Katie Piper

(NOTE: You can Google this young lady’s name and ignore what I’m going to write following or you can read this post first but either way, please make a point of learning about her. Be warned, her story is not for the faint of heart. But I guarantee it will warm your heart.)

We (okay, I) frequently find myself bemoaning the seeming lack of (commitment, dedication, whatever) of the generation following mine own.  They’re not sufficiently aware of politics. They tend to be rude, by my lights. They’re too often self-absorbed, uninformed, clueless.

It’s easy to discount the motivations of others, especially when they belong to a definable demographic that’s different from your own. I find myself categorizing, measuring and ultimately feeling superior to strangers on the street or the bus, people in the news, and yes, kids. Which these days, means basically anyone under about age thirty-five. Tragic, I know, but I’ve never claimed not to be a Fudd.

I don’t like this aspect of my personality. But it’s undeniable and so, I welcome opportunities to remind myself that I’m not the source and arbiter of all things good and right.

A young – in this case, seriously, young – woman by the name of Katie Piper is the latest in a thankfully long list of folks who’ve forced me to adjust my world view. Katie is a beautiful human being whose very definition of beauty was redefined by the assailant a disgruntled ex-boyfriend hired to throw acid in her face.

Imagine being a drop-dead gorgeous twenty-something until the day you wake up in a hospital bed with one eye destroyed and half your face covered with scar tissue. And then go to www.katiepiperfoundation.org.uk to learn what Katie did.

I’m not qualified to sermonize about the courage, generosity and beauty you’ll see on this site. So I won’t. I’ll just say this – I think she’s still gorgeous.

Picking cherries

I came across a photo the other day that brought back some memories.

It showed our kitchen counter chock-a-block with bowls, pans and Tupperware, each brimming with freshly picked cherries.

Grandma Norma stayed with us for part of the summer several years in a row when the girls were young and during that time, we sort of settled into a routine for the visits. She would always teach them how to do something. One summer, she taught the art of crochet.  A couple of summers, we all made capoletti  together. We’d have a thousand of these little meat-filled dumplings laid out on a beach towel to dry before we froze them for use on special occasions in making caplets.

Don’t know what caplets are? Too bad – go get your own northern Italian mother-in-law. I’m not sharing.

Norma always seemed to show up in time to pick the cherries from the tree in our backyard. She got a big kick out of picking them with her granddaughters. Daughter Two was particularly good at cherry picking, or so I recall.

Grandma made pies and – if I whined loudly enough – streudel from the cherries and whatever else we had in the way of fruit filling. Good stuff.  She was a great baker and all I had to do was eat my share. Or, perhaps a bit more.

I don’t know if a picture is really worth a thousand words but it’s at least worth more than these couple hundred. Because what I can’t put in these words is the taste of those streudels or the pride a little girl gets out of sharing pastry made with her grandma from cherries they picked together.

Please don't show up

Decisions truly are made by those who show up. On that much, I’m thinking we can agree. But then there’s (Dee Hock’s?) take on things: “Whoever shows up are the right people.”  I have trouble with that one.

So, you can imagine I was less than thrilled while perusing the CNN site tonight.

Can’t make the connection? My fault – I should have given you more setup. You see, one of the lead items on the CNN site this evening was an article and blog about Hawaii fielding the perennially lowest voter turnout for national elections and how some woman who’s never, ever voted is running for city council. And this being Hawaii, she actually has a shot.

Then, down the right side there are a series of thumbnails of folks who don’t plan to vote and we’re invited to post comments designed to get them to vote.

My question is, why?

Not meaning why vote – I’ve had that answer ready to go since grade school. No, what I’m getting at is why would we encourage these dullards to vote?

Jefferson spoke of democracy hinging on an educated and informed electorate. I agree. But I’d say there’s a third criterion that should be considered and that’s commitment. If you can’t be bothered to get off your butt and go vote, I’m not sure you’ve sufficient understanding of or dedication to the concept of representative democracy to intelligently exercise the franchise.

I’ve never understood the whole idea of ‘get out the vote’ drives.  Decisions are indeed made by those who show up. So, perhaps what we should be trying to do is make sure the people who show up have access to reliably accurate information. Which of course would mean at the very least funding political campaigns from the public coffers and outlawing donations, which would be problematic since the Supremes have declared that monetary contributions are actually speech within the intent of the Constitution, which has a good joke hiding in there somewhere since all our currency has busts of beloved former presidents who probably ARE the right people to show up but that’s beside the point…. HU-U-U-U-UGE BREATH…I guess now I’m giving you too much setup.

Where the heck was I?

Oh, yeah.

I pretty much always vote. Which is not to say I vote on every item on every ballot. I mean, I really don’t have an opinion as to which candidate is best for Port of Seattle Board of Commissioners Position Seven. But I don’t fake it; I just don’t vote for that one. Unless of course, one of the candidates is silly enough to put something in their voter pamphlet statement that positively identifies them as a dunderhead. Then, of course, the choice becomes simple. There was this one guy…nah, too easy.

Look, if all the people who are too busy or too clueless or can’t find the polling place or forgot today was the day or whatever don’t end up voting, why on earth should we consider that a problem? The people who have a high enough give-a-(darn) factor to have prepared themselves to vote and then actually show up and do the deed are, to my mind, the right people by definition.

So, please, don’t go on the CNN site tonight and try to convince these no-loads to vote. We don’t need them to help make the decision.

A New Beginning

No, this is not a Little House retrospective.

Mary and I are going to be spending the weekend planning a new course for our lives together. It seems we’ve come to a fork in the road and it’s time to consider Frost’s advice. We won’t map out the entire future course in two days, but it’s time we started the conversation.

For the last fourteen years, Mary has worked for the same company. She was a valued and valuable employee, a member of the management team and had the self-fulfillment of knowing she was among the best at what she did.

Although she is still as good as ever, the job had recently ceased to be fulfilling. Enough said about that except that in her newly jobless situation, Mary is presented with opportunities as well as challenges. With no school age children to account for, and the economy recovering despite what some politicians would have us think, a woman with her qualifications has options.

My job is changing as well, but in perhaps some more positive directions. Still, a job is a job and outside of employment considerations, I’m looking toward more fulfilling prospects on a personal level – finally finishing my degree, working on a book that’s been rattling around in my noggin for what seems ever, reaching out to others in our geographic area who share my outdoor interests.

As we think about how we’d like to spend the next pre-retirement five to ten years, it feels like we’re back in Fresno asking the what-if questions we asked ourselves and each other a quarter century ago. The intervening years have been shaped in large part by the need to provide stability and direction for our children. No regrets there – we were, after all, volunteers for the campaign.

But our great good fortune is that both of our daughters are intelligent, self-directed and substantially independent, leaving us with a sense of freedom we’ve seldom felt during our married life.

At the same time, freed from the scheduling constraints of building sets for plays, PTA meetings ad infinitum and line-judging / scoring for volleyball tournaments, we’ve reached out and reconnected with friends with whom contacts during the child rearing years were occasional at best. Friends from high school, our sibs and various cousins are back in our lives, enriching them beyond measure.

I could go on and on with this one but it’s a Saturday morning and chores demand attention without regard to employment status or wistful imaginings for the future. Let me just leave you with this:

If you’re reading this and know how to get hold of us directly, please do. We’d welcome a chat. Especially if you’ve ideas as to which path we should take.

My Bunbury

I like the idea of a Bunbury. An imaginary friend I can use as an excuse to get me out of all sorts of situations.

I swear this is a real thing. If you don’t believe me, re-read The Importance of Being Earnest. If Algernon (the Oscar Wilde one, not the mouse in Flowers For Algernon or the movie Charly) can have a Bunbury, so can I.

My Bunbury is going to be quite needy. Somewhere between Norman’s mother in Psycho and Sarah’s  brother in Love, Actually. And my Bunbury will be an elderly woman. No one will ever question me having to leave a boring party or be late to a useless meeting if I’m rushing off to see to the emergent needs of sweet old Mrs. Bunbury.

Or maybe she’ll be an eighty-something spinster who’s a bit sweet on me and I’m carrying on a harmless flirtation for the sake of brightening up her declining years.

She could be a neighbor – no, scratch that – too many people have met my neighbors and besides, I may have to use the Bunbury dodge on one or more of my real neighbors.  She’ll have to reside vaguely far enough away to take some time to visit but close enough to present a believable excuse for not mowing the lawn while still allowing time for kayaking.

Say, you don’t suppose my wife reads these things, do you?

Or my boss.  After all, kindly ol’ Ms. Bunbury may require my calming presence the next time I’m due for ‘diversity’ training.  I wonder if Bunburys work for getting out of dentist’s appointments?

The list of noisome activities I can shirk thanks to Erma’s needs – did I mention Ms. Bunbury has a first name? – is essentially endless:

·         Shopping for clothing

·         Shopping for almost anything else

·         Meetings

·         Weddings of distant cousins

·         Funerals (Don’t ever allow yourself to become known as the family eulogist – trust me on this!)

·         Bathing dogs

·         Attending almost any social event that’s farther away than across the street

·         Loads of et ceteras

I’m really warming up to this whole idea.

You can have a Bunbury, too. Just change the name. Erma’s already taken.

Door Close

The city is not the best place to work if you’re looking for considerate people. Not that the people of Gotham are necessarily bad people, collectively speaking. But there is a rushing nature to city life that just doesn’t seem to lend itself to kindness toward strangers. Or even civility.

I can deal with the smokers in doorways and people mindlessly blocking the sidewalk. Taking up a whole bench with your butt, backpack and stretched out legs is rude enough but usually, I’m not wanting to sit on the bench at any rate.

Some jerk shoulder-slammed me one day for daring to be in his way. He was fazed not at all by the fact that I was standing on the curb waiting for the light, whereas he was blatantly jaywalking.

All the people I’ve discussed so far did something overtly rude but I can deal with that.

I don’t know why, but the people who really make me grit my teeth are the ones who get on the elevator, hit their floor button and then more or less automatically, hit the “Door Close” button. There’s something about that – some “I got mine, so screw you” mentality – that really lights me up.

I guess what really gets me is that these are people who would probably be horrified to find a stranger considers them self-centered. Selfish, even. It’s hard to take the big rudenesses by jerks.  But these little, unthinking discourtesies committed by seemingly regular people really chap my hide.

To be fair, I do see a lot of folks holding the doors for others. In fact, they kinder, gentler elevator riders are without doubt in the majority at 1501 4^th Ave.

I just wish the Door Close people would stop it.

My nightmare

Of this alone even a god is deprived – to make what is all done to have never happened. – Agathon, according to Aristotle

All of us have things in our lives that we wish hadn’t happened, memories we’d change if we could to right wrongs that should never have happened.  Those things haunt us in the odd moments when some chance encounter or oblique reference brings them to mind.

So often, we find ourselves wishing we could go back and make things right. A ‘do over’ is maybe the most frantic - and ultimately fruitless – wish we can wish for.

But what about ‘do aheads’? What about when we see the bad thing developing before it happens and know how to prevent the disaster and still can’t make things right? You’re the only one who can see both the people standing on the tracks and the approaching train and the track-standers just can’t quite make sense of your warning screams – what then?

We live in a dog-friendly neighborhood. At least every other house has a dog and frequently more than one. There are occasional problems. This one is an escape artiste, that one is indiscriminate in its distribution of scat. Ours are barkers and Barb’s Joy next door is a crotchety old gal who will nip at you if you annoy her.

Generally though, the problems are small and under control and we all love living in a place where our canine friends are cherished and tolerated.

Then, Eric rented the house next door. His dog Hawking is a pit bull with a massive head and a sweet personality. Sweet, that is, until he snaps. Which he has done several times and of late, with increasing frequency.

When I found out that Hawking had attacked at least three other animals, killing one and putting another in the vet hospital, I checked around with the other neighbors. It seems like none of them were aware that this dog was spooling up in both the frequency and viciousness of his attacks.

So, I filed a complaint with County Animal Services, hoping that putting the attacks plus incidents of aggressiveness I’d witnessed myself all in one report would bring things together for the authorities and action would be taken.

Yesterday, I got a call from a VERY frustrated field investigator for the County. It seems that at least two of the people whose animals were attacked by ole Hawking had declined to file reports. It seems Eric gets to them quickly and uses his own brand of crocodile tears to convince them that theirs is an isolated incident. And in one case, he apparently agreed to pay a substantial vet bill in order to shut things up.

Bottom line: Animal Services can’t make a move until another attack takes place. Could be another injured dog or another dead cat…or even one of the elementary school kids who catch their bus next door to Eric and Hawking.

Elie Wiesel reminds us that while it’s awful to be a perpetrator and tragic to be a victim, evil flourishes due to the inaction of bystanders.

I’ve no idea how to end this missive. Just as I’ve no idea how the problem of Hawking will finally resolve.

Resolve, it will. How? That’s my nightmare.

The Jim Anderson Syndrome

As my sister Anne pointed out at our Aunt Bobbie’s wake, my siblings and I grew up in a sort of Leave It to Beaver world, except of course that our mom never wore pearls while doing housework. We never knew how lucky we were because our normal was – wait for it – just our normal.

Until my own kids started school, I never realized how lucky they were nor how cloistered was my own upbringing.   Mary and I were members of the PTA mafia at our daughters’ elementary school and frequent volunteers thereafter. We considered it a privilege to be involved with a fabulous group of parents. We didn’t always agree on everything and we had our tense moments but the bottom line was that the Simases and Olssons and Prestons and Prescotts and all the others had a very high give-a-shit factor and put their volunteer time where their mouths were.

The ironic thing is, we all got to know each other well because there were so few of us, relative to the school student population. I’m not saying there’s a moral imperative for being active in the PTA. Some parents are active in other ways, some work two jobs or have medical problems, etc. And some great parents are involved with their kids in other ways that don’t intersect with the classroom-mom crowd.

The thing is, even after allowing for differences in how parents expressed their caring, there were loads of kids in the school whose parents just didn’t seem to give a damn. We had kids who arrived at school unregistered, who showed up without an idea what to do for lunch, who showed up with dirty clothes and unwashed faces. My all time fave was the kindergartner who was dropped at the curb the first day of school, unregistered  and whose lack of an idea what to do or where to go was almost as troubling as the fact that she didn’t know her home address or even when – or whether – her parents would return to pick her up.

This would never have happened in the Father Knows Best world in which I grew up. But the truth is, the expectation that all fathers would be clones of Jim Anderson and the mothers like June Cleaver gave us all a false image of what we could expect when we ourselves became parents. The sad truth is that some fathers most decidedly don’t know best and some don’t even give a crap. And of course, some are monsters.

We were extraordinarily lucky, as were our daughters. Their peer groups comprised kids who were raised to believe in themselves and most of all, to believe they could trust the world around them. And so long as the adults around them were Ernie and Sharon or Mike and Helen, that trust was well placed. As long as the kids in their hang out group were Catherine or Alex or Sam, we need not have worried.

But not every kid they’d run into was raised in the Anderson or Cleaver household. Some of them were raised by absent or abusive or simply incompetent parents.

We can’t control the home life of every kid. We can’t even control the peer group with whom our own children hang. Trust me, I tried occasionally and it did NOT work out that well.

What we can do, collectively speaking, is make sure that every kid is provided with some of the basics in the form of a good education. Every kid should view school as a place where they can go and be safe and valued and – get this – educated. It’s the least we can do. It’s the least we should do.

There’s a welter of argumentation going on this election cycle. Frankly, there are so few of the issues that I thoroughly understand that I’m going back to basics in making my decision. I think of the basic things that we as a society should provide the next generation and surely that includes seven hours a day of being safe, feeling valued, a foundation of learning and with maybe a healthful lunch thrown in.

There are of course other differences between the candidates that will affect my vote. But at the bottom line, I’m voting as proxy for the well-being of the kids with whom my grandchildren will have to form their world.

Make of that what you will.

A grand discovery

I love finding the origin of common sayings. Some are stupifyingly easy, such as spittin’ image (‘spirit and image’ through a hill country holler drawl) but others just never seem to come to you.

Today, I was whiling away my bus trip by reading a book on women scientists who contributed to the war effort – World War II, that would be. In reading the chapter on Grace Murray Hopper, the first real software engineer, who gave us COBOL I learned she may or may not have been the one to first use ‘bug’ as shorthand for a random glitch in a computer program. That was impressive enough but I’ve heard the moth-in-the-reed-switch story before so it was kind of old hat. 

But then, there it was, in an interview in which she’s explaining her method of overcoming managerial gridlock, “When you have a good idea and you’ve tried it and you know it’s going to work, go ahead and do it – because it is much easier to apologize later than it is to get permission.”  Which may or may not have actually been the origin of ‘easier to ask forgiveness than permission,’ but I’m going with it.

She appears to be the source of my project management mantra.

I love Grace Murray Hopper! Not in a weird way, of course, she’s been dead since the late 90s.

Chores

Some chores are more satisfying than others. Don’t know why that should be but it is.

I burned a personal day today. Cleaned the stove, took care of some business with the county, had a meeting with the owner of the house next door about a problem renter (whose dog has attacked three other pets, killing one, and with an elementary school bus stop within fifty yards), did some dishes, put together the stuff I need for my online course that starts next Monday, had a doctor’s appointment and took advantage of the gorgeous weather to put a third coat of paint on the porch railing out front.

Guess which one made me feel I got something done?

I’ve tried to figure out why in thinking back on my day, the painting job is the one thing that feels like an accomplishment. It’s not like the other items on the list weren’t important.

I guess it has something to do with the fact that most of these things don’t feel like moving forward. Putting in the paperwork that might end in a dog – even a vicious pit bull – being put down somehow doesn’t feel much like an accomplishment. Cleaning the kitchen – bah!  And as pleasant as it always is to chat with Dr. Anne, I’ve never been a fan of poke and prod sessions.

The railing, on the other hand, has over the course the last week been transformed from a peeling, nasty relic with moss growing around the bottoms of the posts and along the bottom rail, to being a gleaming white, substantial-looking architectural element. One no longer has to look twice before putting one’s hand down on the top rail and the whole thing looks as solid as it is.

It looks done, just as a finished chore should.

So, what did I do with my day off?

Painted the porch rail, of course.