at home
Thursday, 21 March
On this rainy Thursday, my plants came from Digging Dog…always the most challenging to unwrap.
They come in pots, though, which makes them easier to deal with after unwrapping than plants that come without pots!
The rain stopped at 4:30 so I was able (or had to!) garden for a couple of hours, cutting back a penstemon…
…and adding to it in the empty compost bin two some birthday wrapping paper and some crab shells that a friend brought…
…covered with more compost and wool from bin one so it won’t whiff.
Friday, 22 March 2024
Nickel had his veterinary check up. His yowling in the crate went on for an hour, pitifully.
Then the rain allowed me to read till late afternoon, when sunshine insisted that I do some gardening.
I cut back the plants in the water boxes and the water canoe.
Allan helped me reposition some boxes of succulents in a tableau in from of the cold frame.
Before (well, during):
After:
I am trying to eliminate a certain amount of junkiness.
My main purpose was that I no longer want the boxes sitting on the lip of the slowly disintegrating water boxes so that the water can’t be seen. This low drawer can be there because it won’t hide the view. Maybe with a better view, I can see some of the noisy but elusive frogs.
The canoe before:
And after:
reading, good and bad
The rainy weather allowed me to finally finish a good book that I started before our big garden path re-do project. If you haven’t read Ijeoma Oluo’s books, I’d suggest starting with So You Want to Talk About Race.
The chapter in Be A Revolution on disability spoke to me in particular:
“To be clear, when we neglect to consider the needs of disabled people in our movement work, a harmful message is sent. …..’We’re communicating that folks who cannot meet these particular able-bodied, able-minded standards and be in these spaces are not the people that we want to connect with, they are not the people that we want to join.'”
I might add that gardening and community events can also be exclusive and off-putting to disabled people. Not everyone can tour every garden, but we can enjoy the parts that don’t require going down steps, for example, without being made to feel out of place. If we walk slower than others, we can perhaps be spared the sighs and eye rolls that I have witnessed, toward me and others, at Hardy Plant Study Weekend tours. (Which is why I didn’t go to the most recent one in the Pacific Northwest.). And locally, information about upcoming projects are presented to locals in an upstairs room at a local restaurant, making them some money, I suppose, but excluding people who can’t do stairs, when there is a perfectly good and large community meeting room at ground level next to the Ilwaco library.
Ijeomo Oluo makes sure her talks are accessible. “So I talked with some of my friends in the disability justice world about what accommodations I should look for when taking a gig, and I added a standard accessibility clause to my contracts. For years now wheelchair access, seating to accommodate larger bodies, sign-language interpreters and captioning, gender-neutral bathrooms, and more have been a part of pretty much every speaking agreement I sign. It was wild for me to experience pushback on these simple requests. Organizations that had professed a dedication to inclusion and social justice when trying to hire me for an event were almost offended I would require captioning or adequate seating for people.”
There is hope for change in younger generations: “…disability justice leader Stacey Park Milbern sent the video of a march against Trump’s efforts to end DACA and the DREAM Act: “It’s these, like, fourteen-year-old undocumented youth, these Dreamers leading the march. And they were like, ‘Okay, the ASL is right here. We have one hundred chairs for people to sit at the front-for elders, for people with chronic pain, anyone with kids to stay there. We have this huge space for people in wheel chairs. We have sage because we really want to use medicine, but we know some people have asthma, so we’re not gonna light it. Guys, if the revolution is not accessible, it’s not the revolution! And they were fourteen years old. Stacey was like, ‘We won! We kind of-we didn’t win yet, but we kind of won. These kids get it.”
In one of the chapters about education, Ijeomo tells of a teacher who was a saving grace in her life when racism and stereotyping and problems at home was sapping her previous love of school. “The only class I excelled in was art. There was no homework; there were no deadlines. Any way that I chose to show up was enough for my teacher. I’m pretty sure my art teacher, Ms. Dickenson, saw how lost I was, and how much sanctuary that one class was able to give me. For eighth grade, she decided to give up her planning period to me and another kid who was also an art-loving misfit.” Ms. Dickenson, like many wonderful teachers, spent her own money on supplies. When looking at a piece of art that reflected Iejeomo’s sense of isolation, this brilliant teacher had the best advice: “…she then told me that I felt alone because my world was very small right now, as it was for most young people. All I had was within the walls of my home or my classrooms. But every year that I got older, my world would get larger, and one day my world would be big enough that I would find my people. That nobody would ever be too different to not have people out there somewhere.” One great teacher can change a young person’s life.
Being a former Seattleite, I was enthralled to read about wonderful groups that had evolved there since I departed in 1992. Reading about Wa Na Wari, with its combination of feeding the people and supporting Black folks’ art and businesses, drew me to its website where I learned about its Giving Garden and more about the food justice movement.
And then I went from inspirational reading to reading displeasure.
After that excellent book, I started another one that, due to the return of good weather, I finished a couple of days later. What a disappointment! I thought I had discovered a grand new book by an author whose later books amused me despite the flaw when, several times in each travel memoir (the ones about England and Australia and the Appalachian Trail), he managed to insert his contempt for fat people, even though he is a portly man himself! Yes, he is one of us, and yet feels he can look down on other people.
I am reminded of the scene in the movie Freaks, where an able bodied person is horrified when the circus freaks chant, “Gobble gobble, we accept her, one of us!” This scene is the source of the Gabba Gabba Hey chant of my favourite band, The Ramones, but I digress.
I have read the complete memoirs of a number of authors whose viewpoints, especially social and political, I found difficult. I loved the authors but felt that if they knew me, they wouldn’t like me because our disagreements on issues such as classism, racism, anti-semitism would be so deep. Simon Gray, Christopher Isherwood, Derek Tangye, George Orwell, Lillian Beckwith, Marion Cran, Nella Last, were products of their time, and each wrote some passages that I found pretty shocking and disturbing, and yet other people who lived at the same time managed to avoid supporting those isms. I would still call Tangye, Cran, Isherwood, Gray, and Last favourite authors of mine, and I think if they lived in the modern day, they would feel differently about certain topics.
I also loved Bill Bryson’s book At Home and his book about the human body, written when he was much older and wiser, I suppose. And I must repeat that I adored his memoirs about life in the UK and about Austrialia.
However, this book, written he was was 35, was horrific. On page 7, he refers to fat women as “huge and grotesque”. This goes on regularly throughout the book, especially at tourist stops, with his wondering why “tourists are always fat and dress like morons?”. Even on the rare occasion he likes a place and describes it fondly, right in the middle of an eloquent paragraph he feels the need to describe “the waitress’s bottom”. Oh, and apparently everyone he meets is going to be male: “Everybody you meet acts like he would gladly give you his last beer and let you sleep with his sister.”
So even though in the first half of the book, I still found sentences that made me chortle out loud, by the last half I was too repelled by his cruel descriptions of people’s mental abilities, size, clothing, and accents to continue chortling at the parts where the kinder side of his wit shown through. His quest for the perfect little town, the kind you saw in old movies, was a charming and touching quest indeed. (Later on, he might have recognised a fictional version of it in the town of Star’s Hollow in Gilmore Girls.)
A few parts that I loved:
When he went to visit his grandparents’ old house: “I didn’t really expect my grandparents to be waiting for me at the gate, on account of them both having been dead for many years. But I suppose I had vaguely hoped that another nice old couple might be living there now and would invite me in to look around and share my reminiscences. Perhaps they would let me be their grandson. At the very least, I had assumed that my grandparents’ house would be just as I had last seen it.” (It wasn’t.) “I stopped the car on the road out front and just gaped. I cannot describe the sense of loss. Half my memories were inside that house.” (Just when I feel empathy, he described the woman who now lives in the house as being “hugely overweight”.)
Having lived in the UK for years, he had forgotten the size of the USA. “I was only slowly adjusting to the continental scale of America, where states are the size of countries. Illinois is nearly twice as big as Austria, four times the size of Switzerland. There is so much emptiness, so much space between towns. You go through a little place and the dinette looks crowded, so you think, “Oh, I’ll wait till I get to Fudd-ville before I stop for coffee,” because it’s only just down the road, and then you get out on the highway and a sign says, FUDDVILLE 102 MILES. And you realize that you are dealing with another scale of geography altogether. There is a corresponding lack of detail on the maps. On English maps every church and public house is dutifully recorded. Rivers of laughable minuteness–rivers you can step actoss–are landmarks of importance, known for miles around.“
He also writes eloquently of being shocked by gun violence in the USA.
I was also amused by his thoughts on giant RVs on the roads: “That will teach you to take a building on vacation” he thinks after a near miss.
I also strongly identified with what he wrote about change, such as a scenic highway being replaced with a four lane freeway “that doesn’t stop for anything, even mountains. So something else that was nice and pleasant is gone forever because it wasn’t practical- like passenger rains and milk in bottles and corner shops and Burma Shave signs. And now it’s happening in England, too. They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough-the red phone boxes, the pound note….And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.” That is just how I feel about the little towns of Ilwaco and Long Beach changing from quaint little tourist towns with colourful small buildings (which in my opinion was what visitors loved…it was different!) to small cities with big buildings that eventually could end up being a three story wall, because merchants want more space. And the taking away of the carousel and the downtown gazebo. The teeny tiny beach town ambience is being changed, piece by piece.
But just when I get relaxed into enjoying and identifying with some of Bryson’s book, he describes how at his high school reunion, a girl who he had wanted to see without clothes on (that’s another of his themes) in high school had turned into a “blimp”. He changed her name, but how fun for his classmates to speculate which one of them he was ridiculing.
He described himself as “overweight and slobby”. I wonder if he has been ridiculed himself and instead of making him empathetic, it made him want to hurt other people. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Because his later books are so much better, and because the flaw of an “overweight” man denigrating other fat people, while still there, is comparatively infrequent later on, I am glad this wasn’t the first book of his I have read, because I would never have read another and would have missed out on the very funny In a Sunburned Country and The Road to Little Dribbling and the fascinating At Home.
What a huge contrast between two books, one of which gave me hope for humanity and one of which just left me feeling disgruntled and glum.
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