This piece was originally published in The Chinook Observer during October 2011.
One of my nieces was getting married. Yes, we got a “save the date” postcard with the young couple’s photo on it, but no, there was no formal invitation with details. We had to go to a website. At a family get together beforehand, however, it turned out that none of us had taken the time to go to the site to get directions to the farm near Mt. Angel where the wedding would be held—and “us” included the bride’s mother and older sister. And, Google maps (as usual) was pretty vague when providing directions to a rural location.
Keep Calm and Carry On
First published in The Daily Astorian 10/25/2011.
The title of this column comes from a poster I was given by a friend from the British Commonwealth. The words were a civic maxim during World War II. If fascists had crossed the English Channel, posters like the one that now hangs in my shop would have graced windows throughout the U.K.
The essence of this maxim was repeated recently while I was in Rome and Athens. It was shouted when panic spread beside the Colosseum during a demonstration with tens of thousands of people. It was spoken near the foot of the Acropolis during a protest with 100,000 participants, when violence erupted between policemen and provocateurs.
Sometimes a Great Notion
Living statues everywhere
mime the mighty act.
Pilgrims, smiling for posterity,
uphold the old tree of stone.
We almost didn’t come here
on this shiny day in Pisa.
Too cool for clichés,
we’ve seen zombie kitsch before.
Surfing Pop Culture: Three Cheers for TV?
Three cheers for live TV. And that includes reality shows, contests, sitcoms, celebrity roasts, sports news, late night talk shows, and reruns of Slings and Arrows – for that was my surfing menu the other night.
Three cheers for laughter, for in it is life! For its power over death (as evidenced by a naked Ashton Kutcher replacing Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men) and excess (as shown in Comedy Central’s Celebrity Roast where Sheen endured the worst from friends only to emerge unscathed, humble, thankful, and full of love). How cleansing to see folks using wit to say the worst about each other and have it end in life-giving energy and love (if that’s what you can call Stevie B launching himself into Mike Tyson’s fist and breaking his nose at the finale). I’m not kidding. As credits roll, blood drips, William Shatner yelps “WTF?” and emcee Seth McFarlane hollars for a medic.
Rosh Hashanah with barbarian in Paris
September 29 – 30
“Bonjour. Parlez vous Englais?”
Well, damn. How could we have forgotten to bring a French-English dictionary?
The information officer at the Gare de L’Est train station shrugs and says “I speak African.”
I blurt “good!” Africa is the mother continent of humanity. Surely he’s the right person to help a fatigued family find our way to rest in Paris. And he does, although my response of “good” could mean many things or nothing to a stranger who doesn’t know me from Adam.
Arrival in Europe
Recorded sounds of rural alpine life were broadcast over the audio of the airport tram that goes between the arrival concourse in Zurich and baggage claim. Pleasant folk greeting, traditional singing, the evocative sounds bovine mooing and cowbells.
We pick up our four backpacks and re-arrange belongings that will keep us as snug as turtles for five weeks. The folks in customs barely take note of us as we walk out into our first European day.
Beginning a big trip
It’s no small task to leave a farm, bookshop, and midwifery practice to go on a 5 week trip to Europe with a family of four. Sitting in the Boston airport, waiting to depart, I’m hoping we planned well and didn’t forget too much.
We left our Nehalem, Oregon home in the stewardship of poet Travis Champ. He’s got his manual typewriter set up at a desk that looks out a window toward our garden. Overhead are drying bunches of Jennifer’s lavender. Hope it’s a good place for him to work.
Do our actions bear good fruit?
I know I’m not the only bloke who’s fond of the harvest season. Four years ago, writer Matt Winters penned a robust tribal toast to these “prized weeks of plenty” (“We all have dirt under our fingernails,” Daily Astorian, 9/21/07). His ode to the bond of harvest is worth rereading at this time every year.
“After painfully scraping past the starvation gap, the warm but barren months between the depletion of winter stores and arrival of a new summer’s crops, at last this was the time of frenetic gathering, of reaping whatever rewards could be had from strong-hearted prayer and soul-bending labor.”
Way back when, this season marked a time of relative abundance in which our agrarian ancestors could kick up their heels. “At our core, we all are peasants,” writes Winters, and it’s true that humanity is rooted to an earthy cycle of subsistence.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 18
- 19
- 20