a little red hen

Chinese New Year greetings: John Fu & Warren Buffett

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This morning's email brought a dramatic, red, Chinese New Year greeting from John Fu in Copenhagen.  He was a college student when we met in Xian, China eleven years ago.  Determined to get his next degree in the English-speaking world (he was a proficient translator in 2000),  he got his MBA in Denmark where he now lives and works as a business consultant.  We had hilarious experiences with Chinese government officials he helped me to interview in Xian.  I wanted to know how they were dealing with garbage issues. Did they have a problem?  Mayo, as they say in Chinese.

As we sat in a cab on our way to Xian officialdom,  John asked what was in my backpack.  Unzipping the green bag, I pulled out the world's smallest kitchen composter and a red knit worm to explain my kitchen composting mission.  "Oh, so this is your religion," was his insightful reply.*

Dedicated capitalist that he is, John will surely be delighted to be headlined with Warren Buffett performing at a charity fund-raiser.  If you can read Mandarin, let me know how the translation works.  When I went to YouTube for the embed code, I found such ugly, racist comments!  Opened another window on why the U.S. is in deep stuff politically and socially.  Of course, you already knew everything about that from at weeks of the Republican side-show that dominates every TV news program. 

But I digress.  Busha Full of Grace raised my consciousness about the Year of the Dragon.  Currently this spunky, knitting Grandma is nanny to a Chinese family. To expand her knowledge of the celebration, her search led to the ten important facts she posted.   "No sitting in a bedroom" knocked me out;  Number 10, "Songbirds are Good," was more expected.

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*To honor my "religion," John Fu had a chop mark made  with "compost"  in Mandarin.    For "This Dirt Museum: The Ladies' Room," my 2001 installation, I  enlarged the image,  added the word in Spanish. It had a prominent spot in the show and still hangs in our apartment.  Shown here with a few of the 150 red worm interpretations I knit for the exhibition.  [You too can have a chop; order here.]

Though amused by the idea that my intense practice of transforming  kitchen green waste into a useful, earth-enhancing amendment might be considered highly spiritual, perhaps a "religion," John's response has grown on me.

When we moved to our retirement community, a woman in the mail room invited me to join the Green Team.  What a vintage designation my NYC self thought.  Not that at all I discovered.

 We now live in Portland, Oregon, sustainability-intense city where you never forget your reusable grocery bag.  [See latest "Portlandia" episode.]  Once again we kitchen compost.  I am very involved in encouraging neighbors to do likewise.  No longer do red wigglers in our living room transform the stuff, but the intention is the same.

 

Happy Cup, bread, politics: Little red hen's peripatetic days

Rye breads recently made where I neglected to label recipe source.  They were very good.  One on right is 1968 New York Times Sourdough via Craig Claiborne.

And what better to go with a slice of homemade bread than my newest political button.  Yes, 17% is the stunning percentage of women in Congress.  A special election in the quirky district where we live is about to (fingers crossed) give Democrat Suzanne Bonamici a seat in the House of Representatives.  She will replace an unsuitable man I wrote about at length HERE.

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MOM MARKETING,  is a pro bono effort on behalf of HAPPY CUP ; it is my very own "start-up" for 2012.  Timmy Straw, composer and musician, who works at the other wonderful Portland bookstore, Daedalus, in the Northwest, was the first person I tried the idea on.

She listened to my pitch (we are already acquainted).

Three years ago our daughter Rachel (at right) had the idea to open a coffee shop to provide more jobs and more social outlets for her clients with disabilities.  Full Life Coffee Shop quickly attracted other programs who bring their clients on outings to socialize--and drink coffee.

In late 2011, through a circumstance that could only occur in Portland, Rachel had an opportunity to develop a coffee roast.  Happy Cup joined the lively java scene overtaking  America (end of pitch).

Tee-shirt and  mug have been added.  Of course, proud parents tell the Happy Cup story, distribute this small, informative brochure.

As part of  Mom Marketing I give the listener  a sample package of coffee.  Next month:  Happy Cup debuts at Whole Foods in Portland.

 

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day... Black History Month to follow

How would all Americans be thoughtful about Martin Luther King today?  The major story to appear in connection with this commemoration was not positive.  Headline from Atlanta's City Guide:

Historic Church Martin Luther King,

Jr.'s Neighborhood Facing Foreclosure

The church, Higher Groud Empowerment Center, a center of Atlanta's Vine City community for more than 100 years, faced foreclosure by your favorite neighbor and mine--a big bank.

A last minute protest by Occupy Atlanta seems to have halted the move for the moment.  According to the Huffington Post Occupy this action follows a recent wave of anti-foreclosure campaigns that use occupy movements to delay home foreclosures.

Where are we with "the dream" King described?  How many teachers of color will talk about it.  And white teachers like Ernie Brill in Massachusetts who heard the speech in 1963.  Last week, because the day itself is a closed school day, he asked students to analyze a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks written the day after King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

Should it be a holiday?  Holidays around notable American leaders have been commodified, becoming shoppers' specials.  This leads young African Americans like 29 year-old Shukree Hassan Tilghman in 2010 to call for an end to Black History Month:

"But we are talking about who belongs in the pantheon of black heroes, and who doesn’t. And that’s the real problem. We should seize this opportunity to retire Black History Month, which has become an empty ritual of idol-worship that retards real historical progress."

 

Tilghman has made a film, "More than a Month," through ITVS and the National Black Programming Consortium.  Thanks to the University of Oregon's Journalism School the film will be shown in Portland on the evening of February 14 at the Turnbull Center. If you are in Portland, Oregon, please join me to see it.  Or take five minutes to watch this clip.

Seeing the filmmaker's last name, I recall there is a Tilghman Island on the eastern shore of Maryland, where  Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ross Tubman fled from  slavery.  Jamie Stiehm,  writing in the New York Times recently, noted its singularity  "... in no part of the state was slavery as brutal as the Eastern Shore."  Could Shukree Hassan Tilghman be a descendent of slaves once held on Tilghman Island?

The Oregonian reported on a release this very day of a report card by a coalition of seven groups representing Oregon's communities of color.  They evaluated  the state legislature's effectiveness in 2011 year in moving bills to improve racial equity.   The Partnership for Safety and Justice in Portland is a member of the coalition.

"The grades are not good....some of the most crucial [possible] solutions were overlooked....Top priorities failed."

 To use Martin Luther King Day for this significant effort is a fine model that might be emulated by other municipalities.

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                                            UPDATE... 65,000 PETITIONS made a big bank back down. 

January 17 was the day the Atlanta church was saved through efforts of Rebuild the Dream's call for petitions.   Find out more about the American Dream Movement HERE.  Signing petitions does matter.

Loving To Read Obituary Pages

Where did the attraction begin?  In the 1950s and 60s, I worked in public relations in New York City.  Oh, there were so many, many daily papers that I had to read.  Mornings it was the Herald Tribune and the New York Times (image here from last week).

Not the tabloids, the ones whose big, bold headlines I'd see in the hands of subway riders and on newsstands. There was the Daily Mirror, deceased,  the Daily News, still flaunting its increasingly regressive conservatism.  In the afternoon, more that are history:  World Telegram & Sun, the Journal-American.

It was never a job requirement to read obits:  I just liked to read about the lives of others, see images of them from another era.  Ultimately, that curiosity led me to become a psychotherapist in midlife.  (I'll also be interested in your family's photos from the past.)

Reading about the deceased in the Times has continued.  Every now and then there's someone I knew or can connect to through people in my own past.  John Updike, whom I met briefly in a Harvard dorm when he came to borrow a tux from my then-boyfriend Christopher "Kit" Lasch.  I also have a letter* with Lasch's sketch of him; they were college roommates.  Most of the notable people from my era were men.  Rarely do I find a woman's obit except for a few, like my friend Barbara Seaman, who made significant contributions to women's lives with her first book, "The Case against the Pill."

Like Updike in the photo here, all of us smoked cigarettes (to be specific).  Somewhere in my stuff is a photo from 1954, my junior year at Oberlin.  I wear a short-sleeve gray cashmere sweater bought on sale in St. Louis where my family lived then.  In my hand, purposely, is a cigarette.  Updike died of lung cancer--Lasch and Seaman of other forms.  Did I stop early enough in 1968 when I was thirty-three?  Hoping so.

Back to my reading of obits--continued the NYTimes habit as we moved around.  Left NYC in 1968, continued to read the Times in Oberlin (faculty wife this time), and in Baltimore where we landed next.  Also read the ones in the Baltimore Sun once I had a sense of who was who in the community. Back to New York in 1995, still flipping to those back pages in the Times.

What about Portland, Oregon?  We've been permanently for over two-plus years. Why not read these too, all about everyday women and men.  Oddly, these are more satisfying. Years ago, I said to Ron, "Amazing reading obits in The New York Times could make you believe that women never die."  Surely among all those forgotten ball-players, forgotten Hollywood bit players, there could be a woman or two.  Rarely.

Women are a larger presence in the Oregonian.  I learn details of  their lives as working women in the Northwest.  Often there are photos of them both young and old like Ruth S. McDonald here who died at 89 last September.  Most are homemakers.  But there's more to learn here about Ruth's working life.  She was born in 1920, on a farm near Madison, Nebraska, town of about 3,000, whose largest employer is Tyson Fresh Meats.

She moved to Omaha, was working in the Blackstone Hotel as a waitress when she met her Army husband.  They moved to Vancouver, Washington, and both worked at the Kaiser Shipyard.  She had two sons, grandchild, great grandchildren.  Returned to waitressing at sometime in the 20th century, retired from Ye Olde Towne Crier when she was 70!

"She was a true professional who took pride in her work."  Donations suggested to  Sisters of the Road Cafe known for its programs of community-driven solutions to poverty and homelessness, and Bradley Angle, center for domestic violence survivors.  First time I'd seen organizations like these in the obits.  Think Ruth and I would have had some important conversations about tikkun olam (healing the world) if we had met.

*My letters from Lasch went to an archive at the University of Rochester.  To write this post, I saw the link for the first time and cannot figure out where and if the letters are there.   Have to ask my son, Nick, who is behind the curious small world story of how they landed there.  Another time will write about how little personal information Lasch seems to have made public as I noticed in a review of recent biography.