Margotlog: Inauguration Day, 2013
It is cold today in Minnesota--minus 10 on the thermometer on the backyard deck. Two thin-tailed squirrels shiver as they cram their mouths with sunflower seeds. All kinds of birds flock--blue jays dip into the heated bird bath, cardinals alight like rubies in the drooping needes of the white pine, and myriads of finches and nuthatches, chickadees and juncos, pigeons and sparrows select seeds from the ground or hanging feeders. More birds all at once than in milder weather--a feast for the eyes as I help them feast to survive the cold, cold night.
It is a day for inaugurating a president, cold and windy even in Washington, D.C., yet a huge hoard has assembled to celebrate. I love the TV closeups of children with peaches and cream, chocolate cream or honey-colored complexions, laughing eyes and tiny American flags. Our capital is a city of mostly African-Americans, a fitting place for Barack H. Obama, our first African-American president, to be inaugurated into his second term.
He is a rather formal man, though when he smiles, his face lights up. Yet, even then, there is nothing self-satisfied or teasing about him. He is a man familiar with struggle, even hardship. He emphathizes with those who struggle and with the wide-ranging challenges we must adddress. We, the people, he repeats again and again during his address. It is this appeal to our shared accomplishments and continued need to struggle that, I think, won him re-election
I hadn't planned to watch, yet now that the President and his lovely family are assembled, I begin weeping with pride. I take to heart his emphasis on democracy, on our past struggles: to abolish slavery, to assure civil rights to all. We have so much now before us, for as he says, our needs and challenges change, In clear and resounding language he identifies them.
Most compelling are the perennial economic needs to retain what is strong in our entitlement programs, and rein in excess medical spending. To educate citizens for changing jobs and then provide those jobs. To recognize that we are all linked in a central government, yet not to ask that government to do everything.
We must work for practical, sensible solutions, he says, even if partial. We must balance what we ask and what we as citizens can do on our own, in concert with neighbors, communities, businesses. We, the People--he calls on us to work great things. Passivity, he suggests, is as damaging as rigid adherence to narrow, ideological solutions. We must compromise. We must initiate.
Finally, he sounds new notes: On climate change. Whether we agree or not, the evidence of climate change is all around us, in droughts, super storms, fires. We must prepare to meet these challenges and (I add) to mitigate what we can.
On freedoms for all gay and lesbians to enjoy civil unions. On our right to vote swiftly without challenges. And on incouraging immigrants once again to come here and find acceptance, work, citizenship, and respect.
A Mexican-American gay poet Jimmy Blanco reads a sweeping evocation of this broad land, with its changing landscape, language, histories, and work. Like the President's speech, this was a very populist appeal. We, the Workers. We, the Immigrants. We, the People, entitled to protection and respect.
It is a day to feel proud that once again, We the People have helped inaugurate a hard-working, honest, sensible man, with a board vision, and yes, the ability to accomplish great things even if sometimes it seems the country falters, missteps, turns toward evil and destruction. This is a good time to hear from President Obama. In this cold season, We the People have time to think--about gun control and the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." To plan how we can urge, inform, initiate political change. To remember that We the People means all of us doing what we can to conserve, reuse, protect our natural resources.
It's a heady challenge. A time to be proud of what we can accomplish together.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Friday, January 11, 2013
Margotlog: Oft, in the Stilly Night
Margotlog: Oft, in the Stilly Night
It is quiet now with the snow. Streets, sidewalks muffled. A dog barks. We are too far for church bells.
In Charleston winters when I grew up, we often had windows open to the clack of palm fronds and the cries of children playing in the courtyard. The bells of St. Matthew's rang the quarter hour. Yet, with windows shut and us all at home after eight o'clock, it was quiet, as dark came on, and my sister and I sat on either side of our mother, listening to her musical voice reading "In an old house in Paris, all covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines." .
The human voice unmediated. Yes, there was the radio, a gothic affair that sat on the floor. We pressed as close as possible to the speaker cloth, trying to get on the other side to ride with the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Or to tremble with "The Shadow" But the volume was subdued and the fidelity so good I believed I could hear the shadow's wheezing threat.
Occasionally when our parents invited guests for spaghetti supper, we played duets, I on the piano, my fahter on violin. Then voices sang in our quiet, the Italian songs from my father's childhood, brought across the water by the earlier generation. Except when he vented his Italian fury and strode back and forth in agitation, except when I ran in from the courtyard, slamming the kitchen door and protesting that Bobby Star or Jimmy Moon or Mildred Cake was tormenting me, it was quiet. Now, looking back from my own quiet winter house, I recognize quiet as a household blessing.
It is also a civic blessing. Yes, I know. I danced the shag or other rock 'n' roll to very loud booming Elvis, the Coasters, Little Richard. By then a teenager, I had a huge upstairs bedroom in our Mr. Pleasant house--we've moved across the roller coaster bridge and my parents built a small bungalow on a lot with towering magnolia trees. My little radio and small phonograph played loud music. My father--his musician's ear sensitive to anything but his own ranting--would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout, "Margot, turn off that infernal jungle music!" I slammed my door but I turned it down. The last thing I wanted was to have him storm upstairs and yank the record off its cradle.
We were on the edge of disrupting the civic peace and quiet. That was my mother's phrase, "peace and quiet." When my father and I argued, now downstairs, standing nose to nose in the kitchen--"Leonard, Margot," she would protest, "please give us some peace and quiet."
There were no gunshots outside our door. No backfirings of cars that sounded like gunshots. My parents were decent, law-abiding citizens. It was just that my father grew up in a culture where a range of vocalizing was required. Pater familias, he tried to lay down the law, and his own daughter sashayed and sassed him back. I wouldn't have dreamed of taking our argument into the street. There were no guns in our house, ever. If violence was what we were practicing--and his rants against Negroes and "those Commie, Northern infiltrators" wore on and on, threatening destruction and mayhem FROM THEM! though he was the one "raising his voice," as my mother said. "Leonard, lower your voice." If violence was what we were practicing, at least it ended with our walls.
Though I would not want to relive that era of my teen years with my father's hate-filled denunciations, yet they gave me a measure against which to gauge the moment when family conflict passes into violence so destructive that it becomes a civil menace.Violence that occurs within a public arena--and I'm not talking about the north woods or a huge lake--but city streets and parking lots, schools, churches, movie houses--the public arena belongs not only to individual liberty, but to community regulation.
We have a new law that motorists must stop when a pedestrian has stepped off a curb to cross a street. I've seen this new law in action: it is based on the obvious fact that a bus or car or truck has an enormous murderous capacity against a pedestrian. To allow vehicles to usurp the right of way, to rage pell mell across all intersections not only would cause damage to many vehicles, but would kill pedestrians very very dead.
Since many Minnesota drivers use their vehicles as weapons, this is a very precious new law. It puts protection of the "unarmed" first. Would that we could learn to see the connection between the gun and the largely unarmed walker on a stilly night. Just as we regulate who can drive a car--not a child, not a confirmed psychopath... Just as any of us can lose our license and have the civic privilege to drive taken away...Just so should we all be protected from guns outside our houses, in our streets, cafes, churches, schools. We do not drive cars into school yards. Churches. Schools. Guns don't belong there either.
Cars did not exist when our forefathers built the 2nd Amendment. Nor did automatic weapons and cartridges capable of delivering 100 rounds of ammunition within minutes. To pretend that everything capable of destruction today was heralded by our forefathers puts the Constitution within the same sacred category as the Bible. If we intend to treat it this way, then we should be willing to reduce our capability to the level intended by our forefathers. That is, very simple and not particularly deadly firearms. And we should give up our cars for mules and horses and carriages.
That's fine by me. And we can throw out volumes higher than is beneficial to the human ear. But I'd like to maintain soft electric lights and the power to fly, if you don't mind.
It is quiet now with the snow. Streets, sidewalks muffled. A dog barks. We are too far for church bells.
In Charleston winters when I grew up, we often had windows open to the clack of palm fronds and the cries of children playing in the courtyard. The bells of St. Matthew's rang the quarter hour. Yet, with windows shut and us all at home after eight o'clock, it was quiet, as dark came on, and my sister and I sat on either side of our mother, listening to her musical voice reading "In an old house in Paris, all covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines." .
The human voice unmediated. Yes, there was the radio, a gothic affair that sat on the floor. We pressed as close as possible to the speaker cloth, trying to get on the other side to ride with the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Or to tremble with "The Shadow" But the volume was subdued and the fidelity so good I believed I could hear the shadow's wheezing threat.
Occasionally when our parents invited guests for spaghetti supper, we played duets, I on the piano, my fahter on violin. Then voices sang in our quiet, the Italian songs from my father's childhood, brought across the water by the earlier generation. Except when he vented his Italian fury and strode back and forth in agitation, except when I ran in from the courtyard, slamming the kitchen door and protesting that Bobby Star or Jimmy Moon or Mildred Cake was tormenting me, it was quiet. Now, looking back from my own quiet winter house, I recognize quiet as a household blessing.
It is also a civic blessing. Yes, I know. I danced the shag or other rock 'n' roll to very loud booming Elvis, the Coasters, Little Richard. By then a teenager, I had a huge upstairs bedroom in our Mr. Pleasant house--we've moved across the roller coaster bridge and my parents built a small bungalow on a lot with towering magnolia trees. My little radio and small phonograph played loud music. My father--his musician's ear sensitive to anything but his own ranting--would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout, "Margot, turn off that infernal jungle music!" I slammed my door but I turned it down. The last thing I wanted was to have him storm upstairs and yank the record off its cradle.
We were on the edge of disrupting the civic peace and quiet. That was my mother's phrase, "peace and quiet." When my father and I argued, now downstairs, standing nose to nose in the kitchen--"Leonard, Margot," she would protest, "please give us some peace and quiet."
There were no gunshots outside our door. No backfirings of cars that sounded like gunshots. My parents were decent, law-abiding citizens. It was just that my father grew up in a culture where a range of vocalizing was required. Pater familias, he tried to lay down the law, and his own daughter sashayed and sassed him back. I wouldn't have dreamed of taking our argument into the street. There were no guns in our house, ever. If violence was what we were practicing--and his rants against Negroes and "those Commie, Northern infiltrators" wore on and on, threatening destruction and mayhem FROM THEM! though he was the one "raising his voice," as my mother said. "Leonard, lower your voice." If violence was what we were practicing, at least it ended with our walls.
Though I would not want to relive that era of my teen years with my father's hate-filled denunciations, yet they gave me a measure against which to gauge the moment when family conflict passes into violence so destructive that it becomes a civil menace.Violence that occurs within a public arena--and I'm not talking about the north woods or a huge lake--but city streets and parking lots, schools, churches, movie houses--the public arena belongs not only to individual liberty, but to community regulation.
We have a new law that motorists must stop when a pedestrian has stepped off a curb to cross a street. I've seen this new law in action: it is based on the obvious fact that a bus or car or truck has an enormous murderous capacity against a pedestrian. To allow vehicles to usurp the right of way, to rage pell mell across all intersections not only would cause damage to many vehicles, but would kill pedestrians very very dead.
Since many Minnesota drivers use their vehicles as weapons, this is a very precious new law. It puts protection of the "unarmed" first. Would that we could learn to see the connection between the gun and the largely unarmed walker on a stilly night. Just as we regulate who can drive a car--not a child, not a confirmed psychopath... Just as any of us can lose our license and have the civic privilege to drive taken away...Just so should we all be protected from guns outside our houses, in our streets, cafes, churches, schools. We do not drive cars into school yards. Churches. Schools. Guns don't belong there either.
Cars did not exist when our forefathers built the 2nd Amendment. Nor did automatic weapons and cartridges capable of delivering 100 rounds of ammunition within minutes. To pretend that everything capable of destruction today was heralded by our forefathers puts the Constitution within the same sacred category as the Bible. If we intend to treat it this way, then we should be willing to reduce our capability to the level intended by our forefathers. That is, very simple and not particularly deadly firearms. And we should give up our cars for mules and horses and carriages.
That's fine by me. And we can throw out volumes higher than is beneficial to the human ear. But I'd like to maintain soft electric lights and the power to fly, if you don't mind.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Margotlog: Final Grades and the Fiscal Cliff
Margotlog: Final Grades and the Fiscal Cliff
'Tis the season to be taken to account. The US federal government has just averted a financial cliff of cuts and ups that would have, according to financial experts, thrown the country into a downward spiral. This is not news. During the agonizing attempts to reach some sort of compromise, I thought, "Hmm, maybe it would be better simply to fall off!" But this approach would have dragged many millions into precipitate hardship, or so we thought. Partly because, for the past sixty years, this country has been predicated on rising expectations and a rising standard of living. For a good portion of the 20th century, the promise also extended and was even realized for the working class. That is, until President Clinton's North American Trade Agreement allowed US companies to ship jobs overseas with little penality. Then the US working class suffered a significant decline in job offerings and wages.
During this past month, I've also been handing out final grades to two groups of students, one mid-level college writing class, and the other a master's level graduate class. Something happened to me during this semester: I became hard as nails. Yes, I still brought food treats to these evening classes and asked students to sign up to bring their share. I still wrote long (though hardly folksy) comments on student papers and even phoned up a few who seemed to be wandering in the wilderness of confusion or idleness. One I even reported to the "authorities" for rarely being in class and turning in assignments.
But these measures I've largely followed in the past. New this semester was my tone of insistent, direct requirement. "You MUST do such and so, if you want to pass this class." Or, "No, that is NOT right. A bibliography MUST include author's last name, title, date, etc." I squashed the notion that I should make friends with my students. That I should coddle them like tender shoots, lest they wither and die.
Over the past few years, I've read articles by child psychologists bemoaning American youths' belief in their superiority coupled with an unwillingness to work hard. Stands to reason: if you are superior by all definitions and evidence, your middling efforts should be sufficient, even praised. Everyone should earn an A. We have taught our young people entitlement. Raised them well into the age of adulthood to believe that the world/the economy/their parents owe them an easy, good time.
This is hardly the case with some of my students whose lives are so complicated and troubled--with single-parent work and childcare, with fractured families sometimes spread out across the globe, with mental health troubles that bring them up short--that they can't begin to function in a college class.
But for many others, I have come to realize that they engage in far too much partying and expenditure, neither conducive to college performance. They buy fancy expensive tennis shoes, they down so much alcohol and eat so little real food that their electrolytes take a nosedive and reduce them to a quivering mess.
This past semester, I told my mid-level writing class exactly what would happen if they pursued such ridiculous behavior. After the first paper revealed serious deficiencies in American English among some immigrant students, I took them immediately to the writing center and told them they MUST bring every single one of their papers there for help before turning it in.
So with the graduate students: I was also much more directive. I told them what was acceptable and what was not. I led them through outlining, writing opening paragraphs, using quotations in insightful ways. Of the mid-level writing students, many did outstanding work. They turned in weekly assignments, which previous classes had rarely done. They did the readings. They did a lot of research and they wrote clearly and well. Only a few faltered. These had such serious family problems that no teaching of mine could compete.
Back to this national cliff. I am a registered Democrat. I believe that government in some form (local, regional, national) MUST regulate food, water, pollution, environmental standards, traffic,building safety, GUNS, on and so on. But I also realize that we as a nation have built up an enormous debt. It is not my doing: I abhorred the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The minute I heard MPR describe the North American Trade Agreement, I felt in my gut that it would leach jobs from this country, to the advantage of already huge corporations who hardly need the help. Yes, it would reduce the cost of clothing and other manufactured good, but it would not necessarily promise better products as a result.
As we confront the debt which we failed to manage with the recent tax measures, I, for one, will grit my teeth and urge significant belt tightening for all of us except the very very poor. Cuts to the military, cuts to some domestic programs, and yes, plans to reward companies who bring jobs back to the United States. It is the right thing to do. Let's return to a clear-headed vision of the importance of hard work and saving. Let's support our young people by helping them into college and requiring them to perform at their very best.
'Tis the season to be taken to account. The US federal government has just averted a financial cliff of cuts and ups that would have, according to financial experts, thrown the country into a downward spiral. This is not news. During the agonizing attempts to reach some sort of compromise, I thought, "Hmm, maybe it would be better simply to fall off!" But this approach would have dragged many millions into precipitate hardship, or so we thought. Partly because, for the past sixty years, this country has been predicated on rising expectations and a rising standard of living. For a good portion of the 20th century, the promise also extended and was even realized for the working class. That is, until President Clinton's North American Trade Agreement allowed US companies to ship jobs overseas with little penality. Then the US working class suffered a significant decline in job offerings and wages.
During this past month, I've also been handing out final grades to two groups of students, one mid-level college writing class, and the other a master's level graduate class. Something happened to me during this semester: I became hard as nails. Yes, I still brought food treats to these evening classes and asked students to sign up to bring their share. I still wrote long (though hardly folksy) comments on student papers and even phoned up a few who seemed to be wandering in the wilderness of confusion or idleness. One I even reported to the "authorities" for rarely being in class and turning in assignments.
But these measures I've largely followed in the past. New this semester was my tone of insistent, direct requirement. "You MUST do such and so, if you want to pass this class." Or, "No, that is NOT right. A bibliography MUST include author's last name, title, date, etc." I squashed the notion that I should make friends with my students. That I should coddle them like tender shoots, lest they wither and die.
Over the past few years, I've read articles by child psychologists bemoaning American youths' belief in their superiority coupled with an unwillingness to work hard. Stands to reason: if you are superior by all definitions and evidence, your middling efforts should be sufficient, even praised. Everyone should earn an A. We have taught our young people entitlement. Raised them well into the age of adulthood to believe that the world/the economy/their parents owe them an easy, good time.
This is hardly the case with some of my students whose lives are so complicated and troubled--with single-parent work and childcare, with fractured families sometimes spread out across the globe, with mental health troubles that bring them up short--that they can't begin to function in a college class.
But for many others, I have come to realize that they engage in far too much partying and expenditure, neither conducive to college performance. They buy fancy expensive tennis shoes, they down so much alcohol and eat so little real food that their electrolytes take a nosedive and reduce them to a quivering mess.
This past semester, I told my mid-level writing class exactly what would happen if they pursued such ridiculous behavior. After the first paper revealed serious deficiencies in American English among some immigrant students, I took them immediately to the writing center and told them they MUST bring every single one of their papers there for help before turning it in.
So with the graduate students: I was also much more directive. I told them what was acceptable and what was not. I led them through outlining, writing opening paragraphs, using quotations in insightful ways. Of the mid-level writing students, many did outstanding work. They turned in weekly assignments, which previous classes had rarely done. They did the readings. They did a lot of research and they wrote clearly and well. Only a few faltered. These had such serious family problems that no teaching of mine could compete.
Back to this national cliff. I am a registered Democrat. I believe that government in some form (local, regional, national) MUST regulate food, water, pollution, environmental standards, traffic,building safety, GUNS, on and so on. But I also realize that we as a nation have built up an enormous debt. It is not my doing: I abhorred the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The minute I heard MPR describe the North American Trade Agreement, I felt in my gut that it would leach jobs from this country, to the advantage of already huge corporations who hardly need the help. Yes, it would reduce the cost of clothing and other manufactured good, but it would not necessarily promise better products as a result.
As we confront the debt which we failed to manage with the recent tax measures, I, for one, will grit my teeth and urge significant belt tightening for all of us except the very very poor. Cuts to the military, cuts to some domestic programs, and yes, plans to reward companies who bring jobs back to the United States. It is the right thing to do. Let's return to a clear-headed vision of the importance of hard work and saving. Let's support our young people by helping them into college and requiring them to perform at their very best.
Monday, December 24, 2012
Margotlog: The Slant of Memory
Margotlog: The Slant of Memory
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin's Feeding Time:
Time which blows on the kettle's rim
Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992)
I stand alone in the kitchen on dark winter mornings, as the teapot's steam marks this warning in the cold air. I say the lines to myself. They come at the end of her poem about feeding animals and loved ones at this coldest time of the year when the ancient knowledge of starvation waits just beyond the glass
Premonition and death also rise through the plot of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Like all his novels I've read, this one circles back to reverberate its initial scene. A master of headlong plotting, Dickens is also a master of infusing a scene with motion. Thoughts flowing through the bars of a prison: It is the French Revolution. The novel's denouement depends on that all-important first scene.And a recurring prison.
Now with the holidays I have time to read magazines several months old. A New Yorker writer, Anthony Lane offers Henry James as the greatest of all novelists, with his Portrait of an Artist. I flinch from this judgment, (and remember a BBC enactment I heard maybe five months ago). To my taste, James is deficient in chiaroscuro, the lights and darks of which Dickens is a master. Not to mention the ability to call characters out of the sod, the brick, the furnace. Dickens' scenes--from counting house to hovel, from rain-driven clod to cozy fire, from prison bars to sumptuous feast--create a full-bodied, cantankerous, ultimately satisfying world of invention.
Another set of lines recurs: A certain slant of light
on winter afternoons
oppresses like the weight
of cathedral tunes.
There is such sharply slanting light as I walk at the end of these short days. It carries terror with it. Emily Dickinson knew of what she spoke--that oppressive music.
We read to be carried out of ourselves, but also brought back: So lines from poems wend their way through odd moments, and the experience of novels so huge and insistent they envelope my life. I think I still know the difference between Dickens' Paris and mine own, though mine is now shaded, tortured by his. My London remains entirely his, since I've never been in it. But it is full of extraordinary characters and encounters. In Henry James' world, fine perceptions are spun into immense subtlety. That's that I remember: shading going from half sun to darker and darker grey until we stand in ultimate penumbra. .
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin's Feeding Time:
Time which blows on the kettle's rim
Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992)
I stand alone in the kitchen on dark winter mornings, as the teapot's steam marks this warning in the cold air. I say the lines to myself. They come at the end of her poem about feeding animals and loved ones at this coldest time of the year when the ancient knowledge of starvation waits just beyond the glass
Premonition and death also rise through the plot of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Like all his novels I've read, this one circles back to reverberate its initial scene. A master of headlong plotting, Dickens is also a master of infusing a scene with motion. Thoughts flowing through the bars of a prison: It is the French Revolution. The novel's denouement depends on that all-important first scene.And a recurring prison.
Now with the holidays I have time to read magazines several months old. A New Yorker writer, Anthony Lane offers Henry James as the greatest of all novelists, with his Portrait of an Artist. I flinch from this judgment, (and remember a BBC enactment I heard maybe five months ago). To my taste, James is deficient in chiaroscuro, the lights and darks of which Dickens is a master. Not to mention the ability to call characters out of the sod, the brick, the furnace. Dickens' scenes--from counting house to hovel, from rain-driven clod to cozy fire, from prison bars to sumptuous feast--create a full-bodied, cantankerous, ultimately satisfying world of invention.
Another set of lines recurs: A certain slant of light
on winter afternoons
oppresses like the weight
of cathedral tunes.
There is such sharply slanting light as I walk at the end of these short days. It carries terror with it. Emily Dickinson knew of what she spoke--that oppressive music.
We read to be carried out of ourselves, but also brought back: So lines from poems wend their way through odd moments, and the experience of novels so huge and insistent they envelope my life. I think I still know the difference between Dickens' Paris and mine own, though mine is now shaded, tortured by his. My London remains entirely his, since I've never been in it. But it is full of extraordinary characters and encounters. In Henry James' world, fine perceptions are spun into immense subtlety. That's that I remember: shading going from half sun to darker and darker grey until we stand in ultimate penumbra. .
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Margotlog: Thinking Things Over at Christmas
Margotlog: Thinking Things Over at Christmas
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota's finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It's probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in that bossy way of hers, to sit in the dark and so discourage passing drivers from turning in at the driveway. Do not answer the door. Instead, think about all the subjects that can't be discussed with coffee-klatching neighbors.
It is a quiet night at my house, and I am drawing up a ledger of sorts, musings about this most cantankerous of years. I'm thinking about the shooting of 20 children in a Connecticut school and where to lay the blame. It's not possible simply to stand aloof. We in the middle class have become more and more in love with roughness and violence, and less and less aware of what it means to be truly desperate. This divergence between real suffering and the noise and menace we manipulate for enjoyment frightens me.
Item: After President Obama "saved" the Detroit automakers, instead of instituting guidelines for smaller cars with higher fuel efficiency, we porked out on bigger SUVs and 4X4s--souped up trucks so big they roar down residential streets like tanks. Flamboyant displays of power going nowhere!
Item: Sitting in a movie theater as far from home as you can get and not tread on Asia, we waited for a showing of "The Life of Pi." The previews were for shows you're supposed to see with kids. The screaming sound tracks nearly broke my eardrums. The images of mayhem and destruction were so huge and menacing, so "in your face" that I had to hide mine in my lap.Yet all around me, wriggling, jumpy kids kept eating their candy and popcorn, taking it all in.
Item: We know nothing, not really, about the 20-year-old who broke into the elementary school in Connecticut with enough ammunition to kill everyone in the school. We do know that his mother bought the assault-style weapons and the ponderous bullet cases he used. Is it possible that she, who never let anyone close to her house, was engaged in full-fledged terrorizing of her son? Is it possible that his horrendous act went twenty-eight shots beyond what he was experiencing at home?
I've just talked to educators who work with protection against, and prevention of school violence. About lock-downs, one said, "We practice what to do--lock classroom doors, never let anyone in during a class. But within days, all the doors stand open and anyone can appear at a classroom door and get the teacher's attention." The other one said, "Prevention is even more important than protection--talk to students who seem depressed. Ferret out the suicidal and get them help. It's often the suicidal who kills others, then himself."
Item: When I was in high school, we practiced what to do if someone dropped "the bomb." We filed out into the halls and hunkered down, our arms draped over our heads. Then on Saturday night we danced ourselves silly to loud rock 'n' roll. But there was only one shooting in my small South Carolina high school--it was an accident. A brother cleaning a shotgun killed a younger sibling at close range. He was a pariah afterwards, always walking alone, his head down. No one had ever heard of assault-style rifles. Television was silly comedy shows, boring new commentaries and Saturday morning cartoons on our small screen.
Item: My father drove like a maniac, arguing with my mother, lifting his hands off the wheel. In the back seat, I was terrified and furious. Even as a girl, I knew that he was using the car as a weapon to intimidate her.
There is only one conclusion and many corollaries: Humans will be violent, loud and bullying.
Corollaries: Arms control doesn't mean only a detente over the bomb. It also means removing the most dangerous weapons from civil society. Assault weapons and huge magazines of bullets should not be available to anyone except the military. Period.
Violence needs to be channeled to do the least harm: sports and challenging outdoor activities are the best. Children (and that includes teenagers and young adults) are particularly vulnerable to huge, loud, repeated images of aggression. Fed such junk long enough, they will be unable to distinguish between what is playful and what is harmful. The two will become melded. Fear will curdle in their chests and they will spew it on others.
Instead of such a diet, they (and the rest of us) need gentle, quiet, thoughtful activities. We as humans need to learn how to protect and care for living things smaller than and bigger than we are. We need to learn empathy for those around us. Otherwise, we all grow an exaggerated sense of our own power and place in the world, which is an awful set-up for dealing with the biggest challenge we face: repairing the planet in hopes of saving life as we know it before it's too late.
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota's finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It's probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in that bossy way of hers, to sit in the dark and so discourage passing drivers from turning in at the driveway. Do not answer the door. Instead, think about all the subjects that can't be discussed with coffee-klatching neighbors.
It is a quiet night at my house, and I am drawing up a ledger of sorts, musings about this most cantankerous of years. I'm thinking about the shooting of 20 children in a Connecticut school and where to lay the blame. It's not possible simply to stand aloof. We in the middle class have become more and more in love with roughness and violence, and less and less aware of what it means to be truly desperate. This divergence between real suffering and the noise and menace we manipulate for enjoyment frightens me.
Item: After President Obama "saved" the Detroit automakers, instead of instituting guidelines for smaller cars with higher fuel efficiency, we porked out on bigger SUVs and 4X4s--souped up trucks so big they roar down residential streets like tanks. Flamboyant displays of power going nowhere!
Item: Sitting in a movie theater as far from home as you can get and not tread on Asia, we waited for a showing of "The Life of Pi." The previews were for shows you're supposed to see with kids. The screaming sound tracks nearly broke my eardrums. The images of mayhem and destruction were so huge and menacing, so "in your face" that I had to hide mine in my lap.Yet all around me, wriggling, jumpy kids kept eating their candy and popcorn, taking it all in.
Item: We know nothing, not really, about the 20-year-old who broke into the elementary school in Connecticut with enough ammunition to kill everyone in the school. We do know that his mother bought the assault-style weapons and the ponderous bullet cases he used. Is it possible that she, who never let anyone close to her house, was engaged in full-fledged terrorizing of her son? Is it possible that his horrendous act went twenty-eight shots beyond what he was experiencing at home?
I've just talked to educators who work with protection against, and prevention of school violence. About lock-downs, one said, "We practice what to do--lock classroom doors, never let anyone in during a class. But within days, all the doors stand open and anyone can appear at a classroom door and get the teacher's attention." The other one said, "Prevention is even more important than protection--talk to students who seem depressed. Ferret out the suicidal and get them help. It's often the suicidal who kills others, then himself."
Item: When I was in high school, we practiced what to do if someone dropped "the bomb." We filed out into the halls and hunkered down, our arms draped over our heads. Then on Saturday night we danced ourselves silly to loud rock 'n' roll. But there was only one shooting in my small South Carolina high school--it was an accident. A brother cleaning a shotgun killed a younger sibling at close range. He was a pariah afterwards, always walking alone, his head down. No one had ever heard of assault-style rifles. Television was silly comedy shows, boring new commentaries and Saturday morning cartoons on our small screen.
Item: My father drove like a maniac, arguing with my mother, lifting his hands off the wheel. In the back seat, I was terrified and furious. Even as a girl, I knew that he was using the car as a weapon to intimidate her.
There is only one conclusion and many corollaries: Humans will be violent, loud and bullying.
Corollaries: Arms control doesn't mean only a detente over the bomb. It also means removing the most dangerous weapons from civil society. Assault weapons and huge magazines of bullets should not be available to anyone except the military. Period.
Violence needs to be channeled to do the least harm: sports and challenging outdoor activities are the best. Children (and that includes teenagers and young adults) are particularly vulnerable to huge, loud, repeated images of aggression. Fed such junk long enough, they will be unable to distinguish between what is playful and what is harmful. The two will become melded. Fear will curdle in their chests and they will spew it on others.
Instead of such a diet, they (and the rest of us) need gentle, quiet, thoughtful activities. We as humans need to learn how to protect and care for living things smaller than and bigger than we are. We need to learn empathy for those around us. Otherwise, we all grow an exaggerated sense of our own power and place in the world, which is an awful set-up for dealing with the biggest challenge we face: repairing the planet in hopes of saving life as we know it before it's too late.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Margotlog: The Laysan Albatross and the Ocean of Plastic
Margotlog: The Laysan Albatross and the Ocean of Plastic
At the northern edge of Kauai, the most northwesterly of the main Hawaiian Islands, a point of land reaches out to a lighthouse. This is the Kilauea lighthouse. Once there were 14 lighthouses studding the rugged coast of Kauai, in the days of sailing ships and many ports of call, in the days before sonar. Now this one remains as a beacon for those who enjoy watching seabirds and searching the ocean for whales. We visit every time we come to Kauai, our favorite of the Hawaiian Islands, the greenest, least marred by urbanization and volcano activity. For spewing lava and plumes of smoke, go to the "Big Island." For high rises and Waikiki beaches, go to Honolulu. We've done both, and still love Kauai the best.
Several things have happened to the endemic birds of the islands. Odd word, endemic. For a while, every time I saw it, I read "epidemic." But it means "native only to this spot." High up in the sharp-sided mountains of Kauai, there remain some truly unusual birds--bright red with deeply curved beak, or bright yellow or bright red with black wings. They all have sonorous names in native Hawaiian, which of course I don't remember. It's hard for an Anglo to speak Hawaiian, though lovely to hear it, like whoshing wind or lapping waves. But one little endemic bird of Kauaii caught my attention: the apapane, reknown for its varied melodies and (poor thing) for being preyed upon by endemic and imported owls. When the apapane finds an owl in the vicinty, it hides in the leaf clusters of the ohia tree, and whimpers.
What does it take to extend empathy to other living things, the empathy we usually reserve forour own kind? Awe at its physical presence and splendor? Or a sign that it quakes with fear just as we do? Relief from our busy, demanding lives also helps. Quiet attention, absorbing into our very being what the other creature is experiencing. Then responding from our "deep heart's core."(quoting Mathew Arnold)
It's helped me to know that elephants mourn the one of their family. They will lie down beside the suffering one, and remain with it after it dies. If this isn't grief, I don't know what is. Whether elephants, surely one of the smartest animals, will also grieve the death of a creature not their own, I don't know, but there are reports of other kinds of animals forming close bonds--dog and duck, deer and goat.
Visiting the lighthouse at Kilauea I marveled at huge Laysan Albatross on the wing, I was awed by their wide wings (grey on top, white below), at their hooked beaks so close that I could see the hooks, and their regal white heads with goofy tilted eyes, which make them look cross-eyed, but probably are set this way to give wide range of vision--sideways, forward, maybe even above their heads.
They do not nest on the cliffs beside the lighthouse, as do the boobies, all white and not at all dumb. But instead the Laysan Albatross nests on the small islands that stretch west from the main Hawaiian chain. Laysan Island was ruined by a German named Max Schlemmer who introduced rabbits (among other irritants) who so denuded the foilage that all critters and eventually the rabbits themselves died. Eventually Schlemmer was hauled off the island. Rightly so, and the land somewhat restored. I can't tell you what happened to the Laysan Albastross during this environmental mess.
But I can tell you about the fate of a Laysan Albatross chick who was hatched on Green Atoll, which, I assume, lies not far from Laysan itself. (Here I advise you to take a deep breath and let it out slowly.) "Shed Bird" hatched beside a shed and proceeded to be raised by its parents. This was in the early 2000s. Humans of the atmospheric and oceanic type took note of Shed Bird but didn't bother it until they found it dead after (I'm guessing) maybe 4-5 months. By that time it was about a foot long.
Cutting into the stomach, they discovered it had been perforated a number of places. The stomach itself was crammed with junk, so much so that there was little room for jelly fish or flying fish, common food of the Laysan Albatross. Now here's where you and I come in. Two-thirds of the junk was plastic:
plastic bottle caps
aerosol plastic disperser tops
flat pieces of plastic with sharp edges
There was part of a wooden clothespin, part of a small paintbrush, part of a rifle shell.
Laid out in a circle and photographed, the junk inscribed a diameter of maybe two feet. Somewhat artistic in its diversity of shapes and colors. Horrible when seen photographed inside the cut-open bird who obviously had died of starvation. Dumb parents, you might say.
Albatross do not dive for food. They skim it off the ocean surface. Especially where currents meet and offer an upswelling of jelly fish and flying fish, their natural food sources.Dumb humans, I say. Dumb and heedless and ultimately accessories to murder of creatures too dumb to tell the hard crack of a small piece of bright-colored plastic from an iridescent jelly fish.
I stood at the display case where there were charming blue-green waves below the wall of photographs, waves inscribed with details of hump-back whale mating, of monk seal navigation, waves that made the ocean around Hawaii and Laysan and Green Atoll come alive with stories of creatures not human.
It took me a while to read all the stories and rest my eyes on the cut-open chick, on its inside stuffed with human junk, and to read the all-too-obvious message: the chick's death belonged to me as surely as if I'd shot it from the air. Then I wept. For the heedless stupidity and carelessness of my kind, for the beautiful flyers that are the adult Laysan albatross, and the danger that awaits their chicks in the wind-swept middle of the Pacific. Wept for all the pieces of plastic I pick up as I walk, even when I'm tired and grouse to myself that this is stupid, this is not my job, this particular green water bottle top will never reach a body of water.
But I usually pick it up anyway. And I urge you to do the same. Plastic filth is our business. It belongs to all of us. We throw it away to imperil all kinds of living things who are not human. But who are beautiful and deserve to live in a world that is not imperiled by our throw-away habits. Instead of throwing away, let's think about keeping and treasuring. About admiring and preserving. Let's think about our own chicks potentially threatened by minute pieces of plastic in their drinking water, the soil where they dig for fun, the air they breathe. Let's think about places where currents meet and where what we've thrown away returns to haunt and kill. Let's remember there is no place on earth where a substance as unnatural as plastic will not come back to haunt us.
I, for one, am ready to say Good-bye to plastic. Not better, recycleable plastic, but any plastic that can be thrown away by casual, heedless users. Glass is far better. Yes, it stays around a while, but its sharp edges are eventually ground smooth by wave action. It does not float, and eventually it returns to the sillica that is found in sand. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, except in the case of plastic, which is light-weight, and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but will still be plastic forever.
At the northern edge of Kauai, the most northwesterly of the main Hawaiian Islands, a point of land reaches out to a lighthouse. This is the Kilauea lighthouse. Once there were 14 lighthouses studding the rugged coast of Kauai, in the days of sailing ships and many ports of call, in the days before sonar. Now this one remains as a beacon for those who enjoy watching seabirds and searching the ocean for whales. We visit every time we come to Kauai, our favorite of the Hawaiian Islands, the greenest, least marred by urbanization and volcano activity. For spewing lava and plumes of smoke, go to the "Big Island." For high rises and Waikiki beaches, go to Honolulu. We've done both, and still love Kauai the best.
Several things have happened to the endemic birds of the islands. Odd word, endemic. For a while, every time I saw it, I read "epidemic." But it means "native only to this spot." High up in the sharp-sided mountains of Kauai, there remain some truly unusual birds--bright red with deeply curved beak, or bright yellow or bright red with black wings. They all have sonorous names in native Hawaiian, which of course I don't remember. It's hard for an Anglo to speak Hawaiian, though lovely to hear it, like whoshing wind or lapping waves. But one little endemic bird of Kauaii caught my attention: the apapane, reknown for its varied melodies and (poor thing) for being preyed upon by endemic and imported owls. When the apapane finds an owl in the vicinty, it hides in the leaf clusters of the ohia tree, and whimpers.
What does it take to extend empathy to other living things, the empathy we usually reserve forour own kind? Awe at its physical presence and splendor? Or a sign that it quakes with fear just as we do? Relief from our busy, demanding lives also helps. Quiet attention, absorbing into our very being what the other creature is experiencing. Then responding from our "deep heart's core."(quoting Mathew Arnold)
It's helped me to know that elephants mourn the one of their family. They will lie down beside the suffering one, and remain with it after it dies. If this isn't grief, I don't know what is. Whether elephants, surely one of the smartest animals, will also grieve the death of a creature not their own, I don't know, but there are reports of other kinds of animals forming close bonds--dog and duck, deer and goat.
Visiting the lighthouse at Kilauea I marveled at huge Laysan Albatross on the wing, I was awed by their wide wings (grey on top, white below), at their hooked beaks so close that I could see the hooks, and their regal white heads with goofy tilted eyes, which make them look cross-eyed, but probably are set this way to give wide range of vision--sideways, forward, maybe even above their heads.
They do not nest on the cliffs beside the lighthouse, as do the boobies, all white and not at all dumb. But instead the Laysan Albatross nests on the small islands that stretch west from the main Hawaiian chain. Laysan Island was ruined by a German named Max Schlemmer who introduced rabbits (among other irritants) who so denuded the foilage that all critters and eventually the rabbits themselves died. Eventually Schlemmer was hauled off the island. Rightly so, and the land somewhat restored. I can't tell you what happened to the Laysan Albastross during this environmental mess.
But I can tell you about the fate of a Laysan Albatross chick who was hatched on Green Atoll, which, I assume, lies not far from Laysan itself. (Here I advise you to take a deep breath and let it out slowly.) "Shed Bird" hatched beside a shed and proceeded to be raised by its parents. This was in the early 2000s. Humans of the atmospheric and oceanic type took note of Shed Bird but didn't bother it until they found it dead after (I'm guessing) maybe 4-5 months. By that time it was about a foot long.
Cutting into the stomach, they discovered it had been perforated a number of places. The stomach itself was crammed with junk, so much so that there was little room for jelly fish or flying fish, common food of the Laysan Albatross. Now here's where you and I come in. Two-thirds of the junk was plastic:
plastic bottle caps
aerosol plastic disperser tops
flat pieces of plastic with sharp edges
There was part of a wooden clothespin, part of a small paintbrush, part of a rifle shell.
Laid out in a circle and photographed, the junk inscribed a diameter of maybe two feet. Somewhat artistic in its diversity of shapes and colors. Horrible when seen photographed inside the cut-open bird who obviously had died of starvation. Dumb parents, you might say.
Albatross do not dive for food. They skim it off the ocean surface. Especially where currents meet and offer an upswelling of jelly fish and flying fish, their natural food sources.Dumb humans, I say. Dumb and heedless and ultimately accessories to murder of creatures too dumb to tell the hard crack of a small piece of bright-colored plastic from an iridescent jelly fish.
I stood at the display case where there were charming blue-green waves below the wall of photographs, waves inscribed with details of hump-back whale mating, of monk seal navigation, waves that made the ocean around Hawaii and Laysan and Green Atoll come alive with stories of creatures not human.
It took me a while to read all the stories and rest my eyes on the cut-open chick, on its inside stuffed with human junk, and to read the all-too-obvious message: the chick's death belonged to me as surely as if I'd shot it from the air. Then I wept. For the heedless stupidity and carelessness of my kind, for the beautiful flyers that are the adult Laysan albatross, and the danger that awaits their chicks in the wind-swept middle of the Pacific. Wept for all the pieces of plastic I pick up as I walk, even when I'm tired and grouse to myself that this is stupid, this is not my job, this particular green water bottle top will never reach a body of water.
But I usually pick it up anyway. And I urge you to do the same. Plastic filth is our business. It belongs to all of us. We throw it away to imperil all kinds of living things who are not human. But who are beautiful and deserve to live in a world that is not imperiled by our throw-away habits. Instead of throwing away, let's think about keeping and treasuring. About admiring and preserving. Let's think about our own chicks potentially threatened by minute pieces of plastic in their drinking water, the soil where they dig for fun, the air they breathe. Let's think about places where currents meet and where what we've thrown away returns to haunt and kill. Let's remember there is no place on earth where a substance as unnatural as plastic will not come back to haunt us.
I, for one, am ready to say Good-bye to plastic. Not better, recycleable plastic, but any plastic that can be thrown away by casual, heedless users. Glass is far better. Yes, it stays around a while, but its sharp edges are eventually ground smooth by wave action. It does not float, and eventually it returns to the sillica that is found in sand. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, except in the case of plastic, which is light-weight, and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but will still be plastic forever.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Margotlog: Day of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Margotlog: Day of the Dean in San Miguel
The small plane from Houston banked lower, the clouds parted, and there lay a wide, dry plateau spread with cactus like huge Gumbies ready to jig. The word arroyo came back to me: deep fissures in the earth, which would turn into torrents in sudden rains. But the rainy season had passed, said Daniel, our van driver from Leon. Daniel, with dual citizenship, had just finished his stint in the U.S. Marines. Which was worse? one of us asked, Afganistan or Iraq?
Iraq, he answered. There the enemy hid behind buildings. In Afganistan you could see them coming acriss the high desert. Just like here, I thought, and remembered Mary Morris' foray into the desert beyond San Miguel. Dangerous, she wrote in her book Nothing to Declare. Dangerous especially for a gringa, yet the landscape called, and jumping a sewage ditch, she climbed higher. A green hummingbird delighted her, and there at the mouth of a cave she spied a woman in white watching her. Perhaps a bujo, witch; perhaps her guardian spirit.
I came to San Miguel de Allende to teach a memoir class in the home of a friend. Thus my first significant impression was that home which one entered like a white labyrinth, winding back and back until the dust and noise of the street disappeared before a small green oasis of jade plants. On Pat's third floor terrace, we sat and drank wine, and I fell in love with the high sky full of puffy white clouds. A small bird landed in a nearby mesquit tree: brilliant red with black wings. Vermillion flycatcher, said the Aves (Birds) of Mexico book.
San Miguel is a city, not a town. A city of many faceless houses along narrow cobbled streets. Walking can be treacherous. The City of Fallen Women, I learned, and vowed not to fall. But the third day I got sick with some intestinal bug. I was the teacher stretched out on the sofa under the turquoise wool blanket. The concrete, modern house with its many small balconies and roof-top terrace was chilly. That night I asked Pat for an electric blanket and sank into the pleasure of chill-warming heat.
The Jardin (pronounded "hardeen") is the center of civic promenade. Like every other public park I saw, the Jardin (garden in English) is composed of rows of benches set under laurel trees pruned to look like boxes. It's a very odd sensation: box after box of green facing a church like a pink drip castle. Pat's grand-daughter, meeting this Parrochia, asked, "Does Cinderella live there?" She has a point.
We had come to take part in Day of the Dead, which began on our Norde Americano Halloween, with kids and parents threading through the Jardin with open tins or sacks. Many little girls were dressed in fluffy, elaborate outfits, yet their faces were skulls--Cristinas, I believe they are called. Death decked out in her finery! Very odd, indeed, embodied in children. Why am I not spooked by U.S. kids with skull masks, yet these girls troubled me? I think it was the combination of sexy beauty on a child, plus the skull face. Very creepy, but the kids seemed fine, if a little solemn.
Before we left, Pat and I visited the very old cemetery, recently cleaned of ancient filth, and the old tombs, odd-shaped, above-ground bulbous shapes, painted pale pink, grey, yellow, blue. To honor the dead, there were only marigolds--the traditional flower. Orange petal blankets around the tombs, bouquets of orange marigolds, marigold blossoms tucked in crevasses and climbing up trees. The brilliant simplicity took my breath away. Its beauty was both strange and commanding; Stop here, notice and honor, the flowers seemed to say, and we did.
The small plane from Houston banked lower, the clouds parted, and there lay a wide, dry plateau spread with cactus like huge Gumbies ready to jig. The word arroyo came back to me: deep fissures in the earth, which would turn into torrents in sudden rains. But the rainy season had passed, said Daniel, our van driver from Leon. Daniel, with dual citizenship, had just finished his stint in the U.S. Marines. Which was worse? one of us asked, Afganistan or Iraq?
Iraq, he answered. There the enemy hid behind buildings. In Afganistan you could see them coming acriss the high desert. Just like here, I thought, and remembered Mary Morris' foray into the desert beyond San Miguel. Dangerous, she wrote in her book Nothing to Declare. Dangerous especially for a gringa, yet the landscape called, and jumping a sewage ditch, she climbed higher. A green hummingbird delighted her, and there at the mouth of a cave she spied a woman in white watching her. Perhaps a bujo, witch; perhaps her guardian spirit.
I came to San Miguel de Allende to teach a memoir class in the home of a friend. Thus my first significant impression was that home which one entered like a white labyrinth, winding back and back until the dust and noise of the street disappeared before a small green oasis of jade plants. On Pat's third floor terrace, we sat and drank wine, and I fell in love with the high sky full of puffy white clouds. A small bird landed in a nearby mesquit tree: brilliant red with black wings. Vermillion flycatcher, said the Aves (Birds) of Mexico book.
San Miguel is a city, not a town. A city of many faceless houses along narrow cobbled streets. Walking can be treacherous. The City of Fallen Women, I learned, and vowed not to fall. But the third day I got sick with some intestinal bug. I was the teacher stretched out on the sofa under the turquoise wool blanket. The concrete, modern house with its many small balconies and roof-top terrace was chilly. That night I asked Pat for an electric blanket and sank into the pleasure of chill-warming heat.
The Jardin (pronounded "hardeen") is the center of civic promenade. Like every other public park I saw, the Jardin (garden in English) is composed of rows of benches set under laurel trees pruned to look like boxes. It's a very odd sensation: box after box of green facing a church like a pink drip castle. Pat's grand-daughter, meeting this Parrochia, asked, "Does Cinderella live there?" She has a point.
We had come to take part in Day of the Dead, which began on our Norde Americano Halloween, with kids and parents threading through the Jardin with open tins or sacks. Many little girls were dressed in fluffy, elaborate outfits, yet their faces were skulls--Cristinas, I believe they are called. Death decked out in her finery! Very odd, indeed, embodied in children. Why am I not spooked by U.S. kids with skull masks, yet these girls troubled me? I think it was the combination of sexy beauty on a child, plus the skull face. Very creepy, but the kids seemed fine, if a little solemn.
Before we left, Pat and I visited the very old cemetery, recently cleaned of ancient filth, and the old tombs, odd-shaped, above-ground bulbous shapes, painted pale pink, grey, yellow, blue. To honor the dead, there were only marigolds--the traditional flower. Orange petal blankets around the tombs, bouquets of orange marigolds, marigold blossoms tucked in crevasses and climbing up trees. The brilliant simplicity took my breath away. Its beauty was both strange and commanding; Stop here, notice and honor, the flowers seemed to say, and we did.
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