VACILANDO

remember

2008-09-11T07:47:00.001-04:00

11 September 2001.

when is too much too much?

2008-09-03T08:09:00.008-04:00

$133,000,000,000 -

Federal emergency funds and tax credits to the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.

$9.5 billion and climbing -

price tag for ongoing levee repair and new levee builds.

virtually 0% -

local authorities' interest in assisting the reversion to natural wetlands in the most vulnerable areas.

virtually 100% -

local authorities' interest in development, repopulate, rebuild

3 quadrillion dollars -

sum total of Katrina damage claims filed in suit against the Army Corps of Engineers by New Orleans homeowners, businesses, and city entities. In January of this year the Corps was ruled immune from these claims, rulings from the Supreme Court of 1986 and 2001 being cited by U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval:

[the law] "provides immunity where, as here, a flood control project fails to control floodwaters because of the flood control project itself."

Wow. And, what? What's being said here is that an entity can freely squander endless taxpayer dollars on boneheaded slipshod misguided attempts to alter and control that which in the end is not controllable, in this case the Mississippi River and the ocean.

Duval's ruling removes the Corps from the hook, leaving the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and the Orleans Levee District as defendants to the damage claims. Meanwhile, the Corps continues on down there building . . . more levees.

Hurricane Gustav showed mercy and the horrors of Katrina were still alive enough in all minds to ensure an admirable change in how things were done this time. But because Gustav turned out to be the kind of storm people on the coast routinely ride out without evacuating, it's inevitable that the Big Easy will be somewhat more inclined to take it easy when other storms bear down.

One of the first levees the Corps dumped our collective money into was down on the Lower Ninth Ward, which is still largely deserted, never should have been built on to begin with, and doesn't look much different from how it did after Katrina. Yet the Upper Ninth Ward, which is in part a historic area, remains vulnerable to an old and rickety levee.

So, what are we doing? Is it still local and state corruption and graft, rampant during the establishment of the present levee system following Hurricane Betsy in 1965? Or is it now simply a human compulsion to beat Nature at her own game?

No one wants to see New Orleans, one of the last genuinely colorful cultural bastions the U.S. can boast, disappear. But there is higher-ground New Orleans, and then all the rest. If they continue to park houses on places where they shouldn't be, an action akin to populating the side of an active volcano, this cycle of madness will go round and round with no end in sight. The magical quality of life on the coast has been altered irretrievably by the levee system. The coast itself loses more wetland, more beach, more land itself per year than any other measured place in the world, even in seasons when no hurricane makes a direct strike. The Mississippi is unable to behave right because, hemmed in by levees, silts and sediment pile up in its bottom and enable flooding. What then does all this spent money preserve?

* click on title link for more on this from Forecast Earth.

Momofuku Ando

2008-09-02T11:19:00.005-04:00

You can click on the title link to know more about him, but Mr. Ando (who just died last year at the age of 96) created Ramen Noodles, those darlings of dorm dwellers everywhere. How he identified the need for noodles is a moving story.

Well, they're my darlings too. Eight for a dollar! You can't get a single item of anything for a dollar anymore, let alone eight of something. And they weigh next to nothing. Short on fiber, but long on carbs and salt, wiggly and cheerful and ready in 2.65 minutes over a hot fire. Genius.

if you say

2008-09-02T08:17:00.004-04:00

to people that you're a Trail hiker, they tend to attach a sheen of glamour to it. They offer help, rides, munchies, assistance. They want to hear stories. But if you say you're walking because you're homeless, no such offers are forthcoming, and people turn quickly away. It's a most telling social experiment, to try either version and see what happens.

Off the road, on the Trail, where judgments are not made and passed with the blink of a wary eye.

--------------------

Today in 1969 the first ATM machine went into service at the Chemical Bank branch in Rockville, New York, and Star Trek aired its final tv episode.

In 1946 Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway.

And in 1945 on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the Japanese foreign minister and the chief of staff of their army signed the "instrument of surrender".

Today is VJ Day.

pumpkin field

2008-08-31T20:05:00.004-04:00

Lie down under the stars in a pumpkin field, near the top of the gentle slope by the treeline, and you will hear at least one owl, more if you're lucky, and see the foxes on their nocturnal prowl.

The weather has been perfection, clear and dry. Destination: Appalachian Trail, where no one looks at you funny if you have a pack on your back. Not that the animals do that. Only people do.

------------

While things could not be more peaceful here, the Gulf Coast is far from it. May all be well through the storm.

communing with the dead at the grocery store

2008-08-28T06:47:00.009-04:00

Those of you with families doubtless require a grocery cart when you go food shopping. Yes, I know - I too was once like you, and those little carry baskets which have an irredeemably silly aspect to them were out of the question. They're much too small, they look absurd, and can lead to dangerous singing bouts of a-tisket a-tasket a green and yellow basket if you're not careful. And just what the hell are tiskets and taskets anyway? See? No one knows.

But give life enough time, and one might gradually begin reaching for those stupid little baskets instead of taking a cart, without even realizing it's happening. Get a divorce, shave off a spouse, there's one food and toilet paper consumer knocked off the grocery list. Children do that growing-up thing, off they go, unless they're living in your cellar till they're 35 or so. People expire, relatives and friends move away, and by golly one day you're selecting a basket instead of a cart because suddenly it's only you and one roll of Scott t.p. is going to last nearly forever and no one's using your toothpaste and one box of laundry soap will still be going six months from now. Also, not having money helps.

And so, because I am now a basket case, as it were, it's easier to use the self-checkout stations in the big grocery stores. No live human need ring me out anymore, since my net purchases are pitiful, and clear social indicators that I have been single A Really Long Time. Who buys one little tomato, one lonely avocado, one can of soup? Only the Lonely, that's who. dumdumdum dumdedoowaahhhhhhh. oh yeah yeah yeah yeahhhhh. Thank you Roy Orbison.

Since I have no car, I walk to the nearest grocery store. It's huge, clean, lovely and pricey, so I pick my way carefully through the landmines of the budgetary landscape, which are everywhere. And then I approach the self-checkout, where I shall commune with the dead. When whoever invented these things invented them, they made them talk. Why? Any fool can follow the visual prompts, even I.

I want to know who talks like this. The voice is female, and speaks in Robotic, one of the dead Romance Languages I believe, resurrected for telephone auto-replies, airport announcements, and all things impersonal. I want to know who these women are, what they look like, and how they learned to speak like that. That disembodied echo-chamber monotone telling you over and over to Please don't be an idiot is enough to make you bring a hatchet on your next visit and go on a computer hacking spree, thus giving computer hacking what should in fact be its proper definition.

In my store there are five self-checkout aisles. My favorite one has a woman inside it whom I call The Crypt-Keeper. She has something wrong with her, so that her voice comes out as if she's speaking from the beyond, and you're quite sure you're in a cemetery, not a store. I amuse myself by beating her prompts whenever the scanner will let me, cutting her off in spooky mid-command. Here's how our conversations go:

Crypt-Keeper: Please swipe your store card. If you don't have a store card please -

swipe. Hahahahahahhaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!! Shut you up, didn't I.

C-K: Please scan your first item. Please scan your first item. Please scan your first item.

Me: I just like to irritate you. Keep your pants on.

C-K: Please place item on -

swipe

C-K: Please don't mess with me like that. Please place item on the belt.

Me: I'm already way ahead of you, lady. Look, I know you're dead and stuck in this crappy minimum-wage afterlife job. But you shouldn't take it out on the customers. Take it up with the Big Employer upstairs.

C-K: Please shut up, please shut up, please shut up. Please press Pay Now and Method of Payment. Please take your mile-long receipt which is basically a novelette for five items and get away from me.

Me: You do realize what a waste of paper and ink these receipts are, right?

C-K: Please remove your items from the bagging area. Please go away.

There's an attendant who looks after all the people wrestling with the self-checkouts, and there's a lot of wrestling to look after. He's a nice young guy, and he says I'm the only one who talks to the machines. He also says there's a way to shut the voices off but the manager won't do it and he doesn't know why. Sometimes he gets to feeling a tad schizophrenic when all five checkouts are talking at once, and sometimes he is spoken to by them in dreams in the dead of night.

excerption

2008-08-27T10:24:00.006-04:00

I'm in a grateful, surprised daze caused by the interest being shown in Under the Rhubarb. I can't believe it.

I want to explain that this isn't an e-book, nor PA nor anything like that. It's not on amazon, it doesn't have an agent to love it and shepherd it along, it's just me making individual copies by hand at home by myself. Very old-fashioned. Lonely, but happy work. Back when I had a real life, far far away and long ago, I was in commercial printing, so crafting my own little books is not daunting at all.

I'm like the guy who handcrafts chairs one by one in his workshop. Same thing.

Now, in keeping with life's enjoyment of dealing out its endless hand of weirdness cards, a friend the other day handed me a free used scanner out of the blue. I've wanted one for years but couldn't spend on it. Naturally, just when I'm packing and moving things out, a scanner wanders in from nowhere. Well, from a basement.

Today I'll try to get the thing to work and put up some excerpts here and an illustration or two from Rhubarb, since people should be able to see those. Normal people I am sure would accomplish this in a split-second but I'm teaching myself as I go, so please bear with me. I am Olde and LowTech. Hope to have it up by the end of today. If I blow up the scanner I can probably do still camera shots of some of the book pages and put those up.

adding - the Table of Contents and one excerpt can now be found all the way at the bottom of this page. Still working on getting one or two illustrations up, and another story excerpt.

To say that your interest is appreciated would be understatement at its zenith.

Today

2008-08-27T09:13:00.004-04:00

in 1883, Krakatau blew its considerable stack, then blew itself up, with some remarkable consequences. An estimated 31,000 people lost their lives to the resultant tsunamis when the island fell into the water. More in the title link.

1776: the Patriots, suffering 1,000 casualties, were defeated by the British in Brooklyn, New York, at the Battle of Brooklyn.

And in 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and beloved war hero, was blown up along with his grandson Nicholas by the IRA.

Courtesy!

2008-08-26T10:12:00.006-04:00

Well, we seem to all now have gained experience in the world of the non-reply. It's become common practice for certain entities to simply not respond to phone calls or e-mails. Ever. In my own search for a charity willing to talk with me about walking for their benefit I have had a 99% zero-response rate. The one percent was a rude and brusque single-sentence negative. I could not even get the local Habitat for Humanity people IN MY OWN CITY to talk to me. (I did offer what useful skills I have to them as well. And even though I feel reasonably useless these days, I do still have some skills.) Habitat is supposed to be for people who need homes. I didn't want anything from them. I wanted to see if they'd talk to me about my walkabout. So, it's all been weird, and demeaning, and I'm taking a short break from trying to find anyone who will give me the time of day as far as that idea goes.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I e-mailed Jeff Haskins this morning and . . . fasten your seatbelts . . . I RECEIVED A COURTEOUS REPLY. Within ninety minutes.

Who is Jeff Haskins? He's the communications person for the Arctic seed project I posted about and linked to in the next post down from this one. And he communicates. This is as water is in the desert. With his permission, here are a couple of Q and As from their FAQs. Thank you, Mr. Haskins.

What is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault?

The purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to provide insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity held in traditional seed banks around the world. The Seed Vault offers "failsafe" protection for one of the most important natural resources on earth.

Why is the Seed Vault important to developing countries?

Food security is a challenge in many developing countries. Crop diversity is the resource to which plant developers must turn to develop varieties that can withstand pests, diseases, and remain productive in the face of changing climates. It will therefore underpin the world food supply. Also, the Seed Vault will ensure that unique diversity held in genebanks in developing countries is not lost forever if an accident occurs. A backup copy will exist in Svalbard.

The Arctic Seedsavers

2008-08-26T08:29:00.003-04:00

Foresight is one of the greatest (and most underemployed) capabilities of the human mind. For a look at a rare instance of foresight at its best, click on the post title.

butter and eggs

2008-08-25T17:54:00.007-04:00

This beloved wildflower, more commonly known as Yellow Toadflax, comes into its own in the northeast U.S. during August and September. That is, when it isn't being weedwhacked to smithereens. It'll be a cheerful companion to my walk, since it's often not bothered with in the bits of wasteground near roads and sidewalks.

When I was very small the name Toadflax enchanted me, and I envisioned toads in fancy waistcoats with pocketwatch chains and most likely monocles too, coming during the night and somehow spinning flax from the flowers to make more waistcoats and probably little blankets and such.

trees standing still

2008-08-25T11:08:00.008-04:00

One of my more memorable customers at the garden center was a well-dressed individual who wanted a tree "which will not grow. It needs to be exactly 48 inches tall."

"Well," I said, "there are shrubs which stop at that height. No trees though, in this part of the world. Would you like to look at our shrubs?"

"But my neighbor has one. It's a tree, I drive by it every day, and it never grows."

"Then he's pruning it to keep it to that size."

"No he isn't. I never see him pruning it. I want a tree I never have to pay attention to."

Now, trees are objects of honor in my mind, so not paying attention to one is anathema to me. But since the customer means zero maintenance, zero muss and fuss, I must slog on with the conversation. This is, after all, what I am being paid to do. In part, anyway.

"There!" She has turned from me to point at some weeping cherry trees in the nursery, which are fifteen feet tall, not 48 inches. "That's what my neighbor has. But his is short."

"Yes, some people keep them short. " I long to mention the sadistic elements I see inherent in making trees do things they'd rather not, but I do need my paycheck and so, as those who need their little paychecks do, I literally bite my tongue. "Plus some of them are dwarf hybrids, which these here aren't."

"I cannot understand why you do not have 48-inch trees. I can't have messy leaves and all the bother."

Meanwhile a long line of customers is forming up nearby, under the sun, baking and waiting, and so I say politely,

"Well then, you might want to run down to the craft store. They have fake trees just about that height, you could stick one in your yard."

This went over about as well as one might expect, and the steam generated upon customer departure could have lit up the Vegas strip for at least a minute or so. We aimed to please, but sometimes in life there's just no reaching the target.

Miriam Rothschild

2008-08-24T07:51:00.006-04:00

Walter Rothschild

Miriam

Miriam was one of the Rothschilds. Her great-great-grandfather Nathan was the first Rothschild in England, where he was at first a cloth merchant in Manchester. After several years he made a career change to banking, and the rest is history. His son Lionel counted Disraeli as a close friend; Disraeli both made and changed history by financing Britains's 1875 purchase of the Suez Canal. Lionel's son Natty is marked as one of the most gifted financiers in history and was the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. Natty's sons, Walter and Charles, were competent enough bankers but their true fancy was wildlife, in particular insect life. Charles was Miriam's father.

Charles identified and named the rat flea, which is the intermediary between its animal host and humans for bubonic plague. A suicide when Miriam was fifteen, his brother Walter became her influence and mentor. Walter drifted away from the study of beetles in favor of butterflies, his contributions to their science invaluable.

What growing up with almost no formal education around such interesting minds can do is illustrated in the citation comments when Miriam received her honorary degree from Oxford in 1968: " . . . It is unusual too that in natural science anyone, still less a woman, should receive an honorary degree without any degree already from any university." Her degree cites her for her contributions to zoology, neurophysiology, pharmacology, entomology, chemistry, anatomy.

At the age of four Miriam was breeding ladybugs; butterflies she learned with Walter; marine biology became her field of choice as a young woman and was then abandoned to the demands of a husband and six children. She took up her father's study of fleas because it was something she could do at home when the children were small. To David McCullough in an interview she said about this:

"I had six children, so it was quite, you know, a full-time job. But at about eight o'clock in the evening, when they had all gone to bed, I used to settle down to the microscope, and there was nothing more delightful - when the evening would get quieter and quieter and even the sort of clink of cups vanished, and you could settle down and look at these marvelous colors . . . "

Miriam was the first person to record the jump of a flea, her son-in-law being the photographer. She liked to point out that if we were fleas we could jump to the top of Rockefeller Center about 30,000 times without stopping. She figured out the rabbit flea, which carries a virus fatal to rabbits. She worked on mites and ticks, and contributed vitally to our understanding of the chain of life as it bears on the relationship between plants and insects.

In later years she turned her considerable energies toward wildflowers and the preservation of their ancient gene pool, another loss in a modern world of c**ms, big agriculture and suburban lawn.

Miriam died in 2005 at the age of 96. But her books live on, and are linked to in the title of this post. If you want to read about an amazing human being, Miriam is it. She is also present in a wonderful piece by David McCullough in his book Brave Companions. May she and her work never be forgotten.

bumblebee

2008-08-23T17:39:00.004-04:00

bee well

2008-08-23T17:20:00.006-04:00

honeybee

Captain Compost

2008-08-23T08:09:00.005-04:00

This is the guy who knows about as much about the how-to, the physics, makeup, biology and benefits of natural compost as anyone I've come across. Check him out, he's da best. (link is in post title - I'm still trying to figure out how to link to things in the body of posts, sorry. I'll get it one of these days.)

adding - Cap's worth putting in the sidebar, so there he is.

organics

2008-08-23T07:38:00.003-04:00

While I'm normally okay with the ad content which pops up here, to my horror my bees post has drawn a chem ad to kill bugs, which is precisely what I was posting and linking against. The impact of c**m use by megafarms on their crops and everyday folks in their millions of yards and gardens is approaching genuinely tragic consequences. Bees, butterflies, moths, the very wide world of essential pollinators, are being killed off in numbers massive enough to now have a disastrous effect on the chain of life. C***s which bump off "bad" bugs have no brains. They don't distinguish between insects, they just kill every creature in their path.

It isn't just the loss of pollinators but the interruption of their place in the food chain - birds, bats, all the creatures who consume some of these pollinators are feeling the effects as well. And they're oftentimes consuming c**m-soaked, compromised insects. Beneficial insects, of which there are far more than any other type, not only die but any survivors lose their meal ticket too. Beneficial insects do a fine job of keeping troublemakers in check when they're left to their own devices, so long as a friendly environment for them exists. If you look at any patch of waste ground or wild spot, is it all chewed to pieces, the plants full of holes? No. Because the insects are being left alone to balance things out. The chewers are being chewed by the other bugs.

Organics organics organics organics organics. An excellent book toward learning about organics is linked to in the post title. For anyone interested. Organics. There. Compost. Good bugs. Good nematodes in clean soil. Compost. Organics.

bees

2008-08-22T08:43:00.007-04:00

Bees, whose present crisis is linked to in this post title, have always been my friends. They are everyone's friend. They keep the world alive.

During my work at the garden center I was surprised by how many customers disliked the presence of bees amongst our outdoor inventory. I would inquire as to their distress and ask if they were allergic and if so had they brought their epi-pen with them. They were not allergic so far as they knew, although that can change with time and age. But we had epi-pens at the ready for emergencies. They just didn't like bees, and would swat madly at them as they went about their invaluable work of pollination, a human action which always makes me sad.

Bees, hornets, wasps all like me, and will frequently take little walkabouts on me. In a lifetime spent around them I've been stung five times, and only because I ruined their lives by stepping on them while barefoot. That was four times. One was when I grasped a marigold bloom to deadhead it and within was a honeybee, whose last effort on earth was to justifiably sting me but good. Had every right to do so. If some stupid giant came along to my little space and squeezed me to death I'd sting too, you betcha.

Growing up in our apple orchards required a communion with bees. You keep bees in stacked hives for pollination of the fruit trees, you nurture them, and in return they give you honey, fruit, vegetables and flowers. No one gives the way bees do.

By the time I was five years old I was desperate to work in the orchards alongside my father, brothers, and the painfully handsome, callow high school boys who came to help pick apples in the Autumn. try to remember/that kind of September/when grass was green/and grain was yellow/when you were a young and callow fellow

I always think of those boys, nearly all of whom were destined for VietNam, when I listen to that song.

Well, my father said. Come along, and you can ride on the truck while we pick, and sort the cider apples from the sell-apples.

Cider apples were the ones with tiny flaws, since even in the 1960s people would not buy an apple to eat if it had even one. The cider apples went on their merry way to the cider press to be squished, but that's another story for another day. Feeling just as adult as a five-year-old possibly can as one of my brothers tossed me up into the bed of our 1938 Dodge wooden-bed dump truck, away we rocked and rolled up the steep hillside of the front orchard. And as the apples filled the crates, so came the bees, and the hornets, and the wasps, because apple juice is just one of their favorite things, and they will look fervently for it. I had been around them all my short life, but never in such numbers, an artillery bombardment by creatures who had no interest in me whatsoever, yet I flipped out. Flipped right out.

And so I was lifted down from the truck, and my brief employment was gently terminated. I had been fired. Kindly fired but fired all the same. I didn't see my Dad again till late that evening, but when I did he had a proposition. If I could sit up in the orchard with a picnic and books amongst the bees for several hours without flipping out I could return to work. He reminded me of all the things he'd already taught me about the behavior and value of bees. He reminded me that I'd never feared them before, and that I could either get back on the horse or not; it was up to me.

This seemed fair, and I did it, staying up there all day, reading, lolling, dozing in the September sun. All the sting-equipped creatures visited me, strolled all over me, and I became nonchalant. I shared my picnic bits with them and studied their jointed bodies and lacy wings. They allowed me to join their magical club, and I have a lifetime membership.

One of my dreams has been to have a little orchard again, and picnic with the bees.

We're losing them, in part due to pesticides, inclusive of ordinary yard chemicals. Save the bees.

Barbara Harvey

2008-08-22T06:09:00.006-04:00

Magazine subscriptions are too expensive, so I have a long-standing arrangement with friends in which I get a few of their magazines thirdhand once they've read them. Hence I'm a little late picking up a piece of followup news on Barbara Harvey, whom I posted about a few days ago. People Magazine had run a piece about Ms. Harvey and the Santa Barbara parking lot arrangement for people living in their cars. (The title link above connects to an L.A. Times blog article about it). People reports in its August 4 issue that in response to their piece Ms. Harvey has received enough voluntary donations (which she was not seeking) to move into a small, affordable rental house in San Luis Obispo.

She's 67 years old, and off the streets. Only 2,999,999 people to go. Give or take.

I often wonder about the basics of money in the big picture. If X people donated X monies to a trust pool for all those homeless in those dozen parking lots in Santa Barbara, the same type of trust or endowment that private schools and colleges employ to make money make more money, in time there would be not only enough but more than enough.

I see a lot of arguments which hold that only what would boil down to a Socialist system would address the financial difficulties of looking after our own. But applying Capitalism and business structure would work more effectively. I once worked in the Development Office of a private school, whose health depended not on tuition rates but how their Alumni and endowment funds were managed. These were both entirely donation-based. The key was not to spend it all and then wring hands waiting for more donations to come in, but to sock it away in the types of arrangements which generate income while leaving a majority percentage of the initial monies untouched.

I can't figure out why these principles aren't applied to social issues. I wouldn't want the government doing it, full of bloat and lobbyists and overpaid people as it is. Maybe set it up as a non-profit with the strictest of accountability and scrutiny in place. Surely with a little ingenuity something could be created, and I might even go so far as to say anybody who can file a minimum one million dollar personal income for their fiscal year be required to kick in X to such a fund. Yes, required.

Maybe then veterans would be treated properly, maybe then affordable housing would arrive in effective numbers, maybe then jobs training and job placement would have the funding they need, shelter children would not have to wait for jammies to be donated, and this obscene gap between the haves and have-nots could start to close.

Debbie Davies

2008-08-21T21:31:00.004-04:00

In this little city which is barely standing on its feet is an old-fashioned town green on which free concerts are held once a week during the summer. Tonight I walked over there and on her collapsible, portable, towable stage was Debbie Davies with her bass player and her drummer. Her website is linked in this post title, and if you like true blues - gut-melting mind-soothing genuine blues - you'll be remiss if you don't ever hear Debbie and her band.

Gaggles of little kids got right up front and danced, and Debbie played right to them when she wasn't lost in the music as only a blues player can be. Blues are the lament of life, the rootsource of rock and roll, the call of the wild and the howl of the depths of the heart.

rhubarb

2008-08-21T11:58:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time I was a little girl. I liked corduroy pants, Keds, critters, and reading books in the arms of apple trees. We had a farm, and orchards, and a garden.

This garden was bordered all around by an old stone wall, over which tumbled wild June roses. Lilacs and Concord grapevines leaned over the roses on the out side of the wall. On the in side of the east-facing wall was a row of rhubarb, which chewy, sour red stalks were cut on an angle with an old camp knife, rinsed, and cooked down for pies.

When rhubarb plants are top-dressed with old cow manure, as ours were, they can achieve mythic proportions. Their leaves become shelters. When you're little you can crawl under them, be not seen, and feel the sun baking through, or listen to the raindrops pattering away on them, snug as a bug in a rug.

I guess bugs in rugs are pretty snug, although they risk being stepped on. The bugs under rhubarb are also snug, and live less risky lives. Whenever I sheltered under there, they were gracious hosts to me. For a time I was small enough to hide in the rhubarb with a book and a tiny doll's tea set with which I would entertain my insect friends. The minute cups would have a dab of juice from a Concord grape in them; which bugs wanted juice and which didn't were of endless interest to me. But they all seemed glad of my company, juice or no juice.

In the summer of 1964, to my heartbreak, I found that I'd grown too big to live under the rhubarb. Now, I'm too small to live anywhere.

I go back in my mind now all the time to the rhubarb, the safest haven I ever knew.

Lite

2008-08-21T09:09:00.007-04:00

Okay, my readership is requesting some cheerful content. Content Lite. I can't think of any. Although, at least I have a readership, that's cheerful.

I could put up a quick excerpt from a manuscript I was shopping - it won't matter to put it up in the public domain, since nobody wants to publish it anyway. May as well publish it here. It's just an anecdote from the job I was laid off from, at a garden center, at which about forty percent of the customers are new immigrants still getting a handle on English:

'Standing in the nursery is a big broad bald guy with a bright broad smile, in shabby clothing. As I approach him to offer assistance his smile expands till it's touching his ears, and he begins waving his arms like the airport guys with their light wands on the tarmac. Somehow I infer the right thing, that he wants me to go away, and so I do. It's a busy day and I instantly forget that he's out there.

Twenty minutes later there he is at the cash register, still grinning. This is without question the most cheerful human being I've encountered in some time. He points to the parking lot, says "FIVE!" in a Russian accent weighing at least thirty pounds, and crooks his finger at me. Out we go, and sure enough he has five of our best fruit trees neatly arranged at the end of the lot. This man knows his trees.

"PAY!" he bellows happily. The one word every person on earth knows is "okay", so I say that.

"WRITE DOWN!" I write down the total price and the tax and hold up the slip of paper. Into his frayed pocket goes an enormous hand, which resurfaces stuffed with fifties. We make our transaction, he claps me joyfully on the back, and I fight to stay upright. "YOU. AMERICAN. YOU. SAY THANK YOU. WE RUSSIA. BUT I SAY THANK YOU TOO."

It's the most sincere thing I will hear all day. If only all life's transactions went so smoothly.'

Grassroots.org

2008-08-21T06:48:00.005-04:00

Grassroots.org, which is linked to in this post title, is among the outfits I've been writing to just asking if they will TALK to me a minute about my walking to benefit someone or some thing. I don't burden anyone with a big e-mail. I'm brief, concise, courteous, and I include my phone number. The zero-response silence has been overwhelming, and on darker days quite disheartening. But I did receive an answer yesterday from Grassroots.org, and here it is verbatim:

"Sorry, but Grassroots.org cannot help you with that idea."

Bam.

Okay, so, why? No time to even link me to other possibilities? No time for a reason? No time to help? Clearly not.

I wonder if we might not benefit from getting back to the days of having real secretaries, who, worth their weight in gold, handled communication and handled it with courtesy. But of course that would require payment of a person for their skills.

I'd rather have a "No" than nothing at all, but maybe a somewhat less rude "No" could be mustered up. I'm pretty sure ten words of courtesy take as few seconds as ten abrupt ones.

In another wonderful exchange, there was a problem with PayPal yesterday necessitating a phone call to them. The call went to a call center overseas, and the language barrier was nearly impossible to overcome. It took 45 minutes of miscommunication to deal with what was in fact a minor problem. Thirty-one of those minutes (I timed it) were consumed (wasted) on their inability to hear the e-mail address spelling correctly, repeatedly punching it into their keyboard wrong.

No Americans would do these jobs? What was it Bush 43 so insultingly said - jobs Americans won't do? Right. I would do it. Lots of Americans would. Outsourcing our own country, what a wonderful world.

Sicko

2008-08-20T06:35:00.007-04:00

If you click on this post title it will take you to an article by Austan Goolsbee, a Professor of Economics at the U. of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. He's also Barack Obama's economic advisor.

In the article Goolsbee shares his thoughts about the American health care system and the Michael Moore documentary Sicko. It's a measured, level piece of writing, as one might reasonably expect from a man of numbers.

Since the root cause of my present life condition was the absence of health insurance during a crisis, a friend lent me a copy of Sicko, which I watched for the first time last night. It does do all the right things - breaks your heart, frightens and upsets you, makes you question things, makes you want to move to France immediately.

It also sports the same flaws of any Moore film. There's a "rule" in writing, to "show, not tell". Documentaries at their best do the same, but Moore's personal biases always interfere with the showing. Just show us - we'll do the rest, really we will. We can draw our own conclusions, look at other sources of information, make up our own minds. It's true. We can do that, and should.

But, like seeing only the sunny carefree kite-flying Iraqi children of Fahrenheit 911, in Sicko we see only the French lovers lolling in the grass and strolling the lovely old streets, apparently without a care in the world because all French systems are go and life is a rainbow from cradle to grave. Only one couple is interviewed regarding the tax burden of free everything, and they are obviously living comfortably because they both have Really Good Jobs. Nothing is said about the staggering burdens of open-door immigration in France and the millions of people on the government dole there. The money for this has to come from somewhere.

Does France have homeless people? Why yes it does, but you'd never know it from Moore's depiction. Estimates as of 2007 hovered at one million homeless. Are there squatters and vagrants and downtrodden and a tent city in Paris? Yes there are.

In England, another stop Moore makes in the film, the same treatment takes place. We're shown a young doctor living quite well, and life is good. But taxes in the U.K. are through the roof, which receives barely a passing glance in Sicko. A middle- or lower-middle class American would be hard-pressed to assume this kind of financial burden. And, according to homeless.org.uk, the number of people awaiting government housing hovers around 1.5 million. They shy from attaching a specific number to their homeless, since many of these are the "hidden homeless" - those sleeping on someone's couch. The numbers of street dwellers vary, but they most emphatically do exist.

The essential points made in Sicko about U.S. health care are all valid, awful, shameful. The best question Moore asks in his narrative is, "Who are we?"

Our health care became a for-profit monster, garnering all the greed and graft it could along the way, and it needs scrutiny, accountability and overhaul NOW. Why Americans are not banding together to put the screws to Congress to stop pandering to lobbyists and start actually considering their constituents is beyond me. I don't know why Americans don't employ this handy little "We the people" business we were given. We hire these people when we vote for them. They're accountable to US before any lobbyist, but either we've forgotten that fact or we just don't care.

pounds and dollars

2008-08-19T07:57:00.002-04:00

These are the top two concerns while planning this walk.

Water will be scarce and a weighty luxury to lug around, so, cutting my own hair short so there is little of it to keep clean: $0.00.

Unsharpened new pencil and three-foot length of rubber tubing for emergency tourniquet - .43 and $1.29, respectively. Not bad.

100% wool socks, $17.53. Ow.

One box store-brand instant oatmeal, ten packets in the box, weight 15.01 ounces, $1.89. Pretty good.

Purell hand cleaner, $3.79 on sale. Ow again.

Hydrogen peroxide, eight ounces, 43 cents. Still a deal.

Band-aids and gauze, $2.49 and $1.89. Oh well, have to have them.

Tetanus shot: $48.00 out-of-pocket. Crazy. But at least I won't have to haul it around.

Swiss Army knife, all-weather outerwear, sleeping bag: already own, $0.00.

Not too bad so far.