Cultural Disintegration - Part 2.

Part 2 of Cultural Disintegration

The Media in the Middle

In my university days, we used to ask the question:  “Does reality create the media; or, does the media create reality?”  Please note:  We have more television stations available, and yet the content has become increasingly more violent, sensual, and inane.  Has our culture modeled those destructive behaviors first, or has the media imposed those mores on us to shape our worldview?  Even in the 1970’s my mother could not mention the word “Hollywood” in a sentence without using the phrase

“sold their souls to the devil” as well.  The terms had become inextricably linked.  I don’t think she made a mistake.  For all the good that television could have done us: the joy of learning our ABC’s with Big Bird and his friends; the vicarious adventure of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom; and the open doors to other lands with National Geographic, we have mostly left those in the dust.  We’ve traded in education and pleasant viewing for violent crime scenes, complicated, immoral relationships, and judgmental, biased, divisive political ranting.  Somehow most of society feels they cannot survive without this intellectually and spiritually lethal viewing menu.

That being said, people have come to view “having” television on the most basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  I remember thirty years ago standing in a meeting with a stranger next to me making small talk.  I said to him, “Oh, I don’t even OWN a television.  I don’t have time.”  He flatly stated:  “well, I don’t think THAT’s right.”  Don’t misunderstand the tone of voice – he wasn’t saying that I deserved a tv and should have one.  He was saying that I was violating Some Unwritten Cultural Rule by NOT having one!  I found his response confusing. 

Lately, when I am shopping in the Big Box stores and the satellite dish network guys standing at a demo table reach out and ask:  “How’s your cable company treating you?”  I get the biggest charge out of answering:  “I wouldn’t know; I don’t have one.”  Inevitably, the guy is in his late 20’s or early 30’s in a dress shirt and tie and leans forward to ask:  “Well who provides your television service?”  And I respond:  “No one.  Do the math.  I’m saving a minimum of $50/month times 12 months times 30 years.  Plus I’m living MY life, not watching someone else’s.  How much money did I just SAVE?!”  Most likely, it’s the first time for him to do math that high since school, and he chuckles.  I continue on to the dog food aisle, and we are all done with my comedy for the evening.   Yes I do catch a movie or watch dvd’s but nowhere near close to the hours that other people who have paid for service do. 

The Media is about the business of creating an alternate reality.  And that reality is generated in the hearts and minds of the people who are writing the script.  Case in point, I’m watching a tv series on dvd at present and this is how it goes:  Season 1 is flawless, engaging, and has spectacular character development and story lines.  Season 2 they throw in a few curse words (which is offensive to people of faith), and begin the moral decline of the main character with a woman in the hidden stacks of a famous library.  If you want to forget that you just saw that, wait a few episodes and they will reference that rendezvous again.  Then they will take the story line of one of the episodes of Season 3, and film a good 15 minutes of it in a strip bar – and you will see, albeit over the shoulders of the main characters, what the inside of a strip bar looks like… which is a level of voyeurism that decent people prefer to avoid.  It leaves us asking two questions at this point:  What next?  And/or do we give Season 4 a shot for the sake of otherwise “good” content?  The decision is still up in the air.  Where will the line be drawn on what taboo subjects will be shoved in the face of the viewing population?  Yeah, and the one you’re thinking of, they went there too.

No one thinks of the children amidst us anymore –or their innocence.  The Media did not hold back letting us know what the devil in the blue dress did with the man who was holding the office of President of the United States a few years ago.  I was sitting in McD’s having a meal when I heard some details overhead and all I could think of was, “Did I do something to deserve this news in the middle of my meal?”  and, “Wow am I glad I am not a parent eating with little kids who want to know what that term means.”  All of a sudden the entire country was privy to the immorality of the man who OWED IT TO US to be a decent human being with integrity.  He had the highest post in the country and shamed us all.

Currently as I write this a once beloved comedian is having his dalliances strewn about the media’s airwaves.  Just reading the brief description of the case in the newspaper made me nauseous.  I find it hard to believe the woman involved was truly a victim if she put herself in the location with him alone where this could happen.  What did she think they were going to do, drink tea and shoot the breeze?  And, I’m sure that went over well with his wife.  Not.  I am moving towards thinking that the proceedings of trials in the courtroom should now be totally restricted from public knowledge.  If a person is accused of evil and acquitted, it is still difficult to re-build their damaged reputation even if all the details are sealed.  If a person is found guilty and goes to jail, we don’t really need to know how bad they were.  The common city newspaper, both in print and online has basically dropped to a reading level about sixth grade or lower and the content level is on par with the tabloids.  So really, when our city paper goes through the process of evaporating, I say:  “Good riddance.”

Years ago, when the clergy scandals were plastered all over the newspapers, people got the impression that everyone in ministry was a potential perpetrator and that all the accused were automatically guilty.  I have a few friends who are in the clergy.  One of them shared with his congregation that he would be wearing civilian clothes until the emotional climate soothed a bit.  He explained that he had been wearing his clerical blacks and white collar in a grocery store and a woman physically grabbed her kid and pulled the child dramatically to her as if to avoid a kidnapping.  My friend is a gentle soul with integrity and a kind heart.  This action hurt him, but he understood.  As he spoke to us that morning in church he held his left hand up high to the left with a fist grasping an imaginary knot and said, “I have a solution:  a rope and a tree.”  Wow, someone who shared the outrage of the common person.  This is what people need to know:  it is not clergy vs. laity, a Them vs. Us.  It is good against evil.  We have to be clear what that looks like. 

In another case, a man I know was accused and arrested.  I read the 

article and my eyebrows lifted:  three kids in the same family, really?  First and foremost I can say from my conversations with him that he was a man of very high integrity and deep spirituality.  There was hardly even a shadow when he walked in sunshine, he was that solid of a person.  Secondly, he was handsome.  And it did not take much imagination to think that if an unscrupulous single mother made a pass at him he would have deflected it…. And she could attempt to “get even” by accusing him.  And I say this because if you study predators, they are not stupid enough to prey upon children in the same family because it ups the likelihood that one of them will “spill the beans” and the truth will be out.  So that being said, I wrote to the author of the news piece and told her:  “You are guilty of Trial-by-Media.  Every man is due his day in Court.  That is the American way.  You have maligned an innocent man.”  Her response to me was brief:  “Do you know something I need to know?”  See, she was not about truth, she was about more dirt to sell newspapers…. Newspapers which are barely worthy to have my pet birds crap on them.  

At which point will the Media be held accountable for detraction, slander and sensationalism?  When will the people stand up and say:  ENOUGH.  We want truth, not spin.  We don’t want details and sensationalism so you can sell your product.  We are done with you destroying the innocence of our children in the name of avoiding be censored.  We want you to serve the community, not undermine its values and malign its leaders.  We used to have a body or Commission that over-saw such things.  They haven’t ruled on anything in so long, I have forgotten what we called them.  Now it is up to the common people to organize leagues of decency to make sure that the Media doesn’t continue to make Itself Grand Justice and Jury.  They have stepped way out of their bounds.  We need to tie them back to the dog house where they belong.

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Cultural Disintegration - Part I.

Cultural Disintegration

I’d like to make the case that I think we are seeing the end of civilization as we knew it twenty years ago in the United States of America.  I think there are three indicators to this unfortunate reality and I would like to share some thoughts on each of them for your consideration.  

The indicators are these:

                Language/communication

                Media

                Morality

The Moral Shift

Thirty years ago in the United States, cultural commentators began to say that we were seeing the “breakdown of the nuclear family.”  Now, we don’t even know what the nuclear family is!  Perhaps if you asked kids in high school what that term means, they think it is people who live with the fear of nuclear warfare!  (Yes, we unfortunately have that concern too.)  But by “nuclear family” we are referring to a family unit that was comprised of a Mother, a Father, and any children under their roof.  The identifiers for nuclear family were:  eating a common meal together daily, going to worship on the weekend, typically a father being the bread-winner, and the mother being at home caring for the kids … at least until they were of school age.  The kids were told:  “Dad has his job; Mom has her job (taking care of YOU!); and your job is to do well in school.  If you give the teacher any static in school, we will give YOU static on your backside at home.”  There was an order to life and it tended to produce orderly results.

Now, all that has exploded.  Families eat on-the-run which can account for the proliferation of fast food joints across the country.   Some of that is because in the Land of Available Prosperity, you are either working to get “stuff,” or you are trying to enjoy the very “stuff” you worked so hard to achieve – be they vacations, participation in sports and lessons of various types (horseback riding, pottery classes), etc..  Our very eating habits betray the cultural shift.  For those who rely on fast-food (like me!) to make it through the week that is too busy to include real cooking, our bodies begin to look like what we eat:  fat.  For those who manage to eat healthfully, so much of their time and money is sucked up in that enterprise.  It takes some effort to shop and eat the right way – and to a certain degree, we are coming to see that as a luxury of the more solidly middle & upper class echelons.  

To the point:  blue collar workers and the under and unemployed struggle to eat correctly due to deficiencies in both economics and education, and the demographic of Overweight America is lodged more obviously in their arena.  Who ever knew that the What and How of eating was so critical to the health and relationships in our culture?!  In addition, people seem so preoccupied with every other thing of life – work or leisure, eating or dieting, survival or illness, etc. – that their spirituality has all but swirled the drain.

It seems that less than 60% of people who identify with a religion actually show up for services on the weekend.   (data gleaned from observing local churches’ quantity of registrations vs. actual persons in the bench.)  The figure is probably alterable relative to which religion we are assessing, as while Catholic and mainline Protestant Church attendance is down, evangelical Protestant churches are up – arguably, it could also be a shift of where those Catholics and Mainliners are going besides staying home.  As for the general drop off in attendance, we should ask:  What are some of the reasons this happened?  As one segment of the intelligentsia created a false dichotomy between religion and science, anyone who wanted to be thought of as “smart or educated” probably felt they couldn’t show up in a house of worship…. As if people of faith are necessarily cultural ignoramuses.  

Or maybe it was those problematic ten commandments – if they had been ten suggestions, would they have lasted as long before the pseudo-cultural-liberators demanded they be torn off the walls of our courthouses and schools?!  Yet if you look at every single one of those ten commandments, they seem to be the basis for the survival of a moral and thoughtful human community.  Could their damning by so many be the very reason that we as a civilization are imploding?

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Same Genre, Different Specifics

The Same Genre, But Different Specifics

We were swapping stories, as my deacon friend and I often do.  We were talking about “God-incidences.”  A recent author also referred to these occurrences as “God-winks” – where something happens that you just know is a little nod-and-wink from the Father upstairs who truly doesn’t miss a trick.  He told a great story of something that happened recently; I chuckled and then told a similar story with the point:  for him, those kinds of things happen in a reasonable way.  For me, those kinds of things always have a strange, perhaps humorous, twist to them.  I’ll let you decide.

The deacon was speaking with another church staff member in the parking lot.  A young distraught woman came across the tarvia with a bag in her hand.  Deacon went out to meet her, presuming she had some temporal need (ie. food bank access) that he could facilitate.  But when he spoke directly to her and she shared her story of a critically ill family member, he realized that she had come for support that was more spiritual in nature.  She reached into the bag and produced a rosary and simply asked that it be blessed so she could give it to her family member.  Deacon prayed with her asking for consolation for the family member who was suffering as well as the people who were affected by this sad situation.  The young woman expressed her gratitude, “Can I give you a hug?” and both walked away from the interface feeling buoyed-up.

So the ministry interface he had was like this:  broad daylight, visibly observed by another team member, situation was clear on how to proceed and no churchy-rules or regulations were bent or broken in the process.  And then there’s the way that my ministry stuff unfolds:  in the dark, abandoned by any sense of personnel back-up in case the person tries to kill me, and I have to use what little good judgment I have left to decide if/how I can help the person. 

I pulled into the church parking lot at 9pm when it was quite dark, but the autumn air had that warm-yet-crisp feel to it.  I was on my way into the chapel for an hour of prayer.  As I almost always do, I make a visual scan of the area before stepping out of my vehicle.  I see a distraught young woman perhaps in her mid-to-late-twenties clutching a stuffed animal in her arms.  She was looking around as if not knowing what direction to walk.  I stepped out of the car and onto what is now the Stage of God.  Somehow I get the feeling He is watching and orchestrating this to see how I am going to respond. 

“How can I help you?” is really the only question to ask at this point.  She steps toward me, still looking uncertainly behind her across the street toward the rectory where the priest works during the day.  She hesitates and then holds forth the stuffed animal.  I want to say I think it was a dinosaur or a bear of some kind.  “I wanted to see if I can get this blessed for my friend who was just put in the nursing home with only a few weeks to live.” 

I’ve been Catholic all my life.  We typically bring things like rosaries, crucifixes or religious statues or holy pictures to a priest for a special blessing.  The user thereof may then find the object helps them draw closer to God Himself.   

So we’ve got a few irregularities in this current scenario:               #1 no priest present or attainable at this hour (unless you are in the hospital and the priest is called in to give you the final anointing blessing); #2  I’m not ordained clergy to be handing out blessings officially like priests and deacons are; and #3 the item to be blessed is not the norm.  So, I’m thinking, wracking my brain, for what I know about the Scriptures that will justify this break with protocols that I’m about to do.  And the lightbulb over my head pops on and I remember that people brought things like handkerchiefs to St. Paul to bless and then they’d take them home and lay them on the sick person as if the handkerchief represents the presence of the holy person doing the praying.  Those people got healed.  So, this young woman is giving me this stuffed animal that she just picked up at the corner store and is going to bring to the dying woman in the nursing home.  At that point, I started seeing the path forward.  I invited her to step into the church.

I took some holy water and made the sign of the cross on the stuffed animal.  Then I asked her if I could pray with her.  She said yes.  I prayed for healing and consolation in her life, and for the Lord to bring His love to her… then the tears came …. she had given over some of her emotional load and went away feeling a little better.  That’s what I had hoped would happen.

As she walked out the church door and I settled into a time of quiet prayer for my own re-charge, I mused how The Leadership would view me doing this – me, a non-ordained woman just following the leading of the Spirit to help heal His people.  Another Bible passage popped into my mind – where a prophet of God was going in the wrong direction and the donkey he was riding refused to move.  He began to beat his donkey, which then buckled to its knees and spoke to its owner:  “Do not beat me.  I can see the angel of God standing before us blocking this path.”  And I got the message:

If God will use a talking donkey to straighten out a prophet in the Old Testament who was going in the wrong direction, why can’t he use me to help His distraught child find peace?

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Do You Know the ....

“Do you know the Muffler Man, the Muffler Man, the Muffler Man?  Do you know the Muffler Man that lives on Drury Lane?”  Oh wait, wrong words.  It’s MUFFIN man.  But I want to talk about Muffler Men.  No, not guys that work at the garage.  Muffler Men is the technical term for those tourist trap markers that are scattered throughout the country. 

Ever since my childhood, I have always been fascinated by these tall fiberglass statues that were built for the mere purpose of attention-getting.  I remember the one painted like Uncle Sam near a car dealership. There was a replica of Abraham Lincoln somewhere in New England if I remember correctly.  There is a Paul Bunyan up in the Adirondack mountains.   An Amish giant man is in the heart of Lancaster, PA, as well. There’s not much to do about them other than look at them and wonder whose idea it was to put it there, how long it will last, and why do I just love seeing them. 

Do I have a favorite?  YES.  Lucy the Margate Elephant is my favorite.  On my first journey to find Lucy, my friends and I were leaving our annual beach vacation and driving up the coast to find her.  Occasionally, there’d be a landmark sign indicating the general direction toward finding her.  However, after about 20 minutes of rambling up the shore roads, one of my dearest friends snapped and said:  “IF we don’t FIND THAT ELEPHANT in MINUTES we are just GOING HOME.  I haven’t seen my husband in four days!”  Well, I hadn’t seen my husband in longer than four days …. Because I’m NOT married…. I’ve NEVER seen my husband, so I was happily distracted to ramble around looking for a giant elephant.

I stopped a policeman who was, oh, probably 14 years old as they all seem to be in the beach towns.  I asked him where the elephant was.  He looked at me like he was more concerned with where the Psych Ward of the local hospital was for me.  Heck, I’m used to that look by now.  He isn’t the first; he won’t be the last.  When he drew a blank on Lucy the Elephant, I just asked, “How do we get to Margate?”  “Oh, just go over that bridge.”  He pointed and the bridge was visible up the street (to my great joy).  My friends and I jumped back in our vehicles and headed over the bridge, around a bend and BAM!  There she was:  Lucy in all her glory…. On a lot the size of a postage stamp.

Lucy was built by land developers as one of three elephants in New Jersey to attract attention.  One elephant was in Coney Island; unfortunately it went up in flames.  (This being a mystery to me because I didn’t think metal burned.)  The second elephant was on Cape May.  It was removed due to deterioration.  When the time came to consider Lucy’s fate, someone played the “Historic Landmark” card and saved her from a fate similar to the other two.  She was put on rollers and moved down the street from her original position to a small lot facing the ocean in Margate, New Jersey. 

You’ve heard the expression that someone who is hungry “has a hollow leg.”  Lucy the Elephant has a hollow leg …. With a spiral staircase in it.  Tourists can climb up to the belly area and walk around – it was quite empty when I was checking it out; however at one point it had been a haven for quenching thirst…. if you get my drift.   The bar-in-the-elephant didn’t work out long term so when she moved to her current locale, she became a tourist spot.  And, yes, I PAID to go inside the elephant.  Through her eye, you can look forward and see the ocean off the coast of the Jersey Shore.  Tourists are also able to go up to the top of the elephant and enjoy the view from the beautiful Indian canopy. 

That day, unbeknownst to me, my sneaky friends went into the gift shop and purchased my birthday present a few months early:  a black & white pencil sketch of Lucy the Margate Elephant.  It hangs proudly in my kitchen to this day.

In my online search to find a few pictures of these silent giants, I came across a website called usagiants.com.  (I think I found my soul-mate.  LOL.)  It turns out, the guy even produced a few dvd episodes about the topic.  I am amazed at the plethora of giants there are.  They are all around us in so many communities once you start looking!  I wonder if there are elves somewhere too?

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I dedicate today’s thoughts to all who are free to have the joy of a child in their hearts when they see something fun or silly.  “It is to such as these that the Kingdom belongs.” (said Jesus)

The Particulars of Real World Math

The Particulars of Real World Math

Was Algebra class useful for you in the Real World?  Just thought I’d ask.  I’m taking a course in a new kind of mathematics now.  No, it’s not an online course.  It’s more of, well; let’s say an “in-home tutorial.”  Remember when New Math came out?  I remember the phrase but I don’t know the difference between Old Math and New Math.  It’s a detail. 
The course I am taking is called “Dog Math.”  It is closely related to “After-Math.”

The principles of Dog Math are all lived in real-world time.  You can use them daily.  See if you recognize these.

Paper Towels.  The number of paper towels needed for cleaning up a spill on the floor is always multiplied by two.  And then you add yelling.  And you then subtract a dog running away with one of the paper towels (which is why you needed two, so that you wouldn’t be left with zero).  It looks like this:  (Px2)+Y-DRA=0+1

Quantity of Socks in Drawer.  How many socks actually in the drawer, minus 10% for the ones that are mate-less because some are on the back lawn or under a bush or snowbank, divided by two = number of pairs.  It looks like this:  (SID-.10)/2 = pairs.

Dog Fur.  In order to calculate the number of years that dog fur remains in a home after the particular dog is located Elsewhere (dog heaven for most ….) calculate the number of years the dog lived in the home, multiply by number of any dogs still living there.  Then take that figure and multiply it by the number of brooms, vacuum cleaners and dust –busters you have had during the dog years.  Multiply that final figure by 100.  You should end with a number that is higher than one thousand five hundred.  Divide that number by twelve months and you will feel better.  But it is still pretty high.  DF=(DLx#ODs)xBVCDB’sx100= FUR Years/12 months.

Thunder Storm Watch.  To calculate how many dogs it takes to sleep through a thunder storm I recommend this formula:  Begin with you in your bed or on the couch + One dog curled behind your knee +  One dog draped horizontally over your torso + One dog on your head.  (Take the number of dogs available and make sure they are utilized to their own comfort level.)  Now multiply this figure by zero.  Because no one really falls asleep during a thunderstorm, with or without full dog coverage. 

Cat Corollary to Thunder Storm Watch.  When located with appropriate number of dogs on couch, be sure that a cranky cat is lying on the top part of the couch.  When that cat steps in between the dogs, gets snorted in the caboose by one of the dogs and all heck breaks loose, again, the final figure will be Zero Sleep, but you add the Yelling Factor in there for excitement.  

The Bone of Contention Theorem.  The number of special-purchase bones available for dogs in the house can be calculated this way:  Purchase same number of Elk bones as you have dogs in the house.  Minus that figure by quantity of dogs minus one.  That is how many bones will be visible and available, causing dog riots at any given time in the house.  It looks like this:  #B – (#D-1) = number of available bones.  This figure should always calculate to:  one.

Insanity Formula.  This formula is tricky in that it involves time which is impacted by Quantity.  There are many corollaries.  It is always calculated by dogs to ensure Insanity of People is the final outcome.  Apparently, we are more pleasant when we are drooling like the dogs.  Basic formula:  #Dogs > #people in household.  Children also use this principle:  #Kids > #parents in household.  The Boomerang corollary for dogs:  #dogs at home - # puppies sold to new homes + one puppy that boomerang back to the home.  The Boomerang corollary for kids:  #adults at home - # of kids launched into adult life + the kid that returns.  The Commotion corollary for dogs:  #dogs at home x N (noise) x RA (Rambunctious Activity) = WN4O (Wine Night for Owner).

Forgiveness Principle.  How many times a true Dog Lover will forgive their dog.  This is an ancient biblical formula that we find so much easier to apply to dogs than people:  70x7.  Even if it is daily, the Person is only happy to do it.

In Search of a Good Excuse

In Search of a Good Excuse

So I haven’t written for weeks and you want an explanation.  Writer’s block, perhaps?  No.  It’s actually a new disease called:  “Springtime Paralysis.”  This disease affects mostly mid-life people who do yard work.  It is probably a disease related to:  “Midlife Basketball Psychosis.”  The latter is a disease mostly contracted by men who, while in midlife, still think they should be on a basketball court with the young bucks.  Inevitably, they pull something – like a hamstring – and are sidelined until they come to their senses and realize, “Hey, I think my body is older than my soul and I can’t do this anymore.”  Common denominators in both syndromes are:  chronological age; youthful mentality; no one with common sense to deter or stop them; and opportunity.

Opportunity presents itself in many forms.  My symptoms start to come on in mid-February when the winter lashes its cruelest blows using snow and sleet and grey daytimes against my otherwise cherub-like demeanor.  Then, the petri dish that incubates my restless soul comes in the mailbox:  magazines from every garden supplier known to mankind.  Ones with bulbs and ones with perennials.  Tall grasses.  Short shrubs.   Giant thuja trees. The shade-lovers and the drought-tolerant.  Blasts of vibrant red, glorious yellow, majestic purple, soothing blue – the colors intoxicate me and I begin to feel woozy.  I reach for my pencil to create a Wish List.  Perhaps “Lust List” is more accurate.  If it makes it to the List, it may make it to the Planning Journal that I draft to map-out my garden.

Do not be impressed that I have a Planning Journal for my gardening efforts.  It is strictly a memory aid to help me because inevitably I dig out this year as a “weed,” some great thing I planted last year as an “exotic.” (regarding anything officially labeled “exotic,” please add five-to-ten dollars to estimated costs.) For example, I was given many peony tubers this year from a friend, so I had to map where I planted them lest I start tearing them out next year or mowing them down before they become what they are destined to be.  Do not vote for my sanity by saying:  “Oh, come on now, you would never do that.”  I would.  I’ve done it.  How someone can lose roses, thorns and all, I do not know.  But I am not alone.  I suspect that my lawn guy also has been part of the back-asswards process of mowing down what I put in.  Now I have driveway markers indicating when the young trees or shrubs went in.  It is so much easier now - it cuts down on me grinding my teeth every time he mows the grass.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share the Iris Story at this point.  One fine summer day I came home to find not one, not two, but seven large, black, filled, 30 gallon lawn/trash bags lying in a heap on my side driveway.  Question marks danced around the cartoon of my head.  Did the town crew clean the drainage ditch in front of the neighbor’s house and leave the junk there?  Not a chance.  Did someone drop their lawn cuttings?  Or was it a dead body?  With great reserve I peeled back the corner of the bag and then I recognized many, many iris tubers.   A lightbulb went off in my head:  my friend was having her yard cleaned up…. I called her husband.  He said, “Oh no.  They should’ve gone to the landfill.”  His wife was out of town, so I called her on her cell phone:  “Hey did you have your yard worker leave iris bulbs for me?”  “Yes.”  “How many bags?”  “She was supposed to leave two.  She was thinning them out for me.”

Hoo boy.  When your yard worker doesn’t know the difference between “thinning” and “utterly purging,” you are in for heartache.  I broke the news gently:  “They left seven bags of irises.”  The response wasn’t stunned silence, it was immediate profanity.  And rightly so.  Two days later my friend came to my house and began inspecting the contents of the bags because mysteriously her expensive hostas had disappeared from her home’s landscape as well.  They were not in the bags.  Just a million irises…. Only some of which I proceeded to plant in my valley.  The hostas never turned up.  That summer was the beginning of my body starting to feel chronologically challenged.

Then I did a very dumb thing.  The other morning when I woke up –with plenty to do already on my work list – I felt absolutely compelled to get the statue of the Blessed Mother moved from the far back of the property up into the perennial “garden.”  Well, it’s not truly a perennial garden yet, but I am trying really hard to make it one.  Moving the statue six years ago to its extended location in the far back involved three very strong Protestant young men.  That was my first clue.  Moving it to where it is today involved my 4-wheel drive vehicle and me, myself, and I.  It would serve as an important revelation of my physical capabilities at my prime long ago to, at this point, note that in high school I was “clocked” for the Presidential Physical Fitness Awards doing the flexed-arm-hang for negative three seconds.  That means I have less-than-zero upper arm strength.  Did I lift that statue two weeks ago?  Yes I did.  Do you remember the cartoons where people lift something or pull something and they end up with gorilla arms that hang longer than their whole body length?  Yep.  That’s me today.   You may not be able to physically see what happened to my muscles and tendons but I am putting a dent in the pain reliever bottle to help abate the “mild, yet incessant, discomfort” I am experiencing for two weeks straight.  That maneuver, plus raking and pulling weeds for close to two hours finished me off.  Lesson learned.  Maybe.  I won’t be heroically lifting volkswagens off of innocent victims any time soon.  I’m pretty sure I burned up the reserve of adrenaline with the raking of the garden.

All that being said, it’s been kind of tough to be inspired to write when all I want is a couch with no dogs on it and a hot pack draped over my arms.  <Picture me hoisting gingerale>  Here’s to a great gardening season and blooms all summer long!  It will be worth it. I just know it.

The Life of Martha ....

The most profound statement I ever heard Tim Allen say was this: 

“We found the one woman in the country who actually enjoys cooking and cleaning, and we threw her ass in jail!?”  He was speaking, of course, of Martha Stewart.  Like the woman that the Pharisees “caught in the very act of adultery” and dragged before Christ to be judged (they thought), we realize with very little astuteness that a man also HAD TO BE INVOLVED.  So why not more about the man?  In fact, since that culture considered men higher life forms, why not just punish the man?!  I mean if he was smarter, then he should have been more morally responsible, right?!

I want to admit that despite her detour into the shady world of insider trading and time in Sing-Sing or wherever it was, I really respect Martha Stewart.  I think, I hope, she is an example of “do what you love, the money will follow.”  Meaning, I hope she loves what she is doing because she is doing it so fabulously.  I can barely clean the one house I live in!  And I don’t get paid to tell people how to clean or what to plant when. 

I subscribed to her magazine for a year and then stopped because I just never found enough time to read it cover-to-cover as it deserves.  Even when she was otherwise occupied behind bars, the magazine kept being generated with the same impeccable quality I had come to appreciate.  Quite mysteriously last year, the previously expired subscription re-appeared.  So now I have a bunch of reading to catch up on.  It will be a good vacation or rainy-day-read when I am not cleaning up the debris that the new puppy is making in my house, around my house, and in my life in general.  (A debris that I feel privileged to clean up after because the sun, in fact, does rise and set around that little dog.  Someday the AKC will agree with me… even though he does have a tail.) 

May I please take this opportunity to poke fun at one thing in the magazine, though:  Martha’s schedule.  Initially I counted it a privileged revelation that she let us in on what some pieces of her real life looks like.  It was the same kind of privilege, I reckoned, that was bestowed on me when Ciocci Helen gave me the recipe for her Polish Easter Babka (bread).  Ciocci had not given the recipe to anyone else because I practically promised my first born to her in order to get it.  Then I made the bread and found out what a tremendous amount of work went into it.  I understood why she didn’t just photocopy the recipe and pass it around:  she wanted you to “get it” that it was a thoughtful labor of love that literally took ALL DAY to manufacture. 

That is where the similarity to Martha’s Stewart’s personal schedule dissipates.  I am not sure that Martha is working as hard on her schedule as I am on MINE!  Martha may have two or three great estates worthy of being airlifted and put on a hill in Glocca Moira or Wales, but she also has a support staff to help her out.  Let me run the contrast portrait for your entertainment:  we have been a total flood zone in Central New York for the past month.  Not “flood” like New Orleans.  Just “flood” like- um, let’s go see if we’ve got water in the basement, or if all the sump pumps on the shelf are ready to go just in case.  “Flood” like, do I want to take that country road at night and risk it might not actually still be dry to pass?  “Flood” like, why is there an entire flock of Canada geese standing around in my backyard having breakfast and SWIMMING on my grass?  You get the picture.  So the other day after work, I put on my work jeans and climbed up on a ladder to unplug the top of the corner gutter with a gardening claw.  I did not need Martha’s schedule to remind me to clean the gutter:  I knew it was plugged because the water, instead of draining down, was spurting up over the top.  I just managed to snag a few leaves with the claw.  Water surged up into the 40 degree air, splashing my face, going down the front of my jacket inside-and-out, soaking my jeans and wetting parts of my shirt.  It was too cold to even use profanity.  My job was just to hang onto the ladder until I heard the slosh of the water re-routing itself downward and guzzling through the appropriate pipe.  I am wondering if these are Martha-moments, or her staff gets to do them?

It was curious to me, for instance, that only once in the month did she list:  groom the horses.  Um, I’m no equine genius but I think the horses need a brush-out on a fairly regular basis.  I horseback ride once every decade and expect that when I jump astride the horse, someone else has been putting the time in on a regular basis to groom, ride and train this horse so there are no “negative events” when I go out for a trail ride.  One of my dearest friends had a horse that she was crazy about but kind of got distracted with other things and didn’t see him as often as she had hoped.  He was up there at the farm doing what horses do all day:  eating, hanging around, making piles, winking at the girl horses and living off the land.  We went up to visit him and put him on cross ties in the barn to prepare to groom him.  She walked around front to give him a kiss on the forehead and apparently he held some deep grudge against her for the life of Reilly he was living because he bowed his enormous head downward…. and then rammed it up into her chest.  If that was me, he would have knocked me on my keister.  Has Martha had any of those moments?  Or does she shield us, the innocents, from the raw negatives of her life?

I love her birthday reminders on her schedule.  I have those on mine too.  Except they don’t remind me of anything until after I have failed:  I fail to buy the card.  I fail to mail it on time.  I fail to order the present on Amazon early enough so that it makes it.  I fail to bake the cake the day before because I have a meeting of some sort (church, veterinarian, grocery shop, etc.).  Really, I owe one big THANK YOU to anyone that I am supposed to get a birthday card to because I’ve missed everybody’s birthday, including Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Bosses’ Day, and all my dogs’ birthdays at least once and no one reams me about it anymore.  I guess I have to have at least one fault, right?

It is easy to see that Martha has got the organization thing down to a science.  Yet, so do I… except I can’t always execute the plan.  She has it written on one particular day in the fall “plant bulbs.”  Where I live, either it rained that day or some other priority of the urgent trumped my original plan.   I have an apple tree that bears apples once every two or three years.  When those apples “come in,” boy, do they ever!  I am making apple butter it seems for two weeks straight with every free moment I have and often late into the night… only to have two of my critics say, “we don’t eat a lot of butter because of our cholesterol.”  I had to educate them that there is NO cholesterol – or butter, for that matter – in apple butter.  Another commented, “this should be less spicy,” to which I replied:  “um, that would be apple SAUCE.  The point of apple butter is to spice up your toast or your roast!”  Bottom line, when the apples come in, there’s not a free second to be popping bulbs into the ground hoping for a spring showing.  You just wait for Spring, and try to trick mother nature by putting the bulbs in as soon as the ground yields enough to let you.  Then you wait.  And you watch for the squirrels.

I am surprised Martha doesn’t write more about “waiting.”  Waiting is an essential part of gardening, cooking, and living off the land.  Even raising dogs – as I do – requires an inordinate amount of time waiting.  One of my dogs made me wait over a year before she was “in season” to breed.  Then the weekend of the puppies’ anticipated births, I thought I would outright perish with all the waiting.  I am a big reader, and was way too stressed to read.  I could just walk around and pace, like expectant fathers used to do in the hospital baby-delivery lounges.  The dog kept going in and out of the house.  Then once outside it seemed she couldn’t do what she wanted to do.  And then I got it.  She thought the pressure meant that she had to eliminate.  She didn’t realize – and neither did I – that the pressure at that very moment would bring forth Puppy #1 on the back lawn … well, it would have, if I didn’t pop his forehead back in and walk her into our cellar quickly and then encourage her to push her firstborn son out into my waiting palms in the warmth of our home.   Yes.  He was worth the wait – and he is the one that we kept.  His official name is:  Prince Valor of Morning Glory Acres.  This year I have to plant the morning glories.  It wasn’t on Martha’s calendar to remind me, so I guess I’m on my own.

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