a little red hen

Individual-Mandate-America: 21st century arrives!

Didn't you think it was time, already?  The second decade of the century, the one with all the whizz-bang electronic happenings  Yes, we live in a 21st century with many institutions in slow-time--schools, women's rights, (fill in the lagging issue of your choice), and yet the Supreme Court helped us turn a corner.

Even doctors liked it! 

President Obama was very clear:

 

Does this make Obama's re-election easier?  Don't think so.  The Repugs are too ginned up to let go now.  The challenge ahead is to work in the campaign and keep in mind--

 

Black Sheep Gathering with Zoe, day one

If...if...if only all my days could be something like the past weekend lost in fiber.  In Eugene, Oregon, of all places.  Nothing against Eugene, please, in the 1990s the publication site of "The Worm Digest."  On one of our visits to Portland before relocating, we made an unforgettable overnight stop when I was their east coast correspondent.  

Zorba was the intense and gracious Editor whose futon we slept on in his living room.   Ron has never forgotten this; we were only 60-something then.  Very granola place, still felt like the1960s.  So it's no surprise that the vibes are different--even from the perspective of Portland.

In 2008, we took our oldest grandchild, Zach, with us when he was six years old.  We discovered then that a child companion alters the experience.  Shepherds, sheep ranchers are eager to encourage children to touch the animals being prepared for showing.  Now his younger sister Zoe was six; it was time for an out-of-town overnight to "see the sheep."

Thursday afternoon we took her to get a haircut. She had one side braid her mother had made when we arrived.  Clueless grandma had no idea that "braids" at a salon would turn into a glam "French braid" production.  Cute but did not last through swimming practice.  They were gone by Saturday morning when we picked her up.

By late afternoon we were in Eugene and braidless Zoe met her first sheep up-close.  Joanie Livermore of Double J in Oregon City noticed that she did not need much encouragement to help clean the sheep's coat  for showing the next day.  Busy taking pictures, I missed out on touching the animal's skin under the curly white fleece and feeling, as Ron reported, its warmth.

How do the old folks engage with the Gathering?  Ron has a special fondness for Black Sheep as the place he bought his beautiful spinning wheel from Wallace van Eaton of Yakima, Washington. Already in his eighties back then, Wallace has not been a vendor for the past three years and we learned he still lives there though retired from hand crafting wheels.

Ron looks forward to buying roving at the event for his spinning.  It's a good place to have exchanges with other fiber enthusiasts about his knitting and weaving.  He always carries along some button hats and small woven tapestries.  Zoe was a willing model.  Several people will receive a hat for the winter in the mail.  No,  never sells them.

 

Vanport City, a Chiron class at Portland State

Though Portland State runs on a quarter system, I continue to talk about "semesters."  Old habits die hard.  A couple of times, just like the regular students, I've wished the term would continue.  

"Portland History through a social justice lens:  The Vanport Neighborhood," my latest Chiron class, ended yesterday.  Once again a student had developed a class outside the regular curriculum.  Creating  "Kneading to Know" in 2011, was a great experience in my first Chiron class.  Gave me a chance to create  "product" and performance.  

Studying Vanport City took me to an entirely different place. It was built almost overnight in 1942 to house thousands of out-of-state workers who were already pouring into an under-prepared Portland.  They came to work in three new shipyards on the Columbia River.  Vanport's stores, offices, schools were destroyed by a massive flood on Memorial Day, 1948.  

Visiting family in Portland many years before we moved here, I saw  an exhibition, "African-Americans in Portland" at the Oregon Historical Society. The Vanport flood was described.  I bought Manly Maben's  Vanport,  [out of print] published by the Society in 1987.  The story Maben told fascinated and appalled me.  

Who would have thought that  that ten years after learning about Vanport, I would make my home here on the opposite coast.  And I'd be taking a class about it at the university that began as Vanport College, created for returning WWII veterans.  [Vanguard, the PSU student paper ran an article on the flood anniversary in 2011...saved a copy in my book, again, not knowing there would soon be a class about it.]

Many interests of mine--the insults of race, neglected women's and black history, the Northwest landscape--came together during the term.   Under the guidance of a graduate student, Kristin Bowling (right in photo), who had been a U.S. Park service ranger for a number of years, class members were expected to develop projects to present in the end of our short time together.

Taking the course with me was, a neighbor, EM,  from my retirement community.  Her interest came from having lived in there as a child.  Her parents had come from New York in 1942 for jobs.  She can still recall details of the public housing apartment they rented. Fortunately, they moved elsewhere before the flood came. 

We did oral interviews with several neighbors who had lived or worked in Portland at the time and had memories of the flood. Some had helped with the rescue operation.  A staff member told about listening to her grandmother tell stories of coming from the South for better wages in the shipyard, then how she had to leave all her possessions behind to escape the flood.

She also had difficulty re-locating elsewhere in Portland, famous for its hostility toward African Americans and other minorities.  An example of these attitudes can be seen in this photo from the WWII period of a group of women marching outside a shipyard in an anti-Japanese demonstration.

Our younger classmates impressed EM and me with their intellectural curiousity. What they knew expanded my understanding of Portland and Oregon.  
Their class projects were ambitious-- composing music to accompany old video footage of the flood, Herculean efforts to sort out actual historical fact from hearsay, and unearthing old songs with Vanport as the theme from jazz and folk musicians.  More on this later .

I've posted about other good experiences in "regular" Portland State classes.  I prefer Chiron classes where the expectation is that every student will be an active participant. Kristin used a seminar style and was a knowledgable, creative instructor.  There were many chances to learn from one another. Jim, a third Senior Auditor (left in photo at top with Kristin) had actually seen the flood and brought extensive knowledge of the physical landscape of the Vanport site.   Now deserted, It was briefly Oregon's second largest city and had the largest public housing project in the United States.

Since retiring I've experienced a variety of styles for what is called "lifelong learning." One of most known is the  Institute for Retired Professionals, a 50 year old program at the New School in New York where all teaching is done by participants.   Osher Learning Institutes at NYU was briefly offered while I lived there.  Another of these operates out of the University of Oregon in downtown Portland.  PSU's is the most appealing with its mix of enrolled students and Senior Auditors as we're formally described.  Also, the other programs have high fees that limit diversity among participants. In Oregon universities, residents over 65 years old can audit eight credits per term indefinitely for a one-time charge of $25.00! 

 

Adrienne Rich Celebrated Here

"When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her" 

Adrienne Rich May 16, 1929-March 27, 2012

Entering the large airy room where I knew no one was easier than I'd expected.  Smiling women sat at the entry table with papers to take.  On the program, the quote here one beneath aphoto of Adrienne smiling/gesturing, surrounded by stacks of books.

The colorful nautilus topped number 21 from Twenty-one Love Poems on "a complimentary broadside"... printed on a long sheet of heavy paper.  To hold and save as a remembrance.  

Hanging from a cord above our heads quotes from her prose and poetry.  An email for the event  indicated we could sign up to read poems, prose, fragments  (3 minutes per reader) from Adrienne's work.  I did that.

 

A woman and I began an intense exchange about where were the organizations--NOW and other politically engaged women's groups from the 1970s.   

Lani Jo Leigh, whom I'd met recently online when she invited me to be on a panel of feminists next month, identified me via my 17% button.   She had a little 4 x 6 handout about the event,1975 film, an interview with Simone de Beavoir at her newly re-furbished theater. Women meeting and exchanging as in the 1970s.    More and more women came into the room.  Extra chairs were found.  

Seven well known feminist poets read, reflected on personal/political/writing memories from days with Adrienne...Judith Barrington (red vest), Judith Arcana, Francis Payne Adler, Ruth Gundle, Paulann Petersen, Willa Schneberg, Sandy Polishuk (right photo, left), who told me about the event.  

 Willa Schneberg reminded us of the strong thread in Adrienne's life to social justice activism.  This day of our celebration and memorial marked the 2nd anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, courageous abortion provider.  Willa was one of several to speak about Adrienne Rich's Jewishness, her 1982 essay, "Split at the Root" exploringthe complexity of this connection.  Like my own. 

Eleanor Berry   read "With Fire All Around Us," her tribute poem, the only words in the evening not written by Adrienne Rich.  
Followed by about 15 women and one man reading favorites.

 Mine was prose from my old copy of "Lies, Secrets and Silence," in  a 1971 essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision":

"The awakening of consciousness is not like the crossing of a frontier--one step and you are in another country.  Much of woman's poetry has been of the nature of a blues song:  a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction.  And today, much poetry by women--and prose for that matter-- is charged with anger.  I think we need to go through that anger, and we will betry our own anger  if we try, as Virginia Woolf was trying, for an objectivity, a detachment, that would make us sound like Jane Austen or Shakespeare.  We know more than ...[they] knewbecause our lives are more complex...we know more about the lives of women--Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf included."

It was an exhilarating evening.  Perhaps I'll learn of more social action by Portland women from Sandy and Willa.

More to read about Adrienne Rich -- Haaretz and Beacon Broadside (with video), and Margalit Fox obit in The New York Times.  

If you're in town on July 12, let's stir some things up by responding to the voice and image of Simone de Beauvoir on "Why I am a Feminist."

 

"Hello, Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain," Margaret Atwood tells it like it is

How come some of the rest of you old ladies have not reprinted this, or said something about it?  Here Margaret Atwood, one of us, a mere 72 years old, sharing her skewed view, Canadian + feminist + seer, of all of us and our world.

This appeared in the New York Times Sunday "Review," April 28, 2012.   Placed mid-page, centerfold as it were, the entire essay enclosed by the muted pink (!) color seen here.  Mari Kanstad Johnsen did the drawing.  She is an artist in Oslo, Norway.   Marja-Leena Rathje] might be familiar with her work.  Atwood tells of her remarkable encounter:

Last night the Martians touched down in the backyard. They were oval and bright pink, with two antlike antennae topped by eyes fringed with sea-anemone lashes. They said they’d come to study America.

“Why ask me?” I said. “America is farther south.”

“You are an observer,” they said. “Please tell us: Does America have a different ‘flavor’ from that of other countries? Is it the center of the cultural world? How does it look to outsiders?”

“America has always been different from Europe,” I said, “having begun as a utopian religious community. Some have seen it as a dream world where you can be what you choose, others as a mirage that lures, exploits and disappoints.  Some see it as a land of spiritual potential, others as a place of crass and vulgar materialism. Some see it as a mecca for creative entrepreneurs, others as a corporate oligarchy where the big eat the small and inventions helpful to the world are stifled. Some see it as the home of freedom of expression, others as a land of timorous conformity and mob-opinion rule.”

“Thank you,” said the Martians, after looking up “thank you” on translate.google.com™. “How may we best discover the essence of America?”

Were I the essayist of my dreams, my writing would resemble Atwood's.  Moving from straight humor to dark humor, she instructs her visitors to begin with Nathaniel Hawthorne.  They speed read.  On to Herman Melville.   The martians speed-read once again and are amazed by the picture of America  reflected in Moby-Dick.  

As the creatures prepare for the rest of their visit to the U.S. (Las Vegas to gamble is one stop), motherly Margaret Atwood cautions them to be careful.

“Forgive me for pointing this out, but you look a lot like diagrams of the human female uterus,” I said. “Complete with fallopian tubes and ovaries.”

A human being might be insulted to be told this, but it didn’t seem to bother the Martians. Having looked up “uterus” on translate.google.com™, they said, “Isn’t the uterus a good thing? The life force and so on?”

“In some parts of America,” I said, “the men are obsessed with uteri. They feel that having one is potentially demonic....they’d go completely berserk, and pronounce you pregnant, and put you in jail.”

I will not spoil the ending for you.  Read, please, and comment.

Food Curiosities for the aging palate

In our first year in PDX, we discoved some of  the well known engaging things that have made living in Portland so different from New York--

the clear water bubblers on sidewalks,

bike racks on the front of public buses,

announcements of bus schedule under a sheltering roof,

the coffee room blackboard with changing quotations at Powell's Books.

As we've lived here longer, more of new food ideas have come our way. Some will be picked picked up on the other coast..like salty ICE CREAM, to which our first reaction was cautious interest followed by, "we like this!"

Salt & Straw's  first scoop shop is dangerously located across the street on Alberta from Close Knit where we often go on Wednesday nights for a knit circle.  (In less than ayear of business there's already a second S&S.)  What protects us: by nine at night, we draw the line at standing behind 10 people waiting for ice cream. 

Caught up in saltiness, I tried Woodblock Chocolate--$4 for small bar of cacao with fleur de sel.  Not good.  Liked typeface:  design over substance.  Far better, this is not a good thing, found the Starbucks dive into chocolate/coffee/salt advertised at Portland State. I like it and am relieved it will be out of sight with spring term about to end.  Pretty frivilous but my life can't be all politics, all the time.

Stinging neetles, just the name has a buzz to it--as in fairy tales where unrecognized princesses were required to knit sweaters from the harsh fiber-- were in the Portland Farmers Market in April.  Encouraged by Kathy of The Farmers Feast, I bought a package from her neighbor, Springwater Farms; much of the challenge of the stingers (enlarge the photo) is eased by their packaging tender shoots. Even so, city person that I am, should have used protective gloves as she advised.  It was a mild green taste that worked well with chickpeas and millett and in an omelet.

The neetle broth was a beautiful color.  I saved it with the thought of cooking something in it later.  After a couple of weeks in the fridge, it had turned darker, so I tossed it.

Again, I told Kathy who frowned, said it would have been fine to use.  Only excuse is that I did not have a cook for either a mother or stepmother.  Reading has worked well for me. But there are moments when my instincts and urbanish ways do not serve well.