I love the library.  Librarians are right up there with pharmacists as people who are completely on my side.  They are my advocates against censorship and insurance companies, respectively.  So I don’t want to turn around and censor librarians but I have to wonder what exactly they are thinking with some peculiar signs I have seen in two of the branches I habitually haunt.  In one women’s room there is a sign that says,

“Please use paper towels appropriately.”

I looked at it for a long time, wondering what had happened in here that would result in this sign.  Had someone tried to paper the walls with them?  Or jimmy open the dispenser?  The most likely misdemeanor is putting paper towels in the toilet.  But if so, why didn’t the sign just say, “No paper towels in the toilet.”

“The people who are using paper towels inappropriately probably don’t read signs like the one you have up in the women’s room,” I mentioned –as a good citizen–to a librarian.  She looked up from her sleuth.  It took a while for her eyes to focus.

“Good point,” she noted.

I haven’t exercised my good citizenship in regards to another sign currently up in another branch library:

“Strollers block our entrance. Thank you.”

Does this mean they are inviting strollers to block the entrance?  Because that is certainly what’s implied.

Aren’t I annoying?  Most English majors of a certain age are annoying if not cranky.

Schoolchildren are experts at knowing exactly what they mean and saying it anyway.  I had a piano student from St Alphonse’s school come in one day singing a Christmas carol whose chorus went “Noel, Noel, sing in exultation!” But he sang the words the St Al’s kids were inserting:  “Noah, Noah died of constipation!”  Then he did an imitation of a nun frothing at the mouth.

Schoolchildren are also good at saying what they aren’t sure they mean, but they can be forgiven because they are earnestly struggling with why anything means anything.  Most of the rest of us are too tired.  One of those humorous Internet forwards that make the rounds of everyone’s e-mails contained answers children had made on Bible tests.  My favorites were:

*Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

*Throughout history the Jews had trouble with unsympathetic Genitals.

*Christians have only one spouse.  This is called Monotony.

My friend, Terry, who is the most diplomatic person I know, sent me an email of the Bible test answers.  I saw her at an OK Chorale rehearsal later that evening.  Walking over to where she was sitting with the altos, I marshaled my thoughts in order to make a funny comment.

But what came out was, “Hey Terry, how are your genitals?”

Four alto heads snapped up.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry!  That’s not what I meant to say!”  I quickly explained about the email.

Terry just laughed, “What are friends for if one can’t inquire after their genitals once in a while?”

Context is what makes language a casualty or a fortune.  Here’s the funniest exchange I’ve heard in a long time, compliments of Jim, husband of Debi, aka Putzer, the attorney. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/02/away-with-discrepancies/)

Jim was in his front yard doing manly stuff like pruning when a car pulled up in front of the house and the driver rolled down her window.

“How much do you charge for yard work?” she called out.

“Well, the lady at this house lets me sleep with her,” Jim said.

The driver gunned her motor and was gone.

There’s been an on-going Facebook progress report on Jim’s construction of a cradle for his soon to be born grandchild.  It occurred to me that it is taking a long time.  I was trying to formulate something funny to say –on Facebook, mind you–about the lady of the house letting him sleep with her, but I remembered my faux-pas with the genitals comment in time to stop myself.

But I will say this because I want to end this blog: what are paper towels for if one can’t stuff them down the toilet once in a while?  And if your marriage gets monotonous, you might consider a three-way with a porcupine.

My blog topics are a result of little frissons I get in my solar plexus.  Something funny happens and it laughs down there.  Or something thrills when I feel passionate about an idea.  Or I get triggered by something that upsets me so much I want to pretend it doesn’t.

I got one of those triggers on Wednesday.  It is now Sunday.  So that’s five days of trying to pretend I was above it all, above being bothered by something I read on a UCC web site.  UCC is the denomination of the church where I am the choir director.  It’s so liberal that after UCC, you can only go on to Unitarian and from there, well, we all know where that leads.  So it’s about two degrees removed from new age, pagan, atheism.

Anyway a UCC pastor had written that she dreads a particular conversation that ensues after someone has found out she is a minister and feels the need to tell her he is “spiritual but not religious” as though this is some “daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the status quo.”  Next thing she knows, said person is telling her he finds God in sunsets.  “Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset!” she says.

“Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me,” she continues. “There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.  What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you.  Life with God gets rich and provocative when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.  .  .  .You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.”

Wow, I think.  That’s quite a diatribe. That’s quite a load of assumptions about people who have had the misfortune to sit next to you on a plane.    It bothered me so much I got heartburn from my bland American sandwich of white bread and Miracle Whip that I washed down with Sanka.

I am getting heartburn over this piece, but I am pretending it doesn’t bother me while I make dispassionate (and dissociative) observations about it.  When I was involved in a religious tradition I did not invent for myself, that heartburn would have been called “conviction by the Holy Spirit.”  My fundamentalist mother would have said “You’ve gotten away from God and you aren’t eating enough broccoli. That’s your problem.”

This “Reflection,” as the author calls it, is fundamentalist-speak.  This is how war starts.  Someone reduces part of the human race to a small capsule of imagined characteristics and there is a reaction from the other side of the new barricade.   Ancient religious traditions are very good at provoking this.  Next thing you know, there’s a “holy” war and everyone is running around being religious but no one has even approached spirituality.

My war right now is internal.  I have let this writer’s language pull me out of balance.  I have projected her into an enemy out there so I can be infuriated by her complacency, and lack of imagination, the latter being my deepest judgment of another human being.   Her nanny language makes every inch of my skin grimace.  The psycho-analyst in me sees a ten year old child telling adults what is and isn’t appropriate.  I want to spew a comment at the end of her (non) Reflection but there is no place to comment.  I have sarcastic thoughts about that.

My opposition has made it a battle which I have already lost. All my fighting but articulate thoughts (more articulate than hers, so there!) have already spoiled five days and fogged the atmosphere.  I have lost my equilibrium and have heartburn.  It’s too late.

Finally, after five days, I am starting to settle into my rich but non-religious depths.  This pastor is doing something we all do.  It’s so condescending and sounds so awful that I developed amnesia there for a few days.  I have a blog.  I bloviate about anything I want to.  I introduce my prejudices.  I lecture about live music, and my theories of learning.   I even have a category called “Spirituality” where I put blogs that aren’t “religious.”

We meet ourselves in each other.   We are solitary and we all live in relationship with each other.  Do we really have to choose just one?  And do we have to vote between religious or spiritual?  Wars have been fought over less.   Above all, when we demote our uniquely fascinating selves to the one or two characteristics that happen to be on top today, could we at least have some awareness about what we are doing?  Even  if it takes us five days.

We really don’t know what it’s like to be anyone but ourselves.  We are alone no matter how much we “work in community.”   We can only approximate connections.  Billy Collins has a lovely poem that’s about many things, including marriage and relationship.  Here’s the surprising last stanza of “Osso Buco” from The Art of Drowning,

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

The only place I know is myself.  What it feels like in the marrow, when I am alone or with people, whether conscious or unconscious, that’s my spirituality.

I’ve slipped into one of my spy phases so even though I am compromising security, it’s currently the only thing on my mind.   For purposes of this blog, all use of the word “drop” should be considered what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: the plot device of using an often ambiguous thing which the characters  will sacrifice almost anything to get their hands on.  It doesn’t matter so much what the thing actually is, only that everyone wants it.

This spy phase began–we who go into espionage have such varied motivations–when Genevieve of the unearthly beautiful voice  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/10/please-dont-grovel/ ) came in carrying a Dorothy Sayers book under her arm which in itself could be a coded message.  She was re-reading Murder Must Advertise in which mentioning the product Nutrax for Nerves in the correct pub would bag you a half ounce of cocaine in your jacket pocket.  Genevieve and I got to talking about Dorothy Sayers and that was enough for me to review all the old Lord Peter Wimsey BBC productions and to re-read The Dawson Pedigree and Murder Must Advertise. 

Then it was nothing to move on to “‘Allo, ‘Allo,” a sort of French resistance Hogan’s Heroes where they spend nine seasons trying to airlift the same two British airmen out of France; and where German, French, British, and various Communist groups all try to leverage their lives after the war by passing around the valuable painting they call The Fallen Madonna with the big boobies.

Wish Me Luck is a series about British women spies made in the 1980’s in England.  It had me preoccupied for days until I had watched all 23 episodes.   I watched them a second time.  Then I started in on The Sorrow and the Pity.  I usually watch sub-titled movies with my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, but I have kept my espionage interest to myself.  It’s one of the first things you learn: keep your mouth shut.

Especially with my good neighbor, Gwen.  There’s a high fence around her yard.  She says she is doing a lot of reading over there, but who would know?  Someone who knows something about just about everything?  That’s a useful skill.  Then every so often she gets all dressed up and goes somewhere.  She says she goes out to lunch with a former co-worker, but I wonder.

My painting buddy Madelaine paints beautifully.  But then she draws wickedly funny cartoons and signs them Hilaire Squelette.  That’s a cover story if I ever heard one.

I don’t even want to get started with Chris, the unclassifiable but who was in the Army.  There’s a reason she was in the Army and is now unclassifiable.  Oh, wait.  I guess I am the one who calls her that.

I myself have a sweet set-up.  I could write counts under the fifth measure of the first two-page song in a lesson book as a message that sets off a chain reaction resulting in a drop. The only drawback is that it uses children.  My voice students are adults, though.  I could write vocal exercises for them to hum as a secret signal like in The Lady Vanishes.

After spending way too much time reading mysteries and watching spy movies, I don’t see brick walls any more.  I see crevices where a message could be lodged.  And the cemetery behind my house is a perfect drop-site.  Although generally speaking, when something ends up in the cemetery, it has already dropped, so to speak, anywhere from one to five days previously.

The other Sunday in church after I played the hymn before the sermon I went to sit in the back row even though my little friend Marvin, wasn’t there. ( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/choir-dogs/) I wanted to get a closer look at The Hair that was sitting three rows up.  There was about a foot of hair sitting on top of a woman’s head and I wanted to figure out if it was teased up like we used to do in the 60’s or if it was a wig.  My re-con was inconclusive but it did occur to me that she could have a whole drop lodged up there.

I come from a family of robust paranoids so I think I understand something about the popularity of spy novels, crime literature, and mysteries.  Concentrating fear and oppression into stories neutralizes them somewhat.   Not because everything turns out all right in the end because so often it doesn’t.  But the story contains itself in such a way that I can think.  The ability to think is its own freedom.

I believe that safety and freedom begin in our own heads.  The more we can acknowledge our full humanity–the good and the bad–and accept that we all have a spectrum of motives, the less there is to fear outside our own heads.  That drop is not a MacGuffin.

This week I finished a painting inspired by a photograph of a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, and Eugene, my first little soul-mate cat.  He’s the cat who liked raisins, broccoli and ear wax –I don’t need to get into how that came about—and who played my answering machine when he was bored.

I wanted riots of color in this painting and the colors turned out to be a way of making the shadows in front of the wheelbarrow.  But Eugene, my little familiar, did not look quite right until I gave him a little shadow.   He came alive, sitting in the little shadow that belonged to him, that he alone could make.

A shadow is a companion of the thing itself.  Remember “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,” the children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson? The poem treats shadows benignly.   But the word “shadow” in this post Jungian age, has acquired an unfortunate rep for something we ought to be able to get rid of.

But our shadow is our companion.  It’s that vast part of our being that we are not conscious of but who communicates with us as much as we allow.   When we meet our unconscious, it feels like “it” is outside of us.   But our unconscious is the shadow only we can make.

The classic engagements are when we dream and fall in love.  Slips of the tongue can alert us to something we didn’t know we felt or thought.  We meet our shadow when we discover that we’re sexually aroused by the war paint in the movie, Braveheart; or when we realize we love roller derby or the surgery channel.  Or when we discover a capacity for jealousy or tenderness or competitiveness or gratitude we didn’t know we had.  It throws us into a confusion that is an opportunity to expand our ideas about what it means to be human.

No matter how rational we like to think we are, I believe that our unconscious steers us if for no other reason than there is so much more of it in our beings.   It can’t be expunged but it can’t be known either so it seems good to try to live in acknowledgment of its existence and to be-friend it when we can.  Because there is always shadow.  It goes in and out with us.

When you are trying to Create Art, you think a lot about light and dark and how the two need each other.  When I first started learning to draw, I began to see the world in terms of dark and light.  The dark of the trees furthest away is what makes the closer trees look closer.  In other words, shadow gives depth.

Shadow brings relief from the intensity of the sun. If, as David Byrne sings, heaven is a place where nothing really happens maybe it’s because your retinas have been seared and your brain burnt out from the excessive light.  “Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind,” says Emily Dickinson.

Adam Phillips, my favorite psychoanalytic writer, writes, “Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts.  It’s a version of fundamentalism.” (from Going Sane.)

Speaking of fundamentalists, I have a story about my mother.  It’s also a story about a shadow that wasn’t and a spark of light suggesting that she was in the light in which she had always believed; and she didn’t be-grudge me the part I played in our tumultuous relationship.

I got a visitation from her a few months after her death.  I had taken a copy of her death certificate to my bank along with a check for $300 made out to Mary K. Richmond. The check was from a class action law suit against one of many semi-criminal organizations who manipulate money out of elderly people in the form of “pledges.”   Her mail was coming to my house while I tried to get her name off close to 500 of these organizations.  I knew on sight which mail to throw in the re-cycle en route from the mail box to my front door, and which inspired further investigation. I had opened this particular letter. I got together the documents and walked to the bank where they seemed unconcerned about cashing the check.

On my way home I came through the cemetery. It was a cold winter day and there was an unusual amount of snow lying around Seattle.  As I rounded a corner, I saw a shadow come up behind me so I moved to let whoever it was pass.  No one passed. When I turned around there was no one in sight, but there was a momentary glint of sun on a piece of ice, high in a bare tree.  It blinded me for a second, and then was gone.  The bare branch waved.  I smiled a small smile that slowly got broader until I laughed outright.  My first thought was that my mother was pleased to do this small thing for me from beyond the grave. Then it occurred to me that, of course, my mother would come checking on what was happening with her money.  And finally I heard her voice saying, “There. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

I thought this blog had become rather dark and wanted to end it on a light note.

Last Harvest

A year ago today I launched this web site.   Joan, my friend with the theological chops, had been telling me for years that I ought to consolidate all my mischief into one site.  She designed the first OK Chorale web site but she said her skills weren’t up to anything more complex.  Not wanting her chops to go to waste, I set her praying.

Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, and I spent one miserable afternoon trying to create a web site on one of those Do it Yourself sites.  Gwen made one for herself (https://sites.google.com/site/gphowellsite/home) but eventually I found my web designer, Nate, on Craigslist. (http://www.sterr-bros.com/)

Nate was great. He answered all my questions in language I could understand and he listened –so to speak, since the consultations were all done via e-mail–to what I wanted.  I love what he came up with.  He makes changes and updates for me and has been especially savvy, I think, with getting this website onto search engines.

Behind the scenes of the blog itself is a thing called the “Dashboard.”  I can go into the Dashboard to post and edit blogs and comments, and insert photos and links.

But the part of the Dashboard that I haunt is the “Counts per Day.”  I have watched the number of hits climb from 250 that first month to well over 1000 a month.  I knew in the beginning that my friends and acquaintances were reading my blogs but I don’t have hundreds of friends.  When I started posting links on Facebook, the numbers jumped.  My friends have friends.

The “Referrers” section of the “Counts per Day” tells me how other readers are finding the site. I keep an eye of wonder on the “Visitors per Country.”  In the beginning the U.S. was represented plus a few readers in Canada and the U.K.  Then there were two from Japan and four from Brazil.  Then suddenly Spain pulled into third place.  I don’t know anyone in Spain, Japan or Brazil.  By now I have gotten over 200 different visitors from Germany, and nearly 300 from Russia if you count the Ukraine as part of Russia which of course I do not.

I also have readers in France, the Netherlands, Romania (home of my maternal grandparents), Poland, Sweden, India, Latvia, Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

I would love to know who you all are!

Which brings me to the comments.

One of my closest friends, who shall go nameless but her name rhymes with Dinah, doesn’t want to leave a comment because of all she has to go through—name, e-mail address, URL.  I know it’s all very tedious and it’s not like you are going to get a package from Amazon later in the week for your troubles.  In addition, most of us don’t even know what an URL is let alone whether or not we have one.

Here’s what happens when you first leave a comment:  you type your name, email address and the comment.  No one can see your e-mail address except me (and Nate, but I doubt he has the time or interest). Leave the line for the URL blank.  If you don’t know what your URL is it’s because you don’t have one.  You don’t need one.

The first time you leave a comment, it comes to me.  I decide if I want your comment on my web site.  I can fix your grammar, punctuation, and spelling if I want to.  Then I mark the comment approved and it goes up.   When I do this, I am also approving of you and you get your own little quilt square as an identifying feature.

Thereafter when you leave a comment, it goes up immediately with whatever name you have given and your quilt square.  I am notified that a new comment has been posted.  If you have some grammatical error that is un-worthy of you, I can edit it after the fact.  If I don’t like your comment I can delete it after the fact.

Sometimes my friends send comments on Facebook or in an e-mail.  I can post these as comments on my web site.  The comment goes up attributed to me and with my identifying quilt square.  Since I only do this with flattering comments, it looks rather cheesy to have my name attached to them. So like the Wizard of Oz, I retire quickly behind the curtain and change my name to the name of whoever said such nice things about me.  The only catch is that I haven’t figured out how to change the quilt square so there’s a tell.

There’s yet another function in the Counts per Day that gives me a frisson.  It’s called “Currently on-line.”  I can see at any given point when someone is currently on my web site and the country they are in.   I like to look at 6:00 in the morning because that’s when I am most likely to find someone from Germany or Russia.  I imagine them saying, “Boris! (or Helga)  Here’s a new Local Dilettante.”

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I get such pleasure from writing this blog!  And Boris and Helga: please don’t be afraid to leave a comment!

I went to a meeting the other night:  the parking lot of the church where The OK Chorale rehearses floods and loses a quarter of its parking lot every time it rains.  The church got a grant from the city to correct the drainage problem.  As a community member representing an organization that uses the lot, I was asked to write a letter to support the project.  This was the first meeting since the grant was granted.

A meeting!  I’ve been a self-employed sole proprietor since 1983.  Do you know how many meetings I typically go to in a year?  None.  So it was kind of exciting.  I took my knitting and everything (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/07/how-i-learned-to-knit/). I even made brownies decorated to look like a parking lot.  It was a social event for me.  It was all fun and games until an octogenarian from the church broke a tooth on one of the candy cars in the brownie parking lot.

Before we all went home, the moderator said we would need to hold a meeting that would be open to the public, not just the steering committee.

I leaned over and whispered to Chris, the unclassifiable but who was president of the church until last month, “Am I on the steering committee?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“Is that what this is, the steering committee?”

“You’re killing me,” she said.

I do think the drainage problem is serious.  Though I am often in a leadership, not to say bossy position, in a matter like this one, I am happy to just be an ass in a seat.  Besides the lighting is good in that church and I had two inches on this friggin’ sock cuff that I had been knitting and ripping out for days because I couldn’t see it properly.

My friend, Mary-Ellis, who can do a spot on impersonation of the Cowardly Lion singing “When I am king of the forest,” is a civic-minded individual  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/doin-our-stuff/). She was president of the University Section Club at Berkeley last year.  I am guessing that involved a lot of meetings.  I would have been able to make dozens of pairs of socks.  Either that or have stabbed myself with the needles because the truth is, I am not a good person in a meeting.  That’s why I seldom go to meetings; it has nothing to do with being self-employed.  Back in the (pre-knitting) 1980’s when I was secretary for the Seattle music teachers’ association, I was the one rapping the table and saying “What agenda item were we discussing?” at the same time that I passed the photos of the president’s grandchildren to my right without looking at them.

I have my own forms of civic-mindedness.  For example, I vote. We just got our ballots and voters’ guides here in Seattle.  (And by the way, speaking as someone who works at home, I loved going to the polls.  I resent having to vote by mail.)   I see we are being asked again to vote on that ancient structure, the Alaska Way viaduct.

OK, wait I have European readers.  The viaduct is not ancient.  It was built in the 1950’s.  Seattle itself has only been around since the 1800’s.

The viaduct is a well-traveled, double-decker elevated road that has not been retro-fitted. I know people who refuse to use it because they are convinced it could simply cave in at any time.  How many meetings has the viaduct claimed, I wonder?  How many times have we voted to tear it down and build it again or build a tunnel or not build a tunnel, or re-route it or make it a monorail or have I left something out?

Oh, I know, I left out the four times we voted to not, repeat, NOT build a sports stadium, and they built it anyway and made us pay for it.

With all the money gone into meetings, plans, proposals, and ballots for the Alaska Way viaduct, by now we could have re-built it and a monorail and a tunnel, fixed the church’s drainage problem and taken care of the dental bill for Charles’s tooth.

Here’s what I would say if I was on the steering committee for the viaduct: we should have one last ballot to vote on one proposal:  Do you think we should wait until the viaduct crashes in an earthquake and then fix it?  Vote yes or no.  Meeting adjourned.

So anyway .   .   . what was I writing about?  I don’t have photos of grandchildren to show you.

A mild Facebook discussion broke out the other day as a result of a post about Nassir Ghaemi’s new book, First Rate Madness, a book that documents many influential historical figures who showed “signs of mental illness” and were better leaders because the “illness” enhanced creative thinking and empathy.  I agree with the conclusion, but let’s say I am not crazy about the labels.

My block watch did a traffic study a few years back when one of us got it into her head (ok, it was not me) that people were driving too fast in our neighborhood.  We petitioned the city (and that’s an endeavor that can make you feel crazy) numerous times, had speed counters, and took turns trying to get license plate numbers.  It turns out that it only sounded like people were speeding because drivers accelerate coming out of the traffic circles (which the British call “calming devices”—don’t you love it?).

People do speed along the back of the cemetery that abuts my house, however, and barely miss the swerve that would prevent them crashing right into my studio.  Someone did plow right through my fence and into a corner of my house one night when I was sitting with a student at the piano.

But the point of this little digression is to introduce you to William.  He used to live three doors down from me and across the street from the cemetery.  A war veteran, he was a character I could hear and smell half a block away.  After his death when the men in Hazmat suits went into his house, we learned he had been living without plumbing.

William swept the street in the middle of most nights.  On warm nights when I woke up and heard his broom making its way from his house to half a block past mine, it was comforting to know he was there.  During the day, he walked in the neighborhood carrying on an animated conversation with himself. My neighbor at the time, Gretchen, was the one who modeled the ability to respond to him as though his behavior was nothing out of the ordinary.  Occasionally she could carry on a little conversation with him.  He had his own logic; I learned the trick of not insisting that it be the same as mine.

One day as I was yakking on my phone in my side yard, I saw William assembling several buckets of bright white paint. He painted a line across the street from his house to the cemetery.  He suddenly put down his brush and started toward me.  For all his seeming oblivion, he had seen me talking on the phone.  He  must have assumed I was talking about him and he wanted to make sure I had the correct information.

“Drive too fast down this street.”

I think that’s what he said.  He didn’t have many teeth and his speech was garbled at best.

“You want it to be safe for people to cross the street.” I said.

“I want it safe for me.” He was indignant, that seemed clear. “I need to get to my rocks.”

“Oh?”

It took him two weeks, but gradually a generous, official-looking crosswalk (the British call them “zebra crossings”—you gotta love it) appeared.  It gave William safe passage from his front door to the other side of the street where a collection of large rocks cropped up like ancient standing stones except they were painted a garish yellow.

People stopped speeding on that stretch of road because they slowed down to see what the heck the riot of paint was all about.  When I thought of the rest of us feverishly spying on each other and taking down license plate numbers, I had to wonder, who was the crazy one here?

The ancient typologies like astrology and enneagrams, have their limitations. But they are not guilty of what my friend Nancy, who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, would call binary oppositions.  They don’t encourage us to categorize people as sane or insane, mentally ill or healthy.  Every personality “type” has value, has strengths and weaknesses.  Everyone’s mind has its own logic.

For twenty-five years, I have had a poster above my desk where I see it every day.  There’s a list of names: Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Patty Duke, Leo Tolstoy, John Keats, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Robert Schumann.  So even though I am not enamored of the binary opposition it upholds, I do like the starkness of what it says in red letters:

People with mental illness enrich our lives.

In the first season of 30-Rock, Jack Donaghy staticizes Liz Lemon as “New York, third wave feminist, college educated,” a bunch of offensive stuff, and “Every two years you take up knitting for a week.”

I have tried to learn to knit at least half a dozen times.  Within that demographic,  that’s roughly twelve years out of my life that I could have been a calmer person.  Because I have finally learned to knit and I find it calming, mesmerizing even.

Chris, the unclassifiable, except she spent her Army years as a Russian translator, was over the other day because I said I could show her how to knit. She had some bulky purple Peruvian wool and two size 11 knitting needles.  We wound one skein into a ball and sat down together on the sofa.

The first difficulty I ran into was that while I have known right from left for quite a long time, I sometimes can’t articulate it without visualizing a piano in front of me. Sitting there with Chris, her small hands, and those ginormous needles, it was hard to visualize the piano because as I watched her fingers gyrate, I kept seeing one of those Octopus rides at amusement parks.

“You better not put this in your blog,” she said as we watched her fingers manipulate the needles.

“I won’t.”

But that was me six months ago.  Prior to six months ago, when I tried to knit, my neighbor Gwen, who knows something about just about everything, had to cast on for me.  Gwen, of course, knows at least three ways to cast on and I think favors something obscure like the old Norwegian method.  She would do the cast on and I would mutate stitches, creating prits and knurls, until I quietly put it all away and watched a re-run of 30-Rock.

I don’t like a challenge. I don’t.  Life is hard enough.  So six months ago I decided I would give up any investment in actually making something.  Instead I would do what I tell my adult piano students to do: enjoy the process.

I sometimes get a beginning student, someone in their 50’s like me, who tells me she wants to play the Beethoven Appassionata.  That’s the goal.  Everything is to be directed toward that end and this student will evaluate everything she does according to how it measures up.  When the first thing I need to explain is that one plays the piano with the tips of the fingers but the side of the thumb, then I’m sorry, but this student hasn’t yet found a parking place in the neighborhood of the field.  Unless she can seriously adjust her expectations –and students often do– neither of us is going to have any fun at her lessons.

So, to knitting: I decided that I would do nothing but cast-on until I felt comfortable with casting on and the stitches looked reasonably even.  To that end, I cast on, ripped out, and cast on for days.

Then I moved on to the knit stitch.  I knit until I used up a ball of yarn, ripped it all out and knit it up again.   I did the same thing for the purl stitch.  Then I knit-purled.  It took weeks.  Finally I knit a scarf in a rib stitch, ripped it out several times and did it again.  You get the idea.

Fast forward two months to my first hat.  I ripped this out three times before I got it looking respectable.  But it was too big.   I tried to shrink it but it didn’t shrink around, it shrunk up into a beanie that was too big for pretty much anybody’s head except maybe Renee Fleming’s.  So I ripped out the hat and used the now ratty yarn to have a go at making a sock.

Knitting socks on double-pointed needles was a developmental step that interrupted my long stretch of knitting with tranquility. When I graduated myself from working with bulky yarn to using worsted, I also experienced some turbulence.  But I adopted the same policy as when I first learned to do my own income taxes: when I started crying, I just put it away for the rest of the day.

By now I have knit a dozen socks if you count all the ones I ripped out.  But I have four pair of them, three of which are respectable and that’s counting the pair that features a sock slightly smaller than its mate.  I am staying calm about that pair.

My mother was famous for making large afghans with a loose crochet stitch and giving them to just about everyone that walked in the door.  She passed them out like other people might pass around a candy bowl.

“Did you get one of my afghans?  I have a blue, a yellow, and a purple one here.  Which one would you like?”

All the neighbors, all her friends, and their children and grandchildren had at least one each.  Her priest and his family each had one and so did the priest before him.  Any of my friends who had gone with me to Olympia in the 25 years before her death had one.   My mother kept trying to give them to me.  I think five had passed through my hands over the years.  I never wanted one but my policy was to take them and give them away.  It was easier than fighting with her about why I didn’t want another or why I didn’t want that one.

“What’s wrong with it?  You said green.  It’s green”

“That’s not my idea of green.  I said forest green.  Oh never mind, give it here.”

I think about my mother’s afghans when I look at the pile of socks I’ve made.  Some are too small, some too large for me.  I am going to have to start giving them away.  .  .  just like my mother.

Stay calm.

“It’s a nice, relaxing thing to do on a Saturday,” said Carol, a neighbor down the street.

You’ll never guess what Carol was doing at the time.  Since you’ll never guess, I’ll save you the time trying: she was unpacking boxes for a yard sale.  All of Crown Hill was disgorging its garages for the neighborhood event.  I, myself, was on my way to the corner to put up a sign.

I don’t often hear a yard sale described as relaxing, especially not by the folks hosting it and especially not by the ones who declare “No early birds” in their Craig’s List ad.  These are the ones who have their back yards protected with electric wire that they turn off when the sale starts.  They follow you around with a clipboard where they’ve itemized everything down to the number of paperclips in the baby food jar and the number of hotel soaps that Aunt Liza brought back from her trip to New England.

I love the early birds. I’ve done sales where I made the bulk of my money before the sale officially opened.  Besides the early birds sometimes help me move heavy things.  When my fairy god child, Jessie, was school-aged, she and I put together yards sales every summer.  “Here come the experts,” she said when people arrived two hours early.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/05/selling-the-vibrator/

This year’s neighborhood sale was not so relaxing because there was no break in the flow of people.  I didn’t get a chance to pee until 1:30.  It reminded me of the 1980’s before yard sales became so commonplace.  Back then, a sale required two able-bodied people and neither of them had time to pee until 1:30.

So yeah, I’ve been doing yards sales for a long time but until I moved into my current house, I never had such a sweet set-up.  There are two structures on my property: a little cabin built in 1880 and the actual house built in 1936.  I’ve connected the two with a fiber-glass roof and made a sun-room where I can have dinners, teas, singing parties, and recital receptions; and where my painting buddies and I can paint.  I use the sun-room to hang laundry that dries in an hour on a hot day.  I have wood delivered and stacked so it can bake under the fiber-glass roof until November.  A tomato in my sun-room will ripen before September when the summer is chilly.  I read out there on summer mornings.

The cabin in the back provides a storage area so I have a stock room, as it were, where I keep the sale merchandise, much of it left over from the estate sale of my parents’ house three year’s ago.  I can take my time setting up a sale in the sun-room, and take my time packing it away in the cabin until next year.  In between sales I live in my house and pretend I’m a minimalist.

I had parents who never threw anything away—not entirely true.  My mother never threw anything away.  My father threw away a lot of my mother’s junk under cover of darkness.  Even though my parents have been gone for years, they are still supplying me with material for both my yard sales and other less welcome areas of life.

My father never threw out a book.  Over the years I have lugged car load after car load of his books from Olympia to Seattle. They’ve furnished their own little book nook in the cabin.  When life gets to be too much for me, I go back there and alphabetize books.  I’ve sold hundreds of books from that little room but it is always continually stuffed because my friends find it easier to bring boxes of books here than to Good Will. Their cast-off junk as well.

“Here, can you put this in your sale?”

“Sure, I’ll take it.”

It’s the inverse of taking things out of my parents’ house where the exchange was more like this:

“Elena. What have you got in there?”

“It’s that box of mine that we talked about last time, remember? Okay, gotta go!”

Clearly the point of my yearly yard sale is not to get rid of stuff: it’s to play store and make some mad money.

A year ago, in my second post on this website, Freud, the cat, had peed on the Great Books. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/book-chi-part-one/   I never thought it would happen, but I sold those books, de-scented and sterilized to within an inch of their great lives, in the sale this weekend—and to some lovely people who were excited to get them.  What a great way to mark the anniversary of this blog.

There’s a candy store in Ketchikan called KetchiCandies.

“Oh, that’s .  .  . clever.”  I said

The owner looked up dolefully, “Yeah,” he said. “I was drunk.”

It has a reputation for the rough and rowdy, does Ketchikan. The stormy afternoon we arrived, four ships had already tried to dock, had given up and moved on.  Our captain was an intrepid guy.  Earlier in the week he had gotten us closer to the Hubbard glacier than the ship before us.  He managed to dock at Ketchikan despite the storm. The wind blew us down the gangway and onto a street that miraculously turned into a walkway through a huge tourist warehouse.  Who’d have thought?

Spit out the end of the warehouse, we found ourselves on the Street of Many Jewelers with shop guys waving us into their dens like the men in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.  We had coupons for free umbrellas at one of the jewelry stores and we availed ourselves of this rare value. While the wind was snapping the hinges right off the frame of mine, Nancy stopped to talk to the shop guy on the sidewalk.  He was our source about the four ships that didn’t dock.  Apparently they listen in to the ship’s bridges on their Ham radios.

“Is this a formal night for you folks?” he wanted to know.  Jewelry sales go up on formal night.

I buttoned the top of my raincoat and put my hood up. Our destination was Dolly’s House, the brothel museum at 24 Creek Street.  It was staffed by women in the kind of business attire that would have gotten us put off the boat at Juneau.  Our guide, who I immediately pegged as a 10-packs-a-day-for-25-years smoker, was poured into her bustier and leaking out the top of her tights.  She rasped through her introduction with no inflection and hustled us into the next room where we listened to a video that informed us all the wallpaper was original.

“I think our guide might be a cross-dresser,” Nancy whispered.

I stuck my head out the beaded curtain and looked casually around the front parlor.

“Did you need something?”

“This wall paper is original?”

“Everything in the house is the way Dolly left it.”

I pulled back into the video room.

“She doesn’t have an Adam’s apple.”  I whispered.  I learned this tip from watching The Crying Game with a gay friend. 

Here are a few highlights from Dolly’s House:  In the bathroom are flowers that Dolly made from French early 20^th century silk condoms that were demonstrably not good for anything else.  In the hall is a framed copy of an application for employment.  Here are a few of the questions:

Do you speak any foreign languages?

Any other skills our clients might find pleasurable?  How do you know?

Dress size?  Shoe size?  Unmentionable size?

Have you ever worked this side of the street before?

Okay, I am guessing the employment application might not be as original as the wallpaper or the condoms.

We wandered back into town.  I found a Russian tchotchke shop and KetchiCandies.   Nancy found a free WiFi spot in a tavern in a back alley.  We were wet and tired when we re-boarded the ship.

It had been just the sort of day that wanted to end up in Michael’s Club, a quiet little place which I had discovered earlier when I was attempting to flee the noisier venues on the ship.  I had stood inside the door and listened to Tom sing old standards while his fingers danced up and down the keys of the piano.  Clean, simple, and no subwoofer.

Nancy and I went back the next night for a drink.  She ordered a Manhattan and I asked for a Laphroaig.  The bartender, Valentine, looked at me in surprise.

“Laphroaig,” he said.  “That is a very fine Scotch.”

“Yes it is,” I said.  “I like it neat.”

Later that evening, I said to Nancy, “Did you see how appreciative Valentine was when I ordered the Scotch?”

“Yes, Elena,” Nancy said patiently.  “I was there, remember?”

We went back several more nights.  Nancy has a varied palette but I always asked for a Laphroaig.  We chatted with Valentine.  He was Romanian from Transylvania.  My maternal grandparents were from Romania, but when I told Valentine they were ethnic Bulgarians from what used to be called Bessarabia, I believe I lost all the points I had racked up from ordering Laphroiags.  I expect there are hidden political animosities in the Balkans that are beyond me.   Not unlike my mother’s family where all the adults seemed to be seething at one other in no particular order and with no fathomable reason.

On this evening in Michael’s Club, and while we were still docked in Ketchikan, we got to chatting with an old Korean War vet and his wife.  They asked if we had done much traveling.  I have, in fact, done a lot of traveling but I shoved Nancy onto the front line.

“Nancy, here, has been traveling all her life,”

“Don’t get it started,” Nancy murmured to me.

It was too late.  The Story of Nancy began to unravel, beginning with her birth in Beirut.  Nancy told me later she doesn’t like to reveal anything about herself in such situations because she ends up having the kind of conversation I had with the war vet.

“She was born in Beirut?” he asked me as though Nancy wasn’t right there.  “But she lives in the United States now?  Well, that’s good she can live here.”

“She’s American,” I said. “Her parents were American.”

“Well, good for her.  She’s all settled here then?  She can be here permanently?”

“She’s an American.”

“Well, good for her.”

*               *                *               *               *                *               *

I have a friend who has wisely commented that sometimes the farther away one gets from a trip, the better it becomes.  That has been the case here.  Except for the time spent with my congenial traveling companion, I have enjoyed writing about this trip more than the actual experience of it.   Someday, if I drink too much Laphroaig, I might even sign up to do it again.