pier 70

Went to the developer shindig, took a few photos.

sky and water

I don't have much to write about today. I am feeling bruised and chafed and sore and arthritic. For some reason I have been agonizing over my windows -- curtains or shades? What kind of rods, and how high should they go? Why haven't I painted the inside of the front windows, after all this time? And what about the kitchen windows?

So here's a recent shot of the evening sky to the east, taken from my front steps.

And here are two shots I took on the Tennessee Valley hike with Julie and Karl and their friends Les and Barb.

spring

I had a miraculously minor bike accident last Monday -- a pickup truck carrying four Mexican men and towing a generator ran a red light and almost flattened me. Fortunately, I almost got out of the way -- it hit my rear tire and I fell and slid. I have a bad scrape on my left elbow, a not-too-bad scrape on my hip, and assorted bruises and soreness. I haven't ridden the bike since, or looked at it very carefully. At a glance it seems OK. But I will take it to the bike shop and have them make sure it's OK before I ride it again.

I have been weeding. Pulling out lots and lots of oxalis, trying to pull out fennel, cutting back the geranium bushes and the rose bushes in the front. Not sure what I am doing but it's worth trying various things and seeing what happens. The lime tree looks slightly better but still unhealthy -- many blackened leaves and branches. I reconfigured the succulents in the planter and tried to tear out the vine (ivy?) in the corner of the back yard.

The critter control guy, Mike, came on Tuesday morning. He blocked the little mouse hole along the side of the house, near the back. He also climbed up onto the laundryroom roof, lay down on his belly, and shot a bunch of sticky stuff onto the pipe(s) on the back corner of the house next door. He was hoping that maybe this would deter the raccoons and other critters from climbing up onto the roof and squeezing back into the light well. I had been hearing and seeing critters pretty much every night. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I have not heard much these past few nights.

marianne moore by way of james baldwin

I try to avoid defending or condemning other people (except for the people who set themselves up as leaders, elected or otherwise -- they have a special responsibility). I figure people are limited and flawed and they make bad decisions. I know that's true of me. 

Anyway, I was reading James Baldwin the other day and he quoted Marianne Moore: The weak overcomes its menace, the strong overcomes itself.

And that is true no matter how rich or poor people are. But everybody makes choices in a context -- emotional, familial, social, ethical, economic. And the older I get the more I see how rigged the game has been for so long. And I can see how hard most of us have tried to avoid seeing that this country got wealthy through slavery, followed by Jim Crow (in the south and north), followed by white flight and the war on drugs. Also, I begin to understand the cost of that denial, for everyone involved.

Of course, the game is always rigged -- unless there's a revolution going on, rich people can always protect their interests. But for a long time it was rigged, explicitly, by color. Even if we had been willing to face up that (and we haven't been!) it would not have been easy to change it.


And now? It's hard to say what is happening now. I guess I have to keep hoping that we will become better human beings. 


End of lecture, with apologies. I am feeling sad this morning because my aunt Marion died -- not that I knew her well, but I know she was my mom's favorite sister. She is the third of my mom's siblings to die at 90, in the past five years.

Nevertheless

Marianne Moore

you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't

harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come

to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!