Multiples

Make multiples. It’s calming and promotes creativity. I made 27 butterflies today, with help.

Once you select what you’re making and give yourself a goal, you’re set. You have a specific task. You can pursue mastery of this task; you can explore widely within the confines of the task. It’s much easier to explore within the confines of that task. And your goal will be motivating.

If you happen to be trying to keep kids busy with a craft for more than long enough to pour yourself a coffee. multiples might help do that too. That depends on the kid , though. I make no promises.

Today, our house began a 100 butterflies project. We chose butterflies because we have a butterfly hole-punch, and it’s fun to punch them out, and then everyone can color them. It’s great because we have the confining butterfly shape and then anything goes. It is an almost all-ages collaboration. We are making a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Some are semi-realistic. Some are patterned—polka dots, chevrons, stripes, rainbows. Some have flowers and succulents . Some have scribbles.

One of the kids has already asked if we have to stop when we complete our 100.

Tornado Warning

My first attempt to write this post got erased as I went to the basement due to a tornado warning siren. Now I have something different and more succinct to say.

Apparently there is something called the Four Stage strategy from the comedy Yes, Prime Minister, which I have not watched. I just read a blog post about and am now fairly expert. It is a simple four stage non-strategic strategy beginning with denial of the problem and ending with regret that any action is too late.

When a tornado warning comes, the wise course of action is to go to the basement or nearest shelter. It is not to look out the window to see if there is a tornado. It is not to try to film the tornado with your cell phone while you wait to see if it is really coming for you. Just do the cautious thing. And don’t assume that because the other ten tornadoes didn’t actually pull off the roof over your head you’re immune.

It costs relatively little to assume that a tornado warning means a tornado is, as my kids say, “out to get you.” By the time you know for sure it is out to get you, it’s too late. The right process is to heed the warning and, if you can, to hope for the best.

Leftovers are the Best

I made corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day, in true American tradition. I did not have cabbage, which had been far more popular than meat and potatoes at the grocery store I visited. Apparently the prospect of a pandemic quarantine makes people want to buy cabbage or perhaps it just means that restocking the cabbage takes a back seat to more significant items. I had Brussels sprouts instead.

The best part wasn’t the March 17 meal, but the subsequent grilled corned beef sandwiches on rye, with mustard and quick pickled onions. Similarly, the best part of making a big bean soup isn’t the soup. It is having leftover bean soup for tacos.

Why, you could be forgiven for asking, must we have the corned beef and potatoes and cabbage and carrots? Why must we have the bean soup?

Part of the charm is the deeper flavors and the complex combinations facilitated by the leftover meal, of course.

Part of the charm of the glorious leftover meal is that the preparation of the ostensibly main meal takes on much of the labor and virtually all of the decision-making of the leftover meal to come. The leftover meal is a bonus! This is meal-planning for those who don’t meal plan.

Simply starting a day ahead and waiting could result in those two goals. And I am here to suggest that this would be a big mistake. The disposition (definition 2 d on https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disposition ) would be wrong. The process would be wrong. The corned beaf sandwich would not be the same in a new, efficient context. Just make the bean soup and eat it. Look forward to having the tacos tomorrow.

Corned beef on March 17.

What You See out Your Window Is a Sculpture

We have a sculpture out each window--not just a privacy fence, a wall, a cityscape, a landscape. The topography of a major city is, like mountains and trees and rocks, not just what it is made up of, but is a massive sculpture, forming the space. 

One of my favorite sculptors, Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) said: "All my sculpture comes out of landscape,” and, "I'm sick of sculptures in galleries & photos with flat backgrounds... no sculpture really lives until it goes back to the landscape, the trees, air & clouds." She shaped space, carved out, created mass and stillness and significant spaces within the mass of a piece. 

If you’re looking out your window, again (and again and again), look again. If you’re looking at a neighborhood, a building, a roof, a wall, your neighbor’s trashcans, a tremendous cityscape, a suburb, empty fields, wooded forests, water...Look again. Look at the empty spaces, the spaces that appear empty because of distance, the spaces between and the spaces carved out. 

Enjoy the view.

Planting Bulbs

Planting bulbs is always an act of faith and optimism. Last fall, I was out there, in the chill, with a long winter ahead of me, sticking something in the ground to be frozen and thawed repeatedly. It seems so unlikely to work even without the threat of squirrels digging up tasty tulips for a snack. In the middle of my fall bulb planting, it started raining. The kids and I kept at it. The rain wasn’t too hard. Then the rain turned to hail, tiny pellets of ice. I figured I should take the kids in. And I never made it back to bulb planting. 

Photo from Mari Potter@maripotter on Unsplash.

Fast forward four months.

Last weekend, we took inventory. The tulips I planted last fall are just coming up. The squirrels did not get them. I have a fenced in yard without deer, and apparently the local woodchuck isn’t as interested in destroying my tulips as it is in destroying everything else I try to grow (including zinnias and marigolds! It even munched off some hot peppers last summer. Unless that was a spice loving rabbit). Success, of a kind, has already taken place.

My optimism is being rewarded. Some of the edges of the green leaves poking up are tinged with red. Are those the red tulips? Some are curled, others smooth. Even the ones planted in somewhat questionable areas seem to be doing well.

So I did something even more outrageously optimistic: I planted the rest of my bulbs. Not the shriveled up ones, but the ones with weight and in some cases a bit of a shoot coming up. 

It felt like the right thing to do, and even if none of them ever bloom, it was worth it.

Dispatch 5 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

If you’re interested, start with Dispatch 1

The Journalist

Elizabeth Owle--Liza to her friends--looked from her apartment’s small third floor balcony over the city and to the sliver of the Ohio River. The sun was just coming up. This was why she had chosen this apartment, for its balcony with its river view, even if she couldn’t see much in the summer when the trees had leafed out. Though she was in the middle of the city, this was a place in which she always felt alone. Not lonely. Peaceful, free from watchful eyes. When she was awake early, on her balcony, she almost felt that she was in another world, or at least on a farm far from the city. She loved Louisville, but she also loved peace, and the two didn’t often go together. Up here, though, she was surrounded by green, the tree-tops of the smaller trees, the tree line along the river bank further away, the big oak a few lots over. The birds were up, and she kept hearing the loud call of a particularly close and persistent bird but could not find it. She sipped her morning tea. The city was coming to life around her.

An hour later, dressed for work and carrying a small case in which she kept her dictaphone, a few emergency snacks, her current reporter’s notebook and, this morning, the final draft of an entertaining little human interest piece she had finished last night, she exited the building. At the end of last week, she had wrapped up a months-long investigation into a scam involving the duplication of permitting fees. It had taken many hours of painstaking research, including the cultivation of sources in city and county offices. She had attended countless bureaucratic meetings, some less than fully official, and several cocktail parties. She knew it would be quite a while before she would actively seek out another shot of bourbon. 

As a break-- and to ward off the sense of flatness that often engulfed her upon completion of a major project--she had taken on a fluff piece about the upcoming release of a contest-winning new glaze pattern designed by a local potter’s apprentice. She had talked with the young potter and written up a nice little article telling how the young man had dreamed of becoming a potter and describing notebooks of potential designs. The fact that his design won a contest delighted him, and it had been easy to write a cheerfully typical “local boy makes good” story to accompany a photograph of his smiling face next to a prototype mug and plate, each featuring the River Bends design, a simple blue line of Commonwealth Cobalt modeled on the curve of the river at Louisville. It was actually a pleasing design, Liza thought. She would buy a few pieces for herself when the new collection was released. 

With that story done, she was ready for something to dig her teeth into. Something complicated. With luck, her in tray at the office would contain some provocative complaint or tantalizing incongruity. As she walked into the street, she could tell that the restaurant on the ground floor of the building next to hers was making tortillas, and soon she caught a whiff of charring peppers mixed with the usual warm comfortable and appealing smell of popcorn. It always made her want something to eat, even if she had eaten breakfast. Preferably popcorn with chillies and a couple of tacos. Maybe she would find the time to go to a taqueria for lunch. There was a particularly good one near the government buildings. She could already taste their tomatillo pawpaw habanero salsa. Tangy, sweet, hot. 

And their popcorn. Liza was an adequate cook but popcorn was one of those things she preferred to get out. Maybe one day she would get a Cambridge Popper. She always appreciated them when she was visiting family and old friends in New England: A box for popping corn that didn’t burn anything and contained the flying kernels as they exploded! It would be a bit of a luxury, but everyone in New England had them. Unfortunately, export was still illegal, even almost 70 years after the invention of the Cambridge Popper, because of rumored military applications. Liza was skeptical: What did New England think the rest of the states were going to do with a Cambridge Popper other than pop corn? 

She was figuring out what she might look into that day, having filed the completed story she had taken home for a final edit. She nodded her greetings to the other reporters who were already at their desks. Her editor was not. Before she had finished sorting through her in tray, he had arrived. Within minutes, he called out “Liza” and beckoned her over to his office. He shut the door. 

This was unusual and she waited expectantly. “Busy?” he asked. 

She shrugged. Everyone was always busy. But there was nothing that she had to do immediately, unless it was buried in her in tray. Besides, he had closed the door. That seemed to promise something exciting. “Nothing crucial,” she said. 

“Right. Something’s just come through. You know Little View?”

She shook her head. “Of course not,” he said. “Small town, corn country. No reason to know of it. Nothing ever happens out there.”

“Until now,” Liza interjected.

“Right. Until now,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’ve just heard over the wire that a small plane has gone down out there.”

Liza looked at him sharply. A small plane crash was hardly reason enough to send someone way out to Little View, wherever that might be. Especially someone like her. Liza was modest, but not unduly so. She was an investigative reporter, not someone to spend her time running from Pikeville to Paducah covering small-town crop-duster crashes.

“Right. You’ll want to know why I’m sending you out there,” he said. 

The fact that he kept saying “right” was not lost on Liza. It was what he did when he was excited or nervous. She nodded, all thoughts of the popcorn and her possible taqueria lunch banished. It wasn’t that Liza relished a plane crash. She wasn’t bloodthirsty, after all. But though she had been told she was too nice to be an investigative reporter, she relished a big story as much as anyone in her profession.

“What I’m hearing is that the Tres Amigos were on that plane,” he said. Liza’s heart skipped a beat. She had spent months watching the new gaming secretary before he had been appointed out of nowhere to fill the role. Nothing definitive had come of it, except that when Plunkett’s name came up, she was the one in the newsroom to whom everyone turned. 

Of course once Klair Plunkett was named the Honorable Secretary of Gaming, she knew she would never get to publish a real explanation, even if she got to the bottom of anything. She might do a personal profile, but she did not care for that kind of story. It wasn’t why she had gone into journalism. She had gone into journalism to watch people, to figure things out. And Liza had known Plunkett was a figure to watch as soon as she first saw him across the room at a Derby party at Churchill Downs that she had begrudgingly attended. The celebrity beat was not for her. But she had gone, and there, she had watched with interest as dapper business men and beautifully dressed young women were seemingly drawn to Plunkett. He was so warm, so down to earth, so expansive. He had implausible crowd-pleasing ideas: A Bubbleland outpost in Louisville! He was playing the crowd, playing the slightly hapless fool to draw them all like moths to the flame, or that is what she’d thought then. So she had kept an eye on him,  and had taken her “vacation” to Bubbleland when she knew he would be there. She had ruthlessly expensed an evening at the high stakes Blackjack table to get closer to him, and she had been rewarded by the realization that the dealer was handing it to Plunkett. But Plunkett had no idea. He was just having fun, a night of Blackjack and bourbon. That Liza would bet on, with her own money, if she were a betting woman. And that is when she revised her assessment of Plunkett: A pawn. That’s what Plunket was. 

Things were starting to make sense, but Liza’s investigation was cut short by  one of the sudden shifts in Commonwealth politics: An ostensibly bloodless coup. White Hall would be behind that. Obviously. Well, if the coup had been bloodless, here was some blood.

Plunkett was in a plane crash. Injured possibly, dead probably. And not just Plunkett--the Tres Amigos. Liza could feel her heart beating in her chest. This wasn’t anxiety. It was gratification, excitement, pride that she was being given this story.  There could hardly be bigger news. As much practice as had she projecting professional unsurprise, she knew that shock registered on her face. 

“Right. That’s what they’re saying.” Her editor paused. “And now you know as much as I do. We’ve got to get on this now. Obviously.”

“Right,” Liza said over her shoulder, wondering whether he would notice her use of his favorite all-purpose word. She was already on her way out of his office. This was precisely the kind of story she lived for. Her notebook and dictaphone were still in her bag, ready. Back at her desk, she checked her train schedule and found that she had a little bit of time before she needed to go to the train station to catch the first train from Louisville that would take her to the Little View station. She went to the politics board and checked the current whereabouts of the Tres Amigos: Yesterday they were to have been in Lexington for a ceremonial baseball game. Today they were to give a press conference in Central City. No other details were listed.

So they were en route from Lexington to Central City. It must have been a very early flight. Ridiculously early. She checked a map. Yes, it could make sense that they would fly over Little View. She checked her watch. She still had a few minutes if she hurried. She went to the research room. The front desk was unoccupied. The support staff wouldn’t arrive for another ten or fifteen minutes. She found a pamphlet on corn and one on the history of the Little View region. She would read them on the train. She signed for them and left the newspaper office for the train station.

On Building a Tiny Path

I built a tiny path, too small for a mouse, too big for an ant. No creature, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has taken this path, and the path itself doesn’t lead much of anywhere. I gathered pebbles in shades of gray and off-white. The path meandered from a sand castle up towards a little rift of grass, dry and tough, still waiting to send out new growth. I meandered through even less spectacular scenes.

This creative undertaking was all about the process. It was very small, completely temporary, utterly pointless, and yet deeply satisfying. The simplicity of the task was calming. Arranging pebbles carefully was consuming. If one rolled down a tiny hill, I picked it back up, the disaster insignificant within the insignificant project.

It is rare that I find the time and prioritize the energy to do something this seemingly insignificant. It is now on my to-do list for tomorrow, which seems paradoxical or absurd, but if a to-do list is the way to get something done, I’m for it. Even if that something is a pebble path never taken.

Note: I attempted to publish this on 3/13, but apparently I published two blank posts instead. I blame my phone.

Looking Down

I think and talk a lot about perspective. Usually, I’m thinking point of view, metaphorically, the way experiences, ideas, identities, and opinions shape how we understand something, what it means to us and how it means something to us. I’m thinking of borrowing the idea of literal perspective and playing around with it in regard to ideas, books, cultures, and so on.

Recently, though, I began spending more time near a window on the third floor of my house. I love the view, looking down at what I usually look up at, like the tree in a neighbor’s yard, and looking down at what cannot be seen otherwise, like the slate roof next door.

The range of color and texture on that roof are beautiful. Squares of grays and beiges, velvety, smooth. The slate changes in the light and depending on weather conditions.

Looking from a new perspective—literally—has been one of my best activities this week.

This house is a clay model at a nearby plays cape.

Planning Does not Equal Panic

I’m a cautious person by inclination, especially when the consequences of the risk are dire. Heard of Covid-19 lately? Even if the risk is low, if people are going to die, I’m not a fan. I have been called pessimistic, and I’m enough of a pessimist that I think acknowledging the possibility of bad outcomes is valuable. If nothing terrible happens, great, and don’t think your smug condescending attitude towards caution is going to sway me. The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast-approaching train.

And I’m enough of a rhetoric-adjacent expert to be frustrated by the implication that any show of caution is essentially an unjustified panic.

Sometimes the annoyance of disruption is worth it, and a global pandemic is one of those times.

Meanwhile, stock up on books.