This is probably one of my most favorite events of all time, not because I am for banning any books but because it tends to have the exact opposite effect on reading.
The list of Banned Books varies from year-to-year and while I am an advocate of age-appropriate distribution of certain books, I am also a failure at monitoring my own children when it came to certain books.
I hid The Color Purple by Alice Walked in my bedroom, deeming it highly inappropriate for my pre-teen daughter.
I didn’t miss it until she’d read it and was ready to replace it.
She didn’t know it was “banned” so she didn’t hide the fact that she borrowed it from me.
We rented the movie and made it a Girl’s Weekend of Great Movies and popcorn.
Banned Book = Teachable Moment.
(We also rented The Stepford Wives, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Birds.)
My son discovered Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess before he was 14. He used to quote Catch-22.
I read A Separate Peace by John Knowles every year throughout high school.
My dad borrowed Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger from me when I was 16. I was quite worried about what my dad would say when he returned the book (a library book) to me. All he said was, “You know that kid is in a nuthouse, don’t you?”
Banned Book = Teachable Moment with your parent.
I just set down Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston (Preston finished the novel for Crichton) in time for Banned Books Week. (It is not one of Crichton’s best and is written like a screenplay (not surprised to see it is already a film). Now that I have my hands free to read a really good novel, I think I will tackle one on the Banned Books List.
I think I will start with a scam on how not to white wash a fence and still get paid for it.
My life is so exciting that an update on the Invincible Kidney Stone is in order.
I’ve been dealing with this stone for a year and nine months now. It’s been through a lot with me, and I’m going to miss it’s constant companionship.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration.
I almost backed out of surgery this time. That is not an exaggeration. There is something fearful about consenting to go under General Anesthesia.
I am glad I did not back out.
I am also very grateful to the wonderful staff at Legacy Meridian Hospital and my urologist, Dr. Michael Gardner. The staff is professional, friendly, reassuring, and they are always washing their hands. I knew the team in the OR was a good team by the way they joked with each other in my pre-op room, and the back-handed compliment the OR nurse gave my surgeon (“quietly unassuming” was the terminology he used for Dr. Gardner, and I would say that is quite accurate). The anesthesiologist, Dr. Zack, was reassuring and humorous.
My husband hovered. ♥
I was scheduled for 2PM; the hospital had an opening and bumped me up to 10AM. Then they had a no-show that bumped me up a little more. I had to wait until 9:30AM only because the back-up plan wasn’t ready.
Yes, my surgeon had a back-up plan: if the laser didn’t work, he was going to try shock waves from the outside. Last year, he tried shock waves, but they didn’t work, hence the laser this year.
I dreamed something pleasant while under, but I don’t know what it was.
Surgery went like this: the laser scope went all the way up the narrow urethra tube to my kidney. There are several openings into the kidney, but only one where the stone – which should have passed a long time ago – was lodged. Last year, Dr. Gardner didn’t get this far because the tube contracted. This year, he discovered there was an abnormal growth of tissue blocking the tube where the stone was located. Cut the tissue out and, lo & behold! The stone had already been blasted into tiny pieces by last year’s shock waves! Dr. Gardner was able to remove all the pieces plus a new 2mm stone.
He put in a stent (“in case”) and gave me a whole bunch of wonderful drugs to take.
I was up on my feet (a little wobbly) and out of the hospital by 12:30PM; home and in my own bed by 1:30.
For unknown reasons, the number of people in the United States with kidney stones has been increasing over the past 30 years. In the late 1970s, less than 4 percent of the population had stone-forming disease. By the early 1990s, the portion of the population with the disease had increased to more than 5 percent. Caucasians are more prone to develop kidney stones than African Americans. Stones occur more frequently in men. The prevalence of kidney stones rises dramatically as men enter their 40s and continues to rise into their 70s. For women, the prevalence of kidney stones peaks in their 50s. Once a person gets more than one stone, other stones are likely to develop.
Doctors do not always know what causes a stone to form. While certain foods may promote stone formation in people who are susceptible, scientists do not believe that eating any specific food causes stones to form in people who are not susceptible.
A person with a family history of kidney stones may be more likely to develop stones.”
I fall into the category of having once had a stone, more likely to develop a stone. The good news is this: the first stone I had was passed in 1980, when I was 24 years of age. I am now in my mid-50’s, when the prevalence of stones hits its peak. To my knowledge, those are the only kidney stones I have ever had: the one in 1980 and these two.
To my hopeful mind and heart: this will be all I ever have to deal with. I don’t drink much soda pop or consume a lot of dairy, foods which traditionally have been associated with the formation of kidney stones (despite what the article says, they still do consider diet – my urologist quickly determined diet was not a factor for me).
Anyway, I am in a bit of pain, mostly from the little bit of cutting and the stent. I will be able to return to work on Monday. The stent comes out on October 8 or very close to that date. And I can move on to the next exciting part of my life (which is, thankfully, not very exciting, medically speaking. And I hope to keep it that boring!).
For your enjoyment: Master Sha’s Soul Song for the Kidney:
I really am not looking forward to the new season. It isn’t that I dislike Autumn – I love it. I don’t hate winter, either. I just hate long grey days full of foreboding clouds and very little sunshine. I am solar-powered and the lack of sunshine through a long Pacific Northwest winter can sometimes pull me down.
I am also not looking forward to the 22-mile one way drive in the dark and the rain. At least it will sneak up on me.
I have looked into public transportation. It would take me longer on public transportation than it does to drive the darn thing, plus I would have to walk from one bus stop to another in several places and wait for over 20 minutes in at least one other place. That seems rather inefficient to me. I prefer to be inside a warm vehicle and moving, even if moving is only at five miles per hour.
My car got in a wreck the other day. Just my car. It did this by itself, didn’t think to invite me.
I park in the very far corner of the parking lot at work, between two large V-8 extended cab pick-up trucks. There is usually an empty space on either side of my car (which is a very small car when you park it next to big trucks). Apparently, someone parked right next to me. And apparently that person did a pretty poor job of backing out of the space. S/he hit my tire and then scraped across my bumper. The scrapes are several millimeters deep.
At least it’s “just” my bumper. And my tire didn’t suffer any permanent damage, although I kept an eye on it all weekend. I’m just ticked because I know that whoever did it knew they did. And kept going. And didn’t leave me an “I’m sorry” note. I wouldn’t have taken it to insurance – it isn’t worth the piddly amount insurance would give me to repair my bumper to pristine. I just want an acknowledgement that whoever hit me, knew it.
I know they knew it.
And, yes, I am looking at the bumpers of other cars in the parking lot this week. I’m sure I’ll find bits of black plastic on someone’s car. They left enough paint on mine.
Something I love about Autumn: spiders.
Spiders spend the greater part of the summer hunting prey and getting fat. Of the bazillions that are hatched in the spring, only a few million are still living by the end of summer. The larger they get and the greater a target they become. By the time winter rushes in, the few million have been reduced by half by hungry birds. But they will have left behind egg sacs full of kazillions of eggs that will hatch into bazillions of babies in the spring. Kill or be killed.
Spiders have us in sheer numbers.
She’s a hungry one, this one.
I can tell you that she is probably an Argiope spider. She is definitely and orb-weaver (my favorite kind of spider). When I was a homeschooling mom, my favorite Science class to teach was taught in the Autumn: we could collect fat female spiders and make prints of their webs.
My mother was not a homeschool mom, but she loved the big Cat Spiders that made webs on our windows and the mailbox. She even left a note for our mail-delivery person: “Please do not destroy the spider’s web.”
The mail-delivery person (the wife of my high school chemistry teacher) left my mom a note: “I will try. But I HATE spiders.”
People fear spiders. Most spiders won’t hurt you. I get the heebie-jeebies if one crawls on me and I know it. My photos of spiders give me the heebie-jeebies. But I love them and all their eight eyes and legs all the same.
I am still watering. We have had a record dry summer here. No, we’re not (yet) in a drought, but it has been wonderfully dry and sunny with no end (yet) in sight. I have a few newly planted items that need the additional water. And a volunteer tomatoe that might actually give me eight fat, juicy tomatoes. I hope.
I love the glitter of light on water droplets.
Ah, Willamette Falls. Upriver dams, irrigation needs and a long, dry spell have left you… high and dry. I look down on the falls and am amazed at the amount of concrete that man has poured, trying to “improve” the falls and make the Willamette navigable to boats. There are locks on the far side.
I do not have photos of the locks, but they are of a very old design: Leonardo da Vinci designed the type of locks we have on the Willamette. It’s pretty cool to watch them work.
Occasionally, a stray boater drifts into the falls and goes over. When that happens, we’re always regaled with stories about how they “did not know the falls were there” or they “did not know how dangerous the falls were”. Seriously. It’s marked well upstream that there are falls and Willamette Falls are the second largest falls in the continental USA (by volume). Eighteenth in the world. That’s pretty impressive for some falls right here in downtown Oregon City.
I’ll save those photos to compare with when we hit flood season next year.
One more thing before I wander off… It has been almost 2 years since I started this crazy medical adventure with a painless kidney stone. You can read about it in my archives, starting here (but I wouldn’t bother – just fast forward to now where it is a simple kidney stone that defies surgery – so far). Last surgery was unsuccessful. the kidney stone remained firmly entrenched in my kidney.
This Thursday, my doctor is trying again. Instead of ultrasound technology, he is trying laser. There’s no guarantee. But at least we will have tried.
I am praying specifically for a painless resolution to a bloody kidney stone. Key word: painless.
Several Band-Tailed pigeons were sitting in the half-dead Lodgepole Pine that commands our front yard. Oh, heck: the Lodgepole is the only tree in our yard. All the bird feeders hang from it’s lowest branches. The fungus that is slowly killing it is hidden deep in its heartwood and the birds don’t know it is dying.
Most of the pigeons flew off when I opened my car door.
“What happened to you?” I asked as I stood beneath the tree, looking up at her. I assume it is a ‘she’. She didn’t answer me.
There are some common misconceptions about Band-tailed Pigeons. They are not the same as “Rock-Doves” or the common Rock Pigeon. Those are the birds you see perched on public statues, along bridges and overpasses; pooping on everything; cooing and begging for crumbs in public parks; and generally making a pestilence of themselves.
Rock Pigeons are introduced from Europe, and like the rest of us former-Europeans, they have edged out the native birds. But the Band-tailed pigeon is a native bird. It is much shier than it’s city counter-part and a very nervous bird at the bird feeder.
One bird posts as a sentry while the rest vie for a place on the feeder.
Apparently this bird did not have a spotter and she tangled with a neighbor cat. I found feathers in and around the disputed territory of my bird bath in the front yard.
I think the cat did not know how big of a bird the pigeon was. She escaped, with a few ruffled feathers and a mild case of indignation.
I think I should name her “Fluffy”.
Days pass. Birds come and go. Cats drink out of the coveted bird bath. Birds continue to use it, too.
There were several Western Scrub Jays at play in the bath today, but this is the only one I captured. He was having too much fun.
Water droplets everywhere and not a care in the world!
Nothing like diving into the bath. This guy wants water everywhere.
He closes his eyes and takes a long sip of cool bath water: ahhhhh!
There were several poses like this: he’d pause, look around and try to identify where sounds were coming from (like the clicking of my shutter) or just to make certain no cats were sneaking up on him.
Speaking of cats.
This guy is either parked under my car or curled up under the hydrangea. He doesn’t live with the other cats that come into my yard: the black-and-white ones or the orange-and white one that cross the street to drink from the bird bath. This cat lives somewhere on the same block I live on.
“Excuse moi? I live here. You, human – and your pestilence of canines, are the guest. Capice?”
Yeah, I love this cat: he always looks at me like that and hes very slow to move when I walk toward him. He figures we’re the interlopers and this is his yard. (Yes, I know he is a tom. I have actually petted him.)
OK, they would be better if I had a spotting scope, but dang! I got some serious photos today.
I was sitting in the sunshine, letting the summer’s last rays warm my aching muscles. The birds were ten feet away, in the shade. I zoomed in on them, but I had sunglasses on and I can’t “see” what the zoom lens sees. I just had to hope that the lens did what it should do: collect all the light and focus on the subject.
I don’t have to wait for film to be developed (although sometimes I miss that step). I had “instant gratification” instead.
Song Sparrow in the bird bath. I called it a Fox Sparrow in FB but I think it is really a Song Sparrow.
Amanda gave me an HTML snippet to use to link to all the other participating sites, but I’ll be darned if I am just plain not Web-savvy. WordPress used to be a little friendlier to the HTML ignorant, but they have changed their format and I am a little lost. But if you go to Amanda’s blog, you can find links to all the other bloggers participating. Happy reading!
For one day, we want to drown out negativity and celebrate the beauty and pride of women.
These days it seems that some people want us to be ashamed of being women. They want us to believe that we’re less: less intelligent, less important, less human. There is so much negativity out there. For one day, we want to flood the internet with positive messages about women.
I thought this subject would come easily to me, but I am lost in the whispers of all the voices of all the beautiful women I have known, some of them lost forever and some of them still living, still encouraging, still fighting the good fight. Some of them live in my own head.
I have decided to share the stories of two women who live in my head.
Here, in my little studio at the top of the stairs, I have created some strong women creatures, Zith & Mitzi. As I worked with the wire and recycled materials that were their bones and clothes, they whispered their stories to me.
Mitzi.
She whispered of a hard life, a life that sapped away at everything she loved. She lived in the sagebrush land. She liked the desert and the desert creatures, and she could often be found sitting on a rock shaded by a quaking aspen tree, next to a trickle of water. In her youth, she was a beautiful faerie with delicate gossamer wings and flowing long hair. She faced no hardships and no long winters of the soul, only the hopeful days of youth.
But winter came to her. The darkness that creeps into our hearts as we age and as we face ferocious opponents took their toll on her beauty. She had her throat slit by barbed wire. An enemy took a swipe at her head with a hatchet. Age ravaged her skin. Her hair thinned and receded. Her wings were plucked during an escape from a predator. She lost her lover, her family, and most of her contemporaries.She battled illness and defeated it.
But through it all, Mitzi never lost her dignity and her soul. She reached into her heart to find strength she did not know was there. A deeply spiritual creature, Mitzi found faith to rise above her circumstances.
Zith.
She is a Woodland Elf, just under 2′ tall. She strides through the woods and meadows with a purpose, silent as a hunter (she is a huntress). She is bold, outrageous, out-going. She is never at a loss for the right words and her heart beats with compassion for the down-trodden.
Confronted by an enemy or a bully, Zith is a fearsome adversary. She will not back down. Zith knows her heart. Zhe is compassionate and passionate, strong-willed and determined.
She is also wounded and broken. The walking staff is a cane. She has a gimpy left arm that she must use to support herself. Still, she takes long strides and rarely pauses for a rest. Rest is for another time. Rest is for when there are no longer hungry mouths to feed and injustices to battle. Rest is for someone else.
Zith and Mitzi. They aren’t living and breathing as we know living and breathing, but they are alive. As my hands formed them, women from my past whispered bits of their stories into my ears and the models became symbols for living women. They carry the spirits of many women in their hearts of recycled wire and cloth, dryer lint and silk fabric.
Isn’t that what we all are, anyway?
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Now go read Amanda‘s post. At the bottom of her post is a link to all of the other bloggers participating today. Maybe you will decide to join us and write something positive about women. If you do, add your link to Amanda’s linky on the bottom of her page. Or go like Celebrating Womanhood on Facebook.
It has been something of a frustrating weekend for me. I have these strange episodes where all my muscles just ache and I can’t find any energy to do anything and I end up doing very little physically. I happen to be in the middle of one of those episodes and it is extremely frustrating. The weather is nice and I want to get my garden winterized.
Or go hiking with my husband.
But instead of doing either, I curled up in the recliner for most of the weekend and read a book.
A good book, mind you, but all the same… I am frustrated by the tenderness and ache in all my muscles.
Harvey is frustrated with it, too. I took him for a walk every morning of the weekend and I kept my promise to him that each walk would be at least a mile long, but a mile isn’t long enough to wear him out and make him a tired but happy doggie.
He has this doggie dream of breaking into the area where we (normally) have a vegetable garden. He wants to catch the cats that he thinks hide in there. He wants to finish tearing off the boards on the fence and escaping. He wants to Run Free.
(what movie does that remind you of? Or, worse – what song from 6th Grade Choir does that remind you of?) (The latter question only applies to people of my age)
(Hint: it has to do with a lioness.)
Have news for Harvey: we have begun the process of rebuilding the Fence That Harvey Ate. It cost us $83.00, so far. I think it will stay under $100.00, but the point is… Harvey is not allowed into the veggie garden area.
Neither is Murphy, but he doesn’t sit and pine away along the fence like Harvey does.
I asked Harvey today what was the matter. Don’t we love him enough? Isn’t he happy here? Why does he always want to run away?
Last week he escaped again. I was struggling with the lawn debris container and the front gate. Harvey slipped between us and into freedom. There was a split second where my heart sank, I quit breathing, and a decision. I knelt down and commanded in my loudest voice (which is never very loud because I have an irritatingly small voice), “Harvey! Here!”
And there was a split second where Harvey vacillated between the Call of the Wild and his conditioning to Come when his owner kneels and points down at the ground with the word, “HERE!”
He came to me and I grabbed his collar. I praised him up one side and down the other, but I could see that he regretted his decision as soon as he was captured.
All I knew was that if he had gone, I would have let him. I hurt too much to give chase.
I am tired of hurting.
If this episode follows the cycle of episodes like it, in two weeks, I will feel fine. No aches, no pain, and lots of energy. In the meantime, I am down to just plain feeling like crud.
In good news: once it gets dark outside, Harvey just wants to stay home. I think he’s afraid of the dark.
August’s Blue Moon. I really lucked out: usually the moon is too bright and the digital camera doesn’t want to focus on the image, leaving me with a huge blurry light in the center of the photo. But there was just enough cloud cover to create a natural filter, and I walked away with three nice photos of the full moon on August 31.
I have spent half the summer trying to get a decent photo of one or another of the several hummingbirds I have finally coerced into my garden. This is one of my favorites. (Female Anna’s Hummingbird)
I can’t tell you how many missed opportunities I’ve had because the darn hummers seem to know when I am sitting in wait with a camera vs. when I am just sitting out in the yard. When I have no camera, the birds are plentiful and friendly, but when I have the camera – they all but disappear!
The male Anna’s Hummingbird. Different day.
I am thinking of putting up a sign next to the bird bath:
Jaci’s Bird & Cat Spa
Birds – free
Cats – $0.25
I doubt it will keep the cats away, but it would be funny.
I do not know what kind of fly this is. It is a fly: two wings. Diptera. My husband suggested it might be a Bot Fly (ewwwww) but I couldn’t find any matching images on the all-powerful Internet (which is not all-powerful but has more images for flies than my Field Guide to Insects by Audobon). It was a large fly: 3/4″ long. Almost as large as a small horsefly and not quite as large as a deer fly. I would have squashed it if it had been a horse or deer fly. They hurt!!
There’s a term for pieces of driftwood that resemble something living, but I cannot remember what the term is. That’s my “squirrel” piece of wood behind the white Chrysanthemum.
What to do with a rotting old stool. Support a Hollyhock, of course!
Why is there an oak tree growing in my lawn? Why is there an oak tree growing anywhere in my yard? I used to blame it on squirrels but I have caught the Scrub jay red-handed with a filbert in it’s beak. I have filbert trees in my yard, too, but we encourage those. The oak must go (although, I confess, it would be a pretty tree…)
Just takes a life time to grow.
(That was a stupid sentence and I know it: of course it takes a life time. The oak’s life time. What I meant was: it takes longer for the oak tree to grow than I have to wait for it to grow.)
Besides, Don will mow over it.
Bags of Hazelnut mulch waiting to be opened and spread around my garden.
Did you happen to notice that I used the term “filbert” and “hazelnut” in the same post? They were Filberts when I was a kid. Somewhere along the line, they became Hazelnuts. We made up a story about that: Filbert died, and Hazel inherited the orchard. So what used to be Filbert’s is now Hazel’s.
Sort of like “The Legend of Falling Rock.” The Legend of Falling Rock is by no means limited to West Virginia mythology: his signs are all over the West, too: “Watch for Falling Rock”, “Fallen Rock”, “Rocks on Road”. My little sister, my older brother and I spent hours in the back seat of the car spinning yarns about Fallen Rock as we traveled on vacations. But our dad always had the best versions.
Honey bees on the Sedum.
I’d love to know whose backyard honey bee hive we contribute pollen to. They should give us free honey for taking care of their honey bees. That’s what I think.
A beautiful anenome. I am so amazed! When I first planted anenomes in our yard, Murphy – the puppy, then – followed me around and dug them all up and ate them. They did not kill him, but I wanted to. This year, I planted a bunch and every single one of them came up and bloomed and thrived.
Murphy must be a wiser dog.
I am so fascinated with the dozens of bees, hover flies and bee flies in our yard! I sneaked up on this drone and started snapping away (digital photography – setting on “Sports” to capture the bees as they moved from flower to flower since the stupid camera argues with me over F-stops and film speed).
And this was a totally accidental capture: the bee on the move! You can see it’s trajectory and the stop-motion as it turned and faced the lens with a little frowning face.
Other than I am going to post a photo I took of the second August full moon, this post probably has nothing to do with blue moons.
Well, other than it was one of my mother’s favorite expressions. She usually said it with an expletive or two thrown in, as in “God-dammit, my dog runs away once in a blue moon and the neighbor is calling the cops?” (She really said that once. She had the leash in her hand and she was headed out the door to retrieve Mr. Tack – aka “Tacky” – from someone’s front yard. I really felt sorry for whatever neighbor it was who threatened to call the cops because you did not ever want to cross my mom. Never.)
My mom very rarely got angry. That was my dad’s job. But when my mom did get angry, everyone within reach blanched and the whole world seemed to suck in its breath.
Except when she was mad at my father. Then she just left the house with car keys in her hand and went out on some back road where she could push the car to it’s limit. It’s been told that she pushed the Dodge station wagon up to 120 miles per hour. I have no idea why she was mad at Dad that night but speed helped her calm down and she returned home a much calmer woman than when she left the house.
I never saw or heard my parents fight. The first clue I had of a disagreement between them was when she walked out the door, alone, with the car keys and the tires on whatever car we owned squealed a little as she pulled out of the driveway.
But I did see my mother angry a time or two.
My most vivid memory of her being angry was set in the sand dunes north of Winnemucca, Nevada. We were part of a four-wheel drive club that hosted sand races. The dunes north of Winnemucca are reminiscent of the Sahara or some exotic place: white-hot sand rising in dunes and dropping off suddenly, fluctuating in the winds, pushing the sagebrush and cheat grass back, always changing, moving, shifting.
There were designated areas for the dune buggies and jeeps that came to compete, and a designated safe place for small children to play in the sand. We checked our tennis shoes for scorpions before we put them back on. We got sun-burned and we ran like wild horses between “our” dune and the concessions stand where our mothers alternated their volunteer time. That was a big old school bus converted into a concession bus.
What I remember of the moment was that I was not on the designated dune, but was somewhere between the concessions stand and the kids’ dune and the area where the rigs were prepped and raced. I didn’t really care much for the races, I just wanted to be a wild horse.
My brother, however, was in the middle of the oil and grease and gears and exhaust and roar of engines. My dad raced. And my sister was too little still to care, so she played on the dune with the rest of the little kids who didn’t care.
Enter the laws of physics and a negligent (and most likely drunk) driver. There were no DUI laws in place in those days that put blood-alcohol limits at .08. Driving drunk was… common. Unregulated, for the most part.
This driver had a passenger. She was one of the mothers of the young kids playing on the hill and one of the mothers who volunteered in the concessions stand.
They drove up the sand dune where the kids were playing and they turned broadside to the kids as they attempted to arc around the kids and on over to the racing area. The problem with this is: the hill was steep. Dune buggies and jeeps roll over. They were broadside to a number of small and clueless children. And they stalled.
And my mother saw them. While everyone else who was looking on sucked in their breath and hoped against hope that the dune buggy would not roll and crush the children below, my mother was hot-footing it from the concession stand to a position between said children and the stalled rig. She moved so fast that no one actually saw her move from the stand to the spot on the dune below the rig, but everyone – I mean EVERYONE – heard her.
She was 5’1″ and weighed 95 pounds. The kids on the sand dune scattered. The driver in the stalled vehicle might have opened his mouth to protest or argue with my mom, but she had the upper hand. And she reamed him out. And his passenger. When she was finished with her verbal assault on their lack of intelligence, common sense, and his driving skills, even the racers on the track had stopped to listen. The jack rabbits, scorpions, rattlesnakes and horned toads pulled their heads back into their shady places and blinked out at this tiny woman in red-and-white striped capris pants in fear. The vultures cleared the heavens.
It was the most awesome, wonderful, powerful display of grizzly bear mama on the sand dunes in the late 1960’s.
It was a once-in-a-blue-moon show of righteous anger and everyone ducked. And when she was finished, the spectators applauded. The jerk that was stuck on the hill meekly backed back down. He didn’t have it in him to argue with the 5’1″ woman who just charged up the hill faster than Superwoman could fly.
So when my mom headed out the door with Tacky’s leash in her hand, swearing at the neighbor who was upset that the stupid Schnauzer had just planted some brown logs on his lawn… well, I stayed home. I didn’t want to see (or hear) what my mother was going to unleash on the neighbor.
After all, Tacky only escaped once in a Blue Moon.
Me? I went to the Oregon State Fair on Saturday. I wanted to just go to the fair and see the animals and exhibits, but my husband zeroed in on the fact that his hero, Joe Walsh, was performing Saturday night. He has a channel on Pandora that is titled “Joe Walsh Radio”. Not that I am complaining – they play a lot of Led Zeppelin on Joe Walsh Radio on Pandora. If I had been the one to set up the station, it would have been Led Zeppelin Radio.
I have Third Day Radio set up on there, too. But I’m the only one who listens to that & I do it when I’m cleaning house.
If I want folk music, I tune into www.folkalley.com because Pandora doesn’t “do” folk or bluegrass.
Anyway, back to what I have been up to. Before I knew it, Don had purchased tickets to Joe Walsh on Saturday at the State Fair. And then he seemed quite surprised that I actually wanted to go to the State Fair and check out the exhibits, too. Silly husband: there are horses at the State Fair!
Not any horse this year, but I noted that there were Gypsy horses and I have recently fallen in love with the breed. I just wanted to see them up close and all.
So we headed down to Salem at 3:00PM, thinking that we’d have about 3 hours to tour the fairgrounds before we had to find our way into the amphitheatre for the all-important Joe Walsh concert. I got to drive. Lucky me. Don is familiar with Salem and I am not. Fortunately, it was very simple, he’s a good so-pilot and the directions to the fairgrounds were well-marked. Parking was free.
Before we even got into the fair, things hinted at a sour day. And I am afraid that I fed into it. Something came over me: righteous anger, indignation, stupidity – I don’t know what. But there were three young men walking ahead of us, big burly youths between 17 and 19 years of age. The tallest and burliest was a strawberry-blond of some indistinct Nordic heritage with a very foul mouth. There were families with small children streaming along the same path; people of every color : pasty white, tan, brown, ecru, burnt sienna, chocolate, coffee. And this ignoramus has the bravado to call someone a “Nigger”.
If his skin had been black, I suppose I would have ignored it. but his skin was pasty-white and his companions were ecru. He didn’t mean the word in vernacular of good friends chiding each other: he meant it in the most derogatory terms. His voice dripped with hatred.
I muttered (loudly) to Don, “That is an inappropriate comment.”
Any swearing of that nature is inappropriate in a crowd, I don’t care what epithets you choose to use. Common sense should tell you that.
Red-head pretended he didn’t hear me and shot back some further derogatory description of people with skin of a different color than his. We were now entering the queue at the gate.
“Your ignorance shows on your face,” I replied – directly, this time because in my opinion the lines were drawn and Mr. 250-pounds of weight lifting anger had crossed a line that Ms. 135-pounds of flabby butter could not, in all good conscience, allow him to cross. My pasty-white flesh rose up.
To everyone’s relief, the three hoods left the queue and stomped silently away, completely (and hopefully, truly) abashed. I can’t stand bullies.
I apologized later to my husband who was just trying to keep his head down as the shots were fired.
It was stupid, I know – but if no one stands up, then who wins? Stupid wins. And I just can’t let stupid win.
I let it go. I wanted to have a great day, so I let it go. They left, everyone in the line let out a collective sigh (actually, I don’t think anyone was listening in, but that sounded good – didn’t it?), and we hustled right through with our tickets purchased online.
The Fair. Well, in a nutshell: the horses are inaccessible for the most part. A few are stalled where the normal fair goer can walk through, but most are kept in stalls beyond the chain-link fence around the fair grounds. How I had forgotten that detail is beyond me. DANG!
The only way to see the horses at Oregon State Fair is to attend the horse show in the arena. What horses you get to see depends on when you are there and the schedule. We got to watch four young horses vie for a ribbon in carriage pulling. I can only tell you that one was an Arabian, one was a draft horse of indeterminate breeding, and two were sharp-looking sorrel horses that could have been anything hot-blooded. The announcer never mentioned breeds.
There was a draft horse competition at 7PM, but we were headed to the concert by then. We did get to see several Clydesdale and Shire horses, but that was about it.
The cattle, sheep, goats and pigs filled a small building. There are more on display at any Clackamas County Fair. I suppose only the best of the best FFA and 4-H animals make it to the State Fair, but it just seems like there are too few when you’ve browsed the stalls at our local county fair for years.
We went looking for the 4-H exhibits and the General Exhibits. The guide to the Fair was ambiguous. The map wasn’t oriented to the North. The graphics did not outline all the entrances. We found all the commercial vendors trying to hawk their newest and bestest wares (stuff you can’t live without, you know), the Master Gardener’s display (banana trees outside? That’s pretty far-fetched in Oregon, even if we’re in a moderate climate), the bare and small 4-H exhibit, and, finally, a small corner at the very outer limits of the fair called the “Artisan’s Village” where local, home-grown Oregon artists demonstrated their trade and their wares. One blacksmith, one wood-carver, a couple potters, a couple jewelry makers…
We found the steam engines and the old car and jeep. We walked briskly through the extended tents of Midway traders selling cheap clothes, jewelry and miscellany made in China, Taiwan, Korea – anywhere but in Oregon. We braved a walk through the commercial exhibits (I pulled Don away from some hawker selling a grill cover you can fry eggs on). And we finally located the main exhibition hall only to realize we’d been there once.
The photography was great. Everything else was displayed county-by-county, presumably to give you an idea of what each county in Oregon is able to produce.
The preserves (canned goods) filled a 4×4′ table. All the jams, pickles, fruits, et cetera from across the entire state: one table top 4×4′. The quilts lined the walls, but I do not recall seeing any identifying tags hanging from them to tell you who/what/where.
Don asked if we could go see the poultry. YES! Certainly there would be a lot of birds! There’s an entire building set aside for birds.
Um. Yeah. Not. I figure – off the top of my head – that there were 40 birds. 12 bunnies. WOW. When I think of trying to make my way through the cages at the local county fair and all the variety of chickens… This was pitiful.
We watched the judging of a beef class (Red Angus). There was no announcer and you had to have some knowledge of agriculture to understand what they were doing. It was really very different from the fairs I have attended before where the beef was open applauded, lauded, and auctioned off to a local grocer or butcher. I’m not going to go into the ethics of raising beef for food (I am not vegan or vegetarian – I am an unashamed omnivore who likes red meat – sorry & yet I understand your position: is that OK?).
We finally found our way into the amphitheatre despite the looks on the faces of the people working the fair. We had a map. the map showed the entrances in different places than where we were directed. We downloaded the map from the Oregon State Fair web site. It was the worst map ever. Well, close. Someone needs to inform the map makers for the State Fair that ALL maps should be oriented to the North and that gates/entrances/exits should be *clearly* marked.
We were still in a very good mood, despite everything I have written. We found our seats in the upper tier. Not many people were seated around us. The grey-haired men who came to take their places around us were giddy with anticipation: the last time they saw Joe Walsh was in 1971. Over forty years ago. Don was in Junior High, so these men were older than him.
And Joe Walsh, that 64-year-old rocker?
He rocked. He rolled. He engaged the audience. He put on a show. He proved that he remains one of the best guitarists of our generation. And the audience sang all of his golden oldies with him.
Thank you, Joe Walsh, for a good show.
You pick. I can’t. It was all good, even if you are sick and tired of Life’s Been Good to Me… It brought the house down.
Jaci Dawn 