20th Century Woman

Birthday Roses from Jerry

Okay, this is a fad, but it was an easy way to construct a post.

I found this meme at The Other Side of Sixty, a blog I enjoy.  

I tried to get Jerry to do this one, but he said it was silly, even though he wanted me to go through all the possibilities. When it got to I should he said, “I should go to bed.”  I read him what I wrote and he said, “Well, that sounds like you.”  So here it is:

I am an old woman who was once a child, then a young woman.  I am small and smart and I still look pretty good for my age.

I want to stay healthy and to use my time wisely.  I want to go to New Zealand as often as possible.

I have a really nice house and 5 acres of woods on an island.  I have another house in Alaska.  I have furniture that belonged to my mother, my father, my aunt, my uncle, and my grandmother.  I have some stuff I got myself when I was young.  I don’t buy many things these days, because I already have so much.

I wish to keep some of what I have and to give away some, so as to simplify life.

I fear death; the death of those I love, and finally my own.

I search for objects I have just put down, and for things I put away years ago.

I wonder whether writing a blog is a sensible use of time.  I wonder why people hurt each other.  I wonder how long the economic downturn will last.  I don’t wonder about cosmic events or religion or anything supernatural, but  I wonder why people believe those things, and what they mean by “spirituality.”

I regret that I have lost track of many of the friends of my youth.  I regret that I didn’t do more to attend my aging parents and aunt.  There are other things I regret, but they are too painful to think about. 

I love Jerry.  I love my children.  I love some of my cousins.  I love my dogs and my cat.  I sort of love my sister.  I love opera and theater and painting and printmaking and drawing and I love words and I sort of love writing.  I love designing houses and building.  I love growing flowers.  I love sex.  I love cooking.  I love a glass of wine (if it’s reasonably good.)

I always listen to the news on the radio.  I always read the New York Times when I travel. I always vote.  I always stroke cats when they let me, and if they don’t I talk to them.

I usually read to Jerry at bedtime.

I am not religious.  I am not as thin as I would like to be, but most people think I am not fat.  I am not depressed.  I am not interested in pop culture or football or any team sport. 

I dance occasionally with Jerry in the kitchen.

I sing occasionally when I am sure I am alone.

I never am unkind to an animal.  I never eat turnips. I never have manicures or facials.  I never wear high heels though I used to when I was young.  I never take illegal drugs, though I smoked marijuana on 2 occasions when I was younger.  I never drink sports drinks.

I rarely tell lies.  I rarely yell at another person.  I rarely go to shopping malls. I rarely use make-up.

I cry at the drop of a hat.  I can’t even read something sentimental without tearing up.

I know a lot less than I used to.  I used to know a lot of science and biology, and a lot about art and some about literature.  I have forgotten so much.  But I still know a good deal about life.  I know a lot about men.

I need to get exercise and rest every day, otherwise I don’t feel good.  I need some new underwear and socks.

I should stop doing this.  I should paint the wall on the stairs.    

Tomorrow I fly away again, this time to Charleston, SC to visit my doctor son, my eldest child.  The day before a trip is always a restless one.  There are a hundred things I should do to get ready.  First of all, pack.  Then, of course, I should leave the house in order for Jerry, who will stay here and look after our 3 black animals – two toy poodles and a 15 pound cat.

Instead being diligent about travel preparations I started rummaging through old papers and files.  I was looking for a collection of poems that I wrote some years ago, thinking I might dare to put some of them on my blog.  For some reason I’m reticent about doing that.  I think they might be terribly bad poems.  Anyhow, it’s not really a problem since I couldn’t find them.

I found lots of other stuff.  Webster gives as a second definition of flotsam: (after the original meaning, floating wreckage of a ship which works) “an accumulation of unimportant, miscellaneous, and often disordered trifles.”  That pretty well sums up the things I was looking at:  old bills, divorce decrees, letters, diplomas, scientific papers that I wrote years ago, artist’s statements, term papers, drafts of my daughter’s novel, my kid’s report cards, vaccination records of long dead animals.  Enough. 

A couple of things I’ll share here.  They are excerpts from journals I started and abandoned.  I have many notebooks with a few pages filled followed by emptiness.

I kept a diary part of the time when my second husband, Willis, and I traveled around Europe for 6 months during his sabbatical.  We had 3 of  my/our children with us: Julie, 20, Debbie, 12, and Benjamin, almost 1.  We camped when we could, because we had little money. Here’s a diary entry, undated, but sometime in spring of 1973.

“We picked up our camping stuff in Frankfurt and drove to Heidelberg where we spent our first night camping.  Julie and I unpacked the new tent and began figuring out how to assemble it.  The weather looked threatening.  We ended up pitching the tent in a hurry in the middle of a thunder storm and poor Jules got sopping wet.  Benjamin didn’t like the tent and tried to crawl out under the flap. 

When the storm was over Julie and I walked down to the kiosk and noticed that all the other tents looked nice and neat, smooth and tight over their supports.  Ours was kind of wrinkled because we had poles of various lengths and had assembled them wrongly.

There was a high bank up to a highway from the campground.  During the thunderstorm a Mercedes Benz had crashed over the bank and landed upside down, demolishing 3 cars below in the campground. 

The camping place was pretty, on a canal with mountains rising behind it.  It turned out to be the noisiest place I was ever in.  All night long trucks roared up the highway.  Barges chugged continually down the canal, and it turned out that there was a nearby railroad station and an airport.  At 6:30 an air hammer across the canal commenced hammering.  However, the bathrooms were good.  Heidelberg was lovely – what we saw of it – brown, pinkish stone ornate buildings with lots of roses all around.”

In another unfinished notebook, 10 years later, this time dated Jan1, 1983, Clearwater Beach:

“I took a morning walk to buy this book and some fast film to use at the race track today.  The weather is just the same as it was last New Year’s Day at Bradenton Beach – gray and warm.  Warmer, perhaps this year and not so foggy.  Maybe warmer because of the hot spot in the ocean near the Aleutian  Islands which is causing us to have this peculiar winter weather.  I like this warm gray air. 

I like the motel here with its ambience of slow elegance from some earlier decade.  The 30’s perhaps.  It is well kept and quiet.  Full of Swedes all the time.  The streets and alleys around here are dilapidated – little shops not prospering but hanging on.  You don’t need to make so much money in a warm climate.  There are a lot of scraggly tropical plants and a light smell of garbage in the soft air.  Lots of old people. 

I walked down a short dead end to a trash littered beach on a small bay.  There was a float in the water with a big rumpled blue heron sitting on it, hunched and disconsolate looking.  I liked it all anyhow. 

A child rode by on a small bicycle, and a child in not so common a sight here.  He had long messy hair and looked too thick and muscular for his height.  He spat, and when I looked more closely his face seemed tight and hard.  I wondered if he was really a child.”

Now it is evening.  I have spent the day focused on bygone times.  I did go with Jerry for our walk with the poodles at around 4 this afternoon.  The weather was clear, and spring is coming.  And I cooked coq-au-vin, a whole chicken so there would be food for Jerry while I am gone. 

It’s finally time for me to go and pack.  I have to be up at 5:30 tomorrow and travel all day.  I’ll be back with all you ethereal friends of the blog world next week.

February Trees

February is the month when the light begins to change.  Days are longer and here in the Northwest there are spells of bright, clear weather.  The sun, still low in the sky, slants through the trees bringing their bare trunks and branches into sharp relief.  Bulbs push up and a few things actually bloom little yellow points.  Robins are here.

This month is birthday month for me.  Mine is the 22 nd.  When I was a kid that was also the birthday of George Washington and was a holiday, but these days they move it around so the holiday is anywhere from a week before to a few days after.  Of course I liked having a holiday on my birthday.  I knew it wasn’t about me, but I pretended it was. I never had to go to school on my birthday. And Senator Ted Kennedy was born on the very same day, in 1932, that I was.

My father was born in February, in 1904, the beginning of the century.  Three of my children were born in February of 1953, 1954, and 1957, the middle of the century.  By the time I was 25 I had three children, a boy and 2 girls.

This February is the 200 th anniversary of two really important birthdays.  By now everyone knows whose those are:  Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Abraham Lincoln was the great heroic and tragic figure looming darkly over the 19 th Century.  He was a master of politics, of words, and of righteousness.  He preserved this country, to become what it is.  He made it possible for Obama to be elected president.

Darwin gave the world the gift of understanding and of rationality.  Many have declined that gift, but fortunately it is completely accepted, with gratitude, by scientists everywhere.  Evolution is not only the factual basis of the study of life and living things, it also enables humans to understand their context in the living world.

Bruce Alberts is the editor of Science. He wrote in the  January 23 rd issue:

            Vast numbers of adults fail to take a scientific approach to solving    

             problems or making judgments based on evidence.  Instead, they

             readily accept simplistic answers to complicated problems that are

             confidently espoused by popular talk-show hosts or political leaders,

             counter to all evidence and logic.  Most shocking to me is the

             finding that many college-educated adults in the United States see

             no difference between scientific and nonscientific explanations of

             natural phenomena such as evolution.

Darwin looked at the evidence, and he followed it where it led.  I have tried always to view the world the way he taught by his example.  I have found it a good way to live.  It permits me to know what I can know, and to distinguish that from what I and other humans can’t know.

February gave me life, it gave me children, it gave me a country, and it gave me a way to think.  February is really a great month.