Daily Archives: April 27, 2013

Cinema and Television

The Movies

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Spring                                                                         Planting Moon

Last night, Water for Elephants.  Tonight, Mildred Pierce.  Wisely held back from the Walker last night, resting my still aching back.  While doing that we watched Water for Elephants.  Loved the 1930’s circus, the cinematography.  Rosie the elephant.  Christoph Walz as the Benzini Circuses’ cruel dictator/savior chewed up crew and spat out hatred.

Reese Witherspoon and vampire Robert Pattison were to rise above it all with the purity of true love.  Except their relationship wasn’t believable.  Pattison had no depth, no fire.  Witherspoon, better, still didn’t fill this role as ably as she has so many others I’ve seen.

It was about half a movie.

Mildred Pierce on the other hand.  Wow.  1945.  Manages to cram a self-reliant mother rising above a gray marriage to start a successful restaurant business into dramatic bed with a daughter who represents the conniving, manipulating greedy woman who only takes.  Throw in three male supporting cast.  A first husband stuck in the 40’s male role of bread winner with no job.  Wally, the blowsy real estate salesman who wants a relationship with Mildred and the playboy, Monte, who ends up two-timing Mildred with her daughter, Veda.

Eva Gardner, of Our Miss Brooks, plays a tough, funny dame who works with Mildred (Joan Crawford) as she builds her business.  The adult women are tough and hard-working. Successful.

Monte, the playboy, and the husband, Bert, are caricatures of the weak male and the wealthy lay-about.  Wally, the hick who seems corny, “I am corny.” is the only one of the three who acts honorably with Mildred.

A murder mystery wrapped in a war time story of female self-empowerment with a side dish of ungrateful daughter.  If you haven’t already seen this classic, pick it up.

Health, Weather +Climate

75!

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Spring                                                                              Planting Moon

 

75.  The temperature outside is 75.  Flick back to Monday and Tuesday.  Snow, blowing snow and hazardous driving conditions.  Minnesota has these occasions, these, oh let’s change seasons for good today moments.  Not my favorite part of Minnesota’s climate, but not a bad one either.

Seasonal whiplash.

The back has gotten better, ouching not quite so much, the trajectory seeming to have tilted in a favorable direction at last.  I miss exercising.

Still feeling a bit submerged since last Sunday when Kona had to go to the emergency vet, as if I’ve not swum quite all the way back to the top.   I can the green filtered light, shafts of yellow reaching me on my way up.

Soon now.  Soon.

 

Dogs, Garden, Travel

Grounded. At last.

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Spring                                                                       Planting Moon

Yes!  Planted under the planting moon even if I couldn’t get the bloodroot up for the bloodroot moon.

We have Wally and Big Daddy onions in, 100 sets each.  Three rows of beets:  Bull’s Blood, Early Blood and Golden.  Pickling cucumbers and Dwarf Gray Sugar Snap Peas.  Of course there was bed prep, too.

With Kate and I wandering around holding this limb and that a bit tenderly I kept getting the image of a dinner bell, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, perhaps someone playing a little Stephen Foster on the grand piano.

Of all the gardening chores, planting is the most magical to me.  That tiny seed.  A beet, a cucumber, a pea.  Those small plants, a fat onion, or a thick leek.  Couldn’t plant the leeks today because the ground is still frozen at about 3 inches down.  How about that?  April 27th.

Had to cancel the Chicago trip due to Kona’s vet bills.  Keeping dogs is a choice and keeping 4 is the same choice 4 times over in terms of food and care.  Choices I have made and make cheerfully.

Garden, Politics, Third Phase, US History

Pioneers

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Spring                                                                        Planting Moon

Finally, my activities and the turning of the Great Wheel will synch up.  Gonna plant cold weather crops today.  The soil’s still cold though the air will warm this week, only to cool down again next.  It’s important to remember that our average last frost date is the beginning of the second week of May and we haven’t gotten there yet.  No transplants outside yet.

Except.  The leek and onion I got in the mail Thursday and Friday.

Kate and I will be a pair out there today, trying to figure out which of us should do what to lessen the likelihood of pain.

As the planting has approached, I’ve pondered, as I have often, the fate of pioneers* who wrenched a back, had disc problems, sprained an ankle, broke an arm at the wrong time of year.  Not that there’s a right time of year, but some times are worse than others.  Planting and harvesting would be terrible times to have a significant physical impairment.  Can you imagine?  Your life and perhaps your family’s depends on planting this year’s crop.

What is today a nuisance, a bother, something to wait out, could have been literally fatal, and not just for one.  I’m sure everybody pitched in, did what they could, but sexual dimorphism and physical development from child to adult would often mean some work simply couldn’t be done.

A bleak prospect.

I can load up on Ultram, lace up the backbrace and then, if necessary, go to the grocery store and buy my vegetables.  The options are better today.

 

*And, yes, I recognize the irony between the pioneers and the Native Americans, the latter  having developed their styles of living off the land in accordance with the way the land provided, at least for the most part.  The pioneers, most of them anyhow, were usually poor folks hunting for a place to live and raise a family.  This phenomenon of the poor spreading out to the places of least convenience continues in our day.

I no longer know how to easily understand the right and wrong of it all.  Yes, the Indian Wars were wrong.  Of course.  And the associated Indian schools and all of it.  Wrong.

The pioneers, though?  They don’t seem wrong to me, perhaps not right in a larger, probably undiscernible sense (for them), but not wrong.  At least not most.  Most were Okies.  Cox’s army.  Peasant class folks hungering for a chance.  For them, I have a lot of empathy.

The question today is not how to go back and redo the past. Rather, it is how to discern the lines that will allow us all to walk into the future together, as friends and allies.