No News Is Bad News

We've been heading in this direction for some time. At 8:00 this morning, the newspaper delivery person tossed a two-pound package in the general direction of the house. I took the parcel out of its two plastic bags and prepared to sort out the readable parts of the San Francisco Chronicle, only to find that there were none. The entire package was advertising sheets and circulars.

As the scene grows darker for print media, the Chronicle has resorted to more and more advertising gimmicks: An advertisement page with the newspaper's logo at the top which obscures a third of the real front page. Various ad pages which protrude from the papers ever-slimmer news sections. Inserts made of stiff paper so that the reader cannot turn the page. And of course column after column of screaming commercial messages, more of them when there is a holiday coming up. (In this case, the Super Bowl--that's football for those of you who do not follow sports-- is next Sunday, and much of the advertising has to do with television sets or what is now being called Home Entertainment Systems.)

There was a time when the Knoxville News-Sentinel had a strict policy that no more than one third of the newspaper could contain advertising. But that was when more people wrote for and read newspapers. It's sad.

A Cat Mystery

Our beautiful gray tortoiseshell cat Mimi died November 13th, and the only thing mysterious about her demise was how well she hid the fact that she had at least three life-threatening conditions while continuing to eat, listen to music, play with her catnip mouse, all the things she liked to do.

We put her body in a plastic box and buried her up in the corner of the yard I like to watch when I am pondering. We put all her toys in the grave as if she were a pharaoh and might need them. We tossed her comb and food dish and scattered her kibble in the back yard, where the neighbor’s dog promptly scarfed it up, looking about furtively for the huge cat which once chased him away.

I had one dream of her, a silent dream, where Mimi was running up the driveway, south, as fast as she could go.

The mystery is what became of all the cat hair. She had a luxurious coat which shed everywhere, floated in the air, worked its way into the carpet, stuck to the stove, adorned all our clothing, collected in the corners behind the furniture. The day after we buried her, all the cat hair mysteriously disappeared. I thought I would use her brush for my hair as a kind of legacy from her, but when I washed the brush, only lint came out; no cat hair. Our black clothing, once richly enhanced with pale gray fur, no longer had a single trace of cat hair.

Some of this might be explained by the heavy-duty air filter on the furnace, at least the floating and pooling hair bits. But what could get the hair off our fleeces, coats and sweaters when energetic efforts with brushes, vacuums and sticky tape would never quite do it?

Nicodemus says she took it all with her.

(Smiling Mimi card by Christine and Jordan Hosfeldt)

Epiphany 2011

In the darkness out there,

the lights are little worlds:

Headlights of the workers driving north,

miners’ lamps up on the mountain,

the blinking of an airplane, eastward bound,

the corona of a yellow street lamp.

Out on the water, there is a moving light

from a crab boat heading out before dawn.

If there are stars about,

they are hidden by fog

and the moon is nowhere to be seen.

Here inside where love has been

severely battered,

one lone candle flickers.

Turning Away Wrath

I know that I have a sharp tongue, which is why I have to make a special effort to keep it under control. My angry letters to erring commercial institutions are legend in our family. Just last month, I let Volkswagen have it, and as a result, after several visits to the dealer, my car is finally repaired. Last year when an orchestra member criticized Nicodemus for not doing something he had in fact done, I wrote her an e-mail which I think shriveled her right up. She hides when she sees me coming.

So this morning when a driver yelled at me in the parking lot, I was careful to give a soft answer. “Why don’t you park it right?” he screamed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You’re half way into my parking bay,” he said, getting into his ugly truck, which was a full four feet away from my car.

“I’ll back up,” I said meekly, and then tried to do so with my hand brake on, I was that rattled. He gave me a dirty look and drove off. I would like to think that, as Stephen Gaskin once advised, that I had taken a bit of meanness out of the world, but I am not that good, and I stewed over the scene for a while.

I remember the last time I ever hit a child of mine (for hitting his brother). I could see my handprint on his sweet face, and I told myself that I would never, ever lose my temper with the children again.

Nicodemus, who can be bitingly sarcastic, can also be a master of the soft answer which turneth away wrath. When someone remarked, thirteen or fourteen years ago, that he didn’t know why people our age bothered to get married, Nicodemus replied “Well, we’re rather conventional.” Anyone who knows us knows better, but the sarcastic man was left speechless.

Once when he was substitute-teaching at a local elementary school, a little girl tugged at his jacket and complained that so-and-so had pushed her or taken her pencil. “Forgive him,” Nicodemus said. I don’t know if she knew what that meant, but I imagine she still remembers it.

Time Travel: The American Farm School

I had a Facebook friend request this week which catapulted me some 9,000 miles east and 50 years back in time, to Christmas, 1958 at the American Farm School.

We had just moved from Athens with our five-month-old son to the school outside Thessaloniki, Greece. We had a small upstairs apartment in a staff housing unit. The kitchen had a deep north window for food storage and a hooded charcoal burner for cooking; I had no idea how to use them. The power went off at 10 P.M. unless the poultry department was incubating eggs, in which case we had electricity all night.

I said I had to have a refrigerator, and the Farm School came up with a kerosene refrigerator which worked fine. I said I had to have a stove, and unknowingly I caused a crisis in the life of my downstairs neighbor, Demetra, who took the bus seven miles to Thessaloniki to do her baking in a public oven. Demetra calculated the cost of the public oven and convinced her husband, George, that she should have a stove at home.

Next door in the upstairs apartment lived Margaritis and Hariklea and their daughter Efthimoula, who was a little older than our son Nonda. It was Efthimoula who invited me to be her Facebook friend yesterday.

Life in the small community of the Farm School was pretty communal. Everybody spoke Greeklish except the 200 high-school-age boy students, who had to go to class.

I substituted at the English class once and taught the boys to sing “Camptown Races”. For months, the students would greet me on the path with “Doo-dah, Doo-dah”. We had the best milk in the world from the school’s fine Jersey cows. I would simply shake a quart bottle to make butter. There was always ice cream at the dairy, and because the boys learned animal husbandry, we could get meat, chickens and eggs from the proper department and vegetables from the huge class garden. Home repairs became classes for masonry, carpentry, plumbing and electricity.

We moved from the apartment to a beautiful stone house on campus. We had fig trees and a view of Mount Olympus. Our teenaged nanny was in heaven with 200 boys about, and she seized upon any excuse to take Nonda walking. We had dance classes on Saturdays, a shopping bus, and a beach bus for the mothers and children in the summer. I had little jobs teaching music at Pinewood, a school for foreign dependents at the edge of the Farm School campus and working on public relations and scholarships for the school. Occasionally I helped teach short courses in theater for people from nearby villages.

It was another lifetime. Actually, it was paradise.

Nicodemus and I visited the Farm School a few years ago. We saw the old house and Princeton Hall, which was the main school building. We visited the Orthodox church where Ed was christened and looked at the 20-ton rock the boys rolled from a neighboring town for a memorial to Theo Litsas, a saint who was my dearest friend; was, in fact, everybody’s dearest friend. I scooped up a little red dirt and brought it back home.

On Theo’s grave are these words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything is worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.

(Photograph is Nonda in the manger scene, 1958. Unfortunately, there were fleas in the hay and Nonda got bitten.)

A Symphony of Bells

A Symphony of Bells

Every loss tolls the bell of every other loss

so that what began as a solitary mournful knell

becomes a pealing of farewells:

The kiss on the lips,

the turning away at the dock,

“Must it be? It must be.”

“Can you see me?”

“For all we know, we may never meet again.”

She took her regal pose in a forbidden place,

looking perfectly entitled. We didn’t know

that she was telling us goodbye.

Later, she appeared in a dream,

but she was running away, not staying.

Mourning for a small animal

brings with it the ghosts of friends

dead, too busy, estranged or distant,

the helpless affectionate shrug

from the spirit about to depart,

reluctant, but having no choice in the matter.

The tolling of remembered farewells

becomes a symphony of bells.

Does it sing of love lost

or love endured

or something else entirely?

A Good Edumacation

Matthew, a former piano student, when asked what he was getting from Home School, said “a good edumacation”. When I heard that it now costs $50,000 a year to attend the University of California at Berkeley, I thought about what I learned at my (much cheaper) college back in the seventies.

*Other people are not necessarily like you (Political Science).

*Teach scales in parallel, not by key signature (Piano Pedagogy).

*Everybody—even you-- has to take the junior English exam.

*Freshman English is fun, even if they make you take it in your senior year.

*Weekend credential courses: Take lots of snacks.

*When you phone somebody with a question, get their name. Write it down.

*If you know some Greek, you can ace beginning Biology.

*When you graduate, take with your left and shake with your right.

I learned left from right, however, in kindergarten. Left was the windows; right was the restroom. I also learned how to pronounce “W”, which unlocked the code of written letters. I learned that it is important to be self-sufficient, like the Little Red Hen. I learned that you have to brush your teeth. I learned that it was OK to sit in the teacher’s lap.

I am sorry to say that at San Francisco State’s graduation, where they herded all of us down to the football field in our disposable caps and gowns, I got confused and took the diploma with my right hand.