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Spring!

4/6/2019

There is a phenomenon called The Green Flash. This is a mysterious event that happens just at the moment when the top of the solar disk just touches the horizon at either dawn or dusk. It can only be seen in very flat topography – an ocean will do. To see it you need to be looking at the exact moment of sunup or sundown, so you will need to be up and attentive and staring at the horizon as the sky slowly turns from black to grey and then a red smear will appear and widen and start creeping up the sky and then there is orange and yellow – keep looking – and it becomes brighter as your eyes become dry and gritty and then you blink and you've missed it. Or you could try it from the other end of the day when you drift to the rail, margarita in hand, and watch as the sun slowly lowers itself into the sea. In this case by the time you get to the green flash stage you will be blind from staring into the sun all that time and will also miss it, but at least you will have that margarita.
Spring is like that. You really have to pay attention or you will miss it.
As winter grinds on and the boots accumulate in the entryway and the pockets of your warmest coat begin to bulge with chapsticks and cough drops and wadded-up Kleenexes and unmatched mittens and you are driving into town in late January barely able to see over the top of your wooly scarf, you may notice a tree whose buds seem larger, more optimistic than they were last time you drove by. It's easy to convince yourself of this. Then in February maybe you'll see some ducks on the rare patch of open water on the river that weren't there last week. And before you know it, the open water place loses its ice cover entirely and it doesn't grow back. Then there is an occasional open patch on a wind-scoured field. And then the cardinals are singing and the tiny birds are squabbling and your car starts without that mournful growl you have grown used to. Then there is a fly on the kitchen window, a larder beetle in the sink and one lone mosquito which you immediately crush. Coons start enjoying your bird feeder. The ducks are humping like minks and the geese are eying one another affectionately. All the dirt roads are nearly impassable owing to potholes whose breadth and depth are sufficient to swallow a small car if not a school bus.
But you keep watching while the buds really do fatten up, and the willows become yellow and the mud grows deep and glutinous before it finally drains and solidifies into deep ruts inviting the passer-by to take a graceless pratfall.
Then one glorious day you open the back door and a cloud of goldfinches scatter. You step out in your shirtsleeves and take a long breath of that intoxicating heavy, sweet, green smell that signals the arrival of spring. You walk out among the flower beds, hyperventilating as you go, looking for signs of life and are not disappointed. Even the weeds are beautiful in spring. The brave little crocuses are up. Something you planted last year is showing signs of life although you can't actually remember what it is. You take a long, happy lungfull of that heady spring smell before going off to the shed to find all your trowels and rakes and wagons and shovels.
So there you are for three or four days purging last year's detritus and spreading mulch, smiling at the bulbs that have made a flower for you, saying kind things to the lilacs that are busy making tiny leaves and pausing often to enjoy the warm sun on your back, listen to the cheerful prattle of all the little birds in the woods trying to lead the ladies astray. You feel so benevolent even the chipmunks are cute.
You dig a little flower bed thinking “Delphiniums here.” You get the vegetable garden more or less ready, weed the perennials, spread mulch hither and yon. “An amur maple there, an Alberta spruce up there. A bank of zinnias by the patio. Another peony near the trellis.” Ambitious plans for massive modifications.
Then one day it rains. A nice warm rain but wet all the same, so no digging. Actually a welcome interlude allowing aching muscles to recover. Then next day it's still wet so you spend the day planning where to put another bed and where to put the cucumbers this year.
Then the next day it is 27º and humid. The mosquitos are out and the coons have inexplicably dug a large hole in the garden. The chipmunks have been ferreting around in the perennial bed and a good third of the seedlings have damped off.
Spring is over.
This is not to say that summer lacks appeal. Who doesn't like to kick back on the plastic furniture engaging in idle gossip and soaking up lemonade before ambling down to the water for another paddle up the river, down the river, and back to the lemonade. Or watching those hardy plants that survived their infancy turn into whatever they're supposed to be. Summer is good but it lacks the ecstasy of those few sublime dream days that connect the poles of our year. So transcendent and so brief.
Like the green flash.

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The Evolution of a Bucket

4/6/2019

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When I was five I wanted to fly. Not in an airplane – just me in my red plaid pajamas. And I wanted angel food cake as a steady diet, and I wanted an electric train like the one my cousin, Bill, had, and I wanted cowboy boots and I wanted to spend all day Sunday over in my grandfather's orchard riding around on my father's shoulders eating peaches and dribbling the juice into his hair. My entire bucket list would have fit right in my little red patent leather purse with room to spare.
By the time I was ten my horizons had broadened. I had heard of other places and had memorized their capitols. I had seen pictures of their camels and igloos and sea-going canoes. My bucket filled with longing to stroke the camels and ride the waves in those canoes. The list grew with each new thing I learned or read. I dreamt of visiting Smallville, Africa, Barsoom, Peking, Shangri-La, Australia, Narnia, New York, Pellucidar, the Rocky Mountains. I now knew, of course, that you couldn't fly without an airplane just as surely as I knew that I would never actually get to go to any of these wonderful places which were all equally real and unattainable.
My parents had been to Europe and brought back stuff, so I knew it was real, but all those other places I had to take on faith. I had seen Nebraska on the television featuring the Lone Ranger and, more importantly, Tonto, so I thought there was a good chance it was real and I could imagine myself flashing across its vast flat emptiness on a pinto pony with a hunting party of noble redskins, and I had seen Oz in a book in the library, so who knew whether the yellow brick road might not be gladdening the lives of some exotic folk in a distant highland.
As time and life moved on, desiderata were added and removed in a constant turnover reflecting new information and changes in my own tastes and resources. I gave up all hope of a cloak of invisibility and a trip to Barsoom and added instead an African safari, a trip to a coral reef. In general for everything I took off the list, I put two more things on. My poor list slowly became such a tangled mess of erasures and cross-outs it was hard to keep track of what I had included and what I had excluded. It seemed that the more I did the more I wanted to do. I wanted to travel everywhere. I wanted to speak 20 languages and go somewhere to speak them. I wanted to learn how to make things. I wanted to gain artistic skills. I wanted to have a Really Breathtaking garden.
I actually tried some of these things. I took courses in Japanese, went on an animal tour in Botswana, knitted half a sweater, made 6 or 8 indifferent paintings and some lopsided pottery, grew a lush plot of drought-resistant weeds, and finally realized that I hadn't added anything to that wretched list in a while. In fact it had stopped increasing some time ago, and was now growing smaller.
I thought about this and one day it came to me that for 20 years, the number one spot was occupied by “Move back to Canada” which had not been possible for much of that time, but suddenly I had been released and had now moved back to Canada. So now I was looking around for the new top spot and realizing that many of the follow-up projects had been achieved while I was obsessively focussed on Canada. Meanwhile air travel had graduated from short-term discomfort to full-blown nightmare. I no longer wanted to populate my house with any more half-completed crafts. There was really nothing I badly wanted that I didn't already have.
So I bundled up that ungainly heap of once-thrilling ideas and stuffed it into the wood stove and sat down with an index card to revise my list which now includes:
Have a nice garden
Learn to play Euchre
Find a reliable contractor.
I have already started on the first of these by planting a few tomato seeds and weeding the peonies, but the others? Well, 33% is better than nothing.

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My Past and Future Lives

4/6/2019

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My name was Herring Snapper. This is a really awkward translation along the lines of Cross-eyed Girl Who Was Born on a Wet Tuesday rather than Harracom. I can't tell you what my real name was because you can't speak Porpoise. And for that matter, now that I have transmigrated into this new shell, neither can I, but I remember it. It was a lovely name, and apt as I was very fond of herring.
It seems that some things don't come with us as we move from husk to husk, as I am not all that fond of herring today.
Oh, how I loved herring clouds when millions of those flashing, dashing little creatures could be rounded up into a sparkling, writhing ball and then you'd plunge into the middle of it, the flash of their dancing, silver bodies surreal, hypnotic. But then you'd come out the other side with a mouthful, and then do it again and again, in brisk competition with the gannets, whales, and any other hungry passers-by. Plenty for all until it was gone and the sea was empty again. Then, well-fed and content we'd cruise away toward nowhere in particular, looking for our next meal, but without urgency.
Then there were the storms. We kept low as much as we could, and moved away toward calmer seas, where the wind wasn't so cruel. We had to get a breath of air from time to time and that moment, breaking the roiling surface, could be frightening, but also exhilarating in an odd way. It was only a moment of exposure to the surface tumult and then a return to the serenity of the deep. The whole sea throbbed at the height of the storm, like someone beating on a drum full of water.
I miss all that. I miss being able to travel in 3 dimensions, fast and slow and then stop, rest, and look around, suspended. Such total freedom. Then arcing up out of the water and splashing back down, a whole different intoxication.
I remember all this, but only in my dreams. I like to think I was skillful and triumphant in the choreographed hunting parties they talk about on nature shows, but I am at best an indifferent team player now, and maybe that was a carry-over from last time.
As for my next iteration, I have looked around at possibilities and there are not a lot of really attractive ones.
I would love to step into the life of a snow leopard. Such grace. Such beauty. But so near extinction. I would hate to start life on those rugged mountain slopes, the royalty of the crags, only to be brought low by a Russian poacher and my beautiful fur sold to clothe some fat capitalist's tacky mistress.
Or an elephant. Another target of our bloodthirsty species, but perhaps a fighting chance, except for the dangers of climate change. It's worth considering. I would love to be able to make those deep throaty sounds they use to chat with their friends miles away. Or to stroll across the veldt ripping up trees and striking terror in the hearts of lions and leopards and such.
All of the conspicuously fun creatures are at the mercy of the Almighty Us, and we are not going to relinquish our murderous ways, so what else is there? Preferably something we cannot or will not extinguish. Preferably something intelligent.
I don't fancy being an insect. Too many legs and no sign of a philosophical bent.
And not pigeons: too stupid and too twitchy for a good conversation.
A cat? A dog? This is a bit of a gamble. There's a chance of landing a Really Nice life. Loving home with silken pillows and chopped liver, or at least food and a warm floor, but sometimes pet owners get carried away with surgical alterations and euthanasia, not to mention the perils of life in the alleys if the coin toss is unfortunate. There you would have to deal with other hungry residents like larger strays, junkies, rats and what not. Best to steer clear of that world, and that pretty well leaves rats or coyotes.
Back when I lived in Vermont, there was a small patch of woodland up behind my house that played host to a family of coyotes. Every year the local macho men, including some women, would stomp through the woods in their camo and insect spray, clutching their semiautomatics and searching these creatures out because they were attacking their cows. This was nonsense, of course, but it gave them an excuse to shoot something. Right after the annual purge the chipmunk population would blossom. I have a parka with a coyote fur ruff around the hood as a reminder of their vulnerability. So not a coyote, then.
Rats. Rats get a bad rap. They only spread disease if the disease is there to begin with. They can be friendly and fun if given the chance, and they are clever little fellows as is clearly demonstrated by their tweaking the noses of those who wish them ill. It's true their life expectancy even under ideal conditions is pretty short, but it might be a good way station between now and what's next.
So if one day after I have waddled off into The Great Mystery, you hear a gnawing under your porch, be kind. Put a bit of hot dog out by the garage.
And thank you.

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Crime in our Times

4/6/2019

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I have been a great fan of Cops & Robbers shows for as long as there has been television. When I was a young thing back in the 50s, the dawn of the boob tube, our channel broadcast Dame Agatha's “And Then There Were None” on 3 consecutive nights, the way they would do it at a movie theater. It all started there, and then moved right along through Dragnet, Peter Gunn, Perry Mason, Hawaii Five-O, Miami Vice, Columbo, Law & Order and so forth and so on.

They are comfortable shows. With few exceptions there is only one story. There are Malefactors who engage in Villainy and are pursued by Paladins who catch them.

The success of this formula lies in the variety of possibilities within the 3 components. For example the Malefactor might be the butler, the stockbroker, the hood with the scraggly beard, the parson, a street gang, a fraternity, the dimple-cheeked secretary; any person or persons imaginable, especially considering the broad compass of possible felonies to choose from. Murder is the recurring favorite since within its embrace lies such multifarious means and motives, as opposed to, say, bank robbery which involves a bank, a lot of money, and somebody who wants it. There is scant opportunity for interesting embellishment here.

But even confined to that single assault on societal etiquette, there is a wide range of styles in the act and the telling, and like all styles, the current vogue is an evanescent thing and quickly replaced by a new and often more extreme version.

There is almost no aspect of society that has not changed in the 60 years since the first attempts at criminal investigation in 45-minute bites, and the character of these hebdomadal dramas has morphed in parallel. For example, back in the 50s when Mom stayed home and baked tuna casseroles for her husband and well-behaved children, the paladins were brave, honest, clean-shaven, officers with clean fingernails who would never do anything mean except in defense of women and children and the Malefactors were sloppy dressers, lousy shots with a pistol, occupied the 40th percentile in their graduating class, and would stop when Joe Friday shouted “Stop! Police!” The felonies in this distant time were inoffensive felonies like off-screen murder or a genteel jewel theft or somesuch. The only women were Madge, the faithful secretary, or an occasional weepy victim, pathetically grateful for the intervention of The Law.

As time went on, the dress code slipped and our heroes started turning up wearing T-shirts under their sports jackets, there were on-screen fights and we got to see the dead guys. The women were still either secretaries (not yet office managers or administrative assistants) or victims, but tending to favor plunging necklines and D-cups.

Finally the dress code deteriorated to where the Officers of the Law are indistinguishable from the gang members, fights and shootings are commonplace and frequently accompanied by a red mist, and the attack squads have abandoned blue serge for black commando outfits with Kevlar vests. They are armed with any number of automatic firearms and pockets full of grenades, mace, tasers, space age electronic stuff allowing them to track their quarry through concrete walls, and communication systems that make NASA look like they use orange juice tins and fishing line.

Quite apart from the questionable pleasure of following our societal history reflected in amusing stories of violent death and mayhem, there is a considerable entertainment value in picking out the imbecilities that are also a perennial feature of this genre.

Consider, the ace police detective, in pursuit of a known and dangerous felon, enters the dark, empty warehouse and makes his way into a warren of offices, storerooms, and piles of boxes. Nobody else is there, except the felon, of course, who has had the good sense to wear sneakers and is making his stealthy way to the back door. Our detective, meanwhile, having worn his hard-soled office shoes is signaling his passage with the unmistakable scritch scritch scritch of hard shoes on a concrete floor until he finally gets a bead on the felon and takes off running, klop klop klop, up the stairs, across the metal catwalk, past crates and barrels. Meanwhile the felon finally gets to the door and crashes through it into the waiting arms of a small crowd of beat cops on patrol who just happened to be in the neighborhood looking for somebody's lost cat.

A variant on this theme is the lady detective, finally allowed out of the typing pool, but still the plunging neckline, and, more importantly, the 3-inch heels, which she always wears when some young, fit drug dealer needs to be pursued down allies and over fences. Fortunately she has mad martial arts skills and when she finally catches up with him in a dead end full of dumpsters, after an initial shootout she easily flips him over and slaps on the cuffs while her overweight partner comes puffing in late scolding her for not waiting for back-up.

And then there are the flashlights. The paladins kick down the door and irrupt into somebody's house, guns at the ready and flashlights darting about. But not a single one of the dozen infiltrators thinks to switch on the lights.

Or there's a dead guy laid out in the desert at high noon, surrounded by emergency people wearing glacier glasses against the intense light, all except the crime scene people who are probing the area with penlights.
And then there's the inescapable interviews with people who knew the deceased who had died a horrible death involving hatchets and ropes and chainsaws, and the first question out of the mouth of the interrogator is “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt Maisie?” Hurt? Really?

I still enjoy these crime dramas and am always happy to sit down with a CSI rerun or one of the newly fashionable coroner shows in which people who are supposed to be looking at stiffs and thinking about what might have killed them are out tearing around the countryside in black SUVs annoying suspects and finding clues that the lazy quarter-wits conducting the investigation have missed. However, the source of my pleasure in these silly stories is waiting for the inevitable nonsense and then preening at my great cleverness at discovering it.

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Visiting the 50s

4/6/2019

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I have a project. The plan is to organize the boxes of completely randomized detritus stacked in the basement. The last box I opened had apparently not been explored for almost half a century. As I pulled stuff out of it, old photos, dead batteries, college souvenirs and snapshots from scarce remembered vacation trips, moldy mementos from a long-dead courtship, a miasma of memory farts filled the air. Tiny bursts of recollection like snapshots yellowed and curled. Digging clams barefoot in the tidal flats. The huge black and yellow spiders in the flower garden. The snort of the horses when I came to let them out on a winter morning. The smell of the oak trees surrounding the Buckingham Friends School where I attended grades 1 through 8.

Both Mrs. Rowe and I started first grade together, she fresh from teachers college, I newly graduated from kindergarten. I fell ill with appendicitis one day which scared the wits out of her, but we both survived the experience.

Mrs. Stetson taught the second grade. She didn't like my handwriting, the first in a long line of critics with a similar view.

Miss Yole had third grade. I sat next to Laurie who drew people with square feet.

In fourth grade Mr. Rowe taught us how to make anemometers out of paper cups, and barometers out of bottles of water (I forget how they worked). We measured humidity with a long hair glued to a stick and read biographies of notable historical figures, such as Squanto, out of orange books that were new and smelled nice.

Then there was fifth grade which was commanded by Mrs Haines who was magnificent. As I understand her story, pieced together from many sources over several decades, she was married to a man who proved to be unsatisfactory in some way. Maybe a drunk, or an abuser, or a gambler. In any case, she gave him the boot, took her 2 daughters, and moved back to her family's farm where she lived until the infirmities of great age took her to a nursing home where she ended her days among nurses, doctors, and other residents who loved and admired her.

But before that happened, she was a young mother with no marketable skills who needed money. Back in those distant times you didn't need to have a college degree or even teacher training in order to become a teacher, so that is what she set out to do. As a birthright Quaker I imagine she had little difficulty getting a test run from the local Quaker school, and so it was that she came to the Buckingham Friends School where she enriched the lives of hundreds of 10-12-year-olds over 4 decades.

When I first knew her she seemed old and huge and scary. In fact, she was probably in her 40s, short and solid and only seemed scary because she didn't bother with the perky false cheerfulness people use with children. Instead she spoke to us with the seriousness of one grown-up to another. Heady stuff. She was the very embodiment of “gravitas.” She was one of the last people to use the Quaker plain speak referring to us as “thee” which may have been part of her mystique. Those students she didn't terrify adored her.

She imposed discipline by allowing us to believe that she was omniscient and all-powerful. One of the methods she used to achieve this was to know who had gotten up to what. So when a window was broken or somebody had put caterpillars in the principle's car, she would collar some child on the way to recess who might well have done it, but probably not, and declare “This is a very bad thing thee has done!” The chosen child would then scamper off, protesting innocence, find out who had done it, and report back in a timely manner. Of course neither the snitch nor Mrs. Haines ever breathed a word about the arrangement, and so it was that justice was done and Mrs. Haines's reputation as omnipotent was maintained.

When not involved in law enforcement, she told us about dragon flies and volcanoes and acorns and thrushes and pollywogs. Squirrels and possums and worms. She drilled us in math and introduced us to algebra, geometry, and kindness.

In the end, though, the most important gift I received from Mrs. Haines was the importance of “Why?” There is no more important or powerful question and it can and should be applied to everything.

Why is that politician saying that?
Why is the car making that noise.
Why is that a good (or bad) thing?
Why are there so many mice this year?
Why do I dislike that person
...or like the other one?
Why did I save all this crap?

Well, I have an answer to the last one. When I was a young thing, I thought 5 years was forever, and so looking at school photos from that long ago was sort of like opening a Pharaoh's tomb. And so I put stuff like that into time capsules of a sort, bundles with rubber bands around them, to amuse my future self, although I could not, at the time, have conceived of the amount of time that has passed to reach this moment. But being both a packrat and a casual housekeeper, a truly beatable combination, I find my elderly self thanking my larval stage for this dusty gift of a window to a distant world I once knew.

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The View from the Periphery

Spring!

The Evolution of a Bucket

My Past and Future Lives

Crime in our Times

Visiting the 50s

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