An exchange...

...heard while waiting for the cross signal at the corner of 3rd and Pike.


Young (man?) dressed in a combination of plumber butt chic and wino layers: "What are you looking at?"
Tourist, absolutely deadpan: "I'm not sure..."

A list for midsummer

I took a little walk at lunch time today and it turned out to be a great day for noticing. It’s so nice when you’re jammed with work and can only take a few minutes to step outside and then the experience even for a few minutes is so great! And of course, I had my short term memory (my little notebook) in my shirt pocket, as always.

So without further falderal, might I present for your entertainment and edification….

Things you would have noticed had you been with me at Westlake Park at 12:09pm today (and were paying attention):

·         The most incredibly, indelibly blue sky;

·         A young guy with dreads getting a ticket from two bicycle cops for skateboarding on the sidewalk;

·         Ping pong games in progress on two tables;

·         A plethora of fake service animals (which chaps my hide but what the hell);

·         Buses coming and going;

·         The hot dog stand that never has a line but always has a customer at the window – gotta try that one day;

·         A young woman asking me to move so she could take a picture;

·         People eating bag- and takeout- and vendor cart- and leftovers-in-containers-lunches;

·         A singer with his guitar under the busker canopy – Dude, you gotta sing louder than that if you want tips;

·         Other people watchers, perhaps watching me – or you;

·         Kids on the big climbing toy;

·         Bums, as always;

·         Folks at the info booth answering questions for tourists;

·         A chess game with the huge pieces and lots of watchers and one young woman who clearly didn’t understand that quietly offering advice to one of the players is just…NOT…done…;

·         A group of students in a tour group staring at everything and everyone;

·          A young shirtless guy playing Chopin (I think) and then Fur Elise under the canopy and people walking right on past as though that’s not unusual – which, in Seattle, it’s not;

·         The illegal food cart guy looking nervously at the cops as they strolled up, until they ordered lunch;

·         And at least one other thing that I noticed but can’t recall because my short term memory notebook is flimsy and my hand tremor was in rare form today. An archeologist couldn’t decipher that scrawl.

Decluttering

I can’t imagine what mental aberration caused me to collect a sufficient cache of office supplies to go through several degree programs without ever taking another trip to Office Depot.

For example, I’ve two cartridges for my laser printer, not counting the one I just installed. When you consider that I go through a cartridge about once every eighteen months, I’m thinking this qualifies as overkill. Especially when you consider how freeking expensive the damn things are.

And for those times when I want to produce my documents manually, I’ve maybe a hundred pens (after sorting out the ones that have dried up and the ones I need to take back to work), and a few dozen unsharpened pencils. I like pencils and use them a lot, so there are also mebbe forty sharpened pencils of various lengths sitting about in various drawers, boxes, organizers and end tables.

Plenty of college ruled paper, assorted notebooks and portfolios, colored paper and construction paper and just plain paper – you know the drill.

My collection of souvenirs of various travels and relationships, of which I am genuinely fond, is overwhelmed by random stacks of guidebooks, brochures, etc. that I brought home from home shows, fairs, conventions, conferences and vacation destinations. We could heat the house for a week in the dead of winter with all this worthless wood fiber.

Can you tell I’m on a decluttering campaign?

Does anyone have a lighter?”

Summer fun

Bro and Sis-in-law are up for a visit and at the same time, we brought Daughter One home for a few days of seester time with Daughter Two. Pulled off the surprise of the year and I’m feeling very manly about my fatherly craftiness. Yowser!

Pat and I did the Fat Salmon paddle Saturday, serving as human buoys for the open water swim race. It was a good time and a good workout. An unusual (for this lake) wind-driven set from the East meant lots of chop and reflex wave action from the shoreline along which the course was laid out. A high number of swimmers tending (sometimes veering) off course, the kayak windcocking in the weird chop, a few of the kayakers fairly clueless newbies all added to the fun. All in all, more of a working day than the relaxing paddle these things usually are. But it was a great return to the water after a long time dry.

Sunday evening was Bjornbecue night. Bjorn is the best griller in the known world! Patty’s beans and Pat’s guac added up to a serious culinary score.

We did the tourist thing in Seattle yesterday – Pike Place, waterfront, seafood, the fishing fleet, the view from the bluff, there and back by monorail, all standard Seattle stuff. Made more enjoyable by the fact that for Pat and me, a lot of this is old home week.

Today will be taken up with a leisurely paddle through the Arboretum. Later, some thrift shop shopping, perhaps a trip to the falls, some easy hiking… Meanwhile, the Seesters will separate from us old folk to have a day of whatever seesters do before One gets back on the airplane in time for a pickup rehearsal for her dinner show.

All in all, this is a good week. One of those visits no agenda except to enjoy each other.

Family time.

An upcoming visit

Me Bro is coming for a visit later this week and I can’t wait! I mean, I knew I was anxious but today my anticipation really clicked into high gear.

I was on a road trip for work today and for once someone else handled the driving, freeing me to watch the scenery. And what scenery! If you’ve never driven along the Sound from Everett to Bellingham, then I’m sorry, you just haven’t lived.

There are more possible put-ins for a kayaker than you can shake a paddle at. Several large rivers empty into Puget Sound along this drive and I can’t wait to check them out. Steamboat Slough should be a fun paddle. The Stillaguamish River provides a welter of tributaries, and the Skagit makes some wild switchbacks in and among the tulip fields before making its sprint to salt water.

Pat wants to revisit Lake Easton and I’m game, so long as he doesn’t plan to get recompense for a certain, er, accidental nudge that left him swimming in snow runoff water a few years back. (Accident, I swear!)

We’ll probably spend some time on Salmon Bay or Lake Union closer to home, but I really do hope we’ll wander up the inland coast a ways.

Oh, and we have that outing to Mount Rainier. Yowser!

So much to see, so little bro time in which to see it.

Curly Abel

On this Independence Day as it approaches 8:00am, I find myself drinking coffee in a comfortable chair while an old movie plays in the background, doing my best to avoid getting off my butt and actually, you know, getting going on some chores.

I really do want to get to the housework, mostly because that’s the only way to be DONE with housework for another day, but this idea has been roiling about in my subconscious for a couple of days and it came together just as I awakened this morning. Or perhaps this is what woke me up.

Today being July 4^th, I see lots of evidence of what passes for patriotic fervor in this country. Don’t get me wrong - the tone of that sentence should not be construed as indicating I eschew love of country. I believe it’s a natural part of our culture and perhaps even embedded in our DNA to cherish from the inside out – children, then spouse, then self, friends,  neighbors, community, state, country…. It’s how we form our allegiances.

I’m no different.

It’s how we express those allegiances that seems sometimes to set me apart even from those close friends and family who have helped form my world view.

I don’t much care for flag waving. I will never make a pledge of fealty to a piece of cloth. That doesn’t mean I don’t love this country or that the photo of the Marines raising the flag on Suribachi fails to tweak my emotions. I’m just not into flags. Sorry, Sheldon!

I don’t trust in any god simply because I can’t accept direction from an entity whose existence I doubt in any form yet described by the various religions. But that doesn’t mean I believe I am an example of the highest intelligence ever in the universe. I accept a power greater than myself – I simply see no point in trying to define a god according to humanly needs and wants and superstitions.

 Therefore, I see as specious any attempt to join the attentions of an ill-defined and most likely imaginary supreme being to the assumed best interests of a country that is deeply divided over such simple matters as gun control and a woman’s right to the sanctity of her own corpus.

Don’t get me wrong, those of you who are tempted to pray for my soul when your knees hit the hardwood this evening. I neither condemn nor scoff at your most deeply held beliefs. I wish I could accept as Truth one of the religious constructs and thus come to believe that all will be sorted out in the end. But belief for me is based on accumulated evidence as filtered through one’s own screening mechanism, which is in turn formed of experience and learning and yes, even for me, deeply held even if unacknowledged superstitions. And my filter finds the existence of a definable god unlikely.

I don’t believe that the firing off of pyrotechnics necessarily prompts any emotion connected to the afore-mentioned love of country. For me, it’s just a good show and one best left to the pros, so please don’t set off your flying bombs over my roof. (Besides, it scares the bejeesus out of our dogs, so July 4^th has for years been an event celebrated primarily by staying home with the canines, feeding them doggie downers and trying to keep them calm. My furry buddies are petrified of your explosives. So please just stop.)

Enough of what I don’t believe. I am – and I suspect this applies equally to many of you – an odd amalgam of what I know versus what I like to believe, of what I’ve seen and heard, tempered by what I hope to be the case.

As a young man, I put on my country’s uniform as a dedicated and hopeful volunteer when most of my friends were desperate to find ways to avoid the draft. Then just a few years later, I took off the uniform forever as a registered conscientious objector. And forty years down the road of life, I still couldn’t tell you which ‘me’ was true.

I’ve voted in every election since 1972, excepting some local frays into which I declined to insert myself, and with  my voting record in front of you and no other evidence, I would defy you to confidently identify me as Democrat, Republican, or other.

In short, I don’t easily align with views in which I can’t personally find the value. But please don’t take my failure to wave a flag as evidence of a lack of love of country. I do love my country but I celebrate it in my own way.

There’s been lots of loose talk of late about heroes. We seem to take the term lightly and I wish we didn’t because it leaves a void of available descriptors when someone acts truly heroically. So I won’t call my friend Curly a hero. I’ll just tell you about her.

 I came across Emma “Curly” Abel years ago when Mary and the girls and I were on a road trip around the country. As we passed through Broadwater, Nebraska, one storefront caught my eye so abruptly and surely that I insisted we stop and take a photo. (For those of you who’ve read this story before, I’ll just hope you agree it bears repeating.)

The Broadwater Library demanded my attention because it was a splash of fresh color in an otherwise fairly dusty little town. It stood out in a way that made my head swivel and I just had to cross the street to peer in the window.

 

 

                             The library was charming and when I got home from our trip, I did a little research. The librarian was Emma Abel and she had taken it from a tiny reading room to a fully functional – even if still tiny – bibliotheque. I saw a computer and shelves of books and a reading area and it was all neat, attractive fresh.

 Fresh, in this tiny town of 160 souls.

Curly built this library. Secured the space, got books from the state library association, a computer from the Gates Foundation, Internet access, carpet, paint. And for six hours each week, the children of the farms around Broadwater had a place to come. Into their isolated world, she brought – the world.

So anyway, I put a posting on our family’s then-website about Curly and her library. And years later I blogged about her. I’ve never forgotten her. But yesterday, while I was thinking about the holiday now upon us, I got to thinking about what really says ‘America’ to me. And I thought of Curly.

When I contacted her those years ago, she was entirely unimpressed about my admiration for the work she’d done. And if you Google her, you’ll quickly learn that she was a regular gal. Church member, Cub Scout leader, 4-H mentor. She worked at a hardware store and lived her life.

And brought the world to the children of Broadwater, Nebraska.

Emma Abel doesn’t get a whole lot of mention in our national annals. If you do Google her, one of the first photos that will come up is the one I took of the library. So, how famous could she be, right? But she is America to me.

This evening, while the yahoos fire off their bottle rockets, I’ll be home calming the dogs. And I’ll think of Emma Abel.

 

 Emma “Curly” Abel, April 27, 1929 – November 16, 2007