a little red hen

Roxie's Hippo and Healthcare Reform

What did you do yesterday while Congress dragged it out?  Stretching a metaphor, I  have been malingering like them by not finishing this knit toy for Roxie, our NYC granddaughter. 

By late December (which issue was the Senate on then?), all the separate pieces of the hippo had been completed.  Another  Susan B.  Anderson pattern in her itty-bitty toys book (something new after making two of her chickens).   Worked well with yarn from my over-large stash.  Tricky to knit the body as it narrowed down with few stitches left on the needles.  (This was November '09...had we lost CHOICE in the House?)

For the second time I used a rubber ball to weight the body.  Hippo is very solid as a result.  This is a substitute for poly pellets when making a toy for young children.

Carried it to North Carolina at Christmas when we last saw Roxie, sure I'd finish it then.  No...  not enough light, too cold--the very sort of lame excuses our congressional reps have been using to waste the taxes we pay them with this endless slog. 

Sunday, March 21, 2010, was so possibly auspicious, that I made my move.   In the morning and early afternoon I watched the proceedings (inside and outside, some more inspirational than others) on television and did embroidery on the hippo's face.  Not great but okay.  Ear attachment went better.

Dinner was at Rachel's, our daughter, where Judy, the other grandma, is visiting from Idaho.  Rachel kept us up with progress in D.C. on her Blackberry (no television here).

Back home to finish the hippo and hope that Congress  and I would both end before midnight.  That actually happened thanks to the determination of many, especially women, thank you.  Several are pictured here.

Nancy Pelosi deserves much more admiration that we have given her lately.  We also are reminded that the  sensible Democrats are the true picture of this country--every geographic direction, all colors and shapes, even a couple of southerners!

Checking email before bed, there was a request to support two women running races against blue dog Dems.  Five dollars each:  I could do that...you can do that!

Intense older man sends me email...

Random photos  on my way to PSU last  week to register for Spring term.  Walking decision followed this exchange with a guy waiting at bus stop. 

"Think one's coming soon?"

"I've been here ten minutes; should be."

"Not sure whether I should wait."

[He smiles] "Need the exercise?"

It was, at that moment mild drizzle.  Of the two routes available to cross the 405 highway overpass, my choice was the one without the quilt-covered homeless man striding in the same direction. 

The decoration on the bridge fencing is something I've noticed before in Portland.  There's a practice known as  "guerrila knitting" (found at the Ravelry site) that favors random knit messaging without words.  But these letters are not knit rather some knot technique.  This particular one is more direct  and celebratory than those favored by the guerrila girls and boys.

Waiting at a Chipolte restaurant for Ron, looking out the window, I wonder if about hanging out here between classes.  Too much loud music.  Probably no place in this universe is music-free.  Library?  Yes, I need to get earphones.  We decide eating here would not work and walk toward the SALC office.  Find other student-type, bad food place-- at least not fried.

The afternoon brightened on reaching  Susan's desk, the tiny, very useful office where old folk  register.   She was the person who patiently answered my cellphone call  as I wandered around campus on another  rainy last Fall. Her insider view as an older student (grandma of four) led me to a department I would never have tried:  Geography!  "Sense of Place" has a description that fits my interests, "...explores meaning in landscapes and identity in regions and localities...through media images, scholarly writings, photography, and art..."

Meanwhile, Ron met a very intense man also waiting to see Susan. Robert Burco, who has a considerable past like the rest of us who have been in the world for a long time.  He filled in some of our Portland, the city, recent  history.  His plan is to complete a PhD begun forty years ago.  I am awed.  He forwarded an email about his local efforts which will require another meeting to understand. 

How will we locate him again on campus?  We might need to form something, leave messages on the bulletin board near the SALC door.  What would other old students respond to as a title--how about a periodic group, a  cell?  On the latter, see #3, the only one I could locate outside biology.

In response to my question to Susan about who might be a person at  the Institute on Aging to discuss thoughts about the state of lifelong learning from those of us outside academe, Susan introduced us to Alan DeLa Torre, a doctoral candidate/research assistant in the department.  Ah, we spoke the same language.  Ron joined us; we learned more about his work in the development of affordable housing for older adults.  And he listened to our questions about holes in lifelong learning for educated old people.

What an afternoon!  We gave up walking in now-heavier rain and took the #8 bus home.

[Been not-so-well over  the past three weeks--flu via grandchildren, maybe some allergic reactions to  new flora in the environment.  Beautifully spring here but we need more of that famous Portland rain!  So will be catching up on the life-transposed in future postings.]

"Kindertransport," more than a theatre experience

A week ago, I saw a local production of "Kindertransport," a play written in 1993 by Diane Samuels, an English writer.  Starting with a London production, it has been produced all over the world.  In Portland, it marks the beginning of Kindertransport 2010,  "an ambitious community outreach project on genocide awareness, in anticipation of the UN’s Genocide Awareness Month this April."

What was I expecting?  Holocaust-focused art has always make  me anxious.  Guilt, one of my favored responses to many things, rises up.  Why have I not cared more about the death and displacement of millions of Jews?  But I did care, I do care.  Somehow that does not seem sufficient.  

As the play began on a mostly-bare stage, only cardboard boxes, my discomfort began.  Eva, a young German Jewish girl, 9 years old, cannot accept what her mother tells her:  she is about to be sent to England to live--alone.  It is 1938 in Berlin and the Germans have agreed to allow ten thousand Jewish children to be sent to families in there.  It was a strange bargain and must have been horrific for everyone involved.

Am I identifying with my own adolescent past when my mother sent me away to live with my father? Awful as that was, I had the luxury of believing  I was going to a better life.  Though Eva goes to Manchester, England with a concerned and loving mother, she is marked by her wish to conceal her origins.   That one is very familiar to me;  I spent high school denying my own past, though not my Jewishness, as Eva does.

Identity, is the dominant theme, and the one most identified in articles about the play.  For me it was also about the struggles between mothers and daughters from childhood to adolescence and beyond.  A dark play, I found it beautifully acted by the four women and one man in the cast.

It is playing here till March 21.  Sacha Reich, the director, (pictured here) has done an excellent job and  also coordinated the talk-backs following the play.  The one we heard was by Dr. Aart Lovenstein, a psychologist treating survivors of trauma.  Himself the child of Dutch Holocaust survivors, he added more to an understanding of the need for "forgetting" or denial by the adult Eva becomes.

In my former life as psychotherapist, one of my clients struggled for many years with her parents, Holocaust survivors, who refused to talk about their past.  She was finally helped by connecting with other children of survivors who have created a worldwide movement to support one another and understand what is, ultimately, the un-understandable.

I hope that it will be seen by non-Jewish audiences (though the empty reviews in both the Oregonian and Williamette Week would not help) since its message extends far beyond the particular setting of the play to our own times.  How do we allow ourselves, our country to stand aside as genocide happens far away?  It was not hard for the United States to turn away in 1938.