Book Friends

I am a congenital saver. By some estimations, that could qualify me as a junior-grade hoarder, but I prefer to think of myself as a preservationist. I have been very fortunate to receive many beautiful pieces of furniture and material culture from parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and even great-greats. I love being surrounded with history, my history, my family's history. I continue to learn more about it all the time. 

There is a downside, though. Where do you put everything? As Jill's creative wings continue to spread, she needs ALL the space in her studio. Considering that my stuff is filling the rest of the house, it's not unreasonable for her to have one room that is totally her own. Until this week, she's had to put up with 4 bookcases of my books.

Understand, we have bookcases in every room except the bathrooms. Hmmmmmm..... 

The bookcases in question are laden with books that I do use from time to time --- history, reference, poetry. It's mainly the non-fiction collection. Plus photo albums dating back to the 1940s. She has had them covered with a brightly colored sheet, to make them look like a wall. Whenever I need to look for a book, I endanger her decor. So now, we're moving the books. 

This morning, I started putting books in boxes for the move and discovered a volume I didn't know I had. It's a 1900 edition of Collier's Cyclopaedia with an inscription indicating that it belonged to my great-grandfather Cramer. I don't know when I acquired it, nor why it is not shelved with the other antique books in my collection. I was happy to hold it in my hand, though.

Many of these books I have moved repeatedly over the years. I still have favorite books from childhood. I have books that were always on my parents' and grandparents' shelves, books whose bindings and titles became so familiar to me that I am instantly carried back to comfort and safety from seeing them on the shelf. Combine the visual image with the smell of an old book as I open it, and it is indeed like greeting an old friend. If it's a book I've read, often more than once, as with the Maida books or Alcott, I am transported into an inner world that is mine alone.

When I was a child, books were my friends. I wasn't a loner, misfit kid. I had friends as well as 3 younger siblings. We played inside and outside, often elaborate pretend games involving witches, fairies, pirates, orphans and royalty. The plots and characters were loosley drawn from the rich tapestry of stories and fairy tales we had been exposed to in books. Our parents read to us nearly every night, and we were surrounded with books and encouraged to read on our own. My brother and I turned out to be the biggest readers, though the other girls took it up later in life. Often, when sent outside to "get some fresh air" (that's mother for leave me alone), I would take Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, Maida or Jo March outside to play with me under a tree or in my hut. The slanted outside doors to the basement were a good place to read, but you needed a blanket to keep from getting splinters of wood or paint. Likewise, the little hill in the front yard, when it was in the sun, was a good place to spread out the old picnic blanket for a read. And when you were done, you could roll down it!

I don't look forward to the arduous task of lifting and tugging bookcases and boxes of books over the next few days. Makes me tired just to think about it. But handling, sorting, browsing, sniffing and delighting in my books while listening to Bach and Handel on vinyl (I just rediscovered those boxed sets!) will be a perfect way to spend the hours. And, at the end, I'll have three of the four bookcases in my writing/sewing/reading room where they belong, and Jill will be able to reclaim her own space. It's a win-win all around. 

Snout Pits and other Ephemera

 

If you look closely above, you will notice that there are many small, cone-shaped holes all around this young Magnolia tree. Those are snout pits.

Snout pits? I had never heard of them until recently, either. Oh, the things you learn when you get a new puppy! We've had diggers before. Tori was determined to dig to China. No matter what Jill filled the deep hole with, it wasn't long before she had it dug out again. Fortunately, it was not in the ordinary path for walking, so there was no danger of falling in, but it was right beside the deck and threatened to undermine one of the supporting posts. Jill-the-Builder finally filled it with cement, which effectively stopped the digging. Whatever Tori was after must not have been available in any other part of the yard.

For awhile, both Buddy and Lucky were digging beneath the maple tree, one hole that they took turns on. Buddy liked to drop toys in it. Lucky had started the hole, and didn't seem to appreciate his contributions, which sometimes caused hierarchical disputes. Lucky won.

But now we have snout pits because we've lucked into having a "Dixie Dingo", aka Carolina Dog. It is one of their most enduring, defining characteristics, this digging of shallow nose holes in which they snuffle around and eat some unknown bug or mineral out of the dirt. Unlike the other dogs, it's not the gravitational pull of one or two holes for burying toys or digging for fun. We have snout pits all over the yard. She digs them side by side sometimes, effectively creating a trench, or more often in a large circle which gradually becomes a maze of little holes. There's no walking in the backyard after dark, if you value your ankles.

Besides my amazement at this built-in behavior, it makes me think about myself and other humans I know. She's born that way --- sound familiar? She can no more stop digging snout pits than any of the other inbred behaviors that were adaptive to the native environment of South Carolina coastal wetland life, which is where these dogs originate. And humans? Well, we seem to have some built-ins as well.

I've been watching the pissing contest in Washington with dismay and some amusement. Sometimes, a depressive bent of mind is helpful: all these clowns will be dead sooner or later, some much sooner than others. Somehow, I find that reassuring. Even though there is no shortage of others to take their place, this particular political setpiece will become another chapter of history, has already moved in that direction. And people who learn about it later will shake their heads in wonder, just as we do when reading about the South Carolina senator who, in 1856, beat fellow senator Charles Sumner with his cane, on the Senate floor, over the issue of slavery. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks

Are these things immutable human behavior? Is this kind of posturing, power seeking, and aggression simply bred into the human psyche? Part of our DNA? Our other dog, Buddy, is a runner and a climber. He has climbed up the fallen willow, several feet off the ground, to chase a squirrel. In order to keep him from climbing over the fence and running the neighborhood, we had to run an electric wire around the top of the fence. He didn't decide not to climb over the fence anymore, he learned it wasn't worth getting his little nose zapped by a shock (very small, I assure you. I've felt it myself, most recently this morning when I accidentally leaned against it.)

Are they teachable, these politicians and corporate power/money mongers? Can they be curbed? They seem determined to pursue their self-selected goals unto the death, which, to me, does not seem adaptive in the long run. I guess these questions have been around as long as there have been people. We teach small children prosocial behaviors in order to make them fit into the prevailing culture. We shape their natural instincts by demanding that, over time and when it's developmentally appropriate, they start toileting in the accepted manner for their society.  It differs by location and culture, but I don't know if there are any communities in which toileting is not circumscribed in some manner. We're not born using the bathroom, but we sure do learn it. As far as I know, all these Congress and Wall Street folk are toilet trained, so they must be teachable, to some degree.

So where do aggression and violence fall on the continuum of social behaviors? Make no mistake about it, verbal aggression is simply a precursor to violence. It's no accident that verbal debate led to Senator Sumner being beaten so badly that he was unable to work for three years afterward. And yet, Preston Brooks, after resigning his seat, was later re-elected --- a seal of approval for his violent behavior.

Our doggy companions want nothing more than to please us. Perhaps, through positive and/or negative reinforcement, I could make Nanalu quit digging treacherous snout pits all over the yard. Maybe I could train her to only do it in certain parts of the yard, if I really cared that much. She is, after all, housebroken, so I know she can learn to modify her natural inclinations.

I believe this tension between instinctual and learned behavior is one of the most fascinating topics there is, and undoubtedly a major reason I was a career educator. Why humans and animals do what they do and learn what they learn is endlessly interesting to me.

You think we could get up an army of preschool teachers and go to Washington and do some intensive work with these guys? Sharing, taking turns, being kind, compromise, using your words and your inside voice. Or maybe just sideline them and show them how it's done. That's the ticket!

The Sky Is Falling! Run For Your Life!!

I'm old enough to remember the Sixties. Whether I do or not, is a horse of another color ---- oooo looky, green! pink! orange swirls! But I digress.

This morning I jumped out of bed like a kid on Christmas, running to the kitchen to see if the government had shut down while I slept. IT DID!

Now what? The tree outside the kitchen window is raucous with birdsongs. The sky is lightening up into a smoky blue. No sirens. No heavy trucks rumbling by. I haven't seen a single black helicopter. Might as well go back to bed.

If the sky is about to fall, you couldn't tell by me. But look on facebook, look on news sites, look on twitter, and it sure does seem as though civilization, as we know it, is about to collapse. It's breathless! It's exciting! It's NEWS!

I'm not belittling the effect it will have on individual people, lots of them. Years ago, when I was a lowly GS-3 in the Department of Labor, Congress had a spate of budget arguments that resulted in short term CRs. On again, off again, with rumors constantly flying. I was a single mother living in a basement apartment with a table, a chair, a mattress on the floor and no refrigerator. I wasn't making much to begin with. So yes, I know how painful it can be for your run-of-the-mill government worker to lose out on paychecks.

The thing is, who remembers that? Only the people involved. An entire generation has grown up and taken positions of power, who have no recollection of the budget wars of the 70s and early 80s. Even the more recent, highly publicized Clinton-era shutdown times are fuzzy in memory. Somehow, as urgent and important as they were at the time, we got through them, the "leaders" involved somehow solved their differences, and the country lurched on to the next crisis.

Will that happen again? Probably. I'm sure, for every failed state there is a time to look back and see the moment it happened --- the single, final straw that took down the whole bloomin' ship. But we're not likely to recognize it at the time. So this will get resolved somehow, and we'll all turn back to jobs and kids and getting sick and getting born and dying and living, just like people always do. Will it be the same? Mostly. There will probably even be people who don't realize our government has just come through a crisis so deep that it had to shut down for awhile. But there will also be change.

Here's what changes: teenagers and young adults who believed in something, will get cynical and turn away. People who thought that reason would always prevail, will be disillusioned and drop out of politics altogether. Some will be radicalized, energized by the fight, the drama, the life-or-death competition, and they will jump in with all barrels blazing. Some people will use the divisions that are so stark right now as a reason to leave the country, to fight with their families and friends, to dig into the problems in their own communities, to strengthen their own faith or bludgeon others with religion, to deepen their commitment to
their own pursuits of love, art, literature, camping, roller derby, four-wheeling or football.

As a matter of fact, what with all of this happening right around time for the World Series and during football season, there's a sizeable chunk of the population who probably aren't tuned into it at all!

As for me, I consider myself a historian and a world citizen. I try to take the long view. I look back, tease out common threads, try to extrapolate the future from what has come before. I take a further step back and realize that everything passes, even the 'exceptional' USA. Babylon's not a world power now. The Cold War is already 60 years old. Remember how long ago the Mayans were a power in governance and knowledge? Remember how the sun never set on the English Empire? It's been like that as long as there have been people (Ahem, -- men) trying to subdue others and grab power.

I'm an optimist. In my own life, I have learned that even the most dispiriting circumstances hold lessons I need to learn. I think we can learn as a society, as a country. I think we CAN. Whether we will or not is a horse of another color ----- oooooo pretty, painted purple horsey.