Sunday, April 26, 2009

with a broad brush

The abrupt change of seasons couldn't have come at a better time. Lately I've been living for the weekend, and this was a convincing argument in favor of that generally misguided attitude. It began with breakfast on the patio, of course, an indulgence that is worth many undone chores.

Shortly after Gven came home from her morning classes, I went to a drum circle at the rec center and reconnected with that creative, loosely cohesive group. Pretty soon they will begin congregating outside in the park, and that will likely change the dynamics considerably, which might be a good thing.

The backyard potluck for a men's group member visiting from Santa Fe was comfortable like an old pair of shoes. The presence of spouses and significant others makes it a very different gathering from our serious weeknight meetings. One of the guys had just come back from ten days in Russia; another is about to move to Arizona. I think we will stay in touch.

Next morning: coffee and fruit on the patio with the Times. Must get a jump on the weeds. Maybe I can place the trunk of a spruce tree along the edge of the vegetable beds as a border. Eventually I'll move stacks of sticks to the woodshed for next year's kindling.

It's about time to change out the compost with shovel and rake, the first stage of soil prep in the veggie beds. There are bare spots where something should be growing, and there are crowded spots that need to be thinned. In other words, I will move things around. I have big plans, but here I sit.

This is the hands-on, labor-intensive, time-consuming part of spring when the forces of earth and sky won't wait. Groundcovers are jumping out of the ground from all that rain and all this sunshine, and so are their competitors the wild things humans call weeds.

I'm the new sheriff in town. It's my job to eliminate some of the competition and make it easier for the more privileged sentient beings to flourish. Maple seedlings, dandelions, and wild strawberry are deported to the compost; ajuga, vinca, and lamium have their green cards.

So I did a little of this and a little of that and kicked the big projects down the road. Painting the garage will take three weekends and counting. Gven put a coat of primer on the side today. The mysterious door-shaped piece of sheet metal was removed, revealing nothing but perfectly good wood siding underneath.

Nobody said this was going to be the most efficient farm on the prairie, but it has to resonate with a rhyme or reason for this or any project to make any improvizational sense. Today was like a dab or two on the coarse fibrous canvas, hardly enough to make a dent.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

My Face Goes to a Class Reunion

I took the bait. Now my life is an open Facebook.

It was relatively easy at first to put my mug shot out there in the vast global social network, with limited exposure to intersecting circles of family and friends. I could be as guarded or as candid as I wanted to be, and my standard profile information likely wouldn't shock anyone. Or would it? And if it did, what difference would it make?

As my Friends list grew longer, I was contacted by more cousins and in-laws, more co-workers and churchfolk, and the game began to change a bit. I see more posts I don't understand from more people I don't know very well. But that's life in the big networking digital city, and maybe that's the purpose - to extend beyond the circle of the known. I can choose to pay attention to them or not, to respond in kind or not, and if anyone wants to write inside jokes or inane stuff, that's their business.

I think I've kept my own inappropriate comments to a minimum, at least I haven't received any restraining orders yet. Nor have I made contact with any mysterious strangers, long-lost friends, or agents whose only desire is to publish my collected works.

On the contrary, my creative output has dwindled from the usual ten blog entries a month - or about 10,000 words - to a cryptic one-liner every couple of days. As the noted author and Twitter critic Shaquille O'Neal has said, "What can you say in 140 characters?" Yes, well, first you have to have something to say. That's always been the would-be writer's hang-up: all dressed up and nowhere to go.

But that's not really point anyway. Facebook is not about writing, yet it has the potential to thwart writing, especially if one hangs out there when one would/could/should be expressing the Great Ideas of Midwestern Civilization here at Istandcorrected. Ahem. Where was I?

So in the throes of Facebook, I started to get email from the Wylie E. Groves High School Class Reunion Committee, aka The Big People. Since I was on the mailing list, the messages included exhortations to participate in the reunion process as well as photos of fellow members of the class of '69. My multiple reactions of fascination, repulsion, and ambivalence have surprised me a bit, though they are probably typical.

A few faces I've seen on the reunion web site are just as familiar 40 years later as they were back in the best of times, or was it the worst of times, whatever that tale of two suburbs was. Other people I wouldn't have recognized without the caption. I suppose it's typical for those of us with a certain amount of "seasoning" to alternate between "You haven't changed a bit" and "Whoa, you look completely different."

A few photos have been quite touching. To see someone I knew at 18 standing beside their 25-year-old kids, or to see their parents as they are now, is quite remarkable.

Inevitably, someone created a Facebook Group for our graduating class and invited the other 600 souls to join it and do the Facebook thing. So I took the plunge; it felt like a plunge to disclose my profile of trivialities to the peers I most wanted to impress 40 years ago. Still in need of validation, still not really an adult, it's strange to revisit that adolescent intersection this far down the line.

So far I've been in real, authentic, personal Facebook contact with only one high school friend. She happened to be the copyeditor of the school paper when I was sports editor, so maybe that's the link. We were not close friends back then, and we've gone in widely different directions since, but it has been very interesting to get a Facebook-sized glimpse inside her world. I don't know if she will make the trip to Detroit from Los Angeles in July, and I doubt whether I will either. I think I prefer it at a distance.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Happy Accidents

The warmest day of the year so far called for breakfast on the patio with sunglasses and the Style section of last Sunday's paper. The neighbors were tearing down an old shed, but I was too absorbed in the sun hitting my face to notice. I cleaned up the kitchen, did a little yard work, and lunch was also on the patio, with another section of the paper. Bread dough rises in a bowl on the tile table in the sun. Life is good.

I started scraping old paint off the back side of the garage, not a bad job if you don't mind a little elbow grease in alternating arms - wax on, wax off - and it's kind of satisfying to smooth out a rough, peeling 80-year-old coat of dark brown paint, getting the point of the scraper down into the grooves between the boards right down to the naked wood. I took a turn scraping, then Gven took a turn while I took a break to knead the bread. Gven is the resident painter, so I will leave the fun part - priming and painting - to her.

Zelda came over for dinner, so I had to stop scraping to start a fire in the Weber, which has survived another winter out in the weather, though its days are numbered. We grilled turkey burgers, but first we grilled Zelda about her trip to New Orleans with her friends for another friend's wedding. She liked the Garden District and will live there someday when she's rich. The French Quarter, at least the touristy stretch of Bourbon Street, was not so great. The reception was in a nice hotel across from Jackson Square, with good food, open bar, a good band, and a view of the river.

The turkey burgers were a little, uh, well done on the outside but still juicy in the middle and delicious with potato salad. I made the fire extra hot to simulate the classic Cajun cuisine of Chez Sven's Norwegian Creole blackened turkey burgers, known only to an obscure bayou colony of beignet-eating crab catchers. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We lit a candle and ate cherry pie a la mode. The embers made their way from the Weber into the brick fire pit and turned into a campfire. Gven and Zelda went inside, never running out of things to talk about, and I stationed myself in the Adirondack chair off to the side of the fire pit. A big bird perched on a low limb of the maple tree in the front yard, just visible over the roof from the back yard. It was bigger than any hawk I've seen, thick around the middle; it might have been an owl. It flew past me, swooping down across the back yard and up through the pine trees, wingspan must have been six feet or more, and then was gone in an instant.

The next day something rather odd and a little embarrassing happened at the morning meditation. While drinking tea, I talked to a tall woman I hadn't seen before about choosing - or finding - the right practice. She told an interesting story about meditating while bicycling in Arizona, but before we could continue the conversation, other people's conversations and a moment of awkwardness intervened. While I drank my green tea, I saw an article open on the table about how certain personality types fit certain practices, so if you know one you can infer the other. Interesting.

Halfway through the article, someone else recognized me from a drumming group that meets at the rec center, and I realized why they looked so familiar. I knew them from somewhere but hadn't figured out where. Having established where we knew each other from, we talked about this and that, and I said something about taiji. They asked if I also do qigong, and it turns out they used to do qigong in the same group I did many moons ago at a church I no longer attend. It took me a minute. They looked different from the people I remembered from the little qigong group, but I probably looked different too.

I hope I have a chance to renew both of those chance encounters. It seems a shame to waste an opportunity to make a connection with someone who is working on a similar endeavor, and second chances are never guaranteed. As Dorothy observed in Oz, people come and go so quickly here.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

This is not a pipe

Jessi fixed a leaky pipe in his house in Crown Heights. Now it works. The pipe, not the house.


These are photos of projects he made for his plumbing class. They are made of copper and black iron. The projects, not the photos.

The teacher designed this one.



Jessi designed this one and put it together over a couple days. It got a very good grade.

I like the way it looks like it's walking (or running).

Sunday, April 05, 2009

The Good News

My burgeoning new social life is preventing me from writing more than three lines a day under the annoying heading 'What's on your mind?' All my new friends are occupying every free moment informing me what famous author, punk rock star, or Grey's Anatomy character they are, and all this newfound human contact enriches my life with the joys of relationship and community, so my blogging pen has all but dried up.

What a terrible loss, I know. In the meantime, half the newspapers in the country have either closed or cut back to three days a week and laid off half their staff, and I didn't know about it because I stopped getting the Dispatch a year ago. As Pogo said, we have met the enemy, and he is us. On the other hand, the startling events of my own circumscribed life continue apace, that is, nothing much has happened, and maybe that's the good news. March was not terribly prolific. There will be no life-crisis to share today.

But it's April now, which promises more prolificity. Daffodils and tulips are up and out; tiny purple buds are appearing on the redbud trees; dandelions and noisy neighbors are making an appearance. Work is sporadic and the future is uncertain, but I'm ensconced in writing three-paragraph features about Swingstate at a third-grade level, and I find I'm pretty good at thinking like a third-grader. Love is in the air. Take a look at the birds and bees and flowers and teenagers. Then get back to work.