Walking to the Polls

Yesterday evening I tucked my sample ballot into my bag and marched off to vote. The air blustered and slapped big rain drops onto the dry ground, creating that dusty smell of a brewing storm. I looked up at the sky and saw a double rainbow emerging from billowed clouds. A good sign. Maybe my vote will help change my state's politics, maybe schools will get proper funding, maybe people won't lose their homes, maybe emigrants won't be run off like mongrel dogs. Get to work rainbow, time's a wasting. But storms blow across the desert landscape so quickly and today blue sky has pushed the clouds to the horizon and I still live in a red state.

Yesterday I did what I do every election, completed the arrows on my ballot, selecting candidates, with a black marker while standing in a booth scantily draped for privacy in a church community hall, exercising one of my fundamental rights as an American citizen, me and an estimated 25% of registered voters in the state. My husband votes by mail-in ballot, but I hang on to the ritual of walking to the polls, being greeted at the door by a volunteer, showing my picture I.D. to another volunteer, signing in, being handed my ballot from yet another volunteer, marking my ballot, and feeding it into the ballot-counting machine while the last volunteer hands me a "I voted today" sticker and asks me to have a nice day. Voting by mail seems a lonely practice by comparison. Though it is less convenient, I make myself walk to the polls to vote, because my whole body gets to be reminded that voting matters, it is an active and vital part of living in a democratic society. I think of my great grandmother who was born long before women's suffrage and how she drove rural women to the polls in Santa Barbara so they could vote for the first time. I try not to think of hanging chads in Florida.

Postcard from Greece aka my face when I found out Reagan had won

I have only missed one election since turning 18, the year I made my first trek to Europe, at 19. Yes, I was in Athens when Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States. My old governor became the oldest American president while I was buying postcards in the Plaka. Too excited about the three months I was going to spend touring the Old Country with my best friend from high school/current college roomie, I never thought about absentee ballots. I didn't vote, so I had to spend the next four years not complaining about Reagan, his trickle-down economics plan, cuts to welfare, education, and the EPA, or any other policy and practice he established.

Never again. I always vote, but secretly feel guilty that I will probably never volunteer to hand voters a sticker and tell them to have a nice day.

The Stand Off

My husband and I had an argument this morning, about returning phone calls and text messages, but it was really about who was right and who was wrong. The presumption being one can't be right unless the other is wrong. One can't validate his opinion without invalidating hers (and by using gender-biased possessives, I have communicated who I believe was right). But just yesterday, I was talking with my daughter about the importance of providing ample room for differing points of view, in the context of discussing the anti-Obama rhetoric expounded by her classmates. My daughter is way more people smart than I am, so she has managed to survive and make friends among people whose political beliefs differ from her own.

I grew up in the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley late sixties, yet watched as the Hippies evolved into what I call Conservative Liberals, people who always approach from a position of moral high ground, people who always know what is right, because they proclaim their opinions so. Self-righteousness used to be a dirty word when I was growing up. Now it is worn like a badge of honor.

When my children are bickering (a verb I use to describe any argument that has devolved to the repetition of "nuh-uh" and"uh-uh.") I tell them, "just agree to disagree," a phrase my daughter accepts, but my son dislikes for its inherent ambiguity. If there is a argument, someone should win, someone should lose. Someone should be right and the other person should be wrong.

My husband and I both enjoy arguing, when we play by the rules of engagement:

1. maintain a sense of humor
2. listen
3. agree to agree to disagree (i.e. be content with Stale Mate, as in chess, not matrimonial boredom)

We didn't do that this morning. We didn't argue, we fought, and broke all three rules.
When the house emptied and it was just me and the animals, I sat by the window trying to figure out whether he was right and I was wrong, or I was right and he was wrong, or we both were right, or both were wrong, or we were both right and wrong.

Then I heard a sound my 26-toed cat has never made inside. We were both sitting by the front window that looks out to the courtyard garden, me gathering my wits, him licking his butt. Or so I thought. Then he made an angry noise, a kind of growlish hiss. That's when I saw the stray ginger tabby sitting on the window ledge staring in at Bigfoot. The tabby has adopted our front yard and carport as his territory, but this is the first time I've seen him look in the window. So far, we've co-habitated, him owning the wilder parts of the garden and Bigfoot claiming the house and courtyard. The tabby stared with such unwavering intent, a stare that seemed to say, I'm considering expanding my territory and your front room will do just fine. Bigfoot bristled, but he's a naturally friendly cat, lets our Golden Retreiver puppy wrestle with him, lets our crabby old Border Collie nip at his face like a mad badger when she imagines he's planning to steal her kibble, so it was a half-hearted gesture. Clearly he was perplexed. His body language seeming to say should I fight this cat? Is it okay for him to be looking in my window? Shouldn't he be sleeping under the jojoba? Why isn't he playing by the rules of engagement? Or is he?

What kept them in a stand off was the thin pane of glass between them. "Fences make good neighbors." Is that what Frost said? So do windows. Without the glass, I'm pretty sure Bigfoot would've gotten his ass kicked. Despite his awesome moth-hunting skills, he lacks a killer instinct. The ginger cat needs one to survive, since our neighborhood has a bounty of stray cats. He's out battling in the real world, while Bigfoot enjoys the luxury of insulation. He should back down because his world is so much nicer than the ginger cat's.

Now I'm not saying I'm Bigfoot and my husband is the ginger cat, but we could learn from their eventual decision (aided by the window) to shrug their little cat shoulders and go their own ways, contented for now to agree to disagree.

Three Laps Around the Garden

I hear what I need to hear when I need to hear it, if I am listening. Last night I walked in the botanical gardens, during the flashlight tours, so the path was lined with docents showing families snakes, lizards and night owls. I had just participated in a one-day writing workshop with Laraine Herring and she made us breath before writing (she let us breath during writing too). Whenever I focus on breathing I realize I'm a shallow breather, so I wanted to practice deep breathing. As I walked in the garden I tried to be a deep breather, which was pleasant since the air was fragrant with creosote. Walking seems to make me listen better, and so, apparently does breathing, or at least breathing attentively, because while I'm walking and breathing I hear a docent say "Anything with an exoskeleton has to shed it if it wants to grow." She's talking about me, I thought to myself.

The docent thought she was talking about a scorpion, but the statement holds for any hard-shelled creatures, like me or my hermit crab.

When my daughter was in kindergarten she came home from a play date with a hermit crab. We went through a few small crabs with brightly painted shells before we learned enough about hermit crab natural history to keep one alive. Turns out hermit crabs breathe with gills that need moisture to function. In a desert climate they need a daily misting or they suffocate. They also need a range of shells to accommodate their eventual growth. The lone surviving crab is Crabicus and he/she (it's hard to determine gender) is at least eight years old. Crabicus sheds his (I think of him as a boy, not sure why, maybe because he's shy and pinches me) exoskeleton a few times each year. He finds a quiet corner of his crabitat and throws off all his armor, exposing the tender soft new shell. There he'll sit while his new shell hardens.

Here's the crazy part. He eats his shed skeleton. He eats it! From an ecological/sustainable point of view, this isn't so crazy, since the discarded shell is a good source of calcium. And there it is right next to him. He's too vulnerable to crawl around to the food bowl, so Crabicus eats his old self in order to make his new self stronger. There's a metaphor for personal growth there.

Weeding

A beautiful morning, the air cool, sunlight glinting through the trees, sparkling with sprinkler dew. Perfect for weeding, so I set my morning coffee on a ledge by my front door and begin to yank up plants that tend to invade the garden, burmuda grass, spurge, Mexican primrose. The primrose, once a popular drought tolerant landscape species has fallen out of favor because of its tenacity. Ours stowed away in a pot from the nursery. The plant I had purchased has long since passed away, but the tiny sprig of primrose that had hidden under its foliage crept down the pot and furrowed into the soil. Now it has spread across the entire front garden. In springtime we enjoy a fleeting burst of pale pink bloom. So why pull it up? If I don't, the plant crawls up and over all the other species and chokes them to death, a slow strangulation followed by pink flowers. It's not a fair trade.

And weeding relaxes me. I get to spend time in the garden yet still feel productive. I'm not just lolling around, enjoying the cool morning air and fresh scent of the earth. See this handful of weeds? That's me being industrious, earning my keep, making my puritan and Victorian workaholic ancesters proud. At least until angry ants swarm my feet and bite me. The garden ants, a particularly irritable breed, will froth into a frenzy at the slightest provocation. What goes on below ground to give them such short fuses? The teen ants leaving their dirty socks on the dining room table? Mother-in-Law ant wants her tupperware back, but the ant-dog ate it. Father ant snores all night long. The Ant boss is an insensitive S.O.B., gave another bad annual ant evaluation. "Your dirt-carrying performance is below expectations." Do ants have a metaphorical set of ant-like irritants interupting the zen flow of their days too?

 Their anger only equaled by their own Victorian work ethic, thay can build a mound in a day. Not a neat conical hill like gentler ant species create, more a formless pile, sand and ant-mouth-sized bits of soil flung about. A lesson in watching them: don't build fast or when furious. (Of course I already learned that one during our 12 year bathroom remodeling project.)


My lone nontoxic defense against their bites is the garden hose. When they bite me, I retaliate with a deluge, knocking their pile flat. Ant Armageddon. Never a natural bug squasher, the ant slaughter is out of character. But they are like insect weeds in my garden. If I let them flourish, the garden will be overrun with angry ants, leaving no safe footing for the rest of us critters. Like the stray ginger cat who lives in an old bath tub in my carport (from bathroom remodel #2 in its 5th year, still no finished walls). I kill for his comfort. . .and my own. Sorry Buddha. Sorry God, the one who used his lightening finger to write the Ten Commandments in stone on Mount Sinai. FYI: I also swat house flies.

The ant bites win this morning and I head back into the house to continue weeding. Where does all this clutter come from? Trees (paper), old dinosaurs (plastic toys, containers, bags, wrapping. . .), fabricated  combinations from the periodic table of elements. . . star dust. How can I throw out old star dust?

For the Love of Sauntering

It seems that every effort, every action, must always present an opportunity to examine personal flaws. The flip side of flaw exposure. . .growth.

I have abandoned my pedometer ap, because it made me walk wrong. My doctor said "get more exercise" to lower my LDL cholesterol. A measurable act for a measurable problem. But, as I figured out by my reaction to walking with a pedometor ap, the one that daily declared me overweight based on my BMI, that shifts my focus away from being present on the walk to trying to up my step count, my pace, my calories burned, and on and on.

Numbers are abstract external measures, and though I love numbers, math, rational thinking. . . healing the body needs to extend beyond the measurable, the quantifiable. On my walk yesterday, I just walked and took pictures. I'm trying a new camera ap and so the pictures came out crappy for the most part (note: CameraOne ap not worth 99 cents). Walking with a camera makes me look more closely. It's an instrument that brings my focus to the present moment, no numbers, just a fresh perspective that there is beauty in my neighborhood. Here are some that came out okay. My neighborhood lacks iconic beauty. I don't live in a quaint hamlet in New England or Old England for that matter. My neighborhood is part of a huge sprawling 20th-century metropolis, laying on the desert like a big-footed teenaged boy plops himself on a couch. But what we have here that gets lost in trees and green hills of more compact romantic landscapes is sky. The sky is my surrogate Pacific Ocean, a vast blue that can stretch to the far horizon. When I'm feeling sorry for myself because I don't live at Baggins End in a hobbit hole, I pay attention to the sky.

Yesterday the canal water was running high and the park had been flooded for irrigation, so I could see the reflected sky. Like a Claude Glass, the reflection softens the view and allowed me to crop out alley trash and other scrappy bits of my neighborhood.

Clearing House/Feeding the Family

Below is a piece I wrote in 2006 and here's why I'm posting it in 2010.

(1) I'm a natural procrastinator. In college I carried an announcement for a procrastinator's support group meeting in my wallet for a year, but never got around to going. True story.

(2) I'm a natural hoarder, not level 5, but the scrapbook I made in high school is on the floor by my bed even though I graduated in 1979. I'm clearing house right now, going through my writing too, and want to share pieces that seem worthy. Anyone who reads this also has to take my broken pen collection :-)

Here it is, a piece called Feeding the Family:

Ever wonder why the airlines tell parents to put on their oxygen mask first before tending to the children? This morning, while getting everyone ready for the first day of school I figured it out. Why tell us every time we fly to save ourselves first? Why do that? Because it goes against natural parental instinct. Take care of the kids first. Take care of the kids first and then and only then do you tend to your own needs. Survival of the species trumps survival of the self. Despite their selfish efforts, even the last few decades of me-gens can’t compete with thousands of years of instinct. The feeding order at breakfast in my house is a daily reminder of this drive to keep the species going strong. Feed the kids first.

Sure, that’s easy enough. But as they’ve grown older, we’ve added pets into the mix. Where do they fit into my theory on species perpetuation? This morning I fed two children, two dogs, two lizards, a hermit crab, a praying mantis, and a few dozen crickets who eat like little pigs and need to stay fattened up (it’s called gut-loading in the exotic pet industry lingo), so the lizard and mantes can get their nutrients. The children are the easy part. I’ve lost so many crickets while trying to use my son’s bug vac during feeding time that my house sounds like a forest, full of cheeps and scurrying noises.

At least the mantes have outgrown their appetite for fruit flies. And thank goodness, since my husband (yes, there is a husband, but he has to forage the forest for his own grub) was getting tired of smelling the tub of fly larva I kept in the kitchen cupboard next to his ice tea glasses. This summer, I learned that fruit flies can be bred not to fly, which technically makes them fruit walkers. They come in a plastic tub, like the kind an old aunt might pack a nice potato salad into for the family picnic. At the bottom of the tub is a gooey mixture that squirms. On close inspection, which I don’t recommend, it’s easy to see that the squirming is hundreds of maggots as small as dry risoni pasta. They smell like old garbage, the moist sticky bits that cling to the edge of the trash bin. The forty praying mantis hatchlings that dripped out of the two egg cases I had bought at a plant nursery for my four-year-old son’s bug habitat must have thought the fly smell was delicious, since they hovered at the habitat opening every meal time.

Praying mantes are fascinating to watch. They grow like mad, shedding old tight skin every few days, emerging big, soft, and younger looking. A bit like a skin peel/reverse lipo combo. After they harden back up a bit, they can snatch prey with lightening speed and graceful dexterity. According to a praying mantis web site (yes, there are many such sites), they bite the neck of their prey first and paralyze them so they can devour a meal that doesn’t fight back. And by the by, they are cannibals. I know some bug advocates might send me scolding letters if they read this next paragraph, but here goes.

I allowed the mantes to eat each other. Yes, I confess to turning a blind eye to cannibalism in my very own kitchen. Here is how I rationalized it. In my house the mantes were guaranteed a last meal, while out in the garden it was anybody’s guess. I live in the desert where all summer long outside temperatures hover in the triple digits. It is hot and miserable. While my garden offers insects more than the usual fare found in the outlying desert, it’s not air-conditioned and fruit flies don’t fall out of the sky like manna. Of the forty or so baby mantes, three survived to be big fat ladies. I call them the three witches, like the ones in Macbeth, since they ate their siblings and looked like they could still go for a little eye of newt or toe of frog. It was only a matter of time before they made a meal of one another, so we released two when the fruit flies ran out. The lone captive moved up to eating crickets.

I’m hoping the two out in the garden among the vinca leaves make egg sacks. Before releasing witch one and witch two, the headless carcasses of smaller males that lay on the floor of the habitat suggest they may be with child. That’s right. The preferred après amour snack of the female praying mantis is its lover’s head (minds out of the gutter ladies, I’m referring to the part of the male body with eyeballs and a brain). For now we’ll search the undersides of leaves for their babies, at least until it’s time for me to go in and prepare lunch.

That was then. Now my family includes the same two kids, same husband, three dogs (new golden retriever), two cats (feral mom birthed in our back yard. Husband still mad at three dogs for allowing this to happen), the same hermit crab, and a psychotic fish that eats all our other fish. I'm retired from bugs and maggots, except when I forget to change the hermit crab's food dish.

Google Research?

When memory fails to conjure the precise shape of a tractor I road as a child, I know I can turn to Google to help me figure out where I sat while plowing fields of Lima Beans with my dad. So I just did an image search for "Lima bean cultivation tools 1965" and wanted to share with you a taste of what came up:

• Julia Child holding a dead naked bird with its wings spread like Jesus on the cross
• Back end of a restored Volkswagen bus
• Coffee table
• Martin Luther King
• George Bush senior
• Mr. Potato Head (George Bush junior?)
• Blue and white polka dot dress
• Man's hairy chest with "do not resuscitate" tattooed on it
• Philly cheese steak sandwich
• Murphy's Law
• Four soldiers posing next to bombs in Okinawa
• and this cartoon

Old Eyes

To look up a word today in my bible of words, the Oxford English Dictionary, I had to use the macro lens on my camera. The standard magnifying glass I've been using just wouldn't do. Maybe by the time my eyeballs fail to focus at any range, the e-version of the OED will be down-loadable on an iPad and I can use the Talk to Me ap. But that won't replace the tactile joy of hefting my two-volume set off the shelf and squinting at the tiny font for the origin of home.

A Post for my Woman Hero Topic

Getting back for a moment to the original idea I had for this blog: my woman heroes, I want to add Ariel Gore to the list. I just finished her book, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, and loved it. I recommend it to anyone who:

• loves to laugh
• wants to write
• wants to be read
• needs a good dose of Girl Power

The book includes interviews, great advice backed up with personal experience, a funny and authentic voice, and, my favorite part, conversations between Rising Lit Star and Magnificent Meteor:

Rising Lit Star: How can I make a living from poetry?

Magnificent Meteor reveals: Print poetry on sexy T-shirts and sell them on the internet.

I'll leave you with this from chapter 16: Devlop a Superhero Alter Ego:

"When I'm trying to do something beyond my known powers and I feel wobbly or fear failure, I snap my magic gesture and my superhero alter ego emerges.

When a bout of low mama-self-esteem comes rumbling on the horizon like a thunderstorm, I repeat after Alli Crews: "Girls like me have raised presidents. We've raised messiahs and musicians, writers and settlers. Girls like me won't compromise and we won't fail." And my superhero alter ego takes control."

Shock of the Ordinary

I hear the phrase “shock of the new,” a lot, the idea that you need novelty to knock you out of your stupor, but, while I believe that is sometimes what is needed, what about the “shock of the ordinary”? Newness and novelty requires energy to seek it out or craft it and this energy could be used to grow food for hungry people, build houses for the homeless, or protect fresh clean water. Isn’t it more sustainable to find wonder in what you already have at your disposal? Ordinary gets a bad rap, it’s too boring, too accessible. Our overly stimulated society needs to be wowed to wake up. If that’s true, why is the sleeping aid market so robust?

can you see the garden

in their eyes?