A week and a half, school’s out

I know that, but it still came as a surprise when Laura announced it. She’s in charge of much of her summer, but I need to follow up on my commitment to find a personal safety program I can approve of. I need to get a grip on driving regulations, too, though I think my personal rule of “teenagers can’t drive teenagers” will suffice.

I had a one year checkup this week on my hearing aids. The fancy little bits of electronics replacing the pair lost on the red bus. I found a one year check up on the rest of me of interest too, at least to me. It’s a recap of what I don’t have back, and never will.

A sense of self. The me who had something to contribute. I read everything; I remembered it. I made sense of it. Conversation! I talked about what I read. I knew what I intended to say, and said it.

A body in time and space. Don’t think you can cast off twenty five pounds and not miss it! I didn’t have it to throw away. It’s what holds up your skin. I think of our old friend Mary Jane. She spent a month in the hospital getting a pig valve in her heart, “but one morning I got out of bed, just for them to weigh me, and I was a head to foot wrinkle!” Yep, that’s how it works.

The deep trough through my skull. Hair still won’t grow in it.

A job. Still bitter about this loss. So much income, present and future. I like money. This was taken away by small minded and stupidly obstinate people. I need to let it go. I can’t. On the other hand, I no longer give a rat’s ass. Like all else, it is what it is.

Every day remains on the calendar, to be dealt with. I used to stay in bed until three in the afternoon, when school was letting out. Now I get up at eight in the morning, like I have something to do. Occasionally I do.

Spring is coming on. I could go for the mail, except I picked it up on the way back from breakfast with Lynn. I would like to go out every day for breakfast, but I don’t have enough friends. Most of them still work.

I need more friends. Too many of them died last fall, essentially at once. It’s damn hard to forge new relationships. There are strong words involved. “Forge,” for instance. Both parties need to put effort in. 

My friend Carol and I laughed about that a bit ago. She left winter behind, moving to South Carolina. She’s finding new friends hard to come by, too. “Acquaintances, yes. Friends? Well, it’s only been two years,” she says. “No one yet I would call in the middle of the night.” We laugh.

If only more loom parts would show up. I still can’t put on a warp!

It’s been this bad

I read an NPR interview with Jon Mecham, whose book The Soul of America explores a country post 2016, its soul inclusive of Martin Luther King and the Ku Klux Klan. We are in a perilous moment now, but it has been far worse. The interview is brief, the synopsis is easy, and I lift much from the text to present it.

The interview begins with Andrew Johnson, immediate post Civil War President, who said African Americans were genetically incapable of self-government. “He was a bully. He was self-absorbed. He gave self-pitying speeches,” Mecham says, though, the story of American history is that we have, in fact, moved forward.

He walks us through the hills and valleys that trended up. Rutherford B. Hayes became President of the United States as part of a compromise that pulled the federal troops out of the South. Theodore Roosevelt, was engaged with the idea of a melting pot, the idea that immigration was a force for good.

Women’s suffrage happened under Woodrow Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt was told if he solved the Great Depression he would be known as a great president, if he failed, the worst. Roosevelt responded, if he failed, he’d be the last. Then there was the beginning of the Cold War, of four years of McCarthyism, under the senator from Wisconsin.

Lyndon Johnson, a white Southerner from a segregated state, decided he was going to create voting rights in this country and finish the work of Abraham Lincoln.  And now President Trump is an aberration in the journey up hills, down hills. 

“The choices we make now will echo for a long time”. The choices are as important as those after the Civil War, as those of the best presidents of the twentieth century, in deciding the people we will be in future.

So, it remains us, and the force of individual choices. That is, the force of all the ideas you threw out onto my mountain of suggestions. I have to tell you, I still would love to see a national shaming system. 

Bigots, racists, just plain idiots need to be deafened by “What Are You Thinking”. How about Paul Ryon, retiring at 48 with a full pension and trying to take food stamps from millions of children and poor families.

I came to that NPS interview through Jenn Hoffman's inspired blog, which I have often referenced and linked to. One suggestion she often concludes with is thanking elected representatives of either persuasion who have helped us move forward any given week. It's as simple as a thank you note or email.

I listened to Elizabeth Warren the other night, on one of her appearances on Steven Colbert. I do not remember what, but she was thanking the audience and America for an outpouring of thanks. "Don't ever think it doesn't matter that you write to us," she shouted above the tumult. It does count. Do it!

With my sister’s help, the loom room is pushed here, pulled there, looking better. Laura is on a two night Adventure Crew camp out at the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum at University Circle in Cleveland. I have no idea what they are up to, and looking forward to hearing. And, we have tickets for the great RBG film, next weekend. There may be a full report.

 

Still mad as hell

My morning news had just one incident since yesterday of white on black trouble; a police officer with a choke hold on a young man, in prom clothing, who just escorted his sixteen year old sister to her prom. My brother used to put on his suit and take me places. When he showed up in his U.S. Air Force uniform, my dorm mates swarmed him. The police never did.

Monday I went to breakfast with my BFF. We used to go to breakfast a couple times a month, but she chucked winter in northeast Ohio two years ago and moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Now we go to breakfast a couple times a year, and it takes longer to catch up.

Carol is a retired medical professional. I am a retired artisan. We met forty odd years ago, divorced, raising small children. She’s Jimmy’s mother; the six year old who followed the only people he knew, my daughters, to the deep end of the YMCA pool, and terrified his mother and me when it was “accomplishment day”, and he performed in the deep end, starting with diving off the tall board. Jim’s retired from the Marines now, Special Operations.

My friend looked across the table Monday, deep in our kvetching, and said “Jo, you know I’m a dyed in the wool, hard core Republican.” (Which is why we don’t place blame when we talk politics.) “Jo, we’ve made a terrible mistake!” That pretty much summed up our conversation of world affairs, domestic affairs and cost of gasoline.

And I told her we’re paying the price for electing Obama as president for eight years. I see no bottom in sight to dismantling liberty and justice. How the hell did John McCain hit the Republican cross-hairs? Why have I and many of my friends hit the drug donut hole in March? We know why gas prices are climbing back to Dubya’s day. Will the CIA find new advanced interrogation techniques? Probably.

I can’t fix it. And I can’t stop being angry about it, reasonable or not.

The Washington Post today has a story about voter identity unease in the Trump’s Midwest; buyer’s remorse among voters who only thought they were poking a finger in an eye, to see what would happen. 

I do have an anecdotal incident to relate. We just had a primary election in Ohio. A friend told of her husband, a lifelong, dyed in the wool Republican, standing at the next station at the table, unable to declare “Republican” for the first time in six decades. He finally asked for an Independent ballot.

Greg, my physical therapist, and his wife, are expecting a baby any day now. Nora Grace. As I left today I reminded him to cancel next Friday for Grace, and let me know. “Nora Grace,” he replied. And I said “No. Right now any baby is Grace.”

The last towel is off the borrowed loom, which is returned. By the end of next week I may be weaving towels in colors of the rainbow. Some of you know what that means. Everyone else will find out. I may be less angry then.  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me…”

Physically ill

A rage is building in me. Part is built on the fact little effort is made toward any restoration of the physical world we have overwhelmed with plastic and vehicle emissions. Another cornerstone is the worldwide eradication of living things, plant and animal.

But the worst, the worst of all, is our inhuman treatment of strangers who deserve the same treatment as friends and neighbors. Two native Americans pulled by police from a college tour. I think of all the people in college and in working who I met, who were of other races.

What the hell is wrong with us. Who is poisoning so many minds to act out like this on essentially a daily basis. I have an acquaintance who made it known she would not board any plane on which she saw an Asian face. Her choice, her loss, her stupidity. She is my age, raised to be a bigot and never saw reason to change.

But a new generation is no better. A black woman asleep in a university common room and the police are summoned. Revolting behavior. Anyone desperate enough to know need only have awakened her and asked. And deserved any scathing remark, though it probably would not have been forthcoming.

Two black men waiting in Starbucks for their business partner. The police are called. I’ve waited in Starbucks often, sometimes doing nothing and ordering nothing for half an hour, forty-five minutes, waiting for chronically late friends and relatives to show up. My white face was not shown the door.

I don’t know what to do past supporting candidates, showing up at protests and rallies, participating in drives, giving money. I’m open to suggestions. I suppose the pessimists among us are right; it’s all too little too late. Well, shame on us for not stirring our comfortable asses fifty years ago, when we knew artificial sweeteners and fast foods were deadly.

What are our suggestions. Throw them all out. A mountain of useless rage. We are well past smacking sense into any one, overpaid politicians down to racists having rants in public restaurants. When will we all be sick of it? How can it change? How will it work? I don’t know.

Like clockwork

A few days ago I got honest with myself and admitted the new LeClerc loom will not fit in my car. I knew I could ask my sister, but her quilting business is so busy she's booked through July. However, no matter which way I measured the back of my car, I was two inches shy. I asked Jan, Tom agreed to lend his truck, and today was the road trip.

I bought this loom sort of locally, from Linda Bertanzetti, who is a nationally known historian, collector, preserver and broker. I should have taken pictures of some of what she has collected and on display, but it was a bit overwhelming, and I was intent on keeping my footing in all the old, restored farm buildings we visited. 

Jan and I set out on a road trip on a beautiful day today. Blue skies, big clouds, leafing trees, nice highway, charming country roads, and a spot on GPS that told us what drive to turn into. Linda, Hal and Jan loaded the loom into Tom's truck, and we came back from Columbiana the same way we went.

My intent was to leave the loom in our drive, for Laura and me to manhandle into the house, but Tom met Jan and me at the house and helped get it in the door and into the "loom room". Laura went in there the other night, inhaled deeply of the smell of thread and announced that now it smelled like a Loom Room in there.

I already ordered a spool rack from the rug loom company on the other side of my state, and I should have that in a week. It has to be built! I bought an electric bobbin winder from Linda today. Back home, I set about accumulating the few missing pieces. I bought forty spools to fill with warp thread with my electric bobbin winder and put on the spool rack to put onto the loom.

I added a LeClerc tension box to the pile I was accumulating at my favorite weaving supply house, and then said Nancy, the clerk, needed to help me. "I need thread guides for nineteen two inch bouts on the LeClerc, so that's nineteen times four, but my calculator is on my phone, and the phone is in my ear!"

A wonderful laugh came over the line. "But you can only fill one bout at a time! Eight thread guides!" I laughed too, and said that was one more fact a massive brain injury stole from me. Nancy knows I am weaving towels on a borrowed loom, and pointed out that all the cross median shuttle throwing already done must be paying off, as I knew exactly what else I needed.

The Loom Room looks cramped now, but I think this time next week it will be a model miniature studio. I looked up "cross median training". Cross training for short. It's like touching your left knee with your right hand. It enhances neuron paths in the brain. Just more physical therapy! Well, mental, this time.