I Hab a Bad, Bad Code

"When I was sick, and lay abed,

I had two pillows at my head .."

Thus begins one of my favorite poems from Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," a book my mother read to us when we were small. There is a wonderful illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith, of a small boy lying in his bed, with a toy village placed her and there in his "Land of Counterpane." Oh, it is ever so cozy.

That's what it was like being sick when I was a kid. Oh, I didn't have a toy village, but there were books and crayons and no school. There was Campbell's chicken rice soup, soda crackers, ginger ale and Jell-o - and paper dolls. When I moved to the couch in the living room I could listen to the soap operas on the radio: "Vic and Sade,""Ma Perkins," and "Pepper Young's Family." Having a cold then was fun. Then.

Now it is a miserable, painful, messy, awful condition that seems to last forever until you can't remember what feeling well is like. The head aches, the nose hurts, the eyes burn and the sneezing and coughing go on forever and keep you awake at night. I've got all the herbal teas, the ginger ale, the crackers and chi ken soup and throat lozenges which provide only temporary relief. Right now I'm missing the spaghetti night at the First Christian Church, but I don't have much of an appetite anyway. My house is littered with snotty tissues and I want my mama.

I know it will end sometime in the near future, but that looks rather bleak after the rotten election results. Wothell is wrong with people? Has this country gone nuts? Even when the damn cold is gone, I'll still have to cope with living amongst people who think it's better to go back to the stone age of the Tea Partyites.

Well, I gotta go blow my dann nose.

Messing Around in the Museum

I just finished an 8 week class (one a week) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, called "Drawing in the Galleries." We started out with five students, but ended up with only three. We began in the Rodin Sculpture Gallery, which is located in a new part of the museum; it's basically a glass box, so the lighting is perfect. Unfortunately, their Rodin collection is not particularly distinguished, but it was a good exercise to begin with, if a tad boring.

We worked with charcoal the first two sessions, working in black and white to get a sense of values. Since most of the time we were in the new East Wing, we were only allowed to use pastel pencils. Before all the new construction, students were able to bring in paints and regular pastels, but now everything is so new and shiny that such messy media are verboten.

We drew in the Egyptian exhibit, the African exhibit, the Impressionist gallery, the Post Modern gallery and the American Impressionist gallery. Along the way, we had to do quick timed drawings of some sculptures by various artists. I think we all liked the more modern galleries best, although the instructor had promised us the Dutch Masters, too, but we never got there. There's a Franz Hals there that I wanted to try.I discovered a Gabriele Munter which I'd never noticed before, so I did that one. I don't know how long they've had it, but I was glad to see it.

At the end - yesterday- we had a general critique and the instructor chose several of our things to hang in the student gallery, just down the hall from the classrooms in the education wing. But it's a hall which visitors to the museum have to pass on their way to the main galleries, so we can all say that we have work at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mine are a drawing from the Degas "Frieze of Dancers" and an African mask used in a circumcision rite. Needless to say, it does not portray a happy face.

Above are the originals of the Gabriele Munter painting and the Picasso from the museum and at the bottom are my copies, more or less. You can see that even copying what you see, it's the real artists who knew what they were doing.

To Get Into My Yard

This past Saturday was the last day of the market for the year. Oh, they will have an indoor market for a couple of days in late November with Christmas goodies - cheese, jellies, soap, maple syrup, but the fine summery things will have to wait until next year. My friend Susan was here for the week-end, so we went and bought peppers and kale and squash. I had already gotten a lovely pie pumpkin the week before, in hopes that John would make one of his fine pies. He has been too busy, so the pumpkins is sitting on the counter with a couple of butternut squash which one of us will make into soup soon.

When Susan and I got home from the market, I heard the unmistakable sound of a clucking chicken. Susan thought it was probably a goose flying over. It seemed improbable that that a chicken would be anywhere in the vicinity of my backyard, but it sounded like a chicken to me.

Then, when I looked out of the kitchen window after I got in, there WAS a chicken, a beautiful white, fat chicken strutting around the backyard, pecking at the ground, and checking out John's truck. A live chicken!

There has been move in this town to allow people to keep chickens. It's all part of the urban farming movement. City council is fighting this move, claiming that rats are attracted to chicken coops on account of the feed. To say nothing of hungry coyotes after the rats.

When I was a child in Atlanta, many folks kept chickens in the city. Hearing roosters crowing in the morning was common. I'll never forget when I was at a playmate's house (her name was Dorothy Crawford and she had a big brother named Beau) and their servant came out with an axe, grabbed one of their chickens, took it to the chopping block and decapitated it with one blow. The headless creature then hopped about, spurting blood everywhere around the yard for a while before collapsing and being taken into the kitchen for dinner. The family's, not the chi ken's. Cold blooded murder! I was six, and I can still see it. We never kept chickens, and bought ours already dead, so I never saw that again.

So anyway, we had this white chicken in the back yard, strutting and clucking and no idea where she had come from. Susan and I went off to see "Waiting for Superman, an excellent documentary, and when we came back, the chicken was gone. John went around the neighborhood and found her owners, who apparently are raising chi kens, and have been doing so, in spite of City Council's refusing to allow it. Good for them. If we start seeing well-fed rats or coyote we'll know whom to blame.

So the chicken is back with her sister hens, but she did cross the road to get to our back yard, which answers that age old question. And I hope she never gets her head chopped off for some one's dinner.

Out With the Old, In With the Fake

There is a trend here in Ohio, where a frenzy of mall building has destroyed the down towns of small cities. They are building fake small towns, Disney-esque in appearance, after tearing down the existing old buildings and replacing them with psuedo-Victorian/Federal brick-fronted "shoppes." These picturesque villages contain no hardware stores, no little pharmacies, no dry cleaners or other mainstays of small towns. Rather, they are full of upscale clothing stores, chain stores, over priced ice cream shops, and various restaurants. And more upscale clothing stores. There are paving stones in the narrow streets and cast iron street lamps (Or maybe they're made of plastic designers to look like cast iron.) There is some on street (or maybe I should call it on-lane parking) but mostly the places are surrounded by huge parking lots, so that one can approach the "village" from a distance, across the non-verdant fields of asphalt. We're not in Hardy country, in spite of the vaguely British names of these places.

My small town, which used to have an actual downtown in which one could find just about anything one needed, has long since died from defection to the many malls surrounding us. We still have some nice old buildings, in which some enterprising folks have started small retail businesses: a book store, a gift shop featuring well-crafted items, a chocolate shop...and bars, and bars and three or four tattoo parlors.

In the last year or so, a gazillionaire has managed to put up a string of fake Federal style building fronts over a group of nondescipt buildings and brought in some boutique-y businesses which are now the pride of the Chamber of Commerce. The effort is to get the students from the university to come into the downtown and shop. He is apparently unaware that students already come downtown in droves to drink and get tattoos. Many of the service businesses which students used to need in town- banks, post office, restaurants - are available on campus, along with stationery, CDs, and periodicals.

Now, with stimulus money as a boost, the town and university fathers are in the process of realizing their dream of having a conference center and hotel right downtown, along with a multi-modal facility for buses, bicycles and car parking. A conference center! A hotel! Now hundreds of people will come to Kent for conferences and stay in a state of the art hotel! There also will be an enormous visitor center right on the by-pass, right in the city, for the university! An esplanade wends its way through the campus right into the downtown, to ease the way for students seeking to get a tattoo! Dozens of houses will be torn down for this symbolic yellow brick road to the many bars.

Right now the hotel/conference center site, one whole square block, is a desolate area of earth scraped over what used to be buildings and houses. I waited too long to get a picture of what it looked like for several weeks, when all you could see were the remains of foundations and basements of what used to be there. It's all surrounded by chain link fences. Building will start soon. There will be retail located in the hotel and the multi modal building - tattoo parlors, bars, maybe a pool hall or game arcade.

And when it's done, we'll have jolly crowds showing up to cheer for our half -baked football team, our pretty good basketball team and who knows what else. The theme is red brick and a mish mash of architectural styles. The buildings will be good for about thirty years at the most and some ambitious developer will tear them down find a new use for the land - maybe a mega tattoo parlor with attached bar.

On the other end of town, the landscape has been made barren in order to build an enormous bridge supposedly to ease traffic over the river. Unfortunately, the design will complicate matters severely, especially since the no-planning committee approved the construction of a mega service station right on the corner by the traffic light, where two main roads come together, both of which are nightmarishly busy during rush hour. It's one of the few ways to get out of town on the north side and there are thousands of commuters who use that intersection every day going both ways. Oy weh!

I don't expect things never to change, it's just that the people in charge around here have no vision, even though they think they have. They still be live in bricks and mortar retail as the salvation of their town, rather than look at the future and how people's needs will change. So they tear things down.

Changing Seasons, Changing Clothes

It's the time of year to get out the fall and winter clothes and put away the summer stuff. Twice a year I go through the same chore, and the Amvets, collectors of other people's cast-offs, fill their trucks with things that people don't want anymore, including clothes that I am just plain tired of. At my age, I don't usually wear things out. I just get really, really bored with my clothes. (Why do people say bored "of" these days? That's what my kids said when they were little, but now I hear adults using that phrase.) This year I got particularly bored with some things I've had for about 6 or 7 years. I just don't want to wear them any more, ever. They're not worn out, but my interest in them is.

Now this is the sort of thing about which I feel guilty, on the order of that thing that mothers used to day about starving children in China. It just seems so dog in the manger.Well, what happened this year is that I kept getting theses Land's End catalogues which had some things I have been trying to find forever, namely, long-sleeved cotton tee shirts which are long enough for my torso, with a crew neck, and all in the most terrific colors. For the last ten years they have made the kind that would hit my around the belly button, with V-necks, boat necks, or scoop necks. I found more at Kohl's and, and old fashioned cardigans, without ruffles or any fancy buttons. Bean's and Land's End don't even have that kind. So I had to buy a lot of new things that I won't be bored with for some time to come. And the beauty part is that all of these things were ON SALE!

Around the house, I usually wear favorites things, like a couple a really nice long sleeved undershirt-y weave things that I bought at Kmart years ago and old blue jeans.

As you can see, I am not a high end shopper. I do clean up good, in the event that I have to attend something where a Kmart undershirt-y thing would not be appropriate, such as wedding or funerals.

The Cleveland Orchestra concerts start this Friday and I'll wear some of my new duds. Nobody gets too fancied up for these matinee concerts, since most of us are geezers who need sensible clothes that don't bore us.

A Diverse Rite

Last Sunday was the day of the memorial service mentioned in my last blog. It was quite moving and a memorable memorial. First of all the church, St. Colman's in the near west side of Cleveland, is a most impressive space. Built in the early 20th century for Irish and German immigrants, it has the grandeur of a European cathedral. It was one of the many diocesan churches which was to be closed by order of the bishop. However, the pastor and the parishioners refused and fought with and won over the bishop. It is proudly the Irish church of Cleveland. I can't imagine how it could possibly have been closed. So now it still stands and serves a mixed congregation, since that area is now largely Latino.

The service started with a group "Om," a sort of audible breathing in and out which filled the space with a living hum. Lovely! Then there was a slide show of the life of the deceased (hereinafter designated as F.) presented by his brother, great family pictures of the two of them as children with their parents and as young adults. There were testimonials by F.'s friends, stories of a talented and witty person. In fact, one of the reasons the service was held at the church is that F. had written a story for the local newspaper about the church and its congregation and the need to preserve it. He had been a writer, a historian and a volunteer for many local historical sites, including the famous Playhouse Square, which is one of the highlights of downtown Cleveland.

One of his friends and Emily and John sang "If I Had a Hammer," a song he had like and everyone sang along. Sounded so fine in that great place.

The Buddhist part included some candle lighting. The Buddhists present were all white suburbanites wearing saffron robes. There was a lot of chanting in which we were invited to participate. Even though it was all written in the program, I had a hard time following it, and jut sort of did some Sha Nah Nah noises, which fit in with the general hubbub. It sounded good since there was a built-in reverberation there.

The final music piece was a kind of Jewish mourning song, sung by the folk singer along with a violinist, again the congregation joining in on the chorus. Even though I did not know F. well, I think he would have liked his send-off. In fact, it was a literal send-off in a way. The final ritual was the clapping of our hands three times while the Buddhist leader told F. that he could go now.

I like that idea . In fact, I thin it would be a good way to get rid of guests who stay too long. Clap! Clap! Clap! Off you go!

Ecumenical Farewell

Emily is home for the third time in six months. In a previous blog I wrote about the tragic loss of our friend's brother. The friend came to our family through Emily, and he is one of her closest friends, so she came back to the U.S. of A. to be with him as he goes through this time of mourning. He has planned a memorial for his brother this coming week-end which promises to be a very interesting, as well as sad, event.

The deceased was a non-observant half-Jewish Buddhist. He had been very active in the Buddhist community in the Cleavland area, and there has already been a Buddhist memorial, so this one will be more ecumenical. There will be chanting, tabla drumming, incense burning, and various testimonials, one of which will be by a rabbi who is also a member of the Buddhist Kirtan in Cleveland. John and Emily will be singing a folk song with a friend of the deceased. There will be audience participation in the chanting and some rhythmic clapping.

All of this will be held in a beautiful Catholic church in an ethnic neighborhood on the near west side of Cleveland.

So I guess all the bases will be covered and the soul of the departed will be at peace at last. And our friend will be surrounded by people who care about him.