something important. With an animal or human guide, they go to the underworld and are harrowed. They return to the ordinary world with newfound knowledge, or a girlfriend, or something else of symbolic value, and the world is a better place because of it.

That's all well and good, but I'm an essay writer at heart. When I try to put ideas like the above into fiction, it comes out like a lecture. You can see the sparkplugs and camshafts and thingies and you can't trust that you'll be entertained rather than boringly, heavily edified.

Someone whose name I don't recognize sent me a set of tapes in the mail of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which has to be one of my favorite books. Stephenson melds the didactic with cracking good action. How the heck in the world does he do it? I'll let you know when I work it out.

Procrastinating was fun, though. Stacked wood, played fiddle when The Piano Player dropped by, took a red-liner bath on the balcony, listened to a boring looking bird sing a song new to me in the apple tree, agreed to shave a Celtic knot on a neighbor's head. Somebody needs to wash the dishes, though.

The Spink and I watched Sense and Sensibility. We ordered it from Netflix because we really liked two other of Ang Lee's movies, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. He's got a sympathetic eye and cinematographic flair. S & S was just as I remembered Austen's novel; thanks, Mr Lee. You get the full range of human emotion, but within the framework of obsessive reserve. Elinor, for example, seems to be willing to go for a lifetime of outwardly tepid silence rather than hint that she regrets that Edward is engaged to somebody else. And, on his part, he shows his exquisite sense of duty by never entertaining the thought of breaking off his engagement with a woman that he no longer loves to go for Elinor.

Just finished off an Agatha Christie (in the tub, thanks for asking) that had the same standards of containing one's emotions. Of course, in both Austen and Christie, there are people who are more open, but they are really not the better sort. The less vivid you are, the better. The ideal is a person who has deep emotions, clear thoughts, perceptive powers of observation, and a keen sense of charity, but who does not allow any of them into public light ever, and very seldom in private either.

As a teacher and totally unsubtle person, I deplore that kind of a culture. I want transparancy in government and private affairs both. I want what people do and what they say to match. I want the spirit of modern science, which calls for open publication of ideas and new discoveries, to prevail in society in general.

Yes. And at the same time, I admire the restraint and reserve of cultures such as the upper classes of Austen's England and Japan. Perhaps without the constant soap operas and gossip that grip our attention in a more sloppy culture, you have to turn your attention to art, music, and ideas. Though I doubt that actual people are often able to do it as gracefully as Austen suggests.

24.September.04 Maybe we can get out the door. Maybe not.

The boys left a huge gap when they moved out. The trick will be not to fill it until I live with it for a bit. Events and my personality conspire against this, though.

Today Kathy came over to play Scrabble and brainstorm our musical. Yet again, we talked about homelessness. I related the tight little story of the legless men and the $1.25 (see Sept 15), adding that my own lunch had cost $5.50.

We can go a little beyond our immediate family with community members, and a little more with friends, sometimes. What does it take to extend to the homeless? Not that I'd expect a random person to feel a mission to end involuntary homelessness, but I think we'd all agree that our country would be a better one to live in if, as a country, we ended it.

We discussed Potemkin Villages. The story is, that when czarina Catherine II of Russia toured the Ukraine, Prince Potemkin had cardboard villages built along her route and made the peasants act cheerful. Kind of like when, more recently, Chinese villages bankrupted their regions to make dance floors out of wheat sheaves so that Mao's prediction of prosperity would seem to be true. Where do homeless people go when a city "cleans up" its homeless?

And with that, we went off to Apple Day at the school. Our community is so dang small (maybe 80 people) that we have to bring in outsiders to have a decent festival. The homeschool group from Orcas filled out the celebrations and everyone seemed to be content with each other.

One of the accordion tunes from 'Amelie.'

They have to listen to us in payment for dinner.

Back home, I tried to work on Chapter 4 in the autumnal sunlight, but the sheep, which we'd experimentally put in the orchard, were busy stripping the bark off the apple trees. One good yank, and there goes a tree. So I refenced. And then remembered the bread in the sun oven, which fell instead of baked because the sun is skimming along the horizon so quickly that if I don't re-point the oven every half hour or so, the temperature drops too fast. So I collected wood from various piles created during the making of the woodshed, and went inside and got domestic. Who needs to write, anyway? It was challah made with turmeric, which turned out quite tasty even though I didn't let it rise a second time.

The Piano Player showed up, at least an inch taller than he was in summer, and we played fiddle tunes. Bob came by too along about dinner time, and stayed for a mysterious showing of Kiki's Delivery Service. None of us could figure out how to get English subtitles, but it was amusing enough in Japanese. Except not for Bob. He snores.

21.September.04 Bk and I on 15th in Seattle.

There are people that one struggles with because their character is skanky, or because they remind one of things that one prefers to leave buried. Then there are people who are difficult for no decent reason. Me.

A couple days ago, I took The Spink to school early because one of the parents had asked me to tutor her daughter in recorder (musical instrument, not electronic device). She'd said that her daughter wanted to learn in a group. So, just before class meeting started a few weeks ago, I sat down with the gathered group and said that such a class was in the air, and did anyone want to join, and did anyone have a problem with that? Because of the school field trip, it would start this last Monday in the half hour before "real" school.

Monday, of course, everyone had forgotten. Tuesday, though, we started. It was noisy and quite successful.

One of the teachers, however, took me aside afterwards and said that he would have appreciated being notified in advance. He said it in a manner that I interpreted as angry, and sort of twisted, like he had a lot of suppressed feelings that he wasn't going to go into, but if I stepped wrong, they would explode. That's how I read it, anyway.

Fine. I've taught with other people for fifteen years. Committed teachers think of school as an extension of themselves. People get uptight about use of space, about being watched, about noise, discipline, tidiness, and what have you. Like learning to get along with a roommate. In this case, since I had been careful to raise the subject in advance (not "notifying," but asking), I jumped to the conclusion that he had something else going. Was it the noise? He said not really. If the kids started out the day with a class, then they would lose the hanging out time that they usually had. It would change the energy of the morning.

I came back at lunch to see if he'd had any further thoughts, and we had another conversation in which neither of us addressed what the other one was saying. He and I seem to use the English language to form mutually acceptible sentences, but their subtext is incompatible.

And don't go saying that things don't have to have a subtext, Dear Reader. It's how our brains are made. Neural pathways slop over into unexpected areas of the brain; that's why poetry works. For me, blue, for example, means a kind of soldierly sadness, or Grandma's silk dress brushed with Eau de Cologne, or the chipped lines of a frozen sea. For you it might mean the slap you got from a guy wearing denim, and something cute at The Gap. Everything comes with a load, delicate or heavy, of meaning and, often, a vague call to action.

Then there was a parent meeting. Lo and behold, "recorder lessons" was on the agenda. Sheesh! I've taught a few kids music (not my own, alas), and find that it works best around the edges. If they think they're going to lessons, then all the strange dysfunctional behavior that builds up around school manifests; a load of meaning put onto the word "lessons." If they're simply learning music, then often they make quite pleasing progress. So, here we were, fair enough. I said I was teaching someone beginning recorder in the morning, that anyone who wanted to join was welcome, and that there was an issue around it maybe being disruptive.

"Whoa!" said the teacher. "Who said it was disruptive?"

"You did," I said.

We smoothed it over in that polite way that well intentioned people have, and we're both certainly well intentioned. But I was disappointed in myself and not sanguine about further dealings with the guy.

This morning was class number two. "Can I talk to you after your class?" asked the teacher.

"Sure!" I said, perkily.

One student wasn't there but there was a new one. We played a couple of duets and when we were done, the kids were flushed with satisfaction.

I followed the teacher into the office. "Would you be willing to teach me recorder?" he asked. He showed me a lovely old tenor that his dad had given him.

I am totally charmed. Here I was, a difficult case, ready to struggle on in a perpetually awkward relationship. And he finessed it.

20.September.04

Molly Ivins is my heroine. She writes clearly and passionately and can back it up with facts. Yay.

Like most of my friends, I've never been that interested in politics. I used to figure, if I kept my nose clean, then I'd be left alone. This, despite growing up with Mom's frequent and chilling tales of Nazi Germany, when keeping your head down was no guarantee of safety, and in fact was later revealed as a moral failing. As it is in our times as well.

Then, just after the Berlin wall came down in '91, my sister and I took the train from relatives in Bonn to other relatives in Berlin. We went through former East Germany to get there, and I was staggered by the contrast between West and East. These were people who were ethnically identical, whose only difference lay in their government. West German farms were tidy and well kept. It was harvest time, and so either the fields were bare or those big white tractor farts dotted the landscape. Villages were tidy and cute; steeples, whitewash, trees. The instant we crossed the line, we saw that all the farms were in trouble. The crops, if planted at all, had lodged (the grain stems had fallen, making them unharvestable). No haystacks or tarped piles. The villages still had bomb scars from WWII, 50 years before. Rusting wrecked Trabis (Trabants, the dysfunctional East German cars) were everywhere. Later, when our West Berlin hostess took us to visit Potsdam in former East Berlin, we personally witnessed three car accidents or their near aftermaths, as people new to driving drove anyway. That side of town was riddled with bullet holes, potholes, and no doubt people had cavities too.

It was a graphic way of understanding that government really does have an effect. Poor policy translates into personal disaster.

To me, it seems as though the upcoming election is a turning point. If Bush wins, we may have universal draft for men and women aged 18 to 26 by spring of 2005. See http://thomas.loc.gov/ and enter HR163 for the text of the bill. Women and girls may lose the right to get abortions under any circumstances, and gays may lose the right to marry (if they had it in the first place). Our civil liberties may continue to dribble away in the name of security. People like The Piano Player will continue to find that there's no safety net. The schools will be required to do dumber and dumber things with no funding to back it up (Ask any superintendent about the "No Child Left Behind" legislation, and be sure to pack a hankie to wipe the spittle off your face). (In a not unrelated incident, Putin just declared that Russian governorships will henceforth be appointed, not elected offices. If the current US leader had been fairly elected, if he were vigorously adhering to the Geneva Convention, if he were effectively and ethically pursuing actual terrorists, do you think Putin would have dared to ignore democratic principles?)

At the very least, you should vote. If you've got friends who don't see the need to vote, help them register, go with them to the polls. Start writing your congresspeople about specific legislation you like or don't like. Word is, they actually do listen, on the theory that one person who writes represents a vast number of people who hold the same opinion but didn't get around to writing. Apathy is a poor reason to trash the future. Our country is too powerful to go to the bad.

19.September.04

Today was the first day in 18 years that only one child was living at home. I got up at 3 and went on a mile-long run. No moon, but the starlight was sufficient. It was quite soothing.

Woke up bursting with energy. After taking The Spink to school, did two loads of laundry, moved some furniture around, hung laundry hither and yon, did the remaining loads of pots and pans that my dear husband and daughter left festering on, near, under, and remote from the sink last week, and settled in on the balcony with my laptop. Revived a book I wrote half of last year and spent four hours rereading it and rewriting. Tomorrow I'll work on the story about a ravenous husky at the end of chapter 2.

Took a break at the piano. The Bach Invention #1 is still not coalescing. I understand its shape but don't place my fingers correctly. Bach is less predictable than the fiddle tunes I'm used to. So, I switched to Marmaduke's Hornpipe, and things did flow better. As a visual person, I have a lot of trouble hearing chords, but since I know that there are only going to be three of them, and since it has to start and end with the dominant chord, there's enough constraints so that I remain hopeful that I'll eventually get it.

Yesterday, The Spink and I walked the beach looking for dead birds for COASST (none, as usual). We went swimming at the Point, a pleasant enough sport for fools and spinks. I wrote a tune there, and today tried to give it chords. Sheesh.

A brisk bout of writing, interspersed with more laundry, and scraping Bk's contact lens goo off his carpet, and then, to relax, moved several wheelbarrow loads of split wood to the new woodshed. The Spink came home from school and helped with that, then with refencing the sheep. We cleaned more upstairs and did another load of laundry. I played the fiddle.

Nick came by with his crew Joe, killing time before the opening tomorrow down near the Tulalip Reservation. Fish buying is a round the clock enterprise, as the fishermen have to clear fish out of their holds periodically to make room for more. We hung around over mozarella, tomatoes, and smoked salmon, discussing G W Bush (bad) and grinding up cars to eat in order to get into the Guiness Book of World Records (stupid) and Japanese (difficult to learn) and curing olives with Red Devil drain cleaner (who would have guessed that that could work?). Then it was bedtime but I still felt energetic. Lucky for me there's blogging.

18.September.04

Drove north to the fulminations of talk radio. Those guys are so angry! It's like the interior monologues I get when I'm not centered and have an injury to brood over, but they seem to have no strategy for using their interior tangles as a means of introspection and growth. It was agreed that the liberals and lack of family values are at the root of all problems in America (Norway, a screamingly liberal country with lots of unusual family combinations and no discernible crime or poverty wasn't mentioned). As far as I could glean, "liberals" means people who are against family values. "Family values" means making most of the families I am acquainted with illegal, or at least imposing the heavy weight of shame on them. My friends include working mothers (bad), marriages of mixed ethnicity (bad), unmarried parents (really bad), lesbian mothers (unspeakably bad), and people who have had abortions (murderers). While my private morality is pretty stiff, first of all, I don't think I'd enjoy living in a mono-QueenJulia society, and second of all, I wouldn't dream of legislating other people's private lives.

When children are involved, of course, moral choices are no longer private. For that reason, I support abortion, as a tragic but crucial way of keeping children from being born into a toxic environment. If children, raised by any sort of parent, are in trouble, there should be a prompt and effective way of protecting them (there isn't. See my Sept 1 entry). That would include educating the parent/s, foster care, adoption, whatever. But, since Americans are innocent until proven guilty, even a black Muslim homosexual transvestite living with his two white liberal Jewish lesbian cousins in a Kerry-supporting enviro-nazi commune should be left alone to raise his kids in peace until and unless the kids are abused. And if they are, the case should be judged on the abuse, not on his "lifestyle." And that's my rant.

Stopped at Cenex for sheep feed (we have to keep our sheep on our land instead of pasturing them out because of the many loose dogs on the island), and at Goodwill to get more books (oops) and a bunch of canvas bags for the books and candles and nori and toe socks and Charles Schwab documents that were strewn around the floor of the car. Here is a list of the books that ended up in a kind of creepy medical supply bag:

Sarah Simblet's Anatomy for the Artist, with lush photos and gross bones and blood vessels.

Studio Ghibli's The Art of Spirited Away, for The Spink's birthday in October.

Gerald Donaldson's Frogs, for The Widow, who already has frog candlesticks and shoes.

Donald Caine's Within Reason, because of an ongoing argument Bk and I are having about whether science and reason are capable of addressing everything. My somewhat wobbly position is that no, they aren't; partly because people have only started using data-driven reasoning since the 1600's (read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver) and so we don't have enough fundamentals to address most problems; and partly because we are in meat space, and there are squishy parts of our brains that are hard-wired to smell, to have irregular grammar, to beat our children, and to do all kinds of other things that a rational entity would not be able to predict. I hope Bk will read this and give you a thumbnail of his side of the argument; I'm too likely to make it sound silly (which it is, it is). I think Caine expands on my "meat space" argument.

A Spanish dictionary and 501 Spanish Verbs. I'm supposed to teach Spanish in October, but I haven't actually used it since 1984, when I taught bilingual 2nd graders. This makes me a little nervous.

Musciano and Kennedy's HTML & XHTML. I may not be capable of reading a how-to book through, but I can amass ten of them and learn through osmosis. Right?

Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide, which is a political history of the 19 teens in Boston, with a "fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses ... at thirty-five miles per hour" disaster in Boston as the narrative hook. Hey, I was at Goodwill and it looked like fun.

Later, on the ferry, as an antidote to the radio, I read the David Remnick interview of Gore in the Sept 13 New Yorker, which talked about Bush's actual record. " ... chaos in Iraq, record budget deficits, the rollback of numerous environmental initiatives, a diminishment of civil liberties, a curtailment of stem-cell research, an erosion of American prestige abroad." With a record like that, a rational public would throw the man out at once. To take it to the level of meat space, I've watched the two candidates on TV, and would throw Bush out just on the basis of his fluttering eyelids. He's got blinkers on. To get biblical, he's got a beam in his eye (no, wait. Bush hasn't read the bible).

The Spink had a fire going, fresh brownies on a platter, and was wearing a black silk skirt. I taught her how to use a hammer and we put together the two Ikea bookshelves, one to replace David's handmade (by me, not him) tilter, and the other to address some of the piles in my studio.

Refenced the sheep. David and I watched them schnarf away at the grass under the spindly peach and plum trees. We can't fence them into that area because they'll eat the entire trees, but now and then we let them linger on their way to the next pen. "I love watching them enjoy the abundance," said David, as they moved almost frantically from grass tufts to dandelion heads to fruit tree suckers.

Funny. Bk and I were recently watching the same thing, and he expressed disapproval that they would wander around in a new space, high-grading everything whilst pooping, and then be stuck with second-rate growth and scattered excrement for the next few days. How much better it would be for them if they could plan out their approach.

To me, it seems to be an artifact of their instinct. Ur-sheep are nomadic, and usually part of a big herd. Choosing the best and then moving on is hard-wired for good reason. That it's not optimal for more permanent pastures is too bad for them; they would have to develop intelligence to make use of such a situation, and even there, the tragedy of the commons seems to be built in to herds of sheep and people both.

In addition to sheeply ruminations, I was struck by how the same circumstance of the grazing sheep brought forward our three persoanlity types.

17.September.04 Hand and knee.

Bk and I unloaded our shabby collection of bags and packs onto the lawn in a crowd of spiffy parents and freshmen. This kind of thing sets me into fits of reminiscing. Why, when my parents took me to college, the crowd of parents was spiffy but the students were smack in the middle of the early 70's and were stooped, beaded, shawled, reeking of patchouli, and jingling vaguely. I personally was barefoot and wore army surplus (to indicate ironic disapproval of the Vietnam War). Maybe such things still happen, but not at SU.

Bk's roommate was bright-eyed and clean. He had settled in to precisely half of the room. His bed was made, his shirt smelled faintly of detergent and matched his pants, his desk was immaculate, his bookshelf had government and history texts neatly arrayed. We opened the black plastic trash bag that Bk had stuffed his bedding into. The sheet was moldy, but we decided that the blanket was still okay. Luckily we had the new sheet set from The Bon. Bk put Tokyo Suckerpunch, which is hot pink and visibly used, on his shelf. Cocoa powder was lightly dusted over his toothbrush, shampoo, and contact lens cleaner. We put them on the sink. I bustled faster and faster. Finally, it occurred to me that it was time to go. I left.

First stop was to check out the Goodwillie exhibit again at The Frye. It was just as good as I remembered. Then, a pleasant walk in fresh sunlight down the steep hills to the Sound. I stopped before I fell in and bought a few pens, a book on html, and a sandwich. I put $1.25 into a legless man's cup (see the 15 Sept entry). I read The New Yorker while the woman sitting at the next table seemed to be doing one of those Natalie Goldberg writing exercises with me as subject. I tried to look odd (see below).

One of the nicest things about foreign cities is Catholic churches. They are always open, and usually exalting to look at. The St James Cathedral is kind of clumsy inside, but there is that residual smell of incense, and all those purposeful side chapels and ritual objects that remind you of the incredible weight of passion and history that haunts the Church. I sat there for about half an hour. I'm going to miss Bk.

A crack of thunder reminded my lovely hostess and me that we really ought to go to Ikea. To get there, you drive through pounding rain. I got the bookshelves I'd gone there to find (my lovely hostess asked, "Do you guys ever throw any books out?), and found some glow-in-the-dark bedsheets for The Spink that will probably give her nightmares.

Over Swedish meatballs, my lovely hostess confirmed that I am indeed odd. So that's settled.

16.September.04 Our lovely hostess.

Our lovely hostess scolded me for my html style and showed me a few basics that ought to be integrated into this site sometime. Bk and I hung around the house for a while, enjoying the rain and the empty agenda.

Along around noon we moseyed to the Seattle Asian Art Museum, where I wanted to see the 15th century firefighters' hopi coats. Indigo dyes last a long time, so the displays looked fresh and contemporary. My favorite was a manga-style painting on the back of a turquoise hopi coat, illustrating a story about a hero who played go against a monk who turned out to be a giant spider.

We were ravenous. The sign on the left hung over the Moroccan style restaurant where we inhaled ravioli in cream sauce and grilled chicken with pitta bread. The waiter barely missed getting his fingers eaten.

We felt better afterwards. The plan was to visit the art museum downtown, but (I should have known) we couldn't find parking and the rain was too heavy for us to walk far. So we prowled for used bookstores. There was an intellectual one in the Fremont District, and a funky one on Greenlake. I got Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson, and highly recommend it for anyone who liked the loopy humor of Shaolin Soccer. The guy is a gaijin who is in Tokyo to cover the under-19 handicapped martial arts tournament, and maybe to get a glimpse of the legendary handicapped martial arts master, whose fame is so great that prospective students amputate their own legs in order to be accepted as disciples. There's a lot of gratuitous violence.

We got peaches and organic cream and hormone-free eggs to make ice cream with. At home, our lovely hostess saw our sketchbooks with the firefighters' hopi coats in them and brought out her own, an indigo cotton one with white things on it that looked like brooms. Then she demonstrated how to install a kimono with a simple obi onto a wriggling daughter. My camera battery gave out during downloading, so you'll have to wait until I get back home to see more pictures. Do wait for them.

15.September.04 Seattle downtown.

Bk and I took the bus downtown, evoking memories of my days as a sardine on the LA Rapid Transit from Beverly to Hollywood on Western Ave as a kid. I love the sway and rattle of buses, the Leonardo da Vinci characters who ride them, and the unsettling mixture of kindliness and surliness that is characteristic of bus drivers.

Our driver this morning was like that. "We want to go to Fifth and Union," I said.

"You got the right bus," he said, and it was clear that he meant it in more ways than one. The right bus.

Tonight Rosh Hashanah begins; Jewish New Year. Endings and beginnings, forgiveness and renewal. The bus stopped for a legless man in a wheelchair. The driver began the whirrings and clankings that lower the ramp. "You going to pay, this time?" he asked. "You didn't last time."

There was a pause. The driver put the seat up so the guy could hook his wheelchair into the metal eye. Next thing I knew, the wheelchair was going back down the street and the bus was lurching forward without him.

I felt terrible. If I'd thought a little faster, or been a little nosier, I could have paid the stupid $1.25 for him. Jewish law is quite clear about charity. It should be generous and prompt. In this case, it could have been totally painless too. The extra quarters in my pocket weighed me down for the rest of the day.

The forgiveness part is that now I know. The exact same situation won't come up again, but there'll be other fleeting opportunities and maybe I'll see them in time next time.

Yesterday, the very nice lady at Charles Schwab told us that if Bk came back with a picture ID, then I could resign as the custodian of his account. Then he'd have it in his name only, and we'd get him checks and a debit card and it would all be copacetic. But it was not to be.

We went through three people, a phone call, and 90 minutes. The situation kept morphing as each new person offered their own version of company policy and State law. Unfortunately, despite the "until age 18" notice on the statement, in Washington, a custodial account has to have a custodian until the minor reaches age 21. Fortunately, Bk could, at 18, open his own account. Unfortunately, if he used his Seattle U address, he would no longer be householded with my account and therefore would have to pay a low balance fee. Fortunately, it might be possible to just have the SU be a mailing address and keep his home address with us. Unfortunately, Schwab doesn't issue checks for accounts with balances under $10,000. Keeps the riff-raff out. Like Bk.

We went next door to Washington Mutual, which would be glad to take our money if Bk could come up with two picture ID's. He could not, but we could go down the street to get him another one.

It just took a passport, a birth certificate, $15, an hour, and a smile to get a Washington State ID. Then we rushed back to WM and got an account and Bk's very first checks. Capitalist piggery, here we come! He spent the first $150 on three textbooks at SU.

Another stop was The Bon, which has a bedding sale. We've gotten by for the last 30 years with thrift store sheets, or ones my mother gave me back in her "my daughter needs a trosseau" stage, or ones that just kind of show up in the way that bedsheets do around people who volunteer to sew costumes for elementary schools. But SU beds are odd sized and the sheets that Bk brought with him are not only too small, but also have little kitty cats on them. If the lad was to have his own checkbook, he should also have dignified sheets.

Okay. Our saleslady was very helpful, and while I was filling out the credit card application so I could get a 15% discount, she said, "I know some people where you live!" Her dinner guests tomorrow night for Mexican Independence Day will include the people who are taking care of The Spink. I think there are 750,000 people in Seattle. I hope The Spink enjoys her tamales.

14.September.04 Bk in the Seattle library.

First thing, was to go to Seattle University and pay Bk's fees. We took Aurora too far, up past the tops of abandoned buildings and curving down into the docks. I kept making Bk take pictures.

"Where do you think SU is?"

"That way, isn't it?"

We drove that way and had to stop when we saw the new library. I took 58 pictures in it. I've always said that if I lived in Cologne, I'd convert to Catholicism just to be able to claim that cathedral as my own. Well, if I lived in Seattle, I'd start reading books.

We parked at The Frye, so after doing our thing at SU, we saw the Scott Goodwillie exhibit. His work is quite disturbing. If we can, I'd like to see it again.

Walked over I5 into downtown to see about banks and things. Seattle is perched over the Puget Sound, very lovely. Suburbs make me itchy, but rural areas like where I live, or the heart of cities like here, are bracing.

We had teriyaki in a mirrored place with blaring Italian opera. The cashier was an old African-American guy who called me girlfriend and served us extra chicken on the grounds of our smiles.

After dinner, our lovely hostess suggested we go to the thrift store for T-shirts for Bk, but without her children because they are so impossible in stores. "No, Mommy," said one of them. "You have it wrong again. I'm the one who gets lost and she's the one who wants you to buy stuff all the time." They came with us. Bk got a black T-shirt and a green one with a frog on it. My hostess's daughter got turquoise tights. The other one got lost, but only for a short while.

13.September.04
The Edison Eye Gallery. The town of Edison. Walls.

Took Bk off to college. On the map, Edison is an inch up from the ferry landing. You turn left at the pink post office, which is Bow, and then there you are. The Edison Eye Gallery was showing dark skies by Clayton James and so it began to rain. I tried to get a cup of coffee but as we approached the shop door, the proprietor rushed out, slammed the door, greeted us in a friendly way, and drove off.

I lasted until the first rest stop on I5, where I took a nap, then tottered off towards the free coffee booth. As I approached, they fitted a "closed" sign onto the window and began tidying up.

In Seattle, Bk and I cruised past Seattle University on our way to Volunteer Park. There's an exhibit of fire fighters' kimonos that I wanted to see, but they were closed. The park is pretty, though.

We visited his grandparents and had a warm chat at The Eating Factory in Bellevue, an all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant, with endless choices of stuff like jellyfish, sashimi and tiramisu; wide-screen TV's, and acoustics designed to make any amount of customers sound like an excited crowd.

Went across the bridge back into Seattle into twilight and just the right music blaring from the radio. Don't even try to download this movie unless you've got a lot of computer; it's 30 seconds on the the Evergreen Bridge.

11.September.04 The road guy, Fred.

David had the first half of the day off. We went to The Widow's to see her house guest's stained glass. We went to Mittelstadt's to see how far apart standard apple trees should be planted (anywhere from 20 to 30 feet). We went to an ongoing giveaway at the home of a fixit guy who moved to Seattle. I got a roll of fencing for the compost heap and rejected the box of piano keys that were correctly rumored to be there. I thought they'd be just little ivory slabs, but they were fake ivory glued to bent wooden sticks; not suitable for my style of peculiar art project. We came home and moved the box from where it had stored firewood at the hot tub site to under the shed, where it will hold the generator once we find a heavy duty cord that won't lose amps on its way from the generator to the house. We moved a quarter cord of wood from the pile to around the shed. We ate fresh nectarines that David got in payment for hauling crates of them.

Ammonia is the reflection lover's friend.

I lay in bed, having just awoken from a nap, wondering what the hell all this movement is for. It fills the days with richness. Would they be even richer if we learned to enjoy the contemplative thrill of gazing at a single peach leaf? Actually, we do know that thrill. The contrast would be, not in gazing at that peach leaf, but in doing nothing else all day except for g. at that p. l.

Part of the answer is in the contrast between a pioneer culture, as the Northwest Coast of the USA has, and a more settled culture such as rural Japan. I don't have servants, nor do I have the wealth and technology that can replace some of what we lost when servants went out. I live in a house on land that was raw forest 11 years ago. If I want warmth in winter, I need to do all the thrashing around that results in the shed, the cut wood, and the stacking by myself. Same with food. If I want apples, I have to plant the things. I can't make the same claim for art with as much justification, but I will anyway. My muse has ADD. If I do something in acrylics today, then it has to be piano keys tomorrow. There's a certain amount of rushing around that is required before the piano keys show up. Or, in this case, don't.

10.September.04 Hey! You can see my reflection! Sort of.

Listened to a talk by Stephane Sarantos, from Clearwater School in Seattle. David and I recognized a kindred soul. She presented the same principles of freedom, trust, and responsibility that we found amongst Quakers, La Leche League people, and the secular homeschooling movement twenty years ago. If I were a young parent in the Seattle area, I'd seriously consider Clearwater School.

Have you ever noticed how people who basically agree with each other bicker more than people who are fundamentally opposed? Kind of like schisms in the Democratic Party, or families. I didn't actually disagree with much, but am moved to pick a few nits.

First of all, that she was talking about diversity and democracy, yet was one of those people (I'm one too, which of course, was why it annoyed me) who has to talk around a subject at length before she gets to where she's really going. The effect was somewhat one of being railroaded. Better in tune with her message would have been a clear, succinct introduction, followed by a long session of question-and-answer, or question-leads-to-new-point.

Second is an issue I have with many of my peers in the trust-your-kids movement. While I agree with much of the rhetoric, I am suspicious when it seems to come from a knee-jerk rejection of all authority. I can understand rejecting arbitrary or cruel authority; but I don't buy it when people say "patriarchal system" to reject any assertive statement. (Bk is fond of quoting Richard Dawkins, who says something like, "At 3,000 feet, show me a cultural relativist and I'll show you a hypocrite." That is to say, some cultures are better than others at jet planes and science. Some things are not "just as valid as anything else," they're better, or worse.) Possibly related to this, I noticed that Ms Sarantos delivered many of her statements of belief with a rising inflection to turn them into questions. In my own opinion, being an expert is not bad. As the talk progressed, I was satisfied that Ms Sarantos is indeed an expert worthy of my respect, and I wanted her to accept that authority by making her statements sound like statements, not questions.

I think that there is a natural authority that comes with experience and knowledge. Children are hard-wired to obey and trust their parents for obvious reasons. Until very recently, the world was filled with bears, slavers, and impenetrable thickets. When parents abdicate their authority, kids don't feel safe.

Hey! You can see my reflection! Sort of.

That's not to say that freedom is an impossibility in the family or in schools. It's just that I think it can't exist when parents or teachers are uncomfortable with exercising their natural authority. No matter what the rhetoric, every kid needs a trustworthy bulwark between themselves and the raw world. Maybe you let them play in the mud all day, but only because you've looked at the mud beforehand and know that it isn't on a toxic waste dump, nor is the guy who lives next to the mud puddle a predator. Kids have to trust that you'll prevent them from doing something that will prey on them later, like forgetting to brush their teeth or damaging their little sister. You let them make their own choices unless there's a compelling reason not to. My test is, "What's the worst that could happen?" If I don't think the worst is acceptable, then I throw my weight around with a clean conscience.

Another thought that came up when she was talking about school, was the need to protect the reserved kids in the group. Under the autocratic system I grew up with, quiet kids were safe in the classroom, and it was the noisy ones that were squelched. The way she described Clearwater School, and within my own experience trying to teach in a non-autocratic way, rambunctious kids spend a lot of everyone's time working out the difference beween freedom and license. This is not necessary for quieter children, and is often quite distressing for them to watch. Children who need contemplative time, aimless dreaming time, order and serenity, are not well served in a family or a classroom where the kids who "need" to express themselves are always doing so.

In my own family, this came up over music. For years, Vruba liked to turn the radio on whenever he came into the room. He found classical music both interesting and soothing. However, he was unable to tolerate poorly played music for any length of time whatsoever, which meant that, while he was around, none of the rest of us could practice. Our freedom to be incompetently noisy impinged on his need for sanity. We never really solved this. I'm not sure it was solvable, given our constraints of space.

I guess what I'm saying (see what I mean about talking in circles?) is that the general principals of trust-based parenting and teaching are great. I like the way kids turn out when they have that kind of childhood experience. But it's not a panacea. It's hard work, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. When you take each person as a whole person worthy of respect, you actually have to listen to them, and you can't shove them into anything. Sometimes stuff just doesn't get worked out.

9.September.04 Reflections in window at McMenamin's in Portland.

We were standing at the crossroads, gossiping. "What my sister doesn't like about eldercare is that it's disgusting," said a neighbor.

"And what I don't like is that it's so sad," said another.

"I don't really mind disgusting, or sad," I said. "But I don't like the tape loops you get. When seemingly random stuff triggers the same screed you heard yesterday and the day before."

"Oh, that stuff is okay," said neighbor #1. "You just agree with it and it slides right by."

It seems to be a solid rule that when something bugs me about others, I need to turn inwards. Really an irritating rule.

So, what is it that gets me about those tape loops? Well, first of all, they seem to be impervious to insight. Here's one example: "I should learn more about computers."

Fine. That's an admirable goal, but it's not a moral one. It's a choice about how you will use your time. If, every day, you pick other things to do instead, that's data. Whenever your words and your actions don't match, that's something to pay attention to. Change one of them.

Second, there's something about being told something you already know that seems to be inherently annoying, at least, if it seems that your "teacher" thinks you don't know it yet. I run up against that both as a mother and as a teacher. It could be the basic need of any species to cover up ignorance and to appear as strong as possible. Birds, for example, tend not to look or act ill until just a few moments before they croak. Boys are much more likely than girls to pretend to knowledge that they don't have. But almost everyone seems to bridle at having to hear something twice unless they ask for a repetition.

Third, I tend to be voracious for information. I want to know everything about the people I'm with. Everything. When a story is repeated for the seventh time, that's six new stories that were edged aside.

Finally, I want everyone to get better every day. I want old people to be wiser, more tolerant, better able to cope with life than younger people. I want to look forward to an effortless improvement. It shouldn't be so difficult to move towards Enlightenment.

So, on the agenda is to look at: how am I impervious to insight? Where do my words and actions not match? Do I repeat myself (to myself or to others)? Do I hide from revealing information through stock stories? Do I fear that instead of getting wiser as I get older, I'm becoming a caricature?

8.September.04 Sea lettuce washed up from the interior of the earth

I have in my lap a somewhat moldy book by Dr. Raymond Bernard, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., entitled The Hollow Earth: The greatest Geographical Discovery in History, Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles -- The True Origin of the Flying Saucers.

Dr Bernard asks the following pungent questions, among others: "If no rivers are flowing from the inside to the outside, then why are all icebergs composed of fresh water? ... If the inside of the Earth is not warm, why do millions of tropical birds and animals go further north in the winter time? ... Why does the wind from the north carry more pollen and blossoms than any wind on the exterior? .... Why is the sun invisible so long in winter near the farthest points north or south?" Think about it, if you dare. Oh, and Eskimos "increase not only by the tribe growing in numbers, but by fresh immigration from the north, which clearly points to further additions from the interior of the earth." And, there are illustrations.

I also have, somewhere in the rubble around my desk, a poorly punctuated pamphlet which, exhorts me, to remember, that unless I believe in Jesus and disbelieve in evolution, I will not be saved. There are Biblical quotes to prove this, but, more telling from my point of view, there is the information that more and more scientists have decided that the Earth cannot be older than 10,000 years old. Proof of that is that a tree that could not have been more than 1,000 years old was found with its roots through strata that scientists had erroneously dated as millions of years old. Everyone knows that roots can't do that.

Last fall, one of my astronomy students thought that we'd be doing astrology (same student thought cosmology would be cosmetology). When I realized he was serious, I went to a bookstore in Port Townsend, and found a how-to horoscope book in an astrology section that was a hundred times as big as their astronomy section.

Using the techniques in that book, which were the best ever developed according to the introduction, I cast my students' horoscopes, my own, and those of various people with distinctive personalities in our Community. The book provided these cool pre-printed circular charts which I filled in with information about where in the zodiac the sun, moon, and planets had appeared on their birth dates. The book was refreshingly clear, and I checked everything twice.

A few days later, I read the horoscopes aloud and students had to chose from the list of possible names, without consulting each other. There were seven of us and fourteen names. On the average, everyone got two right and twelve wrong. We discussed probability. Everyone who already thought astrology was bunk now has ammunition, and the one person who thought there is something to it, does not accept my methodology.

I was satisfied until today. Today, The Spink jumped off the dock with all her clothes on, along with two of her classmates (the marimba players). Five hours later, we were on the beach at the other side of the island and she fell in, getting her clothes soaked.

My in-laws called Bk about some paperwork that he needs to do asap or possibly last week. David replaced the lower unit on his outboard but that turned out not to be the problem. I went to the dock so I could call Blue Shield about replacing our medical cards which I lost, and ended up on hold for the length of time it took me to struggle through a Norwegian fairy tale which used words like snart and snill to convey something more or less about a troll and two boys. Vruba contacted me about his missing birth certificate. I have to order it for him because in order to get it himself, he needs a valid ID, which he can't get without a birth certificate. I missed a staff meeting at school by mistake.

Clearly, The Spink is passing abruptly through Aquarius, and the rest of us have retrograde paperwork planets. The medical cards are in the interior of the earth, covered with blossoms from 1,000 year old trees.

7.September.04 Pants

First day of school for The Spink. Everyone looked scrubbed and pink. The girl clique played marimba and it was just like old times. Awww.

Home to the sunny lawn, strewn with fresh sheep turds. Wrote the first draft to a motet, the word "motet" describing the wordiness of the style. Jeremy's group "Sospira" sang three-part motets where the two sopranos sang related stuff, mainly about the horrors of love but there was one about how you shouldn't trust hucksters and con men. And the tenor sang what seemed to be an unrelated snatch of a Gregorian chant.

When Bk was a lad, he desperately wanted to be able to tell jokes. What he knew about them, was that you said something that didn't make any sense and then everybody laughed. So for years, that's how he told jokes. Later, his sister went on record with the best of them: "Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

(Long pause ... ) "Ketchup!"

"Ketchup who?"

"Lantern!" (Now everybody is instructed to laugh, and they do.)

Similar pitfalls await the sudden motet writer. Luckily, I love pitfalls. Despite the rubble that remains from our room switch, found Milton Love's book on Pacific Coast fish.

Soprano 1	Soprano 2	Tenor
My love for you	There's a voluntary	My love for you,
cold at the bottom of the Sound,	no fishing zone	cold at the
100 fathoms down,	around Skipjack and other .	bottom
solitary	isolated	the depths
long lived	rocky	cold
cold	islands but	under the sea
A ling cod,	men	My love
neither ling nor cod,	crazed with lust for	my love for you
but bottomfish,	their dream big fish	my love
named ophiodon, snake-toothed; .	sail straight there and	swims
a voracious predator, and	send their lines	in the deeps
elongatus, elongated;	down	under
growing every year	100 fathoms to	under the sea
my love for you	my love for you	my love for you

You could say that it is in retaliation for a poem David wrote 25 years ago, comparing our love to a dead horse. The idea was that it was large and you couldn't ignore it. We'd just had an experience with a dead horse. You don't want to know the details, really.

6.September.04 (I keep having to change the date. It's amazing to me how it keeps sliding out from under me, every day without fail. I can hardly keep track. Inge from Australia missed her husband's birthday because of flying over the International Date Line. On the one hand, dates do slippery things like that (and you can use them as a sugar substitute), and on the other hand, they are relentless about ticking over day in, day out. Do you ever wonder what the dinosaurs did about dates? Certainly they had seasons, but dates? I think dates only really got important when the Medievals had to keep track of holy days. But I could be wrong on that one. Anyway, it is now the sixth, but only for another hour-and-a-bit.)

Foggy

Once again, don't even try to puzzle out how the images connect with the text.

We may end up with a Community Songbook as a fundraiser for The Piano Player. There ought to be some kind of welfare available for him, but we don't know how to access it. It would take a lot of work to figure out how to get the County to help him, and even more work to put together a fundraiser ourselves. But the fundraiser would be fun while bureaucracy wouldn't be.

So after waking inexplicably early and rushing off to school to clean the music closet a bit, I collected all the songs I've got that Kathy and I have collaborated on. It's quite an amusing collection. Then she arrived, but before working on our opera, we played Scrabble. Natch.

The Piano Player himself arrived next, all bandaged from an encounter with a feral bicycle. We quizzed him on his response to being homeless but didn't get any juicy bits. So we played "Take Two," on the theory that it would be shorter than a full Scrabble game. It wasn't. By the time Kathy had 1,000 points, there were several other players, including three other former students and a f.s.'s partner. They all ate pizza and drank coffee and it was the longest time I've ever sat down in the middle of the day and played a pointless game, even counting when I was little because my mother would occasionally appear and make us do something useful with ourselves. With considerably more effort, we could have played music together, but our culture isn't set up for that. We'd've had to push against the current to get it going.

Instead, we played "Take Two." Finally, only one f.s. was left, who helped me refence the sheep before spending an enjoyable half hour at the piano working out the chords to a waltz we're writing. We left ourselves four minutes before we rushed up to school, where one of the other f.s's was singing Medieval motets and madrigals with his group, Sospiro. Unexpectedly lovely.

Home to salmon fillets, couscous, wet laundry, bellowing sheep, and blogging.

5.September.04

Camilla's reflection Spent some time last night uploading some horrendous folktales that Mom illustrated just after the war. The site will keep morphing but I have enough up now to be pleased. The problem is that I am approaching programming as though I were in Malawi and trying to learn the language. I look helpless and hope that a friendly person will help me with a particular problem. Things that I don't know to ask about don't get solved. For example, since I have a Mac, my browser is Safari. I configured the site within SubEthaEdit, which is close enough to Safari so that there were only a few problems that I had to address after it uploaded. But I don't know if it works with other browsers, and although I could go find another computer and see, it seems like an overwhelming amount of work, especially if it turns out that I need to do major fixing. In lieu of that, here is a picture.

I need one of these for my bedroom entryway

And then today, in one of those strange fits that historians can seldom fully explain, The Spink and I decided to change bedrooms. She wanted a larger room (the master bedroom and my study take up the west wall of the house), and I wanted to divide my stuff out from the marital stuff. Before today, David has had to fit in around the edges of my overflow, in a room that was barely wide enough to fit our bed.

The Spink and I are both packrats, and the project took all day. We roped in an old friend who came by to chat, and Bk and a visitor of his. There is a 300-book bookshelf that couldn't be moved until we moved the dresser and the 75-book bookshelf that perches on top of it, and listened to some rather biting sarcasm on planning ahead and making sensible decisions. I told Bk that, as a thinker, he would indeed do well to plan ahead. But I'm experiential. Thinking often gets in my way. I do better by just charging ahead and relying on my accumulated experience to eventually pull me through. For him that would be a disaster, since he needs to understand the structure of a problem before moving. "To each," I said wisely, "their own."

So, now we are against the east wall of the house. My studio is completely unusable, being covered with my clothing and art supplies. But divided off from it by furniture, is the new master bedroom,with the bed in the middle. Both David and I get a full bookshelf and a chair and an empty wardrobe. (Well, mine is full of stuff that's not yet fully moved, but you understand the concept, right?) I'm delighted.

4.September.04

A warning: the photos in today's blog are only marginally applicable. I just like them.

Kathy and I spent the morning playing Scrabble (285 vs 361) and discussing what "homeless" means. Our opera is in the fledgling stage, and could grow up to be a vulture or a bluebird. Or a bat.

There's lots to think about. For one thing, neither of us actually wants to go and interview street people. Kathy once housed a paranoid woman who wouldn't leave, and I've had my own experiences with the mentally ill. So, there's compassion maybe, but not to the point where we'd actually want to give it meaningful expression. I'll have to research this further, but I think that the major religions have always had an ambiguous relationship with the underclasses as well. I seem to remember that Medieval Christians and Muslims both opposed institutional charity because without beggars, it would be impossible to practice charity and hence gain points in Heaven. We looked up a modern Jewish theolgian, who says that giving money is not enough, you have to make personal contact and, if possible, give substantial help. That sounds right to my conscience, but not to my practical side that wants to do well by my own family first.

And then, there is our own experience with homelessness. David and I lived out of our car for a few months when the boys were tiny, but since we were waiting for escrow to close on our house, that hardly counts. And, the car ran. But The Piano Player, for whom I have a motherly feeling, is of concern. His stepfather made it impossible for him to move in to his mother's house, and his father lives where there is no high school. There are no foster families where he's going to school. He just wiped out on somebody else's bike, and in addition to his considerable scrapes, has no official place to stay. It may be temporary, but he is homeless. It's disorienting, for him and for the people who care for him.

In dreams, I shore up the foundations of my house, or discover a new room covered in cobwebs, or find that there is an entire wing of the house in which people have been living that I'd forgotten about. Theresa of Avila talked about the rooms in God's house. Houses are a metaphor for the way you order your psyche.

The cleaner and more civilized the 1930's Germans got (they were the cultural heirs of Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller, Mann), the more they had to hide their shadow. Jews and Gypsies represented the unacknowledged side of the culture, and they were tidied away. Do these ideas apply to our homeless people? That there is a group for whom we have no room in our collective houses, that we want gone? I'm not sure about this. So far, the metaphor doesn't seem to hold gracefully. I'll know it's right by the aesthetic feel of it as much as by logic. But it's an example of the way we're brainstorming. A Brechtian thing.

Not that it's all intellectualizing. We've got some songs that are simmering along just under the level of working on them. Maybe in a few weeks, when we know where we want to head with all this.

3.September.04

I asked Bk to show me how to separate the style commands from the body of the blog. The eventual goal is to use a separate style sheet, which, I read, is the Wave of the Future. The new look here is the product of some friendly bickering between me and my son. I hope it was friendly.

Part of the argument was over tepid vs vivid colors. I like folk art a whole lot. Guatemalan embroidery, Cuna Indian molas, Chinese altars. Whee! Back when I didn't quite notice that colorful clothes screamed "hippie chick!" to the disapproving masses, I used to dress in Guatemalan huipiles, too.

About twenty years ago, my aunt Suzanne pointed out in a whisper to my mother, "Yulia dresses chust like Mutti, doesn't she? Zose brilliant colors. And ze schtripes!" She shook her head sadly. I was delighted. When I knew my German grandma, she was waiting to die. Her adored son had been killed in the last days of the war, and she never recovered. In 1962 she moved with her husband from Hamburg, where they had been respected intellectuals, to Los Angeles, where they couldn't say much past the "want eat" stage. I loved her gentleness, her valiant attempts to speak English to her foreign grandchildren, and her relentless committment to losing at cards, chess and Scrabble (after her death I found out that she was one of those people who never forgets a date, and who understands strategy in her bones). She had about four shabby dresses, since their German money couldn't be imported to the US and she had to depend on her struggling children to survive. One of the dresses was a silk peacock-turquoise thing. I totally loved it, and when she wore it, would leave off stroking her delicate papery skin to fondle her dress. It was a delight to find out, years after her death, that indeed, we share the same lurid tastes in color.

It's only gotten worse. My family is polite. The Spink occasionally even collaborates (our flamingo pink outhouse which Vruba bemoans was a Spink special. Although I should admit that I was the one who got the paint in the first place). But our culture as a whole has almost no tolerance for vivid colors, or vivid behavior, for that matter.

Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, wrote that the higher you go in American society, the whiter things get. My in-laws, who rose to near the top of America's banking world, have a house with mostly white drapes and carpeting. My mother-in-law dresses in greys and whites, her daughter in taupes and beiges.

My taste in colors is pretty tasteless. And, in a not unrelated thought, Bk exhorts me to keep improving my blog style. It will be a bit of a struggle. When he goes off to school, I'll be caught up in art projects and the daily swirl of life. Surfing for xhtml tips isn't really on the list. But I can see that he's right.

2.September.04

I've been composing music sort of clandestinely. There've been things that I am really doing, and then composing happens around the edges without my looking directly at it. I've been afraid to disturb the balance.

On the other hand, I want to get better at it. Not allowing myself to participate in the process probably was a good thing at the beginning, but I'm ready to consciously work on musicianship.

Went to a lesson on Orcas and was loaded down with piano music to try. I'd like to move my playing from slow and intellectual to fluent and intuitive. It seems as though that would be a good end in itself, but also that it might help in composing. So far, I compose by the phrase, rather than in big swooping shapes. Brian Odlum on Shaw points out that composing is more a matter of architecture than of individual notes.

I'm supposed to play scales, of course, through three octaves and in whatever keys I can do fluently. Since I'm a fiddler, that would be C, G, D, and A. Okay. Then, take Bach's Invention Nr 1 and a dumbed-down version of Gershwin's Summertime, play each hand separately, and then together. Try to work out an oom-pah accompaniment to Marmaduke's Hornpipe. That's been fun. And, being a compulsive do-er, after practice I end up writing a bit of a something, too. Sort of like doodling while talking on the telephone.

Synchronicity, for me, is a sign that I'm probably doing what I need to be doing. It's been both reassuring and exciting to get an invitation to write an opera with Kathy, whose picture you saw in the August entry on Cabaret Night. We spent a good part of this morning brainstorming titles, characters, and plot. And, in between, playing "Take Two," a jolly version of Scrabble in which you take two tiles at a time and try to add them to your arrangement. Scores ranged between 62 and 179, which probably illustrates something.

Then a late afternoon at the beach, singing with a group of friends and one stranger.

1.September.04

Young Bk started a blog. I like the kid's style. Hope he keeps going while in college. I will miss him.

Spent part of yesterday shepherding The Piano Player (see left, with David) through some pretty scary stuff. Since the contremps with his stepfather, he wisely decided not to live in Arlington. Community members came up with the idea that he go to Orcas Island High School. Where will he stay, though?

The OIHS people were very nice, especially considering that we arrived on the first day of school. Then, while he did the school thing, I nipped around town, networking. It's pretty lame, being a social misfit and trying to network. But there were several bites, and I think things will work out.

To bed very early, up same. Walked along the beach for COASST, looking for dead birds. A very soothing activity, especially since there were none. Dead birds, I mean.

But, of course, I ended up with an internal monologue directed against The Piano Player's stepfather's mindset. Which, I am supposing, on some evidence, is a fundamentalist Christian patriarchal one, based on the slogan, "Spare the rod, spoil the child."

I'm not a Bible scholar but I'm not an ignoramus, either. I think that the "rod" is actually a kind of guiding stick, like a rein across a horse's neck, used to tell a sheep where to go. Makes sense, that you would metaphorically use one of those on a child. Your basic sane shepherd would not beat a sheep; the sheep would panic and dash off in a random direction; trust me on this. From the 23rd Psalm: "Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." Same thing. Guidance would comfort somebody, a beating wouldn't.

So why would a whole generation of fundamentalists decide that the Bible tells them to muscle their kids around? And apparantly deliberately misinterpret the meaning of the word "rod?"

Think about the kids you know, especially the boys. By the time they're teens, they have the capacity to be really, really bad. If you know such a bad 'un, was he beaten by a parent? I bet the answer is yes. Actually, I tend to think that the worst parenting is the erratic kind, where sometimes the kid is beaten, and sometimes ignored, and sometimes courted, and they never know which will happen next. Despite such treatment (I am not ranting about his dad, understand, but about his stepdad), The Piano Player has kept his sense of humor and is developing gentlemanliness. I admire him. What's wrong with Mr. Christian Upright Citizen that he can't deal with this?