Friday, June 12, 2009

Grubbing in the Dirt

Grubbing in the dirt and thinking of my father: the two are inexorably entwined in my mind. My father was an ace gardener: a man ahead of his time, reading and putting into practice principles from Organic Gardening magazine and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring during those environmentally unfriendly DDT years. And, sometimes to my horror, he also wasn’t afraid to experiment with what then were considered-to-be-exotic plants. I was the first kid on the block, possibly in my whole neighborhood, to be treated to yellow tomatoes and spaghetti squash. Oh, joy! But, on good days for me, he would allow me to “help” him with simple gardening tasks and even allotted me a small plot for my own to grow annuals of my choosing. Although I was skeptical of his wanderings into weird-vegetable-land, on my knees beside him in the dirt I thought that I had died and gone to heaven!

In our allegedly adult years, my friend Patsy and I have talked about how, as girls, we much preferred spending time with our “Sainted Daddies” than with our mothers. With rearview-mirror vision, it is clear why. It wasn’t totally that Daddy/Daughter thing, although that probably figured into the equation. We didn’t love our mothers less and our fathers more. Rather, our mothers were inside the house cleaning, and cooking, and mending: those 1950’s-Mother things. It was pretty clear that we were going to be expected to have those items on our agenda for the rest of our lives. So right then, we wanted to be with our fathers in the yard grubbing in the dirt or in the garage messing with power tools. Which of these sets of activities was more interesting was a no-brainer!

Also, on really special days, there were field trips to the hardware store: purveyors of seeds, nursery stock and greasy, unidentifiable-to-us-then mechanical things. Built on those memories, I still love going to hardware stores. The vastness of the inventory is astonishing; just walking through and looking can fill an entire evening. Makes me a “cheap date,” according to Larry.

My father was far less chatty than I, so, as it works with those quiet people, when an opinion was offered, generally it stuck in memory. Not a church-going man, he once commented to me that he didn’t see how anyone who gardened could not believe in a higher power.  His observation embedded itself in my brain. Thus, having at least partially fulfilled my destiny of being in the house doing those “woman things,” one year I made him a sampler that bears a clump of stylized flowers and the sing-songy, poetic legend: “Who Plants a Seed Beneath the Sod and Waits To See Believes in God.” Might be a bit sappy, but his “little girl” had made it for him, so in that Daddy/Daughter-thing way, he was touched that I had remembered his remark. Following his journey to that big garden in the hereafter, that piece of needlework came back to me and now hangs beside the door that I often use on my way outside to work in the garden. I glance at it and it calls to mind my “Sainted Daddy” as I go outdoors to engage in far-less-skilled-than-he gardening activities.  (I couldn’t be programmed totally only to do that in-the-house-stuff, though. In addition to still grubbing in the dirt, and now that I know what a lot of them are, I sometimes mess with greasy mechanical things too. A maintenance person once said to me, “You sure know a lot about maintenance for a woman:” a tribute to my father and a proud moment for me.)

So, as Father’s Day and the gardening season take center stage, and we go outdoors to grub in the dirt, raise a trowel and give a shout out to all those “Sainted Daddy” gardeners everywhere.

Broadcast by Jeanette Saddler Taylor on June 12, 2009
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Home & Garden • Women & Men • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 05, 2009

Zombie

Almost 20 years ago, I was working in St. Louis.  I pulled into my parking space at work and noticed a stray cat in front of the car.  It was a tiny, dirty black kitten and it was very skinny. I am a lover of cats and approached it. When I reached it the cat clung to me like it wanted to be picked up.  It looked to have been badly abused.  All the fur on the top of its head was burned off.  And there were little wounds and scabs all over its body.  The radio station didn’t have much in the way of cat food but we had a guard dog, a German Shepherd.  I took some of the dog’s dog food and fed it to the poor kitten who ate it like it hadn’t eaten in a long time.  The other people I worked with wondered how I had been able to get close to the cat.  They said they had been trying to help it all day.  It seemed the cat had picked me to be the one to help it.

When I left to go home, the cat followed me to my car, calling after me.  I stopped and picked it up again and it clung to me and purred.  I said, sorry girl, I already have too many cats, and went home.  That was a Friday night and the cat stuck in my mind all weekend.  I wished that I had taken it home and felt guilty about it.

I had forgotten all about her when I arrived at work on Monday.  And there she was sitting in my parking place.  My fellow workers said she had been there all day as if looking for me.  Again no one had been able to approach her.  But again she nearly leaped into my arms.  That cinched it.  I decided to adopt her.  I gave her another helping of dog food, and she fell asleep on the desk next to me while I worked that day.

We named the cat Zombie.  It was something about her eyes that always seemed to be wide open and checking everything out.  Zombie eyes.  The name stuck.

She turned out to be an amazing cat.  After her wounds healed and the hair grew back she was beautiful.  She was all black and her hair had a glossy sheen to it.  And her eyes were gorgeous.  I always thought she had a beautiful face.  If cats had beauty contests, she would have had a great shot at Miss America.  And if the story of black cats crossing your path and bringing you bad luck is true then I should have been besieged by unlucky times.  She crossed my path a hundred times a day.

Zombie had been traumatized by whoever mistreated her.  She didn’t trust people, especially children.  But somehow she had picked me out as her companion.  She was more affectionate to me than any cat I ever owned.  She followed me everywhere and watched everything I did.  When I sat down, she usually landed on my lap and went to sleep.

She was by far the smartest cat I’d ever been around and I have had around 20 cats in my life.  She trained herself to do a remarkable trick.  She liked to play with superballs, and I was tossing one of the high bouncing balls to her one day when it went down the basement stairs.  Zombie bounded down the stairs after it, caught in her mouth on the bounce and raced back up the stairs and dropped it at my feet.  For the next two years, she performed the trick flawlessly.  Whenever I tossed the ball down the stairs she would track it down and bring it back to my feet.

One day I was showing off her trick to a group of friends.  When she happily brought the ball back up the stairs and gave it to me, the group burst into applause and bravos for Zombie.  She looked around and you could just see the realization in her eyes that she was being used by these humans.  And she never did the trick again.

Zombie died last week.  According to the vet, most of her body just stopped working at once.  She was 19, a remarkable old age for a cat.

Many men don’t like cats.  But it’s usually guys who are constantly trying to prove how masculine they are to all of us and probably to themselves as well. I am learning, after she’s gone, just how important she was to me.  For over 19 years she was hardly ever out of my reach.  Whenever I was sad, angry, disturbed, frustrated or any of those bad emotions, a couple of strokes of the beautiful black cat and the sound of her purr would take me right out of it.  She got me through a divorce, three long periods of unemployment, money difficulties, and a host of other problems.  She was a very effective mood-altering drug, one that I am taking the cure from cold turkey.  The first night she was gone I was watching a hockey game on television.  Everytime the game got tense I reached for Zombie for reassurance and was reminded that she was gone.

I have another cat who is a great cat but her personality is different and she’s not interested in learning new duties at this point in her life.  And I have adopted a new tiny black kitten.  She doesn’t know it but she has big pawprints to fill.  I think everyone ought to own a black cat, just for the luck they bring.

Broadcast by Lee Burdorf on June 05, 2009
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, May 29, 2009

Twitter Time

I was on car pool duty, arranging rides for a group of Michiana teens, but nobody had a phone number for one of the kids. Apparently today’s youth use the telephone for matters of practicality not so much, compared to previous generations. What about email, I asked. Email is over, email is so yesterday, my passengers from Teen Planet informed me. They’re tracking and arranging their lives on Facebook.

But most people know Facebook by now – even fogies like me have Facebook pages for staying stay in touch with friends. The new is wearing off and it’s time for restless techies to move on.  So let’s all try Twitter, which has the advantage of being simple and not very time-consuming. On Twitter, you send a short message from your phone or computer to anybody who subscribes to your account. Those messages are called tweets, and subscribers are called followers. A famous person like Oprah might genuinely have one million followers reading her tweets – imagine that. Hope she’s got something to say.

Everybody knows that good things come in very small packages.  But seriously, a web service where your messages are limited to 140 characters – not words but type-strokes, and every space and punctuation mark counts? That’s a Twitter message for you, a tweet. If you go on too long, Twitter cuts you off. Why? Are we running out of electrons or something?

And what can you say in 140 characters, anyway?  Here’s what one of history’s most beautifully compressed documents, the Gettysburg Address, becomes in Twitter’s hands: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the prop

Not quite as satisfying as Lincoln’s original text, is it? But you can turn his ten classic sentences into a little tweet like this: 87 years of liberty, and now this shocking battlefield is consecrated by soldiers’ blood. We must fight on, for human freedom must not die.

I’ll take the original version any day. It’s awfully easy to make fun of Twitter, which certainly suffers from human excess just like other parts of the Internet. For example, one sad Michiana resident uses Twitter to record her frequent bouts of drinking. But other people from many walks of life have heard the promise of melody in Twitter’s humble tweet.

For down deep, Twitter is completely open and free and flexible.  You can do anything social with it; it’s a platform for people to people invention. Some folks connect around a shared hobby or because they attend the same college; some share restaurant tips in a tourist town; some advertise their commercial services while others just keep up with friends. For me, the most interesting ones, though, are far-flung individuals who come together around an issue they care about.

For example, on Twitter, you can easily find a few dozen journalists working on how to reinvent a new, 21st century newspaper that will serve democracy without bankrupting the owners. These folks trade ideas every day; they provide links to relevant articles; they create podcasts where two or three of them discuss the latest developments in this very pressing issue. Over time, they coalesce as a community, and their ideas clarify and grow strong, all because they share their thinking each day in 140-character bursts of captured energy on Twitter. If you’re doing something that would be enriched by conversation, Twitter can help kindred spirits find you.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on May 29, 2009
Community • Customs & Rituals • Media & Technology • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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Joe Chaney -- Swinging States / Greetings, Earthlings / Reading the Names / A Culture of Cheating / The Lonely Game / Trends in the Baby Names Market / Questions about Terrorism / Reality Television / Innocence Lost in the Stock Market / Hearing Our Spirit Voice / A Cubs Fantasy / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- Anatomical Correctness / Of Minds and Machines / Geocaching in Spring / Where Are You From? / War / Polka Party in Benton Harbor / First Call for Help / Flora vs. Fauna / Checking My Change / Getting up in the Morning / Surviving the Heat-Wave / More essays by Louise

April Lidinsky -- How Big Can A ‘Small Town’ Be? / Demonstrating Spring / Thinking About Roughing It / Listening to Summer / Bursting into Bloom / Against Tradition / The Way of Fist and Foot, and Heart / Pleasure and Danger … and Gender / Calculating Gender / Spring Break for Grownups / The Deep End / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- Pushing a Lawnmower to the Max in Granger / Going to Hooters / Why Morphine is Overrated / Riding a Big Rig / On the Joys of Flying / Why New Things Stink / Home for the Holidays / Stray Gloves / The World Trade Center and the Meaning of Patriotism / Eating Out With Job Candidates / Bruce Springsteen’s Biggest Michiana Fan / More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- Ice Cream Man / A Hospital Epiphany / Dancing with Trains / A Postcard from the Inner City / Kayaking a Great Lake / Bike to Work Week / Real Estate Physiology / The Last Customer / Bad Neighborhood / Chair Massage / A Kid and a Rock / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- Learning to Like Shakespeare / Life on the Default Setting / Chess Night / Email from the Hurricane Zone / The Con Man / The Exercise Bike / Veterans and Violence / Our Ontario Holiday / Going to College Graduation / Wick / Studebaker Stories / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- True to Type / Location, Location, Location / Dishes / Patrick Henry in the Marching Band / Chronicling Michiana / Basketball Monster / Celebrating Magna Charta Day / The St. John’s Bible / Getting Together / Boomers Going Bust / Being Shallow / More essays by Jeanette