corn shock

Yesterday I remarked to a group of colleagues at lunch when we were discussing Halloween - "Did any of you ever throw corn?" Honestly, they looked at me as if I had two heads! And I immediately knew I was country!

Before this hallowed eve, as children we would raid the neighbor's corn shocks, grab an ear or two of corn and laboriously finger-strip those hard, shining yellow/red/purple kernels of corn into a pail with a handle, which we would carry with us in our nighttime escapades. Mind you, our escapades were quite contained! We lived along a busy two-lane highway, the houses were not side by side and there were no sidewalks. Our range of motion was limited. But that noisy spatter of corn against windows and doors was quite scary - especially to us!!

How could your childhood have been successful without it?!

You know, each morning as I clamber out of bed and stretch to the skies, I try to give thanks. But then as the day progresses, the petty irritations and time pressures melt down and coat my higher self and I forget the miracles that sprout on every hand. I came across the lyrics of an old album from the 70's that contained the song Ten Lepers - from the Biblical parable. Ten were healed and only one returned to give thanks. The last paragraph is:

"Thank you Lord, for the summer sun,
For sight and song and good deeds done,
Faith and family and loving friends,
For the day that begins and the night that ends."

Simple. But the world.

My Dove Chocolate wrapper's message to me yesterday was "Quote your dad." Hmmm.

Dad was a gentle, quiet man of few words. And that was the beauty of it, he lived his messages. I do remember his prayers always contained the words, "Lead, guide and direct us..."

And amid all the clamor of a life with a family of seven, he listened to that inner core of Wisdom, balancing him and us.

His words linger.

draining the swamp

Time magazine apparently features an lead article this month about how the current administration is systematically smashing our government checks and balances and bragging about de-regulation.

Once again, industries are free to spew poisons into our air, rivers, streams, oceans. For what? Money. Oh and they always piously add, jobs. May I ask, what good are jobs if you can't breathe and your children are dying of new cancers?

Or in education, in the area of sexual abuse, they are weakening the ability to prosecute.

Or in special needs, they are slicing into those benefits,
as in Medicare,
as in veterans care,
as in Meals on Wheels, 
And the list trails on endlessly.

It will be a very different world if the country doesn't awake to this new agenda. The people in the red hats may discover there are many different definitions of "great".

Little Red School House

The past few days I’ve been thinking of my two-room grade school and it's teachers. And marveling.

Their pay had to be meager and their tasks Herculean. Their job included banking the coal stove at night and keeping it going during the day, sweeping the oiled floors, emptying the wastepaper baskets, clapping the erasers, washing the blackboards,  - and that’s just the bare-boned maintenance of the building. In addition they needed reasonable four-grade mastery of at least five subjects – spelling, reading, arithmetic, history, geography and an occasional art class thrown in. They needed to be able to sing and it helped to be able to play the rickety out-of-tune piano for opening rituals each day. Bathrooms were privies way far beyond the school at the back of the playground. Water was carried from a neighbor’s pump  to a blue and beige striped cooler resting at the back of the classroom near the hooks for outdoor clothing. But beyond all these basics, they had to keep order with a bunch of overgrown, sweaty, boisterous farm boys on the make! Our teacher in the upper grades had a leather strap that she often carried with her and used with alacrity on offending hands.  She must have had school board muscle behind her and in those days, authoritative bodies still had the respect of the community so no one in my eight years ever got too far out of line.

But all of the above aside, what I am most grateful to my “upper” grades teacher is her understanding that one of the most priceless gifts she could give us, was the time she set aside for reading aloud to us – mind you, we may have gotten short-changed academically, but our literary imaginations were generously stoked. The books I can remember are the entire Little House series – from Little House in the Big Woods to these Happy Golden Years ; White Fang and Call of the Wild; The Moffats; The White Stag, The Singing Tree and the Good Master – and these are only ones I can remember!

School ran from just after Labor Day until early May – to get the farm children back home to help with the spring crops.

I have to think, our teachers had some crops of their own to tend to by that time!

put another nickel in

 Two sibs in their 70’s are out to dinner with their spouses and the one says, “I woke up singing ‘There was her mother, her father, her sister and her brother'….” And the other sib spontaneously joins in the singing to the end of the verse! And the beauty of it being that it was an illicit song (I Never See My Maggie Alone) we learned at our cousin’s house when we were about 5 and 6 and probably had not heard/sung in the intervening 60+ years! That’s family! That’s a musical hug! 

Perhaps our brains are a bit like a nickel-fed jukebox arm that goes back and forth searching through the records until it finds the right "tune" memory and begins to play. How nice when two jukeboxes are working in unison!

In this tumultuous world we currently live in where civility seems to be non-existent and grudges must be nursed into full-blown incidents I had to think back to our Hinkletown kitchen. Whenever I would come home from school with some new injustice or slight, and pour it all out to Mother, most likely when she was at the ironing board, or cooking, or cleaning – she would say, “And what did you do? Or say?”

What?! I was the injured party! Why was that an appropriate question?! And if it was a teacher issue, she would always take her part – “she has so many students to look after, it must be hard for her” or”maybe she misunderstood because she’s usually fair.” On and on the speculation about her view went on. It was very annoying.

And, in retrospect, enlightening. 

I think Donald Trump would have benefited with some after-school time in Mother’s kitchen.

across the miles

I just couldn't believe the color of her skin as she sat across the desk from me, speaking softly about books for her daughter. African of origin, her pigment was so richly dark, words failed me...mahogany, aborigine, ebony - nothing was adequate. I felt my own completely unremarkable wash of whiteness! But color aside, we were talking books. We started with the Little House series and got the first four of them lined up on reserve. Then she spoke of Anne of Green Gables and the Boxcar Children - all old-fashioned classics. "That's what I want my girl to read and love", she said. And I remembered my introduction to the Laura Wilder series... in a rural two-roomed schoolhouse, listening to Mrs.Martin read each one - taking Laura from birth to marriage - and being completely entranced. Suddenly miles, origin, language melted away and  we were home by the fireside smiling knowingly over books.

Expect nothing

Alice Walker is quoted as having said, "Expect nothing; live frugally on surprise."

I love that.

I fail at that daily! I think it is part of my make-up to expect happiness and for an embarrassingly large part of my life, that's just what I have been given. But in this current political state, I think I have to start parsing out those meager surprises with Scrooge-like containment to get me through this presidency!

a storied life

At the end of my book club's lively discussion of The Storied Life of A,J, Fikry, I asked them a question that the author was asked in an interview: What three books have shaped your life? I broadened the question to influence rather than shaped and from different times in your life. That's a toughie for any reader! If you read a lot, it's a harrowing question - but intriguing.

One of the group offered almost immediately, Margaret Wise Brown's Color Kittens, citing that she thinks she was about three and the idea of mixing colors sparked to mixing all kinds of materials and coming up new -leading to a lifetime of creativity. I responded from her answer citing a book of poetry my mother first quoted to me and I later read for myself. I don't even know the title of the book because that's long gone from the raggedy book! Ginger something, I think. But that spawned my memories of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses the contents of which are permanently in my heart forever. And I would add Anne of Green Gables and Understood Betsy to that honored list. These books assured me that at its heart, the world is shining despite struggles along the way. 

It gets harder as I contemplate young adult years but thanks to my childhood context of limited resources the gems really stood out as I wandered into high school reading. And those books were classics - I knew nothing of young adult literature, nothing about dragons, vampires, dystopia, aliens, etc. My loves were built on the solid soil of reality - with a dash of romance thrown in always! Jane Eyre found her way into my heart early - as did Rebecca (Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again....) These are books I read over and over again, suffused with pleasure at each reading. But I can't say they influenced my life, exactly. 

So I'm still thinking and picking up samples to nibble on....and oh what a banquet from which to choose!