Margotlog: May All Your Christmases Be White?
Even as I write this, I sense the double meaning--white as in snow-covered, aka, Minnesota Northland Christmases, but also "white" as in belonging to those with white skin. When I was growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, we "whities" were surrounded by people with brown skin, who celebrated Christmas much as I thought we did. They shopped with us at the dime stores, though not yet sitting at lunch counters. When I occasionally passed their homes, especially those on the barrier islands south of Charleston, the decorations shouted "Christmas"--strings of red bells, twinkling colored lights, maybe even a Rudolph and a sleigh cavorting across a roof top. Christmases were not white at all--but often brilliantly blue and green, with palm fronds clacking, and street-corner Santas looking hot in their red flannel as they rang their bells.
We kids in the Old Citadel decorated our family trees with homemade ornaments cut from colored paper. My parents hung glass dew-drops and balls up high. Lower we placed funny pipe cleaner guys in striped trousers and black vests along with our homemade angels, purple and pink. Who knew where those funny guys in striped pants had come from. Maybe from our parents' Christmases before my sister and I were born. They lived in Pittsburgh for a decade through the Depression and parts of World War II before having children. Sometimes my mother talked nostalgically about big iced cakes from "Swan's" which she picked up after work for Christmas eve. (I have no idea if that was really the name of the store, though something like it rings a bell.)
I have lived in Minnesota longer than anywhere else and Christmases are often white, white and cold. If we're lucky, a brilliant blue sky compensates for unbearable windchill. Again I muse about the line "May all your Christmases be white," and remember that the day before Christmas this year, my husband and I drove west from our Saint Paul neighborhood, across the still unfrozen Mississippi. Another old song popped into mind: "Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go." We certainly wouldn't have wanted to try driving a sleigh over the river this Christmas eve. Not until a few days later did snow and piercing cold arrive. Even now, I bet the Mississippi is not frozen solid.
Still there are these expectations. As Fran and I commented, driving through a still brown urban landscape to Minneapolis and the first of our family Christmas celebrations, so many Christmas songs assume the land will be covered with snow--"that stings the toes and bites the nose as over the ground we go." This is a Nordic assumption, probably from Germany and Britain, I think. "Good king Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about,/ deep and crisp and even." Suddenly, my mind springs back to an encounter I had with my daughter years ago in the huge Munich museum called the Alta Pinakothek.
We were standing before a painting by Albrecht Durer, the great early Renaissance German painter. We're looking at the subject of the painting, a firm-cheeked handsome man named Oswald Krel (1499). He looks thoroughly Renaissance, meaning clear-eyed, in command of his existence, and wearing a fur-trimmed collar. Yet in panels beside him, hairy men brandish clubs and firebrands, attacking travelers on snowy forest roads. "How creepy," I say to her. And she, with her superior knowledge of German language and culture, labels them "Krampus, Austrian ghost walkers who around St. Nicholas eve, Dec 6th, attack villagers in the fields."
As I will write in the book I'm finally finishing called "The Shared Leg or Falling for Botticelli," these ghost walkers and their cruel, unprovoked attacks reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for a very long time. My mother, who grew up in eastern North Dakota, with a German father and Swedish mother, used to tell us that she and her brother and sisters almost always received a piece of coal in their Christmas stockings. When I thought of those killjoy Krampus, I thought of the coal in her stocking. What was it supposed to mean?
A reminder of their inherently "fallen-from-grace" devilishness? Or that "Papa" was always on the lookout for wrong-doers? Or that all of us need the guidance of a loving saint across the winter wastes at Christmas time? The carol about Good King Wencaslas tells us exactly that. Like the King's page, we need to step behind someone who has "dinted" the snow, and when we encounter a poor man, we need to call out "Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither." Because in the bitterest weather of the year, the message of Christmas is...
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.
That still leaves the uncertain meaning of coal in one's stocking, and attacks by Krampus in snowy fields. Deep in the Nordic psyche, I think, lies a delight in shocking expectations, in shocking the innocent on a forest path. Like a snowstorm that roars in out of the west, making it impossible to push open the front door for days. I'm not wishing such a development on any of us. I'm just remembering...
May all your Christmases be white!
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Margotlog: Tucson: Desert Birds
Margotlog: Tucson: Desert Birds
We found a comfy hideaway on the eastern side of Tucson, renting the next to smallest of six casitas (Spanish for little houses), called "Rain Dancer." Second morning as I read to Fran from a new story-in-progress, the ceiling started to drip on his side of the bed--Rain Dancer, living up to its name, but it was a danse macabre in my story. My character, a young woman who was scheduled to waitress at a restaurant in the World Trade Center, had called in sick. The 9/11 attacks occurred. Now she was tormented with guilt at the death of her stand-in. Drip, drip, drip went the gentle rain on my husband's side of the bed.
"This is the greenest desert in the world," a ranger told us. Huge saguaro cacti poked up throughout an uneven terrain of barrel cactus, organ pipe cactus, prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees--some gnarled like ancient bodies gripped by pain. Mesquite protects the small saguaro from heat and predators until they can rise into 200-year grandeur. I was awed. A twelve or twenty-foot saguaro has roots extending the same number of feet in all directions. Even below ground they dominate this desert.
Eventually we had to move out of Rain Center to the larger casita next door. It was decorated with deep indigo-blue tiles around a rounded Mexican fireplace. Deep blue indigo suggests water in the tan and gray-green of the desert, water so rich as to be jeweled, humming with shadowy eminence. In my story set on the North Shore of Lake Superior, water plays a savage role. An ore boat cracks apart in mammoth waves and wind. A sailor from Uzbekistan is rescued and brought into the life of the guilt-ridden young woman.
In our week in the desert, half the days were overcast, but rain fell heavily only once, scaring us out of the Rain Dancer casita. Days later, down a slow incline we reached a "wash." Parts were still wet. A starry plant close to the ground sparkled with drops of dew or left-over rain. Under the dry surface, the sandy soil was still wet. Cottonwoods bent down to get their arms in the dirt. Tall western ash trees turned golden and did not bend at all. It was quiet except for the birds.
Was it the spiny resistance of the vegetation, making one feel alien, that fixed my eyes on the sky? There on wires in the back yard sang a burbling, warbling, scolding, twittering big gray bird with a curved-downward beak. It sounded like a mocking bird. Suddenly I was home in the lush green of a South Carolina Christmas. My father would soon get out his violin and we'd play duets, he counting Italian solfeggio to keep me in tow. The curved-bill thrasher would keep us company.
Walking one evening up the road, I spied a brilliant red bird high in a mesquite bush. Suddenly it swooped into the air, displaying black wings, and returned to its perch. A Vermillion flycatcher. I was mesmerized. It kept spiraling away and returning against the slowly receding light.
From morning to noon, hummers chased each other away from the feeder near the covered patio. One hummer took its time. It was bright green with a touch of black on its cheek. Its beak would tilt down to suck, lift out while the bird looked around before tilting down again into the tiny hole of sugar water. Calm, almost nonchalant before another whose black head ruffled open into brilliant red, chased it away with a huge buzz. It was a bit like slapstick, except to the humming birds, territory was everything.
There were no flocks of birds, but four Harris hawks--huge brown-black birds with white across their tails--flew through the brush, posting themselves on electric poles or atop the low trees. Almost too big for the diminutive scale of the desert, these hawks, we learned, work as a family team, scouting and harrying their prey. Our arrival sent them packing to quieter territory and leaving the sky to us and the jewels and capers of the desert.
Maybe the one who made me laugh the most was the rather ungainly Gila woodpecker, with its black and white striped coat and tail. This bird would crouch on the tiny hummer feeder, almost embracing it, as it awkwardly tried to fit its thick beak into the sipping holes. We laughed and felt rather ungainly ourselves in the spare, muted quiet of the almost-winter desert.
We found a comfy hideaway on the eastern side of Tucson, renting the next to smallest of six casitas (Spanish for little houses), called "Rain Dancer." Second morning as I read to Fran from a new story-in-progress, the ceiling started to drip on his side of the bed--Rain Dancer, living up to its name, but it was a danse macabre in my story. My character, a young woman who was scheduled to waitress at a restaurant in the World Trade Center, had called in sick. The 9/11 attacks occurred. Now she was tormented with guilt at the death of her stand-in. Drip, drip, drip went the gentle rain on my husband's side of the bed.
"This is the greenest desert in the world," a ranger told us. Huge saguaro cacti poked up throughout an uneven terrain of barrel cactus, organ pipe cactus, prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees--some gnarled like ancient bodies gripped by pain. Mesquite protects the small saguaro from heat and predators until they can rise into 200-year grandeur. I was awed. A twelve or twenty-foot saguaro has roots extending the same number of feet in all directions. Even below ground they dominate this desert.
Eventually we had to move out of Rain Center to the larger casita next door. It was decorated with deep indigo-blue tiles around a rounded Mexican fireplace. Deep blue indigo suggests water in the tan and gray-green of the desert, water so rich as to be jeweled, humming with shadowy eminence. In my story set on the North Shore of Lake Superior, water plays a savage role. An ore boat cracks apart in mammoth waves and wind. A sailor from Uzbekistan is rescued and brought into the life of the guilt-ridden young woman.
In our week in the desert, half the days were overcast, but rain fell heavily only once, scaring us out of the Rain Dancer casita. Days later, down a slow incline we reached a "wash." Parts were still wet. A starry plant close to the ground sparkled with drops of dew or left-over rain. Under the dry surface, the sandy soil was still wet. Cottonwoods bent down to get their arms in the dirt. Tall western ash trees turned golden and did not bend at all. It was quiet except for the birds.
Was it the spiny resistance of the vegetation, making one feel alien, that fixed my eyes on the sky? There on wires in the back yard sang a burbling, warbling, scolding, twittering big gray bird with a curved-downward beak. It sounded like a mocking bird. Suddenly I was home in the lush green of a South Carolina Christmas. My father would soon get out his violin and we'd play duets, he counting Italian solfeggio to keep me in tow. The curved-bill thrasher would keep us company.
Walking one evening up the road, I spied a brilliant red bird high in a mesquite bush. Suddenly it swooped into the air, displaying black wings, and returned to its perch. A Vermillion flycatcher. I was mesmerized. It kept spiraling away and returning against the slowly receding light.
From morning to noon, hummers chased each other away from the feeder near the covered patio. One hummer took its time. It was bright green with a touch of black on its cheek. Its beak would tilt down to suck, lift out while the bird looked around before tilting down again into the tiny hole of sugar water. Calm, almost nonchalant before another whose black head ruffled open into brilliant red, chased it away with a huge buzz. It was a bit like slapstick, except to the humming birds, territory was everything.
There were no flocks of birds, but four Harris hawks--huge brown-black birds with white across their tails--flew through the brush, posting themselves on electric poles or atop the low trees. Almost too big for the diminutive scale of the desert, these hawks, we learned, work as a family team, scouting and harrying their prey. Our arrival sent them packing to quieter territory and leaving the sky to us and the jewels and capers of the desert.
Maybe the one who made me laugh the most was the rather ungainly Gila woodpecker, with its black and white striped coat and tail. This bird would crouch on the tiny hummer feeder, almost embracing it, as it awkwardly tried to fit its thick beak into the sipping holes. We laughed and felt rather ungainly ourselves in the spare, muted quiet of the almost-winter desert.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Margotlog: Three Cats and Some Humans - Winter Update
Margotlog: Three Cats and Some Humans - Winter Update
I'm more aware of them now with the windows and doors closed - the swishy tails, the meows, and pawing at sleeve or pants leg. I'm more in the house where they live all the time. In summer feeling guilty about cooping them up, I sometimes take sleek, black-and-white Julia, the most compliant, out to sit with me on the back deck, though I never lift a firm hand off her back. We bask together for a while, then that's enough. But at 8 above zero or 20 below, such indulgences are impossible. She might well have lived outside before the Humane Society got ahold of her. Still, I don't want any more cat-inflicted bird deaths. She's a sweet cat, but I have no doubt she could kill birds. Her pupils widen when she's very intent on capture. She waits, her tail swishing. Then, pounce. Another dead string. Another done-in stuffed mouse.
Live mice visit in winter. Maggie, smooth-haired calico cat with a weird orange square cutting through one eye, paws at an outside corner of the kitchen. The next evening, she and Julia are hunkered down staring under the low TV stand. Next they stalk around to the back of the sofa, starting to patrol the perimeter of the living room. A quick dart out to the adjacent dining room. Something has made a beeline behind the huge black radiator at the room's outside corner. I lift out the reflective panel stashed there to help reflect heat. A quick scurry. A somewhat gimpy gray mouse, awkward as a wind-up toy, skitters out of sight on the kitchen linoleum. The next evening, the guy human baits a mousetrap with a little peanut butter and lifts it into the lowered basement ceiling. The following morning there's a sweet gray-backed mouse whose back is broken. After a qualm or two-- outside with it. Our next-door neighbors confess to luring a mouse out of their house. We may have caught it.
I've just finished my winter evening walk-about, rounding from kitchen through entrance hall, living room, dining room and back to kitchen. As I walk I listen to various kinds of classical music. Tonight it's Boccerini, a delightful minor master, born in Luca, Italy, he spent most of his creative life in Spain. Throughout his hundreds of chamber music pieces, you can hear the Spanish influence in rhythms and use of guitars. Boccerini himself was a renown cellist, who overlapped with Mozart before outliving him by four decades. The jaunty rhythms and speedy tempo are great for walking.
The cats like Boccerini because I'm moving around, not sitting and staring silently at something boring like a screen or a page. I swish a toy with colored ribbons threaded through narrow orange and gold tubes to a stuffed mouse flourish. Back and forth this swishing creates a little breeze. The cats don't walk or pounce in my path, but my activity sets them going. Tilly, the old lady of the three, yet the most limber, and most whiny, follows me around with her big green eyes fastened on me. She won't bat at my toy. She wants me to get down on her level, so after 30 minutes or so of walking, I kneel beside the long "barrel" made out of some crinkly fabric and stiffened with heavy interior wires. It has a hole in its top where a hand can reach through and pat a cat inside. Julia, the best game player, will keep batting a ball away from the barrel opening when she's inside. But Tilly simply enters at one end and pads through to the other. I touch her furry back as she passes under the opening. Next she'll inhale or lick up some catnip from the corrugated round scratching disk. Finally, pestering me with meows until I sit on the floor outside the back of her chair, she is energized enough to paw at a ribbon I'm swishing at the openings in the chair back. We eye each other. Her beautiful, foxy-shaped face with its orange lightning mark--a feline Harry Potter--soulful green eyes, and tufty cheeks of motley black--always pleases me. Anyone who says cats don't have facial expressions hasn't looked very hard. Her eyes signal anger, appeal, scorn, sympathy, disgust, jealousy, and right now, relatively lively attention for an old lady cat over fifteen years old.
The cats like Boccerini because they like having me moving around
I'm more aware of them now with the windows and doors closed - the swishy tails, the meows, and pawing at sleeve or pants leg. I'm more in the house where they live all the time. In summer feeling guilty about cooping them up, I sometimes take sleek, black-and-white Julia, the most compliant, out to sit with me on the back deck, though I never lift a firm hand off her back. We bask together for a while, then that's enough. But at 8 above zero or 20 below, such indulgences are impossible. She might well have lived outside before the Humane Society got ahold of her. Still, I don't want any more cat-inflicted bird deaths. She's a sweet cat, but I have no doubt she could kill birds. Her pupils widen when she's very intent on capture. She waits, her tail swishing. Then, pounce. Another dead string. Another done-in stuffed mouse.
Live mice visit in winter. Maggie, smooth-haired calico cat with a weird orange square cutting through one eye, paws at an outside corner of the kitchen. The next evening, she and Julia are hunkered down staring under the low TV stand. Next they stalk around to the back of the sofa, starting to patrol the perimeter of the living room. A quick dart out to the adjacent dining room. Something has made a beeline behind the huge black radiator at the room's outside corner. I lift out the reflective panel stashed there to help reflect heat. A quick scurry. A somewhat gimpy gray mouse, awkward as a wind-up toy, skitters out of sight on the kitchen linoleum. The next evening, the guy human baits a mousetrap with a little peanut butter and lifts it into the lowered basement ceiling. The following morning there's a sweet gray-backed mouse whose back is broken. After a qualm or two-- outside with it. Our next-door neighbors confess to luring a mouse out of their house. We may have caught it.
I've just finished my winter evening walk-about, rounding from kitchen through entrance hall, living room, dining room and back to kitchen. As I walk I listen to various kinds of classical music. Tonight it's Boccerini, a delightful minor master, born in Luca, Italy, he spent most of his creative life in Spain. Throughout his hundreds of chamber music pieces, you can hear the Spanish influence in rhythms and use of guitars. Boccerini himself was a renown cellist, who overlapped with Mozart before outliving him by four decades. The jaunty rhythms and speedy tempo are great for walking.
The cats like Boccerini because I'm moving around, not sitting and staring silently at something boring like a screen or a page. I swish a toy with colored ribbons threaded through narrow orange and gold tubes to a stuffed mouse flourish. Back and forth this swishing creates a little breeze. The cats don't walk or pounce in my path, but my activity sets them going. Tilly, the old lady of the three, yet the most limber, and most whiny, follows me around with her big green eyes fastened on me. She won't bat at my toy. She wants me to get down on her level, so after 30 minutes or so of walking, I kneel beside the long "barrel" made out of some crinkly fabric and stiffened with heavy interior wires. It has a hole in its top where a hand can reach through and pat a cat inside. Julia, the best game player, will keep batting a ball away from the barrel opening when she's inside. But Tilly simply enters at one end and pads through to the other. I touch her furry back as she passes under the opening. Next she'll inhale or lick up some catnip from the corrugated round scratching disk. Finally, pestering me with meows until I sit on the floor outside the back of her chair, she is energized enough to paw at a ribbon I'm swishing at the openings in the chair back. We eye each other. Her beautiful, foxy-shaped face with its orange lightning mark--a feline Harry Potter--soulful green eyes, and tufty cheeks of motley black--always pleases me. Anyone who says cats don't have facial expressions hasn't looked very hard. Her eyes signal anger, appeal, scorn, sympathy, disgust, jealousy, and right now, relatively lively attention for an old lady cat over fifteen years old.
The cats like Boccerini because they like having me moving around
Monday, November 10, 2014
Margotlog: Bare Ruined Choirs, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Margotlog: Bare Ruined Choirs, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
The Wise Old Owl counts the leaves falling off her catalpa tree with the snow. She counts up to 56, the same number as children who have been abused by caregivers in Minnesota since 2005. Not many two-leggeds care to count catalpa leaves falling. Not many have cared to climb the tree of these children's lives to help them hold onto their leaves, keep those young chests and limbs from snapping off, breaking open.
It makes the Wise Old very sad. "Bare ruined choirs" calls to her the soaring cathedral of nature--quite a religious experience, she'll tell you. Choirs where children might sing, might have been kept safe, beloved and gently held, not with palms burned down to the bone, not with hearts beating inside broken ribs, not with cracked-open skulls.
Is this the poor house of Charles Dickens' time? Lots of very young children died then from malnutrition and exposure to cold and wet. No, the state of Minnesota does not condone poor houses or orphanages. Maybe she's mistaken, maybe the homes where these children died are the poor house of today. Not enough decent food, not any protection from rats and garbage, or the rampage of caregivers.
She wonders if maybe these poor houses are the killing fields of a kind of war? She's heard of concentration camps across the oceans where whole flocks were burned to death, stuffed into ovens. "Sing a song of blackbirds," blacked bones baked in a pyre of hatred. But not here, surely. Not in the sane security of the U.S. of A.
In her travels she's noted differences, however. Homes huge as pumpkins on steroids with four or five of those racing roaches that humans like to crowd onto highways. Homes that are mere piles of sticks with cold zinging through them. Poor versions of the poet's "bare ruined choirs." Noting as she does how pumpkins patches crowd together, whereas the piles of sticks are often off by themselves, at least here in the heartland. Or if crowded together, they house only the poor.
She suspects the caregivers who neglected or abused these 56 fallen leaves lived in the seclusion of Minnesota's heartland. It's not such a jolly place, this heartland. She's noticed that. Little towns become quite bare themselves. Empty. Ruined choirs. Why? She's watched slowly one jolly giant gathers all the acres into one enormous parcel. Takes several big machines and a few two-leggeds, leaving the town flock with very poor pickings. She can attest to that.
Knowing what's good for her, she's lately moved her home to a park land in a city. By the big river. One of her favorite places, that river. Don't find too many mangled, burned, picked over skeletons in places like this. They hum with prosperity. If they can't keep the leaves on their trees--nature being what it is--they buy fake. Take a gander, she suggests, liking the notion of a goose walking around with the two-leggeds. Don't find many bare ruined children in places like these.
The Wise Old Owl counts the leaves falling off her catalpa tree with the snow. She counts up to 56, the same number as children who have been abused by caregivers in Minnesota since 2005. Not many two-leggeds care to count catalpa leaves falling. Not many have cared to climb the tree of these children's lives to help them hold onto their leaves, keep those young chests and limbs from snapping off, breaking open.
It makes the Wise Old very sad. "Bare ruined choirs" calls to her the soaring cathedral of nature--quite a religious experience, she'll tell you. Choirs where children might sing, might have been kept safe, beloved and gently held, not with palms burned down to the bone, not with hearts beating inside broken ribs, not with cracked-open skulls.
Is this the poor house of Charles Dickens' time? Lots of very young children died then from malnutrition and exposure to cold and wet. No, the state of Minnesota does not condone poor houses or orphanages. Maybe she's mistaken, maybe the homes where these children died are the poor house of today. Not enough decent food, not any protection from rats and garbage, or the rampage of caregivers.
She wonders if maybe these poor houses are the killing fields of a kind of war? She's heard of concentration camps across the oceans where whole flocks were burned to death, stuffed into ovens. "Sing a song of blackbirds," blacked bones baked in a pyre of hatred. But not here, surely. Not in the sane security of the U.S. of A.
In her travels she's noted differences, however. Homes huge as pumpkins on steroids with four or five of those racing roaches that humans like to crowd onto highways. Homes that are mere piles of sticks with cold zinging through them. Poor versions of the poet's "bare ruined choirs." Noting as she does how pumpkins patches crowd together, whereas the piles of sticks are often off by themselves, at least here in the heartland. Or if crowded together, they house only the poor.
She suspects the caregivers who neglected or abused these 56 fallen leaves lived in the seclusion of Minnesota's heartland. It's not such a jolly place, this heartland. She's noticed that. Little towns become quite bare themselves. Empty. Ruined choirs. Why? She's watched slowly one jolly giant gathers all the acres into one enormous parcel. Takes several big machines and a few two-leggeds, leaving the town flock with very poor pickings. She can attest to that.
Knowing what's good for her, she's lately moved her home to a park land in a city. By the big river. One of her favorite places, that river. Don't find too many mangled, burned, picked over skeletons in places like this. They hum with prosperity. If they can't keep the leaves on their trees--nature being what it is--they buy fake. Take a gander, she suggests, liking the notion of a goose walking around with the two-leggeds. Don't find many bare ruined children in places like these.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Margotlog: Why GIve a Hoot?
Margotlog: Why Give a Hoot?
Wise Old Owl looks at various arguments pro and con about adding bird-friendly glass to the Vikings Stadium design, in Minneapolis, MN.
* Item one: A Star Tribune editorial (Oct 18) has asked Wise Old to keep "bird deaths in perspective." Being a bird in modern America isn't work a hoot, so the argument goes. Bird deaths due to hitting a tall glass, Viking wall will be a drop in the bucket, simply not worth the expense of installing less-damaging glass.
* Item two: Wise Old decides to expand the human and avian perspective on this advice. The city of Minneapolis via the Park Board has been considering what to do with a piece of supposed parkland once called The Yard, and now evidently called The Common, adjacent to the rising stadium. When Wise Old closes her eyes, she easily imagines this parcel littered with dead birds, each 24 hours' "harvest" from winged encounters with Vikings glass. This is possibly akin to a football quarterback being clobbered by a linebacker. But, of course, birds don't wear helmets.
* Item three: Wise Old tries expanding the perspective even further. Another recent article in the Star Tribune reports Minneapolis' desire to recreate its downtown as more "tree friendly." Wise Old scratches her neck feathers at this one. How does a desire to be more tree-friendly, attracting birds in the process, fit with a shoulder-shrug against more bird-friendly glass? Quite a conundrum for this Wise Old.
* Item four, last item: Star Tribune reporter Brandon Stahl has roused astonished outrage at the death of 4-year-old Eric Dean of Pope County, whose stepmother beat him repeatedly, yet county child protection did nothing to stop it. Minnesota, it turns out, has one of the country's worse records on child protection. Gov. Mark Dayton has convened a panel to look into this.'
Not to be confusing, Wise Old asks, What's the connection between a lack of child protection and bird deaths from nonfriendly glass in the Vikings stadium? Wise Old hoots at even having to ask the question: It's a matter of compassion and--she gives two hoots here--preventing damage once the danger is identified.
With a final couple of hoots, Wise Old urges commercial giants in her adopted city to reconsider. Bird-friendly glass is, if nothing else, a great popular move. She closes her eyes and imagines the marketing potential: a gorgeous red cardinal preening atop the helmet of Adrian Peterson, if he's ever allowed back on the field.
Better yet, for the Vikes, a proud blue jay hanging on while rookie Teddy Bridgewater runs the ball down the line. Plus a medley of warblers on their way south, fanning the balls toward wide receivers like Greg Jennings and Cordarrelle Patterson, who haven't done so well lately fielding. Maybe bird-friendly acts can help.
(Originally published in the Opinion Exchange section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tuesday Oct 21, 2014.)
Wise Old Owl looks at various arguments pro and con about adding bird-friendly glass to the Vikings Stadium design, in Minneapolis, MN.
* Item one: A Star Tribune editorial (Oct 18) has asked Wise Old to keep "bird deaths in perspective." Being a bird in modern America isn't work a hoot, so the argument goes. Bird deaths due to hitting a tall glass, Viking wall will be a drop in the bucket, simply not worth the expense of installing less-damaging glass.
* Item two: Wise Old decides to expand the human and avian perspective on this advice. The city of Minneapolis via the Park Board has been considering what to do with a piece of supposed parkland once called The Yard, and now evidently called The Common, adjacent to the rising stadium. When Wise Old closes her eyes, she easily imagines this parcel littered with dead birds, each 24 hours' "harvest" from winged encounters with Vikings glass. This is possibly akin to a football quarterback being clobbered by a linebacker. But, of course, birds don't wear helmets.
* Item three: Wise Old tries expanding the perspective even further. Another recent article in the Star Tribune reports Minneapolis' desire to recreate its downtown as more "tree friendly." Wise Old scratches her neck feathers at this one. How does a desire to be more tree-friendly, attracting birds in the process, fit with a shoulder-shrug against more bird-friendly glass? Quite a conundrum for this Wise Old.
* Item four, last item: Star Tribune reporter Brandon Stahl has roused astonished outrage at the death of 4-year-old Eric Dean of Pope County, whose stepmother beat him repeatedly, yet county child protection did nothing to stop it. Minnesota, it turns out, has one of the country's worse records on child protection. Gov. Mark Dayton has convened a panel to look into this.'
Not to be confusing, Wise Old asks, What's the connection between a lack of child protection and bird deaths from nonfriendly glass in the Vikings stadium? Wise Old hoots at even having to ask the question: It's a matter of compassion and--she gives two hoots here--preventing damage once the danger is identified.
With a final couple of hoots, Wise Old urges commercial giants in her adopted city to reconsider. Bird-friendly glass is, if nothing else, a great popular move. She closes her eyes and imagines the marketing potential: a gorgeous red cardinal preening atop the helmet of Adrian Peterson, if he's ever allowed back on the field.
Better yet, for the Vikes, a proud blue jay hanging on while rookie Teddy Bridgewater runs the ball down the line. Plus a medley of warblers on their way south, fanning the balls toward wide receivers like Greg Jennings and Cordarrelle Patterson, who haven't done so well lately fielding. Maybe bird-friendly acts can help.
(Originally published in the Opinion Exchange section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tuesday Oct 21, 2014.)
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Margotlog: Where Were the Neighbors?
Margotlog: Where
Were the Neighbors?
We
Americans like to think of ourselves as individuals to the max, making our own
way for better or worse in the world. Yet, as I think about the tragedy of
4-year-old's Eric Dean's death, reported Sept 2, 2014 in the StarTribune, I
find myself asking, "Where were the neighbors?"
Eric's
childcare workers brought frequent reports of the child's abuse to the Pope
County's Child Protection services. Yet, little was done. The boy was bitten by
his father's girlfriend, bitten many times, as well as punched, bruised, thrown
down stairs which led to his arm being broken. And finally he was inflicted
with sufficient bodily harm to lead to gastro-intestinal death. No wonder
his former childcare workers feel guilty.
Yet,
why didn't they go to the police. Were none of the neighbors suspicious of the
boy's trauma? Was his house so isolated that no one except his childcare
workers saw much of him? As I mull the difference between city and rural life,
I'm aware of events in my St. Paul Lex-Ham neighborhood that took place about
ten years ago.
The
"incident" involved a very friendly, full-bred Siamese kitten named
Bandit. Anyone walking past Bandit's house, as I often did, would find him coming
to be patted. He seemed to have a limp. A month later he began walking the
neighborhood meowing for food. When he came up on our porch and yowled, I fed
him and he purred a thank-you.
Word
about Bandit began to circulate--his friendliness, his limp, his desire for
food, his being outside in all weathers. A neighbor closer to Bandit's house
reported that his owners were keeping him as a "stud." They wanted
him inside only when it was time to impregnate their female Siamese.
His
limp got worse. He looked thinner and thinner. I along with a few others
knocked on the owners' door and told the surly man who answered that we were
concerned about the cat. "I'll be happy to adopt him if you don't want
him," I said through the screen and gave him my name.
The
owner threatened to call the police if Bandit went missing, and slammed the
door in our faces. The next afternoon a very polite Saint Paul policeman rang
our bell. We stood talking on the porch for a few minutes. The gist of his
message was that the owner had called, threatening to do damage to anyone who
showed any interest in Bandit. The policeman urged me to stay away from Bandit.
He also said he'd told the owner it was his job to feed the cat, and keep it
indoors if he didn't want it wandering the neighborhood.
A
cat is not a child. Yet we often treat our pets the way we treat our children.
Some are pampered and indulged. Some deprived like Eric of a most basic human
rights--safety. Bandit might not have been older than a four-year-old boy, but
he knew how to survive up to a point. Within a month, however, we heard that
his owner had run over him, whether on purpose or not, we never knew. Some of
us were very sad for Bandit.
Six
years later when Bandit's home burned, his surly owner died of smoke inhalation.
Few of us grieved. But we were shaken. The fire seemed like retribution far
beyond the misdemeanor of neglecting or abusing a pet.
If
Bandit had been a child, I like to tell myself, our neighborhood attempt to
help him might have made a difference. It certainly eased my distress over
Bandit's neglect, and gave us the support of like-minded neighbors and a kind,
sensible city policeman.
I
wish the same had been true for Eric's childcare workers who tried so hard to
protect him but were stymied by the family's stone-walling, by limits on Child
Protection follow-ups, by fear that going to the police might lose them their
jobs. Some things, like limits on the number of abuse reports kept active, will
change, so Minnesota officials promise, but no change will bring back a badly
and repeatedly damaged child. I wish there had been neighbors to sound the alarm. I wish someone had called the police.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy and My Poem, "The Annunciation"
Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy, and My Poem "The Annunciation"
I just came home from la bel'Italia, specifically three cities: Orte, Arezzo, and Florence. I've never been to Orte and Arezzo before, Florence, however, many many times. As part-Italian, and an art-lover, as a happy speaker of even limited Italian, as a fan of the country's quirky history and beautiful landscapes, and ever a pasta-lover--my trips to Italy rejuvenate me and send me home after 8-10 days completely satisfied.
There are always snags. This time, I was at my wits end trying to procure b & b's and even a hotel at the last minute. Luckily, friends who know Orte agreed to pick me up at the train station and chug-chug me up the incredibly high wall face to the old city. They deposited me at the clean quiet B&B I'd reserved, and the second day I took a tour of the enormous city underground - miles of snaking tunnels and deep pools which once formed the city's water reservoir and delivery system. There were no desiccated bodies as in Rome's catacombs, but the sense of being in another world, with quivery light, and deep blue water satisfied some desire to try out burial ahead of time.
Arezzo, though also high, is not much like Orte's almost funeral quiet. Arezzo is a town of youth wearing everything from torn jeans to tiered gauzy dresses. The first evening in a rambling two-room hall, a friend held a retrospective exhibit of her lover's work. He died three years ago. They kept horses in a stone farmhouse 40 kilometers outside town. She still stables two mares and a filly-in-training for the big time. It was a time of celebration, but full of strangers and maybe on my part, too much wine.
It was the second day, on my own, when I truly gathered a sense of this ancient yet very lively town.
High up beside the cathedral, I sat in a very pleasant park under a rim of umbrella pines leaning together to catch the sun. Children ran across an open circle with their dark German shepherd barking after them. When he was leashed and couldn't follow, he emitted the strangest groans and gurgles I've ever heard coming from a dog. Otherwise, in the quiet, I looked into the hills studded with a few
quintessential Tuscan farmhouses, three-story, with the bronzed terracotta look of old wood, and topped by an almost flat roof that overhung the entire building, like a sheltering hat.
Coming down from this repose, I found myself surrounded by young men in snazzy suits, pulling and pushing one of their comrades in a bicycle three-seater. He carried a bouquet of huge zinnias. What's going on? I wondered. Following them as they braked to keep him from zipping down the steep street, I stopped with them before an ancient building renown for its collection of different columns. Then, up from the bottom of the street, chugged a VW bus. Inside sat the bride, dressed in gauzy white, with cheeks as round and firm as a ripe apple. She looked so young, almost like myself, in the photos of my first wedding, the one where I too wore a veil partly hiding my face. Lots of onlookers like myself hung around to see her slowly descend, have her veil spread around her and slowly enter the sanctuary, carrying her own bouquet of red, pink, yellow, and orange zinnias.
Finally Florence with my artist friend Patricia Glee Smith (look for her website). We visited the Uffizi at night, the only way to avoid the crowds. Standing before Leonardo's "Annunciation," I was happily transported to my first love affair with this painting, which coincided with falling in love with the back of a young man walking down the aisle of a Minneapolis poetry reading.
Now I give you the poem, published in my full-length poetry collection, Between the Houses (Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004). If you order it from Amazon and read it, please leave a comment on the Amazon page for the book. Here's the poem, perhaps the one I treasure most:
The Annunciation
In Leonardo's painting, she studies
out of doors, this eminent virgin
in her habitual cloth of red and blue.
out of doors, this eminent virgin
in her habitual cloth of red and blue.
Before her on a pedestal table
encrusted with a mollusk shell, lies
an open book from which she raises her eyes
to the boy dressed in swan's wings, wearing
a cap of curls and carrying a lily wand.
She may have seen him ahead of her
encrusted with a mollusk shell, lies
an open book from which she raises her eyes
to the boy dressed in swan's wings, wearing
a cap of curls and carrying a lily wand.
She may have seen him ahead of her
in church, his shoulders and torso
masculine and square, his hair
a tangle of innuendo.
masculine and square, his hair
a tangle of innuendo.
That he comes to her in the garb
of heaven is only an accident
of myth and history, for she needs
nothing announced. The cleft in the palm
of her raised hand anticipates all he means
and she accepts only provisionally,
for he is her inspiration, not a winged
word or an unborn child. This child-man
with fabulous pinions, will cause her
to abandon the protected corner,
to crush the low, delicate plants,
and dream his weight will never rise.
of heaven is only an accident
of myth and history, for she needs
nothing announced. The cleft in the palm
of her raised hand anticipates all he means
and she accepts only provisionally,
for he is her inspiration, not a winged
word or an unborn child. This child-man
with fabulous pinions, will cause her
to abandon the protected corner,
to crush the low, delicate plants,
and dream his weight will never rise.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Margotlog: Window Washing
Margotlog: Window Washing
It's perfect Minnesota weather for window washing--clear, crisp, low humidity, pleasant to stand outside washing a year's grim off my kitchen windows, then the front ones within the porch, then the kitchen door--all with silhouettes of falcons pasted on the glass to deter those drive-by smashers who insist on seeing their enemies in mirrors of themselves.
This rather pleasant, repetitive cleansing of grim to allow clear sight takes me back to our very earliest days in this house, bought before anyone heard of a "crash." How much did we pay? Does it matter? It was a good deal, this three-story house with a finished attic, though the two "attic" rooms (once maids' rooms, so we heard) still retained remnants of the old gas fixtures--odd fingers clothed in black tape. Needless to say we replaced them with electricity.
These would become the daughters' rooms, the blended-family daughters, so shy they barely spoke to each other at first, one choosing fleur-de-lis silver-and-blue wallpaper and pink carpeting, the other wanting shy strips of violets and beige carpet. There are plants on that third floor who had lived there the entire 30 years since we moved in--asparagus ferns, one still thriving, the other kaput, head down below the back deck.
And the daughters? As I swipe away grime, I think of these stalwart, handsome young women--well not so young as mature, competent, making their mark in the world. How we worried about them, then, blended family artifacts. Would they ever speak to each other? Would they ever outgrow the difficulty our divorces and remarriage had caused them?
At the time, I substituted joyous decorating and cooking for broken bonds. As I wipe grime off the windows, I glimpse that huge main courses my new husband and I both produced--lasagna, "hot dish"--his contribution, some concoction of noodles, mushroom soup, and hamburger. We sat awkwardly around the dining room table from his single-fellow house, actually quite a fine table with comfortable chairs. But the comfort did not extend to our blended family dinners. His son glowered, the only one of the three children who had the guts to show his true feelings. While I probably gabbled on, switching topics with lighting speed, and my husband smiled and passed the hot dish.
I have loved this house with and without children in it. Its windows face straight north and south, bringing in winter sun on north-facing windows where for years of winters, I've basked with the cats. And in summer, with windows in both directions open, we have wonderful breezes. I love the cramped second floor rooms, where I now write this message to the world. Full of plants for me except in summer when they all get time outside. But now, after our threat of freeze, the Christmas cactus have come to sit beside me, arching their awkward claws toward light, and catching the sun on their flat palm-like limbs.
Birds have become my children substitutes. I feed seed-eaters morning and evening, a ritual that sends me out in all weather, serving needs other than my own, loving the glimpses of nut-hatches eating upside down, finches swarming the sunflower seeds, and in the twilight just before dark, the cardinals with their chip, chip, chip. Beautiful, shy birds, my emissaries from the other world, the southland of my growing up, which too is folded into this house.
It's perfect Minnesota weather for window washing--clear, crisp, low humidity, pleasant to stand outside washing a year's grim off my kitchen windows, then the front ones within the porch, then the kitchen door--all with silhouettes of falcons pasted on the glass to deter those drive-by smashers who insist on seeing their enemies in mirrors of themselves.
This rather pleasant, repetitive cleansing of grim to allow clear sight takes me back to our very earliest days in this house, bought before anyone heard of a "crash." How much did we pay? Does it matter? It was a good deal, this three-story house with a finished attic, though the two "attic" rooms (once maids' rooms, so we heard) still retained remnants of the old gas fixtures--odd fingers clothed in black tape. Needless to say we replaced them with electricity.
These would become the daughters' rooms, the blended-family daughters, so shy they barely spoke to each other at first, one choosing fleur-de-lis silver-and-blue wallpaper and pink carpeting, the other wanting shy strips of violets and beige carpet. There are plants on that third floor who had lived there the entire 30 years since we moved in--asparagus ferns, one still thriving, the other kaput, head down below the back deck.
And the daughters? As I swipe away grime, I think of these stalwart, handsome young women--well not so young as mature, competent, making their mark in the world. How we worried about them, then, blended family artifacts. Would they ever speak to each other? Would they ever outgrow the difficulty our divorces and remarriage had caused them?
At the time, I substituted joyous decorating and cooking for broken bonds. As I wipe grime off the windows, I glimpse that huge main courses my new husband and I both produced--lasagna, "hot dish"--his contribution, some concoction of noodles, mushroom soup, and hamburger. We sat awkwardly around the dining room table from his single-fellow house, actually quite a fine table with comfortable chairs. But the comfort did not extend to our blended family dinners. His son glowered, the only one of the three children who had the guts to show his true feelings. While I probably gabbled on, switching topics with lighting speed, and my husband smiled and passed the hot dish.
I have loved this house with and without children in it. Its windows face straight north and south, bringing in winter sun on north-facing windows where for years of winters, I've basked with the cats. And in summer, with windows in both directions open, we have wonderful breezes. I love the cramped second floor rooms, where I now write this message to the world. Full of plants for me except in summer when they all get time outside. But now, after our threat of freeze, the Christmas cactus have come to sit beside me, arching their awkward claws toward light, and catching the sun on their flat palm-like limbs.
Birds have become my children substitutes. I feed seed-eaters morning and evening, a ritual that sends me out in all weather, serving needs other than my own, loving the glimpses of nut-hatches eating upside down, finches swarming the sunflower seeds, and in the twilight just before dark, the cardinals with their chip, chip, chip. Beautiful, shy birds, my emissaries from the other world, the southland of my growing up, which too is folded into this house.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Margotlog: Neighborhood Round-up: On a Scale of 1-10
Margotlog: Neighborhood Roundup: On a Scale of 1-10.
It's a beautiful morning in this small part of the Upper Midwest--skies "couple-colored as a brindled cow," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. Brisk breezes counteract humidity. Sun dazzle makes a row of poplars wink and glow. Within a tall stand of golden glow, taller than I am, wrens and goldfinch rasp and tweet. Raising babies.
It's hard to hold onto horror on such a lovely morning. Yet here it is. The horror of a young mother's death, the agony of a young child's slow torture and final murder. One of these is rather personal. The other not.
The personal is occurring just beyond my three-generation family circle. The daughter-in-law of friends has 4th stage breast cancer. She's no more than 41 or 42. Tomorrow her parents will leave for London to visit her one last time, and help the husband, their older son, manage two grandchildren aged 2 and 4. Do we call and speak our shock and grief to the parents who used to be better friends, possibly because for several years as this young woman's breast cancer spread, and she suffered through surgeries and chemo-therapy, our friends were distracted by grief, anxiety, and fear. And by frequent visits to her and her family.
Their grief and the young woman's impending death seem particularly frightening to me this morning because I just spent a happy afternoon with my own daughter, about this young mother's age. It's a vulnerable time, late 30s, early 40s. Many come into their own, earn more, expand families. Others can be struck numb by loss, disappointment, error. It can be a time of reassessment, of taking stricter account of oneself. Of shedding destructive habits. Of making big moves. I shucked a destructive relationship and moved with my daughter into a little house with an eyebrow window. The alcohol abuse which had precipitated the break-up was curable. I was lucky. There was Al-Anon.
The other horror amid the glow of this late morning arrived via the Sunday StarTribune as a long report about a 3-year-boy whose child-care workers repeatedly reported bruises, face bites, and toward the end, a tell-tale broken arm to Minnesota's Pope County child protection agency. Tell-tale break because when adults physically abuse young children by twisting their arms or legs, the bones break in recognizable patterns. The County did nothing. Over and over, when these reports arrived, child protection workers did nothing. Or the one time they questioned the step-mother, and she denied or prevaricated, that was that. Now she is going to jail for life.
Beyond the obvious facts, what went so horribly wrong here? Over and over as I walked through this morning's beauty, the naked refusal of those employed in Pope County to protect, search, question, build a case, who "Did Nothing" made a tattoo of disgust and shock to the time of my footsteps. Why did they routinely do nothing? Why did the child care workers who saw the boy hurt over and over and took the time to report this, why did they not go to the police? Would the local police have done better? What would it have taken to rouse these officials into action? What kept them so criminally unresponsive?
I could make a case for neighborhood, and small-town connivance in shielding perpetrators through fear of "rocking the boat...we have to live with these people...who's to say these child-care people know what they're talking about?"
Yet small-town connivance was broken when the women who took care of the boy reported his bites and bruises, and finally his broken leg. Imagine a step-mother biting the face of a three-year-old. Biting his face. It makes me shudder. Poor thing, poor neglected, hurt small creature. His father evidently shielding the brutal step-mother, the child-care workers not sufficiently empowered to go to the law. And this woman rampaging over the body of a pliant boy of three.
I say Pope County needs to clean out its compliant abettors. Replace them with stern, determined experts who care nothing for community pride and connivance. Who care for innocent children. Who are determined to get to the bottom of reported abuse. Who do something until the doer of such crimes is behind bars and the hurt child, instead of being dear, might have a chance to recover.
It's a beautiful morning in this small part of the Upper Midwest--skies "couple-colored as a brindled cow," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. Brisk breezes counteract humidity. Sun dazzle makes a row of poplars wink and glow. Within a tall stand of golden glow, taller than I am, wrens and goldfinch rasp and tweet. Raising babies.
It's hard to hold onto horror on such a lovely morning. Yet here it is. The horror of a young mother's death, the agony of a young child's slow torture and final murder. One of these is rather personal. The other not.
The personal is occurring just beyond my three-generation family circle. The daughter-in-law of friends has 4th stage breast cancer. She's no more than 41 or 42. Tomorrow her parents will leave for London to visit her one last time, and help the husband, their older son, manage two grandchildren aged 2 and 4. Do we call and speak our shock and grief to the parents who used to be better friends, possibly because for several years as this young woman's breast cancer spread, and she suffered through surgeries and chemo-therapy, our friends were distracted by grief, anxiety, and fear. And by frequent visits to her and her family.
Their grief and the young woman's impending death seem particularly frightening to me this morning because I just spent a happy afternoon with my own daughter, about this young mother's age. It's a vulnerable time, late 30s, early 40s. Many come into their own, earn more, expand families. Others can be struck numb by loss, disappointment, error. It can be a time of reassessment, of taking stricter account of oneself. Of shedding destructive habits. Of making big moves. I shucked a destructive relationship and moved with my daughter into a little house with an eyebrow window. The alcohol abuse which had precipitated the break-up was curable. I was lucky. There was Al-Anon.
The other horror amid the glow of this late morning arrived via the Sunday StarTribune as a long report about a 3-year-boy whose child-care workers repeatedly reported bruises, face bites, and toward the end, a tell-tale broken arm to Minnesota's Pope County child protection agency. Tell-tale break because when adults physically abuse young children by twisting their arms or legs, the bones break in recognizable patterns. The County did nothing. Over and over, when these reports arrived, child protection workers did nothing. Or the one time they questioned the step-mother, and she denied or prevaricated, that was that. Now she is going to jail for life.
Beyond the obvious facts, what went so horribly wrong here? Over and over as I walked through this morning's beauty, the naked refusal of those employed in Pope County to protect, search, question, build a case, who "Did Nothing" made a tattoo of disgust and shock to the time of my footsteps. Why did they routinely do nothing? Why did the child care workers who saw the boy hurt over and over and took the time to report this, why did they not go to the police? Would the local police have done better? What would it have taken to rouse these officials into action? What kept them so criminally unresponsive?
I could make a case for neighborhood, and small-town connivance in shielding perpetrators through fear of "rocking the boat...we have to live with these people...who's to say these child-care people know what they're talking about?"
Yet small-town connivance was broken when the women who took care of the boy reported his bites and bruises, and finally his broken leg. Imagine a step-mother biting the face of a three-year-old. Biting his face. It makes me shudder. Poor thing, poor neglected, hurt small creature. His father evidently shielding the brutal step-mother, the child-care workers not sufficiently empowered to go to the law. And this woman rampaging over the body of a pliant boy of three.
I say Pope County needs to clean out its compliant abettors. Replace them with stern, determined experts who care nothing for community pride and connivance. Who care for innocent children. Who are determined to get to the bottom of reported abuse. Who do something until the doer of such crimes is behind bars and the hurt child, instead of being dear, might have a chance to recover.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Margotlog: Late Summer Tears
Margotlog: Late Summer Tears
You don't have to weep with me--not wrenching sobs at any rate, just a slow seep of wet, honoring the clouds of green and scimitars of swallows twittering against high blue. Mornings on the deck with black and white Julia pinned beside me, a red-splashed finch goes time and again to select sunflower seeds, while one, no two fledglings peep incessantly from the crap apple tree. Their wings flutter, the almost universal sign of baby-bird begging. Only a sudden movement startles them and they fly off together.
Maybe ten days ago, huge jay teens pined for food as their parents (hard to tell father from mother) ignored them. Now on their own, these goofy loud oafs fly in and claim the place, their head feathers not quite formed for adulthood, their wings and tails not quite adult blue with crisp black stripes. They command any perch they choose, though usually one holds back to act as sentry with a loud, "Caw, caw," or a funny "click, click, gurgle," which I can't translate. Not a danger sign, I think, but some family jay-chatter meant only for familiar ears.
The season is tending toward its end, making these pleasures bitter-sweet. When the State Fair begins late August, it's almost always intensely hot and humid. Once when my daughter answered phones in the cow barns, I'd call her up just to hear her mushy voice, nearly drowning in her own sweat. We still have a week before the pops of fireworks begin to light up the northern sky, and I can almost hear the disk-jockeys announcing either a tune or a heifer.
And why does any of this bring on tears? Because the green fuse is almost burnt out, and I pine for the season's already fleeting beauty. The glory of lilies is over, now comes the brazen tall-as-a man sunflowers. Yet, even amid these stanch portrayals of summer, even more than in winter, when we hunker into ourselves, summer ghosts flit among the zinnias. And there I am sitting in my mother's place, mid-morning of a hot South Carolina summer's day. It's her back porch, not unlike my back deck, and there's the shade of a maple she planted after Hurricane Hugo made off with some older tree or another. Her maple was not as sky-high as mine, brushing the air with enormous billows of green, but it was full enough for lovely shade. She had jays too, and flickers, sticking their long beaks in the ground looking for grubs.
As she ate her breakfast on a tray--always the same cereal with milk and a banana--she and Cindy, the dog of her solitude, low to the ground and wire-haired gray, perused the yard happenings. It was both her love of the outdoors, her tender care of trees and flowers and hydrangeas which she turned blue by burying some metal at their roots, as well as her solitude, facing the morning alone with her big empty house at her back (mine is not empty but I forget that)--both make me tear-up.
Maybe I sense I have become her, and unlike my resistance of years gone by, I don't mind so much. In fact, I honor her for making the day and the season and the active life of her yard as important to her as life itself. For it was much of her life then. She had no husband or work, no nearby offspring to bring her out of herself. But the wider world was sufficient. Whether she wrapped up in raincoat and headscarf or wore only a thin cotton shift--she found her life in touch with the red birds and azaleas, the jays and mocking birds, the maples and sycamores, the breeze and scent of Charleston harbor way off in the distance.
When my sister or I did arrive, she talked incessantly, as if she'd saved up a thousand things to tell us. But I wasn't fooled. She was always shyer than she wanted to let on, and talk covered her joy in our visit, her need to be hostess and keep the party going. But it's not her conversation I remember, but the rapt attention to a "green thought it a green shade," that I honor. This phrase from Andrew Marvell's 17th century poem, "The Garden," captures exactly that twining of leaf and memory that brings me almost perfectly in line with her shape, years ago facing the last heat of summer.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
You don't have to weep with me--not wrenching sobs at any rate, just a slow seep of wet, honoring the clouds of green and scimitars of swallows twittering against high blue. Mornings on the deck with black and white Julia pinned beside me, a red-splashed finch goes time and again to select sunflower seeds, while one, no two fledglings peep incessantly from the crap apple tree. Their wings flutter, the almost universal sign of baby-bird begging. Only a sudden movement startles them and they fly off together.
Maybe ten days ago, huge jay teens pined for food as their parents (hard to tell father from mother) ignored them. Now on their own, these goofy loud oafs fly in and claim the place, their head feathers not quite formed for adulthood, their wings and tails not quite adult blue with crisp black stripes. They command any perch they choose, though usually one holds back to act as sentry with a loud, "Caw, caw," or a funny "click, click, gurgle," which I can't translate. Not a danger sign, I think, but some family jay-chatter meant only for familiar ears.
The season is tending toward its end, making these pleasures bitter-sweet. When the State Fair begins late August, it's almost always intensely hot and humid. Once when my daughter answered phones in the cow barns, I'd call her up just to hear her mushy voice, nearly drowning in her own sweat. We still have a week before the pops of fireworks begin to light up the northern sky, and I can almost hear the disk-jockeys announcing either a tune or a heifer.
And why does any of this bring on tears? Because the green fuse is almost burnt out, and I pine for the season's already fleeting beauty. The glory of lilies is over, now comes the brazen tall-as-a man sunflowers. Yet, even amid these stanch portrayals of summer, even more than in winter, when we hunker into ourselves, summer ghosts flit among the zinnias. And there I am sitting in my mother's place, mid-morning of a hot South Carolina summer's day. It's her back porch, not unlike my back deck, and there's the shade of a maple she planted after Hurricane Hugo made off with some older tree or another. Her maple was not as sky-high as mine, brushing the air with enormous billows of green, but it was full enough for lovely shade. She had jays too, and flickers, sticking their long beaks in the ground looking for grubs.
As she ate her breakfast on a tray--always the same cereal with milk and a banana--she and Cindy, the dog of her solitude, low to the ground and wire-haired gray, perused the yard happenings. It was both her love of the outdoors, her tender care of trees and flowers and hydrangeas which she turned blue by burying some metal at their roots, as well as her solitude, facing the morning alone with her big empty house at her back (mine is not empty but I forget that)--both make me tear-up.
Maybe I sense I have become her, and unlike my resistance of years gone by, I don't mind so much. In fact, I honor her for making the day and the season and the active life of her yard as important to her as life itself. For it was much of her life then. She had no husband or work, no nearby offspring to bring her out of herself. But the wider world was sufficient. Whether she wrapped up in raincoat and headscarf or wore only a thin cotton shift--she found her life in touch with the red birds and azaleas, the jays and mocking birds, the maples and sycamores, the breeze and scent of Charleston harbor way off in the distance.
When my sister or I did arrive, she talked incessantly, as if she'd saved up a thousand things to tell us. But I wasn't fooled. She was always shyer than she wanted to let on, and talk covered her joy in our visit, her need to be hostess and keep the party going. But it's not her conversation I remember, but the rapt attention to a "green thought it a green shade," that I honor. This phrase from Andrew Marvell's 17th century poem, "The Garden," captures exactly that twining of leaf and memory that brings me almost perfectly in line with her shape, years ago facing the last heat of summer.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened
Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened
For five days I've been out of contact. Yes, the cell phone rang a few times. And I talked to my daughter who shared a room with me. But I read no newspaper, saw no TV news, checked no email. Instead I gazed at "purple mountains majesty." Looked up at enormous white pine, so tall I had to bend backwards to see their feathery tops. Morning mist clung to the mountains. A family of Canada geese climbed out of the lake and waddled across the grass.
In this yoga retreat center called Kripalu in western Massachusetts, I saw plenty of people at meals. But once I closed the door of my little cell, the quiet was profound. Almost nothing happened. Except in the novel I was writing. The books I was reading. In my dreams.
Then we left. The drive to Logan Airport in Boston took four hours, the last in heavy rain. As my daughter drove, I chanted jump-rope rhymes--"Miss Mary Mack, Mark, Mary, all dressed in black, black, black," or "Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to see her fellow." Almost no boys jump rope. Almost all jump-rope rhymes are about girly girls.
We tried singing show tunes, but the drive out had exhausted the charm of "the surrey with the fringe on top" and "I'm just a girl who cyan't say no." By the time we returned the rental car and found the empty check-in counter for Sun Country airlines, my intense inwardness of the past five days was eroding. I smiled at the young man who was making salads for the first time at Le Bon Pan. I studied an older daughter from India who pushed her baby sister sternly away from her mother. As the wait extended from an hour to 90 minutes to two hours, my alertness sagged. It was 6:30, 7, 7:30.
We began the long walk to the gate. I took the moving walkway, feeling more and more zombielike. Slumping into a seat not far from the boarding gate, I noticed several TV screens suspended from the ceiling nearby. The screens were split into three -- the anchor in the middle flanked by one or two commentators. All were talking about the bombing of civilians in Gaza in retaliation for the abduction and probable death of one Israeli soldier. This had evidently broken a brief cease fire and renewed hostilities. I hadn't known there was a cease fire,
In my exhaustion, the reiteration of certain facts drilled into me: several thousand Gaza civilians killed in Israeli rocket fire over the past couple of days. Killed in homes and schools, in supposed safe areas. One Israeli soldier abducted and possibly dead against hundreds, thousands of civilians dead in Gaza. The numbers did not compute.
This extreme imbalance of suffering shocked me. I clenched my teeth. Every time the screen showed destruction in Gaza, I grew angrier. For the death of one combatant, Israel felt justified in what could only be called mass murder of innocent people.
Isn't that exactly what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II? I asked myself with a flare for dramatizing the obvious. Not so easy to state even to myself was what this implied:
about Israel. Now, looking back after 24 hours, I recognize the enormity of Israel's response. The death of one Israeli soldier prompted the bombing of thousands in retaliation. One Israeli, so precious, one Israeli death, such an enormity that it was almost impossible that enemy suffering could balance this death.
Was I witnessing arrogance? Or was it fear that without extreme retaliation, fury would rain down on Israel? If an atrocity as my gut told me, would it go unnamed (our president's response so bland as to be despicable) because many wealthy, powerful U.S. Jews hold key positions in commerce, government, and politics? It is possible that for the first time, CNN commentators were speaking out in disgust and outrage appropriate to an enormity, while U.S. officials said almost nothing? Did that silence make us, as individuals and a country, complicit? What was behind this pretense that almost nothing had happened?
For five days I've been out of contact. Yes, the cell phone rang a few times. And I talked to my daughter who shared a room with me. But I read no newspaper, saw no TV news, checked no email. Instead I gazed at "purple mountains majesty." Looked up at enormous white pine, so tall I had to bend backwards to see their feathery tops. Morning mist clung to the mountains. A family of Canada geese climbed out of the lake and waddled across the grass.
In this yoga retreat center called Kripalu in western Massachusetts, I saw plenty of people at meals. But once I closed the door of my little cell, the quiet was profound. Almost nothing happened. Except in the novel I was writing. The books I was reading. In my dreams.
Then we left. The drive to Logan Airport in Boston took four hours, the last in heavy rain. As my daughter drove, I chanted jump-rope rhymes--"Miss Mary Mack, Mark, Mary, all dressed in black, black, black," or "Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to see her fellow." Almost no boys jump rope. Almost all jump-rope rhymes are about girly girls.
We tried singing show tunes, but the drive out had exhausted the charm of "the surrey with the fringe on top" and "I'm just a girl who cyan't say no." By the time we returned the rental car and found the empty check-in counter for Sun Country airlines, my intense inwardness of the past five days was eroding. I smiled at the young man who was making salads for the first time at Le Bon Pan. I studied an older daughter from India who pushed her baby sister sternly away from her mother. As the wait extended from an hour to 90 minutes to two hours, my alertness sagged. It was 6:30, 7, 7:30.
We began the long walk to the gate. I took the moving walkway, feeling more and more zombielike. Slumping into a seat not far from the boarding gate, I noticed several TV screens suspended from the ceiling nearby. The screens were split into three -- the anchor in the middle flanked by one or two commentators. All were talking about the bombing of civilians in Gaza in retaliation for the abduction and probable death of one Israeli soldier. This had evidently broken a brief cease fire and renewed hostilities. I hadn't known there was a cease fire,
In my exhaustion, the reiteration of certain facts drilled into me: several thousand Gaza civilians killed in Israeli rocket fire over the past couple of days. Killed in homes and schools, in supposed safe areas. One Israeli soldier abducted and possibly dead against hundreds, thousands of civilians dead in Gaza. The numbers did not compute.
This extreme imbalance of suffering shocked me. I clenched my teeth. Every time the screen showed destruction in Gaza, I grew angrier. For the death of one combatant, Israel felt justified in what could only be called mass murder of innocent people.
Isn't that exactly what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II? I asked myself with a flare for dramatizing the obvious. Not so easy to state even to myself was what this implied:
about Israel. Now, looking back after 24 hours, I recognize the enormity of Israel's response. The death of one Israeli soldier prompted the bombing of thousands in retaliation. One Israeli, so precious, one Israeli death, such an enormity that it was almost impossible that enemy suffering could balance this death.
Was I witnessing arrogance? Or was it fear that without extreme retaliation, fury would rain down on Israel? If an atrocity as my gut told me, would it go unnamed (our president's response so bland as to be despicable) because many wealthy, powerful U.S. Jews hold key positions in commerce, government, and politics? It is possible that for the first time, CNN commentators were speaking out in disgust and outrage appropriate to an enormity, while U.S. officials said almost nothing? Did that silence make us, as individuals and a country, complicit? What was behind this pretense that almost nothing had happened?
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Margotlog: War in Val d'Orcia
Margotlog: War in Val D'Orcia
According to Uncle Frankie, fighting with the American 8th Army, surviving malaria in North Africa, working their way up Italy's boot, slipping Neapolitan whores into American officers' beds, and falling in love with a New York lawyer attached to Eisenhower's central staff kept him so busy and entertained, he never felt hunger, fear or exhaustion. Let his flat-footed, weak-eyed brothers stay home and drive cab or do war work. With his perfect Neapolitan dialect, my rascally youngest uncle played World War II for all it was worth.
Iris and Antonio Origin, deep in the hills of southern Tuscany, weren't particularly discomfited by the war either, not in the beginning. On their network of 50 farms, they worked with Tuscan farmers to refashion agricultural practices that had eroded the soil. Iris went to Rome for the birth of her second child. The city was tense, she found, as the U.S. 8th Army advanced from Sicily, and German troops retreated behind them. But the Origos were absorbed in their experiment to return 150, 000 acres of marginal Tuscan land to productivity. In their huge 15th-century manor house, La Foce, they had no trouble housing twenty refugee children from the north, bombed out of their homes. Iris started a school. She began writing a diary at night when the children slept.
It is this diary that now has become one of the most respected accounts of life in the chaos that was Italy's disintegration. Mussolini had fallen. For a while it looked like Prime Minister Badoglio would declare Italian neutrality, but as he hesitated, Fascists took control of many towns, grimly determined to resist the Allies. With an insouciance hard to imagine, Iris and Antonio conversed with German officers, begged Fascists for leniency, urged infuriated Partisans to caution and stealth, and kept faith with their peasant co-conspirators. All buried hams and cheese. Iris buried books and beautiful objects, cloth and thread. What could not be purchased, was made over from what remained. Each affectionate connection with a combatant throbbed with shared danger and the fear of loss, yet Antonio drove through mined fields to various provincial towns to beg or consult, to advise or test the water.
The nearer the Americans came, the more dire became their situation. German troops had flooded down from the north. Sporadic fighting among Partisans, Fascists and Germans proved constantly unpredictable. Many whom the Origos encountered they could not trust. But to show this openly was as dangerous as their uncertainty. Through most of it, these two stanch patriots of what was best in Italy struggled to maintain their composure, the health and livelihood of the farms that depended on them, and the lives of their own smaller but always growing group.
Thinking back on this absorbing account, I am reminded of another war diary, Mary Boykin Chestnut's Diary from Dixie, her description of South Carolina during the Civil Wary. In General Sherman's march to the sea, the Battle of Charleston, the fate of plantations throughout the South Carolina low country, and the chaos of unpredictable allegiances and troop movements--Mary Chestnut kept her head held high and her pluck in hand. It's impossible to compare suffering, but the immediacy of both these diaries and the writers' intelligence, stamina, and determination to survive make them unforgettable.
Only at the end, when the Origos and their many charges had to walk away from La Foce, with only the clothes and minimal food they could carry, only after sleeping with children on the ground, soothing their fears of constant aircraft strafing, and with almost no water to be had, only then did Iris begin to suffer acutely. Finding refuge in a tiny town, being stuffed in cellars for days as the battle raged above them--this meant that when the British and Americans finally arrived, she and all her clan greeted them with passionate relief. Yet she noted that the soldiers were a bit bored by it all, having lived through similar "liberations."
At the end her offering to the peasants stands as testimony to what was best in conflicted country: "Resigned and laborious, they and their men folk turn back from the fresh graves and the wreckage of their homes to their accustomed daily toil. It is they who will bring the land to life again." (1947, 1984, p. 239)
According to Uncle Frankie, fighting with the American 8th Army, surviving malaria in North Africa, working their way up Italy's boot, slipping Neapolitan whores into American officers' beds, and falling in love with a New York lawyer attached to Eisenhower's central staff kept him so busy and entertained, he never felt hunger, fear or exhaustion. Let his flat-footed, weak-eyed brothers stay home and drive cab or do war work. With his perfect Neapolitan dialect, my rascally youngest uncle played World War II for all it was worth.
Iris and Antonio Origin, deep in the hills of southern Tuscany, weren't particularly discomfited by the war either, not in the beginning. On their network of 50 farms, they worked with Tuscan farmers to refashion agricultural practices that had eroded the soil. Iris went to Rome for the birth of her second child. The city was tense, she found, as the U.S. 8th Army advanced from Sicily, and German troops retreated behind them. But the Origos were absorbed in their experiment to return 150, 000 acres of marginal Tuscan land to productivity. In their huge 15th-century manor house, La Foce, they had no trouble housing twenty refugee children from the north, bombed out of their homes. Iris started a school. She began writing a diary at night when the children slept.
It is this diary that now has become one of the most respected accounts of life in the chaos that was Italy's disintegration. Mussolini had fallen. For a while it looked like Prime Minister Badoglio would declare Italian neutrality, but as he hesitated, Fascists took control of many towns, grimly determined to resist the Allies. With an insouciance hard to imagine, Iris and Antonio conversed with German officers, begged Fascists for leniency, urged infuriated Partisans to caution and stealth, and kept faith with their peasant co-conspirators. All buried hams and cheese. Iris buried books and beautiful objects, cloth and thread. What could not be purchased, was made over from what remained. Each affectionate connection with a combatant throbbed with shared danger and the fear of loss, yet Antonio drove through mined fields to various provincial towns to beg or consult, to advise or test the water.
The nearer the Americans came, the more dire became their situation. German troops had flooded down from the north. Sporadic fighting among Partisans, Fascists and Germans proved constantly unpredictable. Many whom the Origos encountered they could not trust. But to show this openly was as dangerous as their uncertainty. Through most of it, these two stanch patriots of what was best in Italy struggled to maintain their composure, the health and livelihood of the farms that depended on them, and the lives of their own smaller but always growing group.
Thinking back on this absorbing account, I am reminded of another war diary, Mary Boykin Chestnut's Diary from Dixie, her description of South Carolina during the Civil Wary. In General Sherman's march to the sea, the Battle of Charleston, the fate of plantations throughout the South Carolina low country, and the chaos of unpredictable allegiances and troop movements--Mary Chestnut kept her head held high and her pluck in hand. It's impossible to compare suffering, but the immediacy of both these diaries and the writers' intelligence, stamina, and determination to survive make them unforgettable.
Only at the end, when the Origos and their many charges had to walk away from La Foce, with only the clothes and minimal food they could carry, only after sleeping with children on the ground, soothing their fears of constant aircraft strafing, and with almost no water to be had, only then did Iris begin to suffer acutely. Finding refuge in a tiny town, being stuffed in cellars for days as the battle raged above them--this meant that when the British and Americans finally arrived, she and all her clan greeted them with passionate relief. Yet she noted that the soldiers were a bit bored by it all, having lived through similar "liberations."
At the end her offering to the peasants stands as testimony to what was best in conflicted country: "Resigned and laborious, they and their men folk turn back from the fresh graves and the wreckage of their homes to their accustomed daily toil. It is they who will bring the land to life again." (1947, 1984, p. 239)
Monday, July 7, 2014
Margotlog: Musing on Losing the Elephants
Margotlog: Musing on Losing the Elephants
I was standing in the shadows of my kitchen, looking out into blazing summer heat. What I saw instead of backyard summer green was the death of elephants. Hundreds of them. I saw the Babar I'd loved as a child, gunned down in rampant slaughter. I saw his children nudging his prone body and his face with his huge ears, bloodied from hacked-off tusks. A wave of nausea and hatred against my tribe paralyzed me, and kept me staring from darkness into rampant sun. Eventually I turned and wrote a check to African Conservation. I had to do something from my northern state, halfway across the world, to try and save the Elephants. It was the mid-1990s, the beginning of my environmental conscience.
It's very difficult to write about the whole-sale slaughter of one of the earth's most magnificent animals. Over the years, my outrage and sorrow have taken me toward many other gross indignities against life on earth. Dangers from pesticides and herbicides--read increased autism if one lives within a mile of most U.S. farms, read loss of one third of the nation's colonies of bees--create fear and extra efforts for my little plot of soil and beyond. Lower and lower numbers of many birds--read loss of habitat to increased population, human numbers growing at 227,000 per day. Threats against drinking water and pristine native habitats from fracking and the transport via pipelines or rail cars of oil. And then there are the extreme disasters like the British Petroleum oil rig spew that has turned some of the Gulf of Mexico into a death trap for every kind of creature from tuna fry to sea birds to dolphins, not to mention humans who try to make a living from the sea.
It's hard to write about whole-sale slaughter because over the years, I've become deadened myself to the outrage and stupidity, the whole-sale greed and convenient ignorance of so much of the world, including many neighbors in parts of the United States. Our news comes to us piecemeal. It takes concentration and stitching together of separate facts, it takes time to let these facts percolate into reality before outrage and determination are aroused.
Recently I saw a documentary about 1964: Mississippi Freedom Summer, commemorating that enormous sweep of mostly white young people into Mississippi to live with black people there who were denied the right to vote. What struck me was the danger, but even more how those who being denied had to overcome enormous fear and centuries of submission. It took an outside force, young blacks and whites often from the north, to help stand by them, to build up hope.
I want to build hope that we can help save the Elephants, the bees, the endangered birds. For Elephants, many efforts have already been tried and for a time succeeded--adding rangers to the various national parks in African where most Elephants live; creating a global signatory of nations agreeing to ban the sale of ivory, supporting skilled NGO's like TRAFFIC which keep track of Elephants and what happens to them and the ivory which is so often the reason they are killed.
As Elizabeth Kolbert's recent commentary in The New Yorker outlines (7/7/2014) the United States plus the British and Chinese have pledged large grants and the outlawing of ivory. But I think much much more needs to be done. Here are some ideas:
* Since the primary sales of ivory occur in Thailand, we need to pressure the Thai government to put real teeth into forbidding the sale of ivory products. We need to fund these efforts, and probably as important, educate school children in Thailand about the magnificent animals who are being killed to bring bracelets to Thai shops.
* Coloring books, posters, school curriculum - all about Elephants in Africa. We need to rouse children to love these big animals the way I loved Babar and his family, years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, before I even saw an elephant. We need to give rewards to those shops that proudly display "NO IVORY SALES" in their windows. We need to educate tourists against buying ivory and encourage them to protest any sale they encounter.
* We need an international, political effort, perhaps a Peace Corps for the Elephants, to educate and protect the animals and to arouse the countries where Elephants roam and ivory is sold to act in their defense.
I want to believe this is possible. I want to believe that my monthly contributions to the World Wildlife Fund's endeavors for Elephants will make a difference. I hope you who read this will contact your legislators and urge that the US institute immediately the planned efforts to protect the elephants. I urge all of us to remain involved, submit ideas, protest and lobby. In our lifetimes, there have been astonishing environmental successes in our lifetimes - notably outlawing DDT. There can be more. As they say in the ballparks, MAKE NOISE.
I was standing in the shadows of my kitchen, looking out into blazing summer heat. What I saw instead of backyard summer green was the death of elephants. Hundreds of them. I saw the Babar I'd loved as a child, gunned down in rampant slaughter. I saw his children nudging his prone body and his face with his huge ears, bloodied from hacked-off tusks. A wave of nausea and hatred against my tribe paralyzed me, and kept me staring from darkness into rampant sun. Eventually I turned and wrote a check to African Conservation. I had to do something from my northern state, halfway across the world, to try and save the Elephants. It was the mid-1990s, the beginning of my environmental conscience.
It's very difficult to write about the whole-sale slaughter of one of the earth's most magnificent animals. Over the years, my outrage and sorrow have taken me toward many other gross indignities against life on earth. Dangers from pesticides and herbicides--read increased autism if one lives within a mile of most U.S. farms, read loss of one third of the nation's colonies of bees--create fear and extra efforts for my little plot of soil and beyond. Lower and lower numbers of many birds--read loss of habitat to increased population, human numbers growing at 227,000 per day. Threats against drinking water and pristine native habitats from fracking and the transport via pipelines or rail cars of oil. And then there are the extreme disasters like the British Petroleum oil rig spew that has turned some of the Gulf of Mexico into a death trap for every kind of creature from tuna fry to sea birds to dolphins, not to mention humans who try to make a living from the sea.
It's hard to write about whole-sale slaughter because over the years, I've become deadened myself to the outrage and stupidity, the whole-sale greed and convenient ignorance of so much of the world, including many neighbors in parts of the United States. Our news comes to us piecemeal. It takes concentration and stitching together of separate facts, it takes time to let these facts percolate into reality before outrage and determination are aroused.
Recently I saw a documentary about 1964: Mississippi Freedom Summer, commemorating that enormous sweep of mostly white young people into Mississippi to live with black people there who were denied the right to vote. What struck me was the danger, but even more how those who being denied had to overcome enormous fear and centuries of submission. It took an outside force, young blacks and whites often from the north, to help stand by them, to build up hope.
I want to build hope that we can help save the Elephants, the bees, the endangered birds. For Elephants, many efforts have already been tried and for a time succeeded--adding rangers to the various national parks in African where most Elephants live; creating a global signatory of nations agreeing to ban the sale of ivory, supporting skilled NGO's like TRAFFIC which keep track of Elephants and what happens to them and the ivory which is so often the reason they are killed.
As Elizabeth Kolbert's recent commentary in The New Yorker outlines (7/7/2014) the United States plus the British and Chinese have pledged large grants and the outlawing of ivory. But I think much much more needs to be done. Here are some ideas:
* Since the primary sales of ivory occur in Thailand, we need to pressure the Thai government to put real teeth into forbidding the sale of ivory products. We need to fund these efforts, and probably as important, educate school children in Thailand about the magnificent animals who are being killed to bring bracelets to Thai shops.
* Coloring books, posters, school curriculum - all about Elephants in Africa. We need to rouse children to love these big animals the way I loved Babar and his family, years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, before I even saw an elephant. We need to give rewards to those shops that proudly display "NO IVORY SALES" in their windows. We need to educate tourists against buying ivory and encourage them to protest any sale they encounter.
* We need an international, political effort, perhaps a Peace Corps for the Elephants, to educate and protect the animals and to arouse the countries where Elephants roam and ivory is sold to act in their defense.
I want to believe this is possible. I want to believe that my monthly contributions to the World Wildlife Fund's endeavors for Elephants will make a difference. I hope you who read this will contact your legislators and urge that the US institute immediately the planned efforts to protect the elephants. I urge all of us to remain involved, submit ideas, protest and lobby. In our lifetimes, there have been astonishing environmental successes in our lifetimes - notably outlawing DDT. There can be more. As they say in the ballparks, MAKE NOISE.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Margotlog: The Achievement Gap
Margotlog: The Achievement Gap
Growing up in South Carolina, I had no trouble identifying segregation. Blacks sat at the back of the city bus, whites in front. In dime stores, blacks were not allowed to sit at lunch counters. Super markets were for whites; small corner groceries for blacks. Because of slavery, Charleston didn't have sharp demarcations between where blacks and whites lived. The small houses which used to shelter slaves remained behind the mansions of former masters. Sometimes the small houses were inhabited by contemporary blacks. Neighbors, yet divided by wealth.
As a child, born of parents from the north who knew nothing first hand about racism, I was naïve and accepting. In other words, I hadn't imbibed racism in my mother's-milk. Yet even I knew, walking to my white girls private school, that the black granny swinging in the dirt yard and the small brown children hanging off the third-floor porches were poorer than my family. They wore torn, dirty clothes. Brown men in baggy trousers and slouch hats hung around corners, trading gossip. Even I sensed there was something terribly wrong with this--they weren't working. Later when I rode the city bus by myself, the cruelty of my whiteness made me very ashamed--black women who'd worked all day in whites' houses had to walk past empty seats, carrying heavy shopping bags, to find a seat in back.
Over many years living in Minnesota, I've come to think about racism as a very different kind of problem. Subtle and off-hand, it starts with an ignorance of black culture so deep-seated, so apparently innocuous and unquestioned as to appear nonexistent. A few years ago, I had a smart, white, masters-in-education student who had grown up in northern Minnesota, She quietly but intently refused to believe that she harbored any racism at all. "How often do you interact with black people? How much have you read about slavery and race in America? What black writers or educators, musicians or inventors can you name?" I knew she'd heard of at least two black politicians--Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It took nearly the entire course for her to acknowledge that she had white privilege (even though her family was poor) and that she took many things for granted which most blacks did not dare assume.
I'm not saying it's impossible for well-meaning whites and blacks in Minnesota to reach across the racial divide and work together for the common good. But I know, whatever their success, they remain in very different relations to civil power and authority--differences sharpened by centuries of oppression and yes ignorance. It's the rare white person in Minnesota whose mother or grandmother was forced to be demeaned on a city bus. It's not so rare for an African-American who lives here now to have that experience as part of their personal family history.
Recently I talked with a black graduate student whom I'll call Emily. Emily works in a Twin Cities school system--she's an aide in an elementary classroom. This year, Emily had health problems, as did several of her white cohorts, yet Emily was the only one who had to bring a doctor's order to obtain a school release for a doctor's appointment. "You people," said her supervisor, "often don't know how to follow regulations." The white teachers were not treated this way. Emily filed a grievance. "I had corroboration," she said. So far nothing has been done to correct the supervisor who so blatantly singled her out.
Another graduate student has recently written about teachers in the Twin Cities who have quietly, often with not much support from their districts, become effective educators of both white and black students. Interviewing these educators off school grounds, Andrea (not her real name) discovered several characteristics the teachers share: The most important is that they don't demean or give up on black students. They hold them accountable, but when they don't measure up, do not resort to labeling them racially inferior. Such teachers continue to let all their students know, no matter what race or culture, that they as teachers and human beings are concerned and care about them. This means, they recognize their students' potential, despite their immediate behavior.
Often black culture stymies white Minnesotans because black culture is more vocal, confrontative, "signifying," than most Minnesotan whites are comfortable with.
A good example comes from a northern suburban middle-school. Here teachers are being coached to "sing/talk/sign" (my words) their black students through daily transitions. For instance, as two students, Jake and Tammy, are making their way to their desks, teachers will say something like "There they go, ok Jake, let's see the bottoms of those shoes go faster. And Tammy, she's getting closer, there she goes, swishing past Patsy, and ok, she's sitting."
Andrea's interviews also indicate the importance of empathy in working with students from different cultures. Teachers who have their own experiences of rejection, struggle, fear of failure have a far better chance of helping students whose race and culture differ from Minnesota's predominately white population. Ultimately, chances are, if students find encouragement in their teachers they are more likely to try and succeed. Education is, after all, a social, communal bus where we all get to take the first available seat.
Growing up in South Carolina, I had no trouble identifying segregation. Blacks sat at the back of the city bus, whites in front. In dime stores, blacks were not allowed to sit at lunch counters. Super markets were for whites; small corner groceries for blacks. Because of slavery, Charleston didn't have sharp demarcations between where blacks and whites lived. The small houses which used to shelter slaves remained behind the mansions of former masters. Sometimes the small houses were inhabited by contemporary blacks. Neighbors, yet divided by wealth.
As a child, born of parents from the north who knew nothing first hand about racism, I was naïve and accepting. In other words, I hadn't imbibed racism in my mother's-milk. Yet even I knew, walking to my white girls private school, that the black granny swinging in the dirt yard and the small brown children hanging off the third-floor porches were poorer than my family. They wore torn, dirty clothes. Brown men in baggy trousers and slouch hats hung around corners, trading gossip. Even I sensed there was something terribly wrong with this--they weren't working. Later when I rode the city bus by myself, the cruelty of my whiteness made me very ashamed--black women who'd worked all day in whites' houses had to walk past empty seats, carrying heavy shopping bags, to find a seat in back.
Over many years living in Minnesota, I've come to think about racism as a very different kind of problem. Subtle and off-hand, it starts with an ignorance of black culture so deep-seated, so apparently innocuous and unquestioned as to appear nonexistent. A few years ago, I had a smart, white, masters-in-education student who had grown up in northern Minnesota, She quietly but intently refused to believe that she harbored any racism at all. "How often do you interact with black people? How much have you read about slavery and race in America? What black writers or educators, musicians or inventors can you name?" I knew she'd heard of at least two black politicians--Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It took nearly the entire course for her to acknowledge that she had white privilege (even though her family was poor) and that she took many things for granted which most blacks did not dare assume.
I'm not saying it's impossible for well-meaning whites and blacks in Minnesota to reach across the racial divide and work together for the common good. But I know, whatever their success, they remain in very different relations to civil power and authority--differences sharpened by centuries of oppression and yes ignorance. It's the rare white person in Minnesota whose mother or grandmother was forced to be demeaned on a city bus. It's not so rare for an African-American who lives here now to have that experience as part of their personal family history.
Recently I talked with a black graduate student whom I'll call Emily. Emily works in a Twin Cities school system--she's an aide in an elementary classroom. This year, Emily had health problems, as did several of her white cohorts, yet Emily was the only one who had to bring a doctor's order to obtain a school release for a doctor's appointment. "You people," said her supervisor, "often don't know how to follow regulations." The white teachers were not treated this way. Emily filed a grievance. "I had corroboration," she said. So far nothing has been done to correct the supervisor who so blatantly singled her out.
Another graduate student has recently written about teachers in the Twin Cities who have quietly, often with not much support from their districts, become effective educators of both white and black students. Interviewing these educators off school grounds, Andrea (not her real name) discovered several characteristics the teachers share: The most important is that they don't demean or give up on black students. They hold them accountable, but when they don't measure up, do not resort to labeling them racially inferior. Such teachers continue to let all their students know, no matter what race or culture, that they as teachers and human beings are concerned and care about them. This means, they recognize their students' potential, despite their immediate behavior.
Often black culture stymies white Minnesotans because black culture is more vocal, confrontative, "signifying," than most Minnesotan whites are comfortable with.
A good example comes from a northern suburban middle-school. Here teachers are being coached to "sing/talk/sign" (my words) their black students through daily transitions. For instance, as two students, Jake and Tammy, are making their way to their desks, teachers will say something like "There they go, ok Jake, let's see the bottoms of those shoes go faster. And Tammy, she's getting closer, there she goes, swishing past Patsy, and ok, she's sitting."
Andrea's interviews also indicate the importance of empathy in working with students from different cultures. Teachers who have their own experiences of rejection, struggle, fear of failure have a far better chance of helping students whose race and culture differ from Minnesota's predominately white population. Ultimately, chances are, if students find encouragement in their teachers they are more likely to try and succeed. Education is, after all, a social, communal bus where we all get to take the first available seat.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Margotlog: Otricoli in a Distant Mirror
Margotlog: Otricoli in a Distant Mirror
Standing before my huge bathroom mirror, I look beyond my raised arm and find Otricoli, a memory so vivid as to be painted on the opposite wall. "What an odd name," I said, the first time Pat and Giangi showed me around the Roman ruins below the Umbrian hill town. "What does it mean?"
Giangi, grizzled mariner who had returned from filming in Australia, shrugged one of those quintessential Italian shrugs--shoulders raised, hands spreading, ready to capture whatever inspiration hits. "Forse, a name for the two-handled Roman jugs?" Forse, perhaps. My Italia, acquired through frequent trips and reburbished just before leaving home, works fine when he talks slowly, but if he speeds up, I an lost.
On that first visit years ago, before they'd renovated a single room in their hill top tower, I gathered unconnected impressions--helter-skelter carpentry in the ceilingless tower, narrow streets with only a hint of sky above, and a look-out point reached by wide stone stairs. Only later when I spent spend five nights with Pat did I get a sense of the place from gate to gate. She and Giangi had finished the tower sufficiently to include a bath and tiny kitchen at one end of her lofty studio, and a tiny third-floor bedroom and bath tucked under the eaves. When we stood on the top-floor terrace and stared down into the sweeping Tiber Valley, I grasped the setting's beauty. The original residents had moved up from the river to escape the barbarians, but I found their escape point far more commanding and breath-taking than the Roman ruins below.
Pat had brought back a Turkish cat Anusha, from an archaeological dig where she drew every object unearthed. Anusha stared down at us from the rafters--orange, black and white face with gleaming green eyes.
At night out of my third-floor widow twinkled the distant lights of Rome. We lingered over lunches, two women trying to tell each other our entire stories in five days. Mornings I wrote and Pat painted in her studio. A magic haze of effort and serenity hung over us. Gone was the huge shadow of the rest of our lives, hanging just out of reach, ready to smother us.
There were many other happy times. Once at Christmas, with Giangi in residence, I slept at the lowest level facing Pat's enormous collection of antique dolls and stuffed animals which she'd brought from her childhood in Savannah, Illinois. She baked one of her grandmother's extraordinary cakes--more trouble in one slice than I'd devote to meals for a month. We ate in the second-floor kitchen overlooking the narrow street--the neighbor's windows almost close enough to touch. In the holiday atmosphere, we talked about my buying a tiny pied-a-terre in town.
Later as Giangi and I sat before a functioning antique fireplace framed in stone, he talked about being a boy during the war. As he rode his bicycle along a rural road, American and British planes straffed him. He rolled into a ditch and survived without thinking much of it. Now years later he was plagued by nightmares. His constant travels perhaps an escape from what Italy presented in his dreams.
It is probably ten years since I've been in Otricoli. Pat and I still meet in Venice or Florence, still enjoy each other's company. We are full of opinions on everything from cell-phone use to our art forms, her painting, my writing. We discuss the U.S. and Italy. She is far more vehement politically than I am. I am more in search of little hints that will roll open, once more, a scene from Otricoli--perhaps La Contessa is serving us tea in 100-degree July heat. Near 90, she is dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse and navy cotton skirt. In the cool grandeur of her drawing room, cluttered with mementoes, she too talks about the war, her hunger and that of her first child, and how they eventually went to live with a farm family, who fed them sorghum.
La Contessa is long gone, and Giangi is not well. It is not so easy to be with Pat in Otricoli. Her life has become complicated.
And so I remember the charm of our early days, hanging over ancient stones and glimpsing the Tiber on its way to Rome between banks flecked with green.
Standing before my huge bathroom mirror, I look beyond my raised arm and find Otricoli, a memory so vivid as to be painted on the opposite wall. "What an odd name," I said, the first time Pat and Giangi showed me around the Roman ruins below the Umbrian hill town. "What does it mean?"
Giangi, grizzled mariner who had returned from filming in Australia, shrugged one of those quintessential Italian shrugs--shoulders raised, hands spreading, ready to capture whatever inspiration hits. "Forse, a name for the two-handled Roman jugs?" Forse, perhaps. My Italia, acquired through frequent trips and reburbished just before leaving home, works fine when he talks slowly, but if he speeds up, I an lost.
On that first visit years ago, before they'd renovated a single room in their hill top tower, I gathered unconnected impressions--helter-skelter carpentry in the ceilingless tower, narrow streets with only a hint of sky above, and a look-out point reached by wide stone stairs. Only later when I spent spend five nights with Pat did I get a sense of the place from gate to gate. She and Giangi had finished the tower sufficiently to include a bath and tiny kitchen at one end of her lofty studio, and a tiny third-floor bedroom and bath tucked under the eaves. When we stood on the top-floor terrace and stared down into the sweeping Tiber Valley, I grasped the setting's beauty. The original residents had moved up from the river to escape the barbarians, but I found their escape point far more commanding and breath-taking than the Roman ruins below.
Pat had brought back a Turkish cat Anusha, from an archaeological dig where she drew every object unearthed. Anusha stared down at us from the rafters--orange, black and white face with gleaming green eyes.
At night out of my third-floor widow twinkled the distant lights of Rome. We lingered over lunches, two women trying to tell each other our entire stories in five days. Mornings I wrote and Pat painted in her studio. A magic haze of effort and serenity hung over us. Gone was the huge shadow of the rest of our lives, hanging just out of reach, ready to smother us.
There were many other happy times. Once at Christmas, with Giangi in residence, I slept at the lowest level facing Pat's enormous collection of antique dolls and stuffed animals which she'd brought from her childhood in Savannah, Illinois. She baked one of her grandmother's extraordinary cakes--more trouble in one slice than I'd devote to meals for a month. We ate in the second-floor kitchen overlooking the narrow street--the neighbor's windows almost close enough to touch. In the holiday atmosphere, we talked about my buying a tiny pied-a-terre in town.
Later as Giangi and I sat before a functioning antique fireplace framed in stone, he talked about being a boy during the war. As he rode his bicycle along a rural road, American and British planes straffed him. He rolled into a ditch and survived without thinking much of it. Now years later he was plagued by nightmares. His constant travels perhaps an escape from what Italy presented in his dreams.
It is probably ten years since I've been in Otricoli. Pat and I still meet in Venice or Florence, still enjoy each other's company. We are full of opinions on everything from cell-phone use to our art forms, her painting, my writing. We discuss the U.S. and Italy. She is far more vehement politically than I am. I am more in search of little hints that will roll open, once more, a scene from Otricoli--perhaps La Contessa is serving us tea in 100-degree July heat. Near 90, she is dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse and navy cotton skirt. In the cool grandeur of her drawing room, cluttered with mementoes, she too talks about the war, her hunger and that of her first child, and how they eventually went to live with a farm family, who fed them sorghum.
La Contessa is long gone, and Giangi is not well. It is not so easy to be with Pat in Otricoli. Her life has become complicated.
And so I remember the charm of our early days, hanging over ancient stones and glimpsing the Tiber on its way to Rome between banks flecked with green.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Margotlog: Alone with Cats, or a Dog
Margotlog: Alone with Cats, or a Dog
There are three of them. Three tails and twelve paws to our none and four. When I'm rushing to respond to other humans by phone, written comment, physical interaction, the three of them are a blur and minor rumble--tails around my legs, faces meowing for food. But when I'm alone with them, I descend to their level. I'm lying on the hardwood floor under the dining room table, a position I've taken many times with Julia, Tilly, Maggie.
Right now, Julia, the black and white Kitler, has wrapped herself around a chair leg and it beating the shit out of it with her back claws. Where did she learn this? None of the others, raised in hot-house environments, act like this. But Julia was a single mom at a young age. Out in the wild, she must have caught birds, even squirrels, and clawed them to death. Her pupils dilate. She is incredibly fast. If I don't wiggle and dangle the prey-string, she comes after it with her claws..
Lying on the floor like this, I've often studied the underside of the table with its frame and brackets. There's a secret passage in the middle, like a drawer with neither front nor back. When Tilly was little and mischievous, I'd draw a string from one end to the other and tantalize her. She batted at it. Better yet, when the back of the small baby grand piano was up, she leapt to its top, and from there to the curtain rods, miles above her tiny body. We watched her peek down at us. Tilly: the kitten whose foster mother kept her and her brothers in the basement where they lived on the furnace pipes, safe from grabbing children, Tilly can't leap like that anymore, but she is still and always NOT a lap cat.
My daughter has gotten another dog to go with her huge, fluffy, hundred-pound Pyrennes. The new dog, Fritzer, is a tiny Pomeranian, all thirteen pounds, but like his enormous brother Winston, Fritzie is also very fluffy, front and back, like a dame with a cinched waist and a deck, fore and aft. Now my daughter's ménage includes two dogs and two cats, one so aged that it sleeps on a heating pad and rarely greets company. This is a lot of critter action. She thrives on it, single mom that she is.
As does my neighbor, also single, who fosters puppies, along with her usual two terriers. All are high strung. Recently this neighbor, about the same age as my daughter, took a "rescue" trip to Kentucky or was it Missouri? The goal: to bring back a van-load of neglected dogs. I've heard other Minnesotans say most of the rescue dogs in our neck of the woods come from the south. Pets are not part of the family there. They are kept to prevent nuisance mice or to use for hunting or dog fighting. No pet "owner" bothers to spay or neuter them. When the inevitable occurs the babies are drowned in a rock-weighted sack or simply go wild.
How different it is from making intimates of our pets, indulging them, talking to them, giving in to them, and sometimes treating them like equals.
There are three of them. Three tails and twelve paws to our none and four. When I'm rushing to respond to other humans by phone, written comment, physical interaction, the three of them are a blur and minor rumble--tails around my legs, faces meowing for food. But when I'm alone with them, I descend to their level. I'm lying on the hardwood floor under the dining room table, a position I've taken many times with Julia, Tilly, Maggie.
Right now, Julia, the black and white Kitler, has wrapped herself around a chair leg and it beating the shit out of it with her back claws. Where did she learn this? None of the others, raised in hot-house environments, act like this. But Julia was a single mom at a young age. Out in the wild, she must have caught birds, even squirrels, and clawed them to death. Her pupils dilate. She is incredibly fast. If I don't wiggle and dangle the prey-string, she comes after it with her claws..
Lying on the floor like this, I've often studied the underside of the table with its frame and brackets. There's a secret passage in the middle, like a drawer with neither front nor back. When Tilly was little and mischievous, I'd draw a string from one end to the other and tantalize her. She batted at it. Better yet, when the back of the small baby grand piano was up, she leapt to its top, and from there to the curtain rods, miles above her tiny body. We watched her peek down at us. Tilly: the kitten whose foster mother kept her and her brothers in the basement where they lived on the furnace pipes, safe from grabbing children, Tilly can't leap like that anymore, but she is still and always NOT a lap cat.
My daughter has gotten another dog to go with her huge, fluffy, hundred-pound Pyrennes. The new dog, Fritzer, is a tiny Pomeranian, all thirteen pounds, but like his enormous brother Winston, Fritzie is also very fluffy, front and back, like a dame with a cinched waist and a deck, fore and aft. Now my daughter's ménage includes two dogs and two cats, one so aged that it sleeps on a heating pad and rarely greets company. This is a lot of critter action. She thrives on it, single mom that she is.
As does my neighbor, also single, who fosters puppies, along with her usual two terriers. All are high strung. Recently this neighbor, about the same age as my daughter, took a "rescue" trip to Kentucky or was it Missouri? The goal: to bring back a van-load of neglected dogs. I've heard other Minnesotans say most of the rescue dogs in our neck of the woods come from the south. Pets are not part of the family there. They are kept to prevent nuisance mice or to use for hunting or dog fighting. No pet "owner" bothers to spay or neuter them. When the inevitable occurs the babies are drowned in a rock-weighted sack or simply go wild.
How different it is from making intimates of our pets, indulging them, talking to them, giving in to them, and sometimes treating them like equals.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Margotlog: Oil and Water: Minnesota Sandpiper Project
Margotlog: Oil and Water: Minnesota Sandpiper Project
Two things in recent StarTribune articles sent mini-shock waves through my thoughts: first that Enbridge Energy in Calgary wants to add another pipeline to carry oil from the North Dakota tar sands under and near iconic Minnesota bogs and lakes and parks -- think Lake Itasca. The pipeline already there skirts Lake Itasca by what looks like only a few miles.
The second item of note, from the same area, came in today's paper - Fargo, N. Dakota, and Moorhead, MN, on either side of the Red River of the North, could soon be in the middle of a huge flood-control project that would flood hundreds if not thousands of farm land acres, especially to the west of Fargo. Flooding spreads pesticide residue and disrupts all kinds of life systems. No surprise: farmers in the area are up in arms.
Oil and water do not mix.
Flooding along the Red River suggests flooding further east in the bogs and wetlands where thousands of already endangered waterfowl nest, or rest, to and from summer and winter grounds. Many prairie and water birds once swarming through western MN and eastern ND in the hundreds of thousands have already been reduced due to draining of land for farming, pesticide damage and other predation.
Every time I hear the "Big Oil" wants to put down probes in a watery environment, I think the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only did this kill thousands of dolphins, fish and water birds, but many more have been dying slow deaths, damaged by oil residue. Most recently, the StarTribune published an article about tuna in the Gulf whose eggs now show malformations. This means that for decades to come, tuna fisheries will find slim pickings. No doubt all kinds of other creatures are likely damaged "in the egg."
Oil damage does not go away. It is very difficult to reverse.
Of course, the bottom line is our own inordinate appetite for fuel. Yes, President Obama has set higher standards for retiring coal plants, for reducing electrical energy use. But this oil from North Dakota will probably fuel cars/trucks/planes.
We are going so fast we forget to notice the consequences until "But Oil" does a nasty and we're all shocked and appalled.
Here's something we can do: The Minnesota Public Utilities Comission is the ultimate permitting authority for PROJECT SANDPIPER. (Innocuous name for such a nasty business, especially when we consider that a big oil leak would no doubt kill many many sandpipers.)
I just called Tracy Smetana at the Public Utilities Commission who kindly told me that there are two ways to be involved:
1st: email sanpiperdocketing.puc@state.mn.us and ask to be put on their email list for updating on the project.
2nd: Once the assessment is completed--by the MN PUblic Utilities Commission, the MN Commerce Dept, and US Army Corps of Engineers--there will be A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD.
3rd. Go on line and let the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission know that you oppose the additional pipeline and why.
Help keep Oil and precious wetlands and water going their separate ways.
Two things in recent StarTribune articles sent mini-shock waves through my thoughts: first that Enbridge Energy in Calgary wants to add another pipeline to carry oil from the North Dakota tar sands under and near iconic Minnesota bogs and lakes and parks -- think Lake Itasca. The pipeline already there skirts Lake Itasca by what looks like only a few miles.
The second item of note, from the same area, came in today's paper - Fargo, N. Dakota, and Moorhead, MN, on either side of the Red River of the North, could soon be in the middle of a huge flood-control project that would flood hundreds if not thousands of farm land acres, especially to the west of Fargo. Flooding spreads pesticide residue and disrupts all kinds of life systems. No surprise: farmers in the area are up in arms.
Oil and water do not mix.
Flooding along the Red River suggests flooding further east in the bogs and wetlands where thousands of already endangered waterfowl nest, or rest, to and from summer and winter grounds. Many prairie and water birds once swarming through western MN and eastern ND in the hundreds of thousands have already been reduced due to draining of land for farming, pesticide damage and other predation.
Every time I hear the "Big Oil" wants to put down probes in a watery environment, I think the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only did this kill thousands of dolphins, fish and water birds, but many more have been dying slow deaths, damaged by oil residue. Most recently, the StarTribune published an article about tuna in the Gulf whose eggs now show malformations. This means that for decades to come, tuna fisheries will find slim pickings. No doubt all kinds of other creatures are likely damaged "in the egg."
Oil damage does not go away. It is very difficult to reverse.
Of course, the bottom line is our own inordinate appetite for fuel. Yes, President Obama has set higher standards for retiring coal plants, for reducing electrical energy use. But this oil from North Dakota will probably fuel cars/trucks/planes.
We are going so fast we forget to notice the consequences until "But Oil" does a nasty and we're all shocked and appalled.
Here's something we can do: The Minnesota Public Utilities Comission is the ultimate permitting authority for PROJECT SANDPIPER. (Innocuous name for such a nasty business, especially when we consider that a big oil leak would no doubt kill many many sandpipers.)
I just called Tracy Smetana at the Public Utilities Commission who kindly told me that there are two ways to be involved:
1st: email sanpiperdocketing.puc@state.mn.us and ask to be put on their email list for updating on the project.
2nd: Once the assessment is completed--by the MN PUblic Utilities Commission, the MN Commerce Dept, and US Army Corps of Engineers--there will be A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD.
3rd. Go on line and let the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission know that you oppose the additional pipeline and why.
Help keep Oil and precious wetlands and water going their separate ways.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Margotlog: The Upper Room
Margotlog: The Upper Room
It was first my daughter's when we moved into this tall St. Paul house. One of two rooms on the third floor, it was the one facing south. And until the locust and olive trees grew tall enough for shade, it was flooded with morning light, even in winter. She wanted pink carpeting and blue fleur de lis wall paper--a feminine, girly look, for a teen in the interesting, challenging process of growing up.
Initially, given the divorce agreement that split her time between her dad in Minneapolis and our blended family in St. Paul, she spent only half her time in this lovely room, with postcards of moon and sun from Nuremberg above the door, winking and blinking in deep night sky. Midway through high school, she tired of shuttling back and forth and made this room her permanent abode.
For six more years through college, the room absorbed her sweet smell: eyelet pillows on the bed, a dream-catcher I'd commissioned from a Minnesota Native American artist hanging on the door to catch her bad dreams and let them melt in morning light.
The pink carpet, blue fleur de lis wallpaper, and dream catcher are still there, but I can no longer sniff her presence on the air. Slowly over the twenty years since she left, I've positioned my own mementoes along one wall.
There is a photograph of my great-grandfather from Sicily, the soldier turned Protestant minister who was forced from a chapel outside Palermo. Ruffians burned missals, shattered windows and cracked the organ. Leonardo D'Anna--his first name passed on to my father, and his last to my operatic sister. The man himself I never met, yet I see above the huge walrus moustache of the era, a "lead on, oh kindly light" in his eyes. They were blue, inherited by his grand-daughter Eleonora, named after Eleonora Duse, the great Italian soprano. My Eleonora, the last of her tribe, who died two Februaries ago at age 94.
There is a photograph of our family in New York when I was five, wearing heavy bangs and long bob, sitting beside my sister with pale eyes and curls. We were 5 and 3, sitting on a table in a famous New York seafood restaurant which my mother had bragged about. Our parents, Maxine and Leonard, sit at the table across from his paternal cousins, Lena and Eda.
My parents' beauty, those many years ago, takes my breath away. Their faces unlined, their hair well coiffed, and my father, smirking below his rimless glasses, full of pride and self-confidence. He is the apple of every female eye. My mother, shy and subdued, yet covered in a quiet sheen of loveliness. Not yet dashed aside by marital argument and bringing up daughters "on a professor's salary."
There are other photographs but today they don't speak to me. Instead I notice a copy of H. G. Adler's Panorama, a quiet yet damning memoir of the Holocaust--hard to read because of the author's elisions but unmistakably, a work of genius. Many other books line the shelves, but few others claim my attention like this one. I believe it was either lost or repressed for years until it came to light and was reprinted. Perhaps I've made this up. Yet, that something like this happened feels authentic since until this century the book was not well known in the United States.
Also on the shelves sits an "upside-down" doll from my South Carolina childhood. The face and dress that are currently "up" belong to a blond, vacant-eyed white lady. Under her skirt wait the face and plainer dress of "a colored lady." The weight of prejudice, barely conscious as I used to slip these two--mirror images of each other, but now so obvious--racist, joined under their skirts. In my South Carolina childhood, racism against black men often took violent, jeering forms, but its formula among colored and white women was more subdued. Out of necessity, perhaps, because white women and their children depended on black women to work their stoves and laundry tubs, to clean their toilets, even raise their children. There is a sickening fondness for "Mammy," in some closets of white culture, the Mammies who were shuttled to shacks along Low-Country roads, who sat toothless in their old age, sucking their gums as they rocked back and forth, staring at the passing traffic.
This too is a strong memory, not that I was raised by a woman of color, but I noticed the exhaustion of those maids and cooks who mounted the steps of a city bus in the days of segregation, carrying heavy shopping bags, and making their way to the back. The color of my skin weighed like a judgment of shame. I was so ashamed of what my white race made these tired brown women do. And I was proud when the ones, namely Rosa Parks and those she inspired in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted their segregated buses.
This shame has entered my bloodstream and made me attentive to the burden racism puts on African Americans. When I teach these students in Minnesota schools, I tell them this memory and read them my poem "No More Back of the Bus" (published in my poetry collection, "Between the Houses," from the Laurel Poetry Collective via Amazon). The poem helps ease the students' mistrust of me. Helps me reach through history to encourage and empathize, acknowledge what my kind of people owe their kind of people. I cannot forget, or pretend that just because "kids" of color act up, they are deficient, or not open to learning. We who are complicit must work against what has hurt us all.
.
It was first my daughter's when we moved into this tall St. Paul house. One of two rooms on the third floor, it was the one facing south. And until the locust and olive trees grew tall enough for shade, it was flooded with morning light, even in winter. She wanted pink carpeting and blue fleur de lis wall paper--a feminine, girly look, for a teen in the interesting, challenging process of growing up.
Initially, given the divorce agreement that split her time between her dad in Minneapolis and our blended family in St. Paul, she spent only half her time in this lovely room, with postcards of moon and sun from Nuremberg above the door, winking and blinking in deep night sky. Midway through high school, she tired of shuttling back and forth and made this room her permanent abode.
For six more years through college, the room absorbed her sweet smell: eyelet pillows on the bed, a dream-catcher I'd commissioned from a Minnesota Native American artist hanging on the door to catch her bad dreams and let them melt in morning light.
The pink carpet, blue fleur de lis wallpaper, and dream catcher are still there, but I can no longer sniff her presence on the air. Slowly over the twenty years since she left, I've positioned my own mementoes along one wall.
There is a photograph of my great-grandfather from Sicily, the soldier turned Protestant minister who was forced from a chapel outside Palermo. Ruffians burned missals, shattered windows and cracked the organ. Leonardo D'Anna--his first name passed on to my father, and his last to my operatic sister. The man himself I never met, yet I see above the huge walrus moustache of the era, a "lead on, oh kindly light" in his eyes. They were blue, inherited by his grand-daughter Eleonora, named after Eleonora Duse, the great Italian soprano. My Eleonora, the last of her tribe, who died two Februaries ago at age 94.
There is a photograph of our family in New York when I was five, wearing heavy bangs and long bob, sitting beside my sister with pale eyes and curls. We were 5 and 3, sitting on a table in a famous New York seafood restaurant which my mother had bragged about. Our parents, Maxine and Leonard, sit at the table across from his paternal cousins, Lena and Eda.
My parents' beauty, those many years ago, takes my breath away. Their faces unlined, their hair well coiffed, and my father, smirking below his rimless glasses, full of pride and self-confidence. He is the apple of every female eye. My mother, shy and subdued, yet covered in a quiet sheen of loveliness. Not yet dashed aside by marital argument and bringing up daughters "on a professor's salary."
There are other photographs but today they don't speak to me. Instead I notice a copy of H. G. Adler's Panorama, a quiet yet damning memoir of the Holocaust--hard to read because of the author's elisions but unmistakably, a work of genius. Many other books line the shelves, but few others claim my attention like this one. I believe it was either lost or repressed for years until it came to light and was reprinted. Perhaps I've made this up. Yet, that something like this happened feels authentic since until this century the book was not well known in the United States.
Also on the shelves sits an "upside-down" doll from my South Carolina childhood. The face and dress that are currently "up" belong to a blond, vacant-eyed white lady. Under her skirt wait the face and plainer dress of "a colored lady." The weight of prejudice, barely conscious as I used to slip these two--mirror images of each other, but now so obvious--racist, joined under their skirts. In my South Carolina childhood, racism against black men often took violent, jeering forms, but its formula among colored and white women was more subdued. Out of necessity, perhaps, because white women and their children depended on black women to work their stoves and laundry tubs, to clean their toilets, even raise their children. There is a sickening fondness for "Mammy," in some closets of white culture, the Mammies who were shuttled to shacks along Low-Country roads, who sat toothless in their old age, sucking their gums as they rocked back and forth, staring at the passing traffic.
This too is a strong memory, not that I was raised by a woman of color, but I noticed the exhaustion of those maids and cooks who mounted the steps of a city bus in the days of segregation, carrying heavy shopping bags, and making their way to the back. The color of my skin weighed like a judgment of shame. I was so ashamed of what my white race made these tired brown women do. And I was proud when the ones, namely Rosa Parks and those she inspired in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted their segregated buses.
This shame has entered my bloodstream and made me attentive to the burden racism puts on African Americans. When I teach these students in Minnesota schools, I tell them this memory and read them my poem "No More Back of the Bus" (published in my poetry collection, "Between the Houses," from the Laurel Poetry Collective via Amazon). The poem helps ease the students' mistrust of me. Helps me reach through history to encourage and empathize, acknowledge what my kind of people owe their kind of people. I cannot forget, or pretend that just because "kids" of color act up, they are deficient, or not open to learning. We who are complicit must work against what has hurt us all.
.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Margotlog: The Mayor and the Cottonwood Tree
Dear Mayor Coleman, a bevy of city workers met me at the cottonwood tree this afternoon - if bevy is quite the word to include a burly Public Works guy. There they all were, kind, and informative.
What seemed to doom the tree at this meeting was the traffic circle which is part of the bike way now slated to exist on Griggs.If the traffic circle is put where the corners are in the crossing, it will impair the tree. Yes, the traffic circle could be moved somewhat west in the intersection, thus making more room for a cottonwood tree boulevard, but neither the burly public works guy nor the slender forestry guy was particularly hep to this notion. Could it be possible to make such an adjustment to a plan that had been federally funded for months and needed to be implemented? They kept shaking their heads and talking about digging down and injuring the tree which would surely fall on something or someone.
For me, at this point, the root of the problem goes back to initial Lex-Ham discussions of the two choices for the bikeway through the neighborhood - should it be narrow Griggs with many older trees or should it be broader Dunlap with broader boulevards and almost all young trees?
The community had no "forestry input" at the point of deciding. No one came to tell the group that mature trees would be in danger of being removed if two traffic circles were put in.
Here's my suggestion: that there be a plan put in place to do just that--to make sure that community members asked to help make a decision about city streets and traffic patterns be informed about just what would happen to current trees if certain solutions were put in place. I suspect knowing the cottonwood tree would be doomed with putting a traffic circle on Griggs and Portland might well have swayed the community against selecting Griggs and instead choosing Dunlap.
Meanwhile I keep hoping that a tree fairy will wave a magic wand and gently ease the traffic circle west, expanding the boulevard for the cottonwood. Just maybe the cottonwood could become the Poster Tree for St. Paul's new bikeway system. After all, both trees and biking help lessen the CO2 that cars spew into our atmosphere. Both trees and bikes are part of a global solution.
This is the perspective of a poet tree lover who's written a poem about that very tree: It's called
Miracoli
Something divine in the daily exercise
rafter of clouds,
the sun shafting its spear,
a wasteland colonized
with milkweed's sails of white,
a grey squirrel suddenly white
in high-pitched shade
reminder of the day
when overnight a cottonwood let fall
its gold-white hearts, and
kissed the ground all over.
Thank you for all you've done. With best wishes.
What seemed to doom the tree at this meeting was the traffic circle which is part of the bike way now slated to exist on Griggs.If the traffic circle is put where the corners are in the crossing, it will impair the tree. Yes, the traffic circle could be moved somewhat west in the intersection, thus making more room for a cottonwood tree boulevard, but neither the burly public works guy nor the slender forestry guy was particularly hep to this notion. Could it be possible to make such an adjustment to a plan that had been federally funded for months and needed to be implemented? They kept shaking their heads and talking about digging down and injuring the tree which would surely fall on something or someone.
For me, at this point, the root of the problem goes back to initial Lex-Ham discussions of the two choices for the bikeway through the neighborhood - should it be narrow Griggs with many older trees or should it be broader Dunlap with broader boulevards and almost all young trees?
The community had no "forestry input" at the point of deciding. No one came to tell the group that mature trees would be in danger of being removed if two traffic circles were put in.
Here's my suggestion: that there be a plan put in place to do just that--to make sure that community members asked to help make a decision about city streets and traffic patterns be informed about just what would happen to current trees if certain solutions were put in place. I suspect knowing the cottonwood tree would be doomed with putting a traffic circle on Griggs and Portland might well have swayed the community against selecting Griggs and instead choosing Dunlap.
Meanwhile I keep hoping that a tree fairy will wave a magic wand and gently ease the traffic circle west, expanding the boulevard for the cottonwood. Just maybe the cottonwood could become the Poster Tree for St. Paul's new bikeway system. After all, both trees and biking help lessen the CO2 that cars spew into our atmosphere. Both trees and bikes are part of a global solution.
This is the perspective of a poet tree lover who's written a poem about that very tree: It's called
Miracoli
Something divine in the daily exercise
rafter of clouds,
the sun shafting its spear,
a wasteland colonized
with milkweed's sails of white,
a grey squirrel suddenly white
in high-pitched shade
reminder of the day
when overnight a cottonwood let fall
its gold-white hearts, and
kissed the ground all over.
Thank you for all you've done. With best wishes.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Margotlog: Mozart and Matisse
Margotlog: Mozart and Matisse
I used to believe that I was the young Mozart. This came about when I read his biography, a book with an orange cover, sitting in my father's huge, over-stuffed chair, during the heat of a South Carolina summer. When our mother took my sister and me to the Charleston Symphony concerts at Memminger Auditorium, I suspected that the boy Mozart hung suspended within the velvet folds of the curtains at the left of the stage. Never the right. Something of the rascally, talented boy waited there.
In those days, there were many biographies for young readers with orange covers. Another told the story of Madame Curie, a celebrated female scientist, unusual at any period. She lived in Paris. Cure and Curie sounded alike. Yet, though I admired her, I did not want to be Madame Curie, but always the young Mozart. He came alive under my fingers running up and down the piano keys, the years I studied piano with Grace Miller, walking down the irregular slate sidewalks of Charleston, and presenting myself at her door. She had a face peppered with orange freckles, and surrounded by a frizz of orange-brown hair. Something of a leprechaun.
I chose Mozart and not Beethoven or Haydn, whose concerto for four hands I learned well enough to perform with Miss Miller at my last piano recital. I chose Mozart because he was a boy genius, full of fire and jokes and whimsy. We were a family of sudden inspirations and surprises--my father embracing my mother in the kitchen instead of yelling at her about spots on his Citadel uniform. A rat running across the Old Citadel courtyard, its tail long as a ladle. Slabs of ceiling plaster falling and crushing our little play table. When we returned who knows how many days later, long strands of straw, ancient as the Old Citadel itself, hung over the wreckage.
When "Amadeus," the film about Mozart and his rival Salieri, came out in 1984, I believed in it with a child's abandon even though by that time, I considered myself more than grown up. I wanted to be that boy genius so endowed with grace that he could make silly faces while performing like an angel. Creating music of soaring divinity while sliding a frog down the soprano's décolletage. Struggling in poverty toward an early grave even as he composed one of the world's most enchanted opera, The Magic Flute.
Now I've seen a production of The Magic Flute by the Minnesota Opera Company that does justice to my early vision of Mozart's comically sweet, dark music. The production uses animation with dragons built of clockworks, devils playing hangman with one's chances, yet reversing the tune just in time toward sublime, tumbling delights. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood. Maybe Mozart never left his first, but trundled it along toward his death at age 35, fulfilling symphonic demands yet retaining inside his pocket a pop-up nose of a delightful nihilist who brings joy even as he sings these madcap harmonies toward the grave, to the tune of bells.
Matisse, the French Impressionist, turned wild colorist and final graceful abstractionist, could not have led a life less inspired by childhood. He was a quintessential pater familias, good bourgeois who went to work in a suit. I bring him up here because also this week I saw an exhibit of Matisse's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Opera in St. Paul; painting in Minneapolis. We are very arty twin cities sometimes.
These two artists, separated by almost a century, tell different tales of how talent discovers itself. The boy Mozart, born with genius, bestowed in relatively few years and reverenced ever since. Matisse, taking years to work himself beyond a rather dry repetition of the time-honored subject--woman in a chair. Yes, Matisse became a Fauve, a wild beast throwing bright colors against each other, sometimes even slashing a green stripe down his model's face. Yet there remained in him the
careful, constant revisionist. Take his series of drawings of an odalisque--that exotic import from a sultan's palace, aka the reclining nude, sometimes as in Ingres, very tightly painted despite her naked curves, sometimes as in Delacroix, tinged with shadows and patterned cloth, a hint of hand cymbals just beyond the frame.
For Matisse toward the end of his painterly development, this motive was played back and forth, from more naturalistic to greater simplicity and monumentality. We know because he took pictures of the more than 12 studies of an odalisque which he made over a week or two. How interesting, I say to myself, noticing how in one he retains the slit of buttock against buttock, yet how in another that elides that to a simple curve. The final painting is almost Egyptian in its rock-like U shape. I'm not sure I like it.
But I love what happened not long after, when giving up painting for paper cut-outs, Matisse began an experiment with bright colors, flat shapes, and jazzy placements. Wavy curving thin thick light dark blue chartreuse red black arranged almost at random on time-honored 9 x 12 paper. Or as in the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, set a line of huge cavorting females in an array of colors across a huge mural--the essence of motion so joyful as to obliterate anything but itself.
I used to believe that I was the young Mozart. This came about when I read his biography, a book with an orange cover, sitting in my father's huge, over-stuffed chair, during the heat of a South Carolina summer. When our mother took my sister and me to the Charleston Symphony concerts at Memminger Auditorium, I suspected that the boy Mozart hung suspended within the velvet folds of the curtains at the left of the stage. Never the right. Something of the rascally, talented boy waited there.
In those days, there were many biographies for young readers with orange covers. Another told the story of Madame Curie, a celebrated female scientist, unusual at any period. She lived in Paris. Cure and Curie sounded alike. Yet, though I admired her, I did not want to be Madame Curie, but always the young Mozart. He came alive under my fingers running up and down the piano keys, the years I studied piano with Grace Miller, walking down the irregular slate sidewalks of Charleston, and presenting myself at her door. She had a face peppered with orange freckles, and surrounded by a frizz of orange-brown hair. Something of a leprechaun.
I chose Mozart and not Beethoven or Haydn, whose concerto for four hands I learned well enough to perform with Miss Miller at my last piano recital. I chose Mozart because he was a boy genius, full of fire and jokes and whimsy. We were a family of sudden inspirations and surprises--my father embracing my mother in the kitchen instead of yelling at her about spots on his Citadel uniform. A rat running across the Old Citadel courtyard, its tail long as a ladle. Slabs of ceiling plaster falling and crushing our little play table. When we returned who knows how many days later, long strands of straw, ancient as the Old Citadel itself, hung over the wreckage.
When "Amadeus," the film about Mozart and his rival Salieri, came out in 1984, I believed in it with a child's abandon even though by that time, I considered myself more than grown up. I wanted to be that boy genius so endowed with grace that he could make silly faces while performing like an angel. Creating music of soaring divinity while sliding a frog down the soprano's décolletage. Struggling in poverty toward an early grave even as he composed one of the world's most enchanted opera, The Magic Flute.
Now I've seen a production of The Magic Flute by the Minnesota Opera Company that does justice to my early vision of Mozart's comically sweet, dark music. The production uses animation with dragons built of clockworks, devils playing hangman with one's chances, yet reversing the tune just in time toward sublime, tumbling delights. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood. Maybe Mozart never left his first, but trundled it along toward his death at age 35, fulfilling symphonic demands yet retaining inside his pocket a pop-up nose of a delightful nihilist who brings joy even as he sings these madcap harmonies toward the grave, to the tune of bells.
Matisse, the French Impressionist, turned wild colorist and final graceful abstractionist, could not have led a life less inspired by childhood. He was a quintessential pater familias, good bourgeois who went to work in a suit. I bring him up here because also this week I saw an exhibit of Matisse's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Opera in St. Paul; painting in Minneapolis. We are very arty twin cities sometimes.
These two artists, separated by almost a century, tell different tales of how talent discovers itself. The boy Mozart, born with genius, bestowed in relatively few years and reverenced ever since. Matisse, taking years to work himself beyond a rather dry repetition of the time-honored subject--woman in a chair. Yes, Matisse became a Fauve, a wild beast throwing bright colors against each other, sometimes even slashing a green stripe down his model's face. Yet there remained in him the
careful, constant revisionist. Take his series of drawings of an odalisque--that exotic import from a sultan's palace, aka the reclining nude, sometimes as in Ingres, very tightly painted despite her naked curves, sometimes as in Delacroix, tinged with shadows and patterned cloth, a hint of hand cymbals just beyond the frame.
For Matisse toward the end of his painterly development, this motive was played back and forth, from more naturalistic to greater simplicity and monumentality. We know because he took pictures of the more than 12 studies of an odalisque which he made over a week or two. How interesting, I say to myself, noticing how in one he retains the slit of buttock against buttock, yet how in another that elides that to a simple curve. The final painting is almost Egyptian in its rock-like U shape. I'm not sure I like it.
But I love what happened not long after, when giving up painting for paper cut-outs, Matisse began an experiment with bright colors, flat shapes, and jazzy placements. Wavy curving thin thick light dark blue chartreuse red black arranged almost at random on time-honored 9 x 12 paper. Or as in the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, set a line of huge cavorting females in an array of colors across a huge mural--the essence of motion so joyful as to obliterate anything but itself.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
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