Monthly Archives: May 2012

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Literature, Travel

A Thought, A Sigh

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Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

original by Ivan Walsh)

Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

 

 

Garden

A Nod to Flora

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Beltane                                                          Beltane Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

When we began life here in Andover, we decided we would like cut flowers in our home as often as possible, especially during the growing season.  We’ve not always cut them, but we sure have grown them.  Kate brought me two vases just a moment ago, one with fragrant lilacs and the other early purple iris and late, yellow daffodils.

To do this over the course of the growing season, that is, cut flowers for inside, requires planning for perennials that bloom throughout. (I’m not much of an annual guy, though Kate buys some each year.) Not always an easy task.  I still have some lacunae, late June and late July.  Finding fall bloomers that would survive here was a task for a while but asters and monkshod and clematis fill in with the help of the occasional fall-blooming crocus.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Changes

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Beltane                                                                       Beltane Moon

Received a second invitation to a going away party for two friends moving to Maine.  They’re part of the Woolly change, the moves and deaths, the losses that accrue as we head past 65.  They seem pretty energized by this move to a home in Robbinston, a spot near the Atlantic and New Brunswick.  And why not?

Change can give us a fresh perspective, a place to begin again or to continue, but in a different direction.

Over the last several years I’ve chosen to embrace change as a deepening process, crossing thresholds into the unknown in areas with which I have substantial familiarity:  literature, arts, gardening, politics, family, religion.

In literature, for example, I moved into a different kind of book, a fantasy epic instead of the one off novels I’ve written up till now.  This change exhilarated me, made me stretch, thinking about the long arc rather than the shorter one handled in one volume.

The Latin learning and translating I’m doing is in service of deepening, too.  Deepening my knowledge of Greek myth and Roman culture.  I have, also, now peaked behind the veil of translation, learned something about the kinds of choices translators have to make.

In the arts I’ve chosen to focus most of my learning in Asian arts, probing deeper into Chinese history and the role of context for the art we have at the MIA.  This part year didn’t see as any Asian tours as in the past, but I’ve continued studying, reading Chinese literature and learning more history.

My grasp of photography has increased considerably, too, as has my understanding of contemporary art.  Going deeper.

As Kate and I have gotten wiser about our garden and how we actually use it, we’ve gone deeper into vegetable and fruit growing and preserving.  The bees increased our appreciation for the engagement of insects in the plant world.  And for honey, too.

In religion I’ve stepped away from any organized groups or lines of thought, trying now to penetrate how changes underway across the world might demand a new way of faith.  This one’s proving difficult.  But, that’s where the juice is, right?

Finally, I’m learning, still, how to be a grandparent with my two instructors, Gabe and Ruth.  Also, I’m learning the role of parent in children’s mid-life, where demands of work and family consume them.  Again, a deepening and a change.

Emerson said long ago that we do not need to travel to Italy to see beauty.  Beauty is where we see it, not only, perhaps not even primarily, where others see it.

 

Dogs

Fencing Masters

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Beltane                                                     Beltane Moon

Sitting at our patio, talking, I said to Kate, “You know, with all the education sitting at this table, two doctorates, you’d think we could outsmart a 60-pound German short hair who’s thinking at about a three-year old level.”  This after Kate had just attached short runs of fencing to the wire contraption I put together on Saturday.

(a sheep fence in Scotland obviously created by a house with three doctorates.)

Gertie found another fence she could master.  I had a plan.  Wire strung across the fence top, four strands (rubber coated) attached to two pieces of iron with holes drilled in it at regular intervals.  My plan failed.  Gertie got up, bellied over the wires and in the process bent the iron (not thick enough).  I didn’t see her getting over the wire.

Kate’s idea might work.  We’ll see.  The electric fence that stopped Rigel doesn’t work with Gertie because she jumps up on the fence, which is wood, and never completes the circuit.

Pets, you gotta love’em.

Garden

Planting Time

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Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

Just looked back over my last several posts and realized my not so happy face stares out of most of them.

Feeling a little fragmented, not focused.  Not that things aren’t getting done.

Yesterday I planted tomatoes and peppers.  A bit early, maybe.  But the predicted lows look pretty hopeful.  Up here in Andover we land in the southern reaching tongue of Minnesota that has a predicted last frost date of May 22-28.  At least according to Bruce Watson and son’s Minnesota weather calendar.  Today I planted chard, collard greens and carrots.  Tomorrow pac choy and some more collard greens.

To plant the carrots I had to replant several lilies in our longest raised bed.  Seven or eight years ago I went to a lily sale at the Mn. Landscape Arboretum and purchased a number of lily varieties grown by Minnesotans.  I planted them in this bed as  part of a cut flower garden, before we turned it over to vegetables.  The lilies love this bed.  They have multiplied like crazy and now get in the way of the section of the bed I want to use for leeks and carrots.

Planting carrots, as those of you who have done it know, requires patience.  The seeds are tiny and getting them to come out of the hand one at a time is not easy.  Still, they’re in the soil now.

We decided to plant crops that we store over the winter so this year we’re focusing on onions, carrots, chard, beets, collard greens, potatoes and tomatoes.  In September I’ll plant next year’s garlic crop, too.

We also have a number of fruits on the way: raspberries, strawberries, apples, cherries, currants, blueberries and wild grapes.

Now is the time of watching the weather, scanning for bugs and disease, nurturing the plants.  Attending to the crops.

Family, Memories

Mother’s Day. Not A Happy Day.

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Beltane                                                                        Beltane Moon

Mother’s day.  Every year.  Since her death.  1964.  A long time to be motherless.  Almost a life time.

Her stroke changed all our lives.  We went on but not well.  I often stumbled, not picking myself up and shaking it off, not turning the pain into a gift.  Instead, I experienced it as pain.

(Morristown Post Office)

She was a small town girl. Morristown, Indiana.  800 people.  Many of them our kin.  A rural town right where Indiana breaks into full on country as you travel south, the big cities and heavy industry behind you.  Lots of corn and beans (soy beans), tractors, barns, cows, pigs, a few horses.  Still that way.

Might have been a small town girl her whole life, except for WWII.  Signal Corps.  Mom was a WAC.  She went to Rome, Naples, Capri, Algiers.  After, she married Dad.  She had an A.A. degree in teaching, elementary.

Never learned to drive.  Can you imagine?  A midwestern country girl who never learned to drive.  Didn’t stop her from an active life. In our small town, Alexandria, Indiana, there was no spot you couldn’t reach by walking.  So Mom went everywhere on foot or riding with Dad.

Warm and quick, kind, loving.  Compassionate.  You know, the mom you see on the cover of Saturday Evening Post drawn by Normal Rockwell.

Since 1964, she’s been a memory.  At times she almost seems to slip away, a murmur, a rumor from the past, like an imaginary place I used to visit as a small boy.  Then I recall the garden spider at our kitchen window.  Her taking insects in a kleenex to release outside, something I still do.  Her voice breaking as she learned her father, Charlie Keaton, my namesake and grandfather, had died.

So, mother’s day has not been a big favorite of mine, not for a long time.  Not a happy day with dinner out, flowers and a big hug.  No, “remember when?”  No, “you’re just what I hoped.”  No, “oh, you.”  Just not. Absence.

Asia

Vikings, JP Morgan, China

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Beltane                                                               Beltane Moon

JP Morgan lost 2 billion dollars.  Meanwhile a bunch of Viking clad middle class morons jumped up and down excited about the stadium deal as the billionaire recipient of their tax dollar welfare looked on beaming.  WTF!

Also, news from China beginning to look problematic on the economic front.  China has a multitude of potential problems, big ones:  environmental degradation, water shortages in its wheat growing north, a sudden aging of its population with few caregivers due to the one child policy and political tensions from unevenly distributed economic gains.  None of us, however, need or should want China to have a weakening economy.  It occupies a large and important part in world trade and finance, a part we all need it continue to play.

It’s an interesting time right now with authoritarian, command control systems getting a lot of press for being more mobile, more flexible and less encumbered by the clumsiness of democracy.  Arguing for democratic government and laissez faire markets became a lot harder starting in 2008 as US and European economies did a header and their democratic governments floundered as they tried to respond.

If China heads into deep waters economically, then we might all have gotten the dose of humility necessary to start rethinking government and markets for the third millennium.   World trade has become so interlocked that we cannot afford to have any large segment of it in trouble.

There is, of course, a bit of schadenfreude if China is in trouble.  Each Asian nation that climbs the hill seems to run into trouble.  First it was the Asian tigers, then Japan.  If China were to slip, too, a certain part of the Chinese arrogance (matched only by our own, so I’m not casting stones in a glass house here) would fall with it.  That would be welcome, just as the humbling of the US during the great recession was welcome.

I remain fascinated by the possible friendship between the oldest continuous culture and the youngest ever world hegemon.  Think of the places we could go and the things we could do.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Fated?

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Beltane                                                         Beltane Moon

“Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man (sic) can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”

Thomas Pynchon

In a sense, of course, the fates represent the exact opposite of the Pynchon quote.  That is, nothing happens by accident; perhaps they are the ancient and  mythic equivalent of the strange folks in cognitive science these days who say we have no free will.

On the other hand, all those accidents looked at retrospectively can have a fated feel.  What Pynchon does is remind us of the true randomness of events that in the rear view mirror seem to have happened with sequential causation.

Caprice might seem to have a chilling affect on the notion of a life, especially a life lived with purpose, according to a plan, headed toward a goal.  Yet.  It could free us from the burden of pressing our life forward, having to be at the wheel every moment attentive to the other drivers, no nodding off.

The old theological joke, which I never liked, is, “Man plans; God laughs.”  Take God out of the equation and we can see what is meant.  Life has too many unforseens, too many dips and twists, too many accidents.

Does this mean we shouldn’t plan?  I suppose not, but it does suggest a realistic humility about accounting for all the variables ahead.

Art and Culture

Thinking About The Sports Show

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Beltane                                                                 Beltane Moon

Bees in the am.  Art in the pm.  Part of a small group of docents:  Allison, Jane, Wendy, Ginny, Carreen and myself (all class of 2005) who visited with David Little for an hour or so about the Sports Show.

This particular group is not shy in presenting their perspectives, so it was a lively time.  Carreen observed that many, most, take photographs for granted, as images that come into being perhaps with no intervening action, like parthenogenesis.  It’s important, then, that their be guides, docents, to help tease out the work of photography, to appreciate the choices made and the quality of the image achieved.

Allison brought us all together and offered stories of her tours like the guy who pointed out his company’s box seats visible on the first ever cover of Sports Illustrated.  Jane remembered a woman at the YA Tittle photograph who said, “Oh.  Big John! I delivered mail to him for ten years.”

Ginny talked about the OJ piece, how much she enjoyed showing it and the controversy it engendered.  I’m not remembering right now what Wendy said, but it will reappear at some point.

That this is an MIA mounted exhibition is important to the museum’s overall visibility, especially among other museums.  It’s content and it’s catalog should keep it in the public eye a long while, perhaps even increasing its visibility as time goes on.

The p.r., which included Time Magazine with single issue sales around 28000000 and TV exposure on all broadcast channels here and even more uniquely on their sports shows, also broadened the reach of the museum as a cultural institution in the nation.

Having a sit down with a curator after a show has never happened in my time at the museum and I feel confident it never happened before my time either.  Allison just asked.  It was a privilege to peak behind the scenes of curatorial thinking about an exhibition.  And fun, too.

 

Bees

Artemis Hives: Year IV

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Beltane                                                            Beltane Moon

Bees have begun to add brood, the northern colony a bit faster than the southern.  I noticed today that some of the bees have very small eyes relative to the others, I imagine these are nursery bees, 1-14 days old.  They perform caretaking functions for the larvae.

As a result of last year’s hair raising end, I’m much more deliberate in all phases of approaching the colonies:  smoke, veil, gloves, smooth slow movements.

This year I notice I’m taking more time to observe.  Today I noticed two bees head to head flicking their antennae back and forth.  I noticed another fanning its wings, cooling down the hive.  Many had their head entirely in the cells, butts sticking up, wiggling and moving to the side as other workers passed their spots. The queens still prove elusive.  Someday I’m going to learn how to find them.

One patch of laid down brood is so beautiful, the foundation is a faint yellow and the caps are tan, held up with the sun at the back the incubating cells glow.  Returning workers with pollen and nectar add to the colonies’ stores, half filled yellow cells for pollen, shimmering honey in others.

This year the whole process seems more peaceful, less fraught.  The fourth year round so I’ve learned a few things, am not so anxious.  Now I can take in the wonder of the hive. Perhaps this year I’ll learn more about the bees themselves, read some of the books I purchased.