"progressive" or what?

I actually got some interesting information today (this post was started way back in in May - jeez it's hard to finish things) from one of the worthy groups that have me on their mailing lists. Ian Mishalove, someone whose title is Online Communications Director of something called Campaign for America's Future, posits four definitions of progressive he has received from readers:

A progressive is someone who cares about the other guy. It's as simple as that!! (Lawrence F. - San Francisco, CA)

A progressive is someone who realizes that she did not get where she is completely on her own. She had help along the way ... and wants to make sure others have the same opportunities, no matter where they started. (Colleen R. - Silver Spring, MD)

A progressive ... believe[s] in liberty balanced with responsibility, economic opportunity balanced with just and open structures, and peace based upon being a global partner not a benevolent empire. (Norman B. - Cambridge, MA)

A progressive is a person who thinks the best is yet to come ... (Craig S. - Fort Collins, CO)

Disclaimer: I do not - DO NOT - mean to suggest that there is no difference, or no meaningful difference, between a 'progressive' and a 'liberal' or a 'radical' or whatever, or that the language used to describe a political ideology is unimportant. On the contrary, in some ways it's all about the language. Politics is talk. If "money is the mother's milk of politics," as the old saying goes, then language is the air. Most of it polluted.

Yet I don't buy the labeling conventions of being a liberal, being a conservative, being a progressive, being a radical, etc. My apologies to those who have patiently heard me harp on this theme before. I'm due for my annual rank on "Them's fightin' words where I come from." I've got issues, obviously, and this plays heavily into one that goes way back with me, at least as far as my very big, very bad graduate-school writing project, which took the onerous title Movement and Discourse in Educational Practice.

One of the arguments in that paper went something like this: a reciprocal relationship exists between the way people use language and the way they use movement. While language is primarily a medium of information and messages, it is also a way of doing things, making things happen. And while movement is primarily a means of gettin' it done and achieving results, it is also a medium of conveying information. Long dissertation short, there is some 'task content' in every verbal message, and there is some 'message content' in every physical task.

My point (and I do have one) is that in politics, the content is heavily loaded on the side of making something happen, leaving about 0.1 percent actual information. So, for example, the inspiring definitions of progressive above have a purpose - to make you want to be like them, to join the movement, and get with the program. If I'm being paid to sell something, of course I want to give it that kind of vibe. To borrow my engineer-manager brother's mantra, You're always selling.

If the salesperson can get you to buy the major premise - such as "Of course I'm a progressive, who the hell isn't?" - he or she is poised to carry out the remainder of their wedge strategy and get you to accept anything they package under the 'Progressive' label. I have run into plenty of well-meaning, nice folks who openly adopt whatever position they believe is the 'liberal' stance, just because they see themselves as a 'liberal', and by simply deduction, whatever other liberals are doing, it logically follows, must be right. Professed 'conservatives' do the same thing. Bill Frist or some other lying blowhard piously declares that conservative Americans want this or that, and people who like the sound of 'conservative' fall into line with the rhetorical call to arms. "Well, yeah, since I see myself as a conservative, I guess I'll let Doctor Bill do my thinking for me."

What was my point again?

Tigers

Where are you from?

My siblings and I had a discussion of that seemingly straightforward but oddly confusing question when we were together for my Mom's birthday two weeks ago. In our family, anyway, it's confusing, since we all grew up in a couple of different times and places, depending on birth order and the vagaries of adolescence and 'upward mobility'.

Anna Banana was almost 16 and in high school when we left LaCrosse, so she really grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. After graduating from high school in Michigan, she went to college at Winona (Minnesota) State, where Mom and Dad had met, so that part of the country is where she is from.

Jeanie Beanie was 14, almost grown up and in junior high school, when we moved from LaCrosse to Detroit. She went to college at Northern Illinois and Iowa State, still has ties to Chicago, and still roots for the Huskies and Cyclones.

Jo Jo was barely 13 at the time, a little less established in the social network of LaCrosse and therefore slightly more influenced by the culture of Detroit. She went to Michigan. Go Blue!

Do we see a pattern?

Like most patterns that try to discern meaning in other people's lives based on selected bits of information seen through a narrow lens, this one exists largely in my imagination. But I stand by it, figment or not.

Little Sven was just nine, less formed as an individual with fewer roots in ancestral soil, when transplanted to Garden City, Michigan, outside Detroit. I was 15 when we moved again, this time uptown to Birmingham, so I went to high school in Birmingham, although I was was from Garden City. Am I splitting hairs? After all, we were all from the Detroit area, Michigan, the Midwest, USA, Earth, etc. You can emphasize the sameness or the differences.

My brother Rock, the youngest, was born and raised in Michigan, so there's no doubt where he is from. He was four years old when we moved uptown and went K-12 through Birmingham schools. He went to college in Detroit and married a girl from Birmingham. Solid. Or maybe it just seems simpler from the distance of a few years in age, as my situation might have seemed simpler from the viewpoint of my sisters.

But what I want to talk about is baseball.

How about them Tigers! Has Jim Leyland done a remarkable job of managing a bunch of decent players, mostly no-names (Brandon Inge, et al) plus a couple of stars (Ivan Rodriguez) who are well past their prime? Have their pitchers developed into a strong rotation at just the right time? Are the fans filling Comerica Park with that rustbelt spirit, just as they filled Tiger Stadium in 1984 and 1968, when the team had bona fide stars like Al freaking Kaline - who lived down the street from a guy I knew in Birmingham - and Bill "go ahead and hit me" Freehan - who lived down the street from me? Was Henry Ford a genius? Was Walter Reuther a saint? Could Gordie Howe skate?

All I know for sure is that it does my heart good to see the Tigers kick the Yankees' large-market asses on TV, then move on and do the same thing to the A's. Bring on the Cardinals - just like in '68 with Gibson, Brock, et al - or the Mets, whoever that other league throws out there. They haven't got a chance, because the Tigers are a team of density!*

*with apologies to George McFly

Taiko

It's not every day that one decides to study to new art form. Sometimes it's an unexpected turn of events, and not "Gee, I always wanted to make pottery/poetry/paintings/paper/performance art." This one kind of snuck up on me.

I've been going to drum circles here and there for a year or so and having a great time just improvising. I'm not a "natural" musician, and I've never picked up an instrument quickly the way some people learn to play a guitar, for example, but I can usually keep time and follow a rhythm. I can't tell you what makes a rumba different from a samba or how a Cuban rhythm is different from a Jamaican rhythm. And it's been a long time since I was hanging with the bad boys in the drum section of the Burger Junior High School band - a long time. Color me 'novice'.

So I showed up at the once-a-month drum circles at the percussion store on High Street and had a grand time playing along with some experienced drummers. then, on a lark, I went to a taiko class that Eric "the Fish" Paden teaches at Capital University. I had never heard of taiko, but it sounded exotic and interesting when I saw it listed on an events calendar.

They have a lot of amazing instruments in the little old brick building nextdoor to the music department, and Eric clearly knows his stuff. To my surprise, this Japanese drumming form is all about movement and energy, in many ways resembling taiji, which I took up on another whim many moons ago.

We started with warmup exercises and learned the proper stance, and then we learned to shift our weight and move the arms and sticks in a circular path. So a lot of this is feeling very familiar. We tried to learn the Japanese words that punctuate a piece, and it's all very aural, so the words matter. Some of the beats coincide with steps and big, expansive gestures. In short, it was possible to graft parts of this whole new tree of information onto the rootstock of the existing body of information I brought with me, so even some fairly esoteric things started to make sense.

Ah, but there was a problem. I showed up in the first place at the taiko class only because there was a break between summer and fall sessions of my Monday night taiji classes at the local rec center. The start of fall quarter presented a schedule conflict, an ethical dilemma, and gnashing of teeth. I was committed to the taiji class, under contract, and a sufficient number of people signed up and paid their money to take it. So I would defer my continued taiko.

But wait! One of my new taiji students came to class exhausted from her dialysis earlier in the day and could barely make it through the hour. When I suggested that we change the meeting time from Monday to Tuesday, she and her husband were more than willing. The other students - also a married couple - indicated their willingness, and after a week of adjustment, we are making a successful transition to the new day and time, which is a miracle with most people's busy schedules.

Although I had missed a couple of taiko classes in the meantime, I was delighted to return, and the class welcomed me back. The other, more experienced, students are interesting people, too. A young man and his Japanese-American daughter; an older woman from Israel whose college-age daughter is spending the year in Japan; a mother and her daughter who attends Columbus School for Girls.

Can I keep up with them and learn the taiko form? Time will tell, but I'll be a fish out of water if I don't acquire the habit of practicing. That - and a poor memory, as well as lack of musical talent - is the present challenge.

Mom, apple pie

The Golly clan had a little reunion last weekend to celebrate my mother's eighty-fifth birthday. Helen Shuck Bye Golly is 85 years young. She looked great and seemed to really enjoy being surrounded by her five children, who converged on southern Indiana from five different states.

We all met in New Harmony, Indiana, at the suggestion of my brother Rock Golly, who had been there for a week-long business school orientation a couple of years ago. There is a hotel/conference center with a good restaurant. There are lots of things to see and do in a beautiful little town on the Wabash River with lots of history.

My sisters Jo Jo Golly and Jeanie Beanie Golly Gee shared a guest house with a garden and a couple of sitting rooms where we could all gather. Mom and Dad, Rock, sister Anna Banana Golly Gosh and her husband Fred Gosh stayed at the New Harmony Inn. Gven, Zelda, and I stayed at the Old Rooming House down the street. Nice comfy digs, and cheap.

The town is pretty amazing, full of gardens and public art, and not obnoxiously touristy. Quite a few building are still standing from the original 1814-1824 town center constructed by the breakaway Lutheran Rev. Rapp and his colony of Harmonists. According to the lovely tour guide, they were hard-working German separatists who were preparing for the Lord to return and end it all. So they built a town, and when the Lord didn't end it all, they sold the whole town and moved back to Economy, Pennsylvania, which was closer to markets for their products. She didn't say whether their beliefs changed along with the names of their towns.

Alas, the community didn't last long because, like the Shakers, they didn't believe in propagating their kind. They believed in work. So they built churches, factories, houses, farms, and towns. As the lovely tour guide put it, what else did they have to do?

Lots of structures remain from the next wave of utopian British socialists led by Robert Owen, who bought New Harmony from the Harmonists in 1824. The Workingman's Institute, for example, is still the oldest functioning public library in the state. There is also a theater and opera house, converted from a Community House that was like a coed dormitory for the celibate Harmonists. Owen and his group were scientists and other intellectuals who had big ideas about reforming civilization - or at least a little corner of it. Unfortunately, they didn't have the skills and know-how to make their vision happen, and the experiment essentially ceased.

One of my favorite places is the Roofless Church, built by Philip Johnson in 1960, a remarkable place sitting at the edge of town just off Main Street near the Inn. Inside a low wall are walkways, benches, a grove of trees, a couple of very modern, expressionistic sculptures, a tiny shrine-like installation with little icons, and a six-sided domed gathering place near one end, all overlooking a soybean field. Nextdoor there's a pottery studio and across the street the New Harmony Artists Guild.

Although it rained briefly, the weather was awesome for walking around looking at things and talking with the folks I've known all my life. Apparently we still have things to talk about. We all gathered at the Yellow Tavern on Church Street Friday night for a beer and a sandwich. Okay it was more than one beer, and it wasn't just any sandwich but a pork brain sandwich, and we ended up closing the place, but it was fun and just the right place to get together and catch up.

The next morning we managed to find each other at the Main Cafe for a hearty Hoosier breakfast. Then the men took off walking to explore the town, while the women went from one antique shop to another for an unbelieveably long and no doubt fascinating shopping adventure. We regrouped for a very nice dinner at the Red Geranium and then went to Jo's and Jean's for cake, coffee, and cards.

There were plenty of tales to tell, news to share, and progress reports on all the grandchildren, nieces, nephews, uncles, and aunts. Turns out Zelda was the only one of her generation who could make it, and she was a joy to have around. She's a good sport, and she has more tolerance of some of the crazy family dynamics than I do. The extended birthday party ended with eggs and apple pie for breakfast Sunday morning before the drive back to Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.

compart mental

If you know me at all, this will come as no surprise, but I thought it would be therapeutic, cathartic even, to get it off my chest cavity, clear my head, or purge it from my abdomen, as it were - that I tend to compartmentalize, categorize, and pigeonhole things.

My name is Sven, and I'm compartmental.

It isn't easy being compartmental. If anything is out of place, it's a problem, and let's face it, most things are out of place most of the time. And it isn't easy living with a person who is compartmental. They have to put everything IN something - a container, a category, a conceptual scheme, a taxonomy, a genus and species, an organizational chart, a box.

They (we) have a compulsion to sort things, organize big piles of stuff into several little piles of stuff, arranged by size, shape, color, texture, material, or other criteria, referably written down but always subject to change. Definitely subject to change. Otherwise, what would the terminally compartmental do when they feel the need to re-compartmentalize?

There is no cure, but there are measures that can be taken to live a full and productive life as a compartmental adult. First of all, embrace your compartmentality. Seek to understand, explore, and exploit your special gift. Compartmentalize EVERYTHING around you. Excel spreadsheets are very useful - all those rows and columns! Shelves are good, drawers are okay, shadowboxes can be wonderful. And be thankful that you're only compart mental and not complete mental.

aufheben

Rent for half of a two-bedroom apartment near campus...$500/month.

Undergraduate tuition...$4,215/semester.

Hearing Zelda talk about her upcoming quizzes in the Art of the Sixties (on Jackson Pollack) and Chinese Art (on the Shang through the Han), the paper that's due next week on Heraclitus and his influence on the Stoics; learning from her that Hegel's dialectic doesn't involve 'synthesis' at all, but aufheben...

Priceless.

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean "to pick up", "to raise", "to keep", "to preserve", but also "to end", "to abolish", "to annul". Hegel exploited this duality of meaning to describe the dialectical process whereby a higher form of thought or being supersedes a lower form, while at the same time "preserving" its "moments of truth". - The journal Aufheben

everybody's got the blues

Look around you. Do you see anyone who isn't down in the dumps, in the doldrums, under the weather, in a pickle, in a slump, or otherwise experiencing an existential malaise? I guess they all have their reasons, some of which can be shared with others, some of which are too private for casual conversation, a few of which might actually explain something, and some of which are beyond the pale of description.

No matter where I look, everybody's got the blues.

Some of them are clearly physical - the aches and pains in my lower back after a weekend of yard work, my son's sniffles audible on the phone, my boss's broken foot, and others far worse - but who's kidding whom, just because the symptoms are "physical" doesn't mean the causes and side-effects aren't connected to other issues, other decisions, conditions, habits, situations, and their unintended consequences.

No matter how smart or successful, everybody's got issues.

Some people wear them on their sleeve. Take my co-worker in the next cubicle - please! The sun doesn't rise without the world inflicting some grievous harm on her undeserving, put-upon self, and every day is a lament. But I'm no different, and neither is anybody else; she just happens to specialize in paying vocal, articulate, loud, and repeated attention to the unfair, stupid, painful drama that is this life.

Lawd have mercy, everybody's got the blues!

On the other hand, some people seem to strive mightily to put a bright, uplifting face on it. You know, always turning lemons into lemonade, pointing out the upside of every downer. And some have developed ways of turning their malaise into art - or some other constructive or creative or at least benign way of working through the hard, dark, unyielding stuff.

And maybe it's just the time of year, the change of seasons, turning colder, and I'm just making it worse by belaboring the fact. Yeah, I think that's it. It's the end of the summer, every day get shorter, my projects' drop-deadlines are looming, I don't have enough time to do what has to be done, my bills still need to be paid, and I'm not getting any younger. Oh, yeah, I think I've found it, now just let me writhe around in it.

It's all good

It's just the parts that suck.

Rev. Susan talked last week about the large over-arching theme of whether "to save or to savor" the world. It's a common dilemma among people who give a hoot about the social problems that plague this planet, whether in a religious context or a political arena or whatever front you choose to confront. It's impossible to enjoy the pleasures this life affords without facing the ugly problems stemming from the many injustices and imbalances that are seemingly everywhere.

She unpacked the question in terms of the Sufi practice of whirling as a kind of meditation meant to center oneself in a peaceful place. Sufis are a mystical order of Muslims, so I gather their practice starts with an inward focus. Which can be said of Unitarians, too, who aren't particularly know for their mysticism, but who do advocate inquiry as well as action.

All of which reminded me of Rudolf Laban's movement theory, which I used to study, in which almost any human efforts can be observed to embody either "fighting" or "indulging" qualities, depending on the attitude and intention of the human agent. People work, play, walk, talk, dance, eat, cook, you name it, in a combination of fighting or indulging qualities, depending on their attitude toward space, time, weight, and stuff like that.

So take that, Hamlet, to save or to savor (or to fight or to indulge), that is the question.

It was a better than average church service. Thinking these thoughts, I drove down route 23 to the Coop in Clintonville and stocked up on flour, beans, fruit and nuts. It's a very different place on Sunday, country music and middle-class housewives instead of hippies and hip-hop. The clerk confiscated by out-of-date membership card, so no more discount for mister delinquent member. It was a pretty day, so I stopped by the nursery while I was in the old neighborhood and impulse-purchased a couple of salvia, a rhododendron, a redbud, and a dawn redwood (metasequoia glyptostroboides, I'm not showing off, I just like that name). Everything was half-price, so I splurged on plant material. Went home and spent most of the afternoon planting perennials and small trees. Savoring.

Or was it fighting the good fight every gardener relishes? I'm not sure I can save anything by putting things in the ground, adding to the flora of our tiny corner lot in Methodistville, but it's something to do.

Canoe canoe?

In my youth, there was a coolly erotic television ad for a men's cologne called Canoe. Understated, patient, it made its point. And it must have made an impression on my adolescent mind that there is something intimate about floating across the water together in near-silence punctuated by paddles breaking the surface as they enter and exit the water.

Alienated after church, in spite of the Ingathering service that marks the official start of the church year, in spite of the annual water celebration in which congregants pour a vial of water - from Lake Erie or the Niagara River or the Mediterranean Sea or wherever they have been over the summer - into a common bowl and describe in one sentence where they have been. In spite of dedicating the new religious education building in a loosely organized ritual of passing the chalice from person to person in a line stretching from the meeting hall to the new space across the street, I was feeling a bit "off" on the heels of this jolly, well-meaning, in-group occasion.

Gven Golly in her wisdom suggested that we put the canoe in the water, so I said sure. But when? We could do all the chores, all the baking, all the miscellaneous stuff, and then go when it cools off; or we could just go. I ate breakfast, drank coffee, wrote notes on some overdue birthday cards, read the paper. Let's just go.

So we loaded the old blue fiberglass canoe on top of the truck, tied it down securely enough to make it two miles out Walnut Street to Hoover, and put it in the water. We decided at the last minute to bring the dog along, so there was that bit of unpredictability. Dali was just a bit freaked out at first, never having been in a boat before, and her lurching back and forth evoked a few choice words from me. Eventually she settled down, kept a low center of gravity, and wasn't a problem.

The rest of the excursion was like a relationship in miniature. It was a lot windier on the water than in town, which I might have anticipated but didn't, and the water was a little choppy. It took us a while to get the hang of paddling directly against the waves, instead of diagonally across them, and eventually we centered ourselves and our surrealist canine friend without getting wet.

It's always an exercise in adaptability, paddling across the water, adapting to conditions and each other's paddling style, keeping our distance from fisherfolk, other boats, sandbars, and waves hitting us broadside. Going far enough without over-extending, having a somatic experience without creating a medical or marital emergency.

Long story short, Gven in the front found a rhythm of changing from right to left that worked for her, and Sven in back managed to pull hard enough and switch sides whenever we needed to change direction. So we cruised a ways up past the County Line bridge and back, not a major excursion but lots of fun.

Somehow that short, hourlong trip changed the rest of the day. We loaded the canoe, drove back up Walnut Street, unloaded the boat, and enjoyed a cold dark beverage. There was still plenty of time to bake bread and apple pie, grill salmon, and watch a very strange movie. Somehow the joint effort transformed otherwise ordinary things into really satisfying stuff, but now that I've been back on land for a while, words don't seem to get it. You had to be there, in the canoe.

White Mustang

As I'm rounding the corner into the parking lot from Orion's Belt, the local public alternative is doing its segue from the news into morning programming with an ethereal techno number that immediately becomes the soundtrack of this rainy scene of people with umbrellas walking from their cars to the entrance of the building, somehow reminding me of last night's dream involving an elusive white Mustang.

I learned to drive in a light blue '66 Mustang, 3-on-the-floor, straight-6, AM radio, very basic, very cool. When I was a senior, it became essentially "my car" which it eventually was halfway through college, when the whole adventure started really taking off - often in road-trips in the light blue Mustang.

Ford introduced the Mustang halfway through the 1964 model year, a clever marketing decision that Hank the Deuce, Lee Iacocca, and their people in Dearborn no doubt planned carefully. We lived in Garden City at the time, a working-class suburb on the Westside of Detroit. Bob Solano, scion of a prominent Garden City family with a big house on Ford Road and a pool, was the first person I knew to own a '64 1/2 Mustang. He could be seen driving his own royal blue convertible to and from GC High School with a select group of friends. Classy.

We were GM people mostly - Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick - although Chas Golly went in for the exotic and bought a cute little gray Renault once, and a light blue Falcon. I guess it was like big GM family car and the small EuroFord for economy. My older sisters got to share the Falcon while they were in high school. After the girls had graduated, we moved to a more uptown suburb, and I got the Mustang to myself. No sexist double-standard here, just the luck of the birth-order, sure, uh-huh.

Mac, my best friend in high school, drove a yellow Mustang. Marco, my best friend in college after I transferred to Michigan, drove a red Mustang. This was Detroit, of course, where cars define people, though it's probably not much different anywhere in America - you are what you drive. Think of "American Grafitti," the pop culture testament to existential lust, youthful longing, and hot cars. Most of us were part Richard Dreyfus, on a quest for the white Thunderbird, and part Ron Howard, torn between big city, bright lights, State U., and hometown Peggy Sue.

So what the heck is this white Mustang doing in my rainy morning dreamspace, now that I drive a gray Ranger to my office job? Maybe I don't want to know.

Year of the Dog

Every 12 years, each of us has a birthday that completes a cycle in the Chinese zodiac, that big wheel of time where each year has its spirit animal. So if you were born in the Year of the Rabbit, you will have (with luck) your 12th, 24th, 36th, 48th, 60th, etc., birthdays in another Year of the Rabbit. Each of those 12-year birthdays will occur in a different 5-year cycle of the elements, so if you're born in a metal year, you will cycle through the water, wood, fire, and earth years and on the fifth cycle of 12 years, return to your birth animal and element.

My middle sister, Jeanie Beanie Golly Bert, celebrated her fifth cycle of 12 this past June, right in the middle of the Year of the Dog. I'm too lazy to look up which of the five elements rules this year, possibly because I was born in the Year of the Sloth. I was not able to attend the big surprise party that her cool, thoughtful husband Barney Bert threw for her down in Flower State, but I bet it was fun.

To add to my guilt, I've been carrying around a card (with pictures of dogs) all summer, neglecting to mail it for one reason or another. Which I finally did this weekend, three months late, and don't give me that "It's the thought that counts" bullshit because it's the act that counts. Knowing Jeanie BGB, she noted the slight, took it personally, forgave me, and retained her doggedly loyal, tenacious, devoted, fiercely protective, watchful character, birthday or no birthday, card or not card. I will see her at another family gathering at the end of September, on the occasion of another momentous birthday, and we'll talk. Maybe we'll talk about dogs.

This weekend was also my son's birthday. Jessi Golly was also born in the Year of the Dog, about three turns of the 12-year wheel after his Aunt Jeanie Beanie and therefore a different element, but he has some of the same protective, loyal, tenacious character. I sent him a card, and I talked to him on the phone. He was at a party, having fun among his friends, and his girlfriend Alex had made him a cake.

MoreGardens summer camp is over for the year, and the kids took a field trip to a farm upstate for their culminating camp experience. They got to hang out with the animals, help out with the gardening, had a great meal, and apparently it went really well. Jessi got around to re-assembling his bike, so he's been riding it, and life is good. He won't be at the other family gathering this month, so I'm glad to get to talk to him.

There's no definitive time line for these things. A few years ago, my friend Bay, who works at Old Progressive College and incidentally has a son around the same age, made the observation that Jessi and I were 'friends'. I said no, not really, the father-son relationship was much more tangled than that, but we were still able to communicate on fairly good terms, though I wouldn't call us 'friends'. I guess the wheel has turned enough since then to make a difference, and at this point I would say that Bay is right.

farm follows function

What could be more obvious than the truism that gardening is grounding? And how many ways can I belabor the fact? You stick a shovel in the ground, you sow seeds in the ground, you plant seedlings in the ground, you pull weeds from the ground, you slice ripe tomatoes that grew (magically) out of the ground, and you go back to the office the next day with some of the ground still under your fingernails.

So this weekend, Labor Day Weekend, I ritually observed the unofficial end of summer by doing some seasonal transitional chores that couldn't be much more mundane and put me into the rhythm of the earth, as if I could ever leave it.

Like thinning the little patch of lambs ear to make a border the whole length of the walk. Then dividing some of the daylilies to fill in gaps in the same bed. Next year it will look fuller.

Like moving three big, mound-shaped perennial geraniums from a back bed next to the veggies to a central location close to the patio, then transplanting three spindly little columbine from the same bed, where they weren't doing well, to a sunny spot near the salvia, where they might do better. Then thinning the strawberry patch to fill up the space left by the geraniums and columbine. Next year, with any luck, there could be twice as many strawberries. Then watering everything in. Buckets, hoses, whatever.

Like dividing the big, thick hostas with a slice of the spade and transplanting the dividends to the edge of the wedge-shaped bed to expand it further into the back corner where Gus the cat rests in peace. Then digging up clumps of mint (or lemonbalm, or whatever it is) that's been steadily encroaching on the hostas and anything else that's in its way, moving it to the weedy wasteland of the front corner, where the oldest, biggest Norway maple shields the sun and rain from everything under it, so nothing much grows there; we'll see if the mint/lemonbalm survives there long enough to cut back the tree and let some light in. That's a chore for later in the fall.

Like picking up apples and trying to find ways to use them up. A few fall every day, and half of them have bites out of them by the squirrels, or worm-holes, or they're too small to bother with, and those go in the compost. So by the time the weekend rolls around I've got a basketful of winesaps to do something with. What? So far, I've made apple cobbler, Gven has made apple crisp, and we've frozen a few.

It's labor-intensive, time-consuming work to peel, wash, core, and slice, even before the actual mixing, baking, and all that. But it's something to do on the weekend when I'm not copyediting, checking, tracking, proofing, revising, or answering e-mail. And I'm convinced that it's a lot more ergonomically correct to walk around all day carrying a shovel, moving from one plot to another, as long as I remember to switch hands. And you know what? I sleep better.