Memorial Day 2009

Two things related to remembering.

Carl and I drove to Elyria this weekend to visit Mom and Mary. Arrived late afternoon on Friday and got up early Saturday morning to go to the West Side Market in Cleveland. What a place! So old world.

The main market building, with beautiful convex tiled ceilings, a minaret type post at one corner and crowds bustling about, is an adventure in crowds, sights and smells. Meat vendors sell sausage, pigs feet, apple cured bacon, seafood, pasties and sandwiches. Each shop inside is marked by a glazed terra cotta marker. G12, H6.

We all split up, C and I right off stopped for a brat with sauerkraut after strolling through the produce market. It was all too tempting. Bought too much and so overstuffed the car on the way home today. Berries, melon, pineapple, chiles rellenos, fried rice. Dangerous, dangerous! We also bought fixings for a delicious dinner last night. Fresh pasta, sauce and sausage. Edye came over and we had a lovely meal.

On the way out of the market, I noticed a small group of demonstrators, standing vigil against the wars -- if that's what you can call them -- in Iraq and Afghanistan. One was a Vietnam vet. I took some video but what I emailed from my cell phone  is about two seconds long. Basically, they are there every day, to remind people of the sacrifices and cost of our efforts in those places.

Second thing. Listening to the radio on the way home, in range of Pittsburgh's WDVE FM station, the DJ played a request for Richie Havens' "Handsome Johnny," anthem to young soldiers who go to fight old mens' wars. I had never heard it before.

A third thing. I remember my Dad and my brother, Chris. Dad was gone just before Memorial Day in 1995 and Chris not too long after in 2005.

 Your loss always makes me melancholy this time of year. We had a wonderful dinner out with Dad at Jim's before he died and a great Memorial Day party with Chris and Edye six weeks before Chris, too was gone. I miss both of you more than I can say.

And to all others: Thank you. And I wish you all were home and had never been away.

Pix and places

India photo first: I have so many, I'm just going to keep inserting them. This is me with Kim's friend Deepa Shah, during our outing to the fascinating Chandni Chowk bazaar in Delhi. I have my Flip camera, the better to film Kim, who was in the rickshaw behind us. Deepa was a great guide! She negotiated the rickshaw fares, took us in to the Sikh temple and found a hole in the wall snack shop for us to grab a delicious bite in. As we ate, I asked her for the name of the place. She looked around, shrugged and said (with a laugh) "I don't know, but it's in all the guidebooks." All I can say is, as you enter Chandni Chowk from the Red Fort, it's not too far in, and on your left. Good luck!

Onward

I work with creative people and we like to share links to cool sites. Most, if not all, are design oriented and I hope to become more adept at finding well written and edited sites. Here is a compilation of design, writing and quirkiness (in no particular order, except the first one, Mysterion, which I just came across today, is most definitely quirky).  Maggie Taylor is awesome! And the Ron Morgan site is truly elegant.

Mysterion

Maggie Taylor

Sappi

Ron Morgan 

And here are two Amy sites: Fabric artist Amy Butler and photographer Amy Parrish. AB is in Granville, Ohio (beautiful home of Denison University) and AP is not too far away, about 30? miles to the west in Columbus, (home of my alma mater, The Ohio State University). 

Amy Butler

Amy Parrish

Finally, this is the What is Blik site, where you can buy neat, fun, elegant, playful and cheesy decals for the walls in your home. Cheaper than painting! And, speaking as someone whose dining room has been a mess for months because I've taken on a painting project that I only get back too  intermittently: FASTER!

On the bus

By way of prelude, I am trying to start every morning with a deep, centering breath – not when I wake up, because that's usually "Oh crap, I slept past the alarm" – but when the girls and I finally get out into the park for our morning walk. This time of year, the centering breath is easy because all is fresh and green and birds are singing and the park is, but for the bird song, quiet. So we walk and I listen and breathe and try to prepare myself for the day. Do your best. Be kind and patient. Listen and be thoughtful. And try to keep that cranky, critical, judgmental person that I live with on the sidelines.

It's a good exercise. It doesn't always work fully, but it does have the effect of making me a mindful person for the day. I'm learning to shake off crankiness (mostly, some crankiness is good, and after all part of who I am!) and remember that when irritation creeps in that's a good signal to stop and think.

So, why the prelude?

Took the bus to work today; it leaves the bottom of Mayfair at about 7:50 and gets Downtown 30 minutes later. Plenty of time to ready the paper, watch people or drowse. Usually I start reading the Wall Street Journal but if I haven't had enough sleep, I put my head against the window.

Today I had good coffee and despite sleeping late, wasn't sleepy. I sat in the back of the bus, higher up than the front seats, and watched the traffic inch alongside us on Banksville Road. I saw these drivers (A lot of them in Honda Civics):

One woman steering with her knees and filing her nails.

One man in a crisp white shirt and tan khakis and tie talking on a cellphone.

One man in blue scrubs going over a stapled report.

One woman driving and holding a Starbucks cup talking to her passenger, also holding a Starbucks cup.

One woman eating Yoplait yogurt.

One woman with a cell phone in her lap.

Another man in scrubs, just driving.

All I could see was from shoulders to laps to knees.

So, what I'm getting back to is, my first immediate reaction is: "Why is no one paying attention? Why so many cars with only one person in them? Why aren't you people on the bus (where passengers also are variously occupied, but at least the driver isn't)?

Then, well, it's none of my business. I wish it weren't so, but, not my call.

Is that wimpy? Pragmatic?

Perhaps the better question is why is there  not a better public transportation system in the United States. And what, besides using the one I have, can I do about it.

How's that for 180 degrees from start to finish? 

A last word, I hope to have a new camera soon. This blog seems so incomplete without photographs. There are some especially beautiful flowers, leaves and fungus in the park. Not to mention two beautiful greyhounds.

Spring quarter snapshots

May has been exceptionally beautiful this year. Azaleas, tulips, iris, daffodils all have been brilliant. And such cool weather. The season has been more fall than spring with grey skies, chilly days and rain, or at least the promise of it and garish white,slanting sunlight

I'm bereft without my camera. This evening in the park, I saw an elegant, plate-like fungus growing in a rotted-out hole in a tree. It had broadly ruffled edges and a creamy white concave surface speckled with brown. I wanted to photograph it.

Why? I have digital volumes of photographs of beautiful flowers and scenes that sit, unopened, unexamined, uncaptioned mostly forgotten, on my computer, on Shutterfly, on Picasa.

I am a digital hoarder. Perhaps the best camera is my mind. There, I can sum up any image at will, caption and context included.  Truthfulness is a whole other matter, given the unreliability of memory. But, it's all I've got.

The Ohio State alumni magazine came the other day, and it included a package on memories of High Street. Horrible, ugly layout. But so fun to read the descriptions of places that once were so alive to me. Pearl Alley. Oar House. The Castle. Quisno's (the original, and I worked there). The student union, in its beautiful mid-century terrazo floor and bronze stair rail glory, before being uglified. I remember a gyro place  and a record store on North High, plus a really tiny hole-in-the-wall jewelry store near where Lane Pharmacy was. (I still have a necklace I bought there.) The Blue Danube. Larry's. Thirsty I. Can't believe some of those places are still around. 

My best memory is of my best friend, Heidi, and I, sitting on a curb one spring quarter not too long before graduation, watching High Street traffic go by, elbows on our knees and just talking talking talking. Somewhere by where the movie theater was.

We had our whole lives ahead of us. It was so lovely to be young.

Humble Pie

OK, before we get to tonight's subject matter, can I (and I am sure I write for so many!) just say how utterly exhausted I am by having to join a site seemingly every time I want information on the Web? This is where the Internet will fail. I have index cards, thickly covered with scribbled user names and passwords, that are my online life. What if I ever lose them? (Reason for rant: Found an old friend on Spoke. Can I just email her from there? No, have to join, download Outlook, blah blah. Joined, then remembered. I have Heidi's phone number. Easy. Pick up phone. Dial. Talk. Or leave message.)

Screw you, Spoke and all your ilk!

Oh, and my password?

Its: p29rsdfanr9q9qq8ds87t233s;vjss/fldgnqhzh;a/rmtrgaroty.

In case anyone asks.

Deep breaths.

What was driven home to me in India, and which I did not address nearly enough, was, and is, an awareness of the poverty of my knowledge about the history of the rest of the world. I did mention it briefly in an earlier post, and have found, now that I am back, I have a real interest and desire to learn India's history.

But it isn't just travel that opens your eyes to your own ignorance. It takes only a bit of observation of the world around you.

One example. Dogs and I are walking this evening, and, now that the days are longer, we dally, to make up for all those short strolls in the dead of winter. A miniscule glint of spring-leaf green, swaying, catches my eyes as we enter the park. Hanging by an invisible thread is an iridescent, tiny caterpillar, trying, I think, to pull itself up along this invisible thread, swaying all the while in the most delicate breath of a breeze. 

This creature curls and pulls itself up, again and again, then stops, seemingly exhausted. Being human, I stop to watch (eyeglasses resting down at the bottom of my nose). Then, again being human, I interfere. I pick up a small twig and touch it to the green swayer.

No. Get away, its body language says. I drop the twig, watch for a few more moments and the girls (most patient beasts!) and I walk away, leaving this beautiful small creation to its task.

What was this little creature and what was it doing? I have no idea, and multiply that by so much and the sum is both awe-inspiring and embarrassing. More math: Multiply me by billions and you have a sum that must be quite a negative number for our planet. The beasts and the bugs live only as nature programs them. They have no greed, lust or passion. Only an imperative to continue on. Blessedly, they have no capacity for questioning it.

And here we are, living among these survivors, not questioning, but demanding accommodation. With our wonderful brains, I would think that we would be the ones who could accommodate our habits to our planet-mates.

If you've read along this far, you might appreciate this article by Leon Kreitzman that appeared recently in The New York Times. He (much as I dislike the word) deconstructs how warming changes the food chain from bottom to top, in a very small section of it.

Observe and report. If we all pay more attention, perhaps we all will take more care.

Welcome back!

Well. I have been busy catching up to "la vie quotiedienne" while frenzying myself at work writing a main piece and sidebar for the paper's Sunday Magazine section about my trip to India. I wrote it, then rewrote it and somehow felt I was not capturing the essence of my adventure as well as I did here. After a last rewrite, I think it turned out well, but the process was exhausting. (Update: Published articles on May 2. Got good feedback and only a couple negative emails. Had a voicemail from a woman who called from India  to thank my for  capturing her country so well. Wow. Thank you! And I wish you had left a phone number or email). But only an OK job. I wrote what I saw, with benefit of tour book prep work, not good background.

Here is the link

Should I have the opportunity for such a trip again, (and I plan to) I would work harder at my photography. Kim and I talked about this a bit while I was there. Digital cameras make it almost too easy; you don't have to pay as much attention to lighting, framing, composition. Just snap, review and if you've got it wrong, delete and try again. About my old Canon SLR, which began acting up on the trip Mom and I took to Paris in 2006: I miss the solid chunk kind of sound it made when the shutter button is pressed. I could feel it, so solid and firm, like the sound of a door in a well-made car slamming shut. The sound of every tiny part fitting together solidly.

I still have the Canon. Carl bought it for me years ago as a present and I have enjoyed using it, if not lugging it around, for all that time. I took it to a repair shop on the North Side after the Paris trip and, at first, it appeared that the only remedy needed was new batteries. It worked fine after that for a while, but then the shutter button again began to refuse to engage.

I hate the thought of giving it up, but I will take it back for one more shot at repairs. It's a dying technology (no doubt to be resurrected in 20 years, just like vinyl records and turntables are being resurrected today) but I grew up with it, loved it, and for a while took some pretty good photographs with it. In the pantheon of great gifts, it has a nice high place.

I had thought I would miss so much of spring by being gone at the end of March and the beginning of April, but there were still daffodils to greet me when I came home and pretty tulips that came up a week later. The lilacs are in their full, fragrant glory, but I am going to have them taken down this year. They are in a prominent place in front of the house and, while they are lovely now, for the rest of the year they will look raggedy, with mildewy leaves and not much structural presence. For as many tear sheets in notebooks that I have, depicting beautiful, serene gardens, I haven't matched that look on my own property. I fall victim to instant enthusiasm in plants, buying shrubs and flowers that are beautiful, but that I have no place for. So my garden, such as it is, is a hodge-podge.

Am trying to change that this year. Fewer flowers, green shrubs for screens. We will buy an umbrella for our now exposed patio, the porch covering it having been removed in February. The garden redo will be a summer-long process, of course. I shall look at it this way: Excellent cardio opportunity!