Oct 3, 2013
I bought The Random House Children’s Encyclopedia at Amanda’s school book fair last fall. It is simply beautiful – each article is one to three pages of blocked text with lots of interesting illustrations. For several days she browsed through it, spending a lot of time on The Human Body and Reproduction. Then it went on the shelf.
Yesterday I took it down to look through it. Still thrilled by the format and illustrations, I looked up subjects at random (after all, it’s Random House). A page about Ballet, with photos of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anna Pavlova, and a drawing of the five positions.
MARGOT FONTEYN. IMAGE:TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
RUDOLPH NUREYEV WITH CARLA FRACCI. IMAGE XOOMER.VIRGILIO.IT
ANNA PAVLOVA. IMAGE:ARTSALIVE.CA
One for Barbarians, with a beautiful jeweled gold belt buckle. Past Bats and Birds to Castles – a most wonderful diagram/drawing of a castle with a cutaway to show the interior – storerooms, spiral staircase, and lord and lady’s richly furnished bedchamber.
IMAGE:ROYAL COLLECTION.ORG.UK
Circuses, Cities, Civil War. One page for English, one page for American. But where was Civil Rights? The Find Out More section of Civil War – American sent me to Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and United States of America, history of. The Lincoln page gave me the Gettysburg address, the log cabin, the election, secession, the war, Mount Rushmore, and a timeline including the Emancipation Proclamation. The abolition movement was “led by white middle-class Northerners.” Harriet Tubman and Andrew Scott get a mention, but where is Frederic Douglass?
FREDERICK DOUGLASS. IMAGE:PBS.ORG
On to Slavery. A brief survey from Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to the European slave trade and abolition, with some details about slave ships, slave markets, and slave rebellions.
IMAGE: NYPL.ORG
United States of America, history of has a timeline. It includes entry into World War II, Kennedy’s assasination, Neil Armstrong on the moon, and Reagan signing the nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. WHERE IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT?
Oh, good, there’s an index – one of my favorite parts of any non-fiction book. And it does list the civil rights movement. It sends me to a single page on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The page includes seventy words for the whole movement, plus about fifty for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Eyes, Oil, and Pirates get a whole page each.
Selecting topics for an encyclopedia must be an agonizing and disputatious process. I can’t imagine doing it on my own, or even worse, with a group of “experts” all fiercely fighting for space. But neither can I imagine producing an encyclopedia for American children which doesn’t cover the Civil Rights Movement.
Sep 6, 2013
Have you ever taken the Meyers Briggs test? If you do, you’ll end up categorized along four different scales, including introvert/extrovert. This doesn’t have much to do with the usual idea that an introvert is shy and retiring while an extrovert is a party animal.
Party animals. Image from sugarbutterbaby.com
Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, made a discreet splash last year. I can’t bring myself to read it. I’m sure it’s full of important data, amusing anecdotes, and helpful advice, but it sounds too earnest for me.
The concept I remember from Meyers Briggs is that an extrovert gets her energy from being with other people, while an introvert charges her battery with solitude. No one would think it, since I can be pretty lively in company, but I am an introvert. I need huge doses of solitude to keep me going.
Charging my batteries
Once when Amanda was four and sitting quietly, I said something to her and she complained, “I was thinking, and now I’ve lost my think.” That’s how I feel. I like my thinks, and want to be left alone to wander around with them.
When I get home and see Joe’s car in the driveway I am likely to feel, “Oh good, Joe’s home.” When there is no car in the driveway I feel, “Oh boy, I’m alone.”
Oh good, he’s home!
Once we were spending the evening with Mary Anne and Larry. I’ve known them over thirty years, and the four of us are as close to family as friends can get; among other things, we share late-in-life parenthood. I said to them, “Being with you is almost as good as being alone.” They understood that I was expressing profound affection.
These blessings came late in our lives
Since I retired I have had lots of solitude. Amanda goes off to her school, Joe goes off to his. My day stretches out in front of me, available for puttering, reading, writing and thinking. I love that.
Still, I have discovered that you can get too much of a good thing. Recently I had minor surgery on my foot. I have a walking cast, but mostly I have to sit with my foot elevated. The pain comes and goes, and if I’m willing to sleep for hours, I can control it with drugs. With all this solitude and enforced leisure, you’d think I would write and write, read and read. Instead I’ve bought streaming Netflix, and I’m watching many movies, as well as multiple episodes of Parks and Recreation.
This experience confirms my belief that watching TV is depressing and addictive. And when I’m confined to a chair, solitude is no fun at all.
So while Sartre had a point when he said that Hell is other people, Milton also got it right. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I’ve got my dog, my cat, my ice pack, good books, good drugs, but if I can’t emerge when I want to, my little solitary heaven becomes a bleak and gloomy place.
Apr 12, 2013
Six months ago I told you how Amanda almost met Michelle Obama, and about my letter to Mrs. Obama. click I was beginning to wonder whether we would ever hear back, whether my letter had landed in the great pile that don’t get past her staff, never to bear fruit. Then, just a day after the election, a manila envelope arrived for Amanda, with the simple return address: The White House.
www.whitehouse.gov
Remember how lovely it was to get mail when you were a child? Partly it was the magic – how did somebody know your name and address, and how did the letter get to your house? It had a certain Santa Claus-Easter Bunny-Tooth Fairy quality to it. I still feel a bit of that same excitement when I get a real letter, from someone I know, among the bills and ads.
So when Amanda came home from Girls Place and dumped her 100-pound backpack on the table, I said,
“Look, you got a letter from the White House.”
“It’s for ME?”
“I think it’s from Michelle Obama. Open it.”
Inside was a letter and an 8×10 color photograph of Michelle Obama and her dog Bo. Bo had been groomed to a toy-like fluffiness – it’s hard to say which of them was more stylish. Both of them had signed the picture.
Amanda was every bit as thrilled as I was. It didn’t matter that I’d secretly been hoping for an invitation to tea. Watching her take it in, her quiet pleasure as she put it carefully back in the envelope and took it to her room, was worth more than any invitation.
The next day, she gave me permission to take it away to be framed. The young man at my favorite frame shop was delighted with the project, and we chatted about Mrs. Obama as we deliberated over matting and frame. The result was, as framing jobs always are, more perfect than I could have imagined.
She took it to Girls Place, where everyone oohed and aahed. She took it south for Thanksgiving for all the relatives to see, and to a visit with her Mommy. Now it hangs in Amanda’s picture gallery, the hall outside her room, with her signed poster of the University of Florida women’s volleyball team, and her many paintings and cartoons.
Here is Mrs. Obama’s letter:
Dear Amanda,
As First Lady, I have no greater joy than learning about the remarkable students across our country. That’s why I am so happy your grandmother told me about your impressive accomplishments.
Every American, no matter what age, has a special role to play in leading us to a better tomorrow. That is why it is so important for you to study hard in school and stay active in your community. If you keep up the good work, I know you will have all the tools you need to achieve your dreams.
Keep up the good work, and remember I believe in you!
Mar 15, 2013
Gainesville, Florida is a Tree City, which means it has a plan, a budget, and staff dedicated to maintaining the tree canopy. click In my neighborhood the sky is filled with tree tops. Sunrise,
sunset, moon and stars, fluffy white clouds or dark mountains of
thunder-heads – all are framed by the curving branches.
Though Gainesville prides itself on its tree canopy, trees are not an unalloyed blessing. Sweetgum balls threaten bare feet. Acorns make a racket on the roof. A giant sycamore across the street sheds 8-inch brown leaves every fall, littering gardens all around. Worst is the pollen. The daily paper gives us the pollen count, but we don’t need the paper to tell us it’s been high for the past week. All of our cars are covered in fine yellow powder, and even those who are not very susceptible are sneezing and coughing non-stop.
source: www.washingtoncitypaper.com
And then there is the lethal combination of old trees and hurricanes. In the summer of 2004, four hurricanes hit Florida: Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jean. Frances and Jean came to Gainesville. Trees fell on cars, houses and power lines. The streets were littered with huge branches and trunks, and all over town people lost electricity for weeks. As Frances blew away, our power came back in just thirty minutes, and I said to Joe as we went to bed, “We’re so lucky to have lights; I feel as if a tree should fall on us or something.”
I have no photo, but Gainesville looked like this. source:http://mplsparksfoundation.org
Not five minutes later our neighbor’s huge water oak obliged, crashing down on the roof right over our heads, breaking the beams and cracking the ceiling. We carried everything into the living room and slept on the couch. In the morning we saw the mess. The tree was over four feet in diameter. It leaned across our side yard and covered half the roof. It was dead, the core was rotten, and it was just waiting for a big storm to take it down.
The ceilings were cracked in all four bedrooms. We lived in the living room for the next nine months while workers invaded our home, drilling, hammering, painting, listening to right-wing talk radio, and reeking of cigarette smoke.
source: Wiki Commons
Several letters to the editor at the end of that terrible hurricane season had an I-told-you-so tone, sneering at tree-huggers and complaining about the money Gainesville spends protecting trees. But even with litter, sore feet, pollen and calamity, I remain a tree-hugger.
At the end of my street is a city nature sanctuary. It’s about 155 acres, and includes Paradise Pond and Hogtown Creek Headwaters Nature Park. Paradise Pond is a stormwater drainage area, two clearings in the woods. The first is a small pond, or in dry weather, a mud puddle. The trees here are full-grown, filled with birdsong and hammering woodpeckers.
Paradise Pond
In the second clearing, spindly saplings, all nicely labeled, were planted in a ring around a long oval depression – I’ve never seen enough water in it to take it beyond soggy. My dog Trisket and I last went there four years ago. It was not an inspiring sight, and we preferred the pond, where she could splash around and get muddy.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/garden
North Florida spring begins in February, with redbuds, dogwoods, and yellow jessamine high in the trees. Now it’s early March and we’re well into spring, though just last week we had to cover all the tender plants at night and scrape ice off our windshields in the morning.
After a long hiatus that was bad for both of us, Trisket and I have resumed our daily walks, and we returned to the second clearing and the ring of trees. The saplings are now sturdy adolescents, big enough to cast a bit of shade. Like all the trees in Gainesville, they are leafing out in every shade of jade,bronze and brick. The leaves are still too small to conceal the graceful branches and bright blue sky.
Though most of the labels have disappeared, some remain: white ash in the olive family, pignut hickory in the walnut family, and an overcup oak in the beech family. How did an oak get into the beech family – intermarriage? I check the internet and find that oaks, beeches and chestnuts are all in the same family: fagaceae. Who knew? My ignorance is as wide as the world. There is one tree I know without a label: the winged elm, so called because of the cork wings along the twigs.
copyright 2002 Steve Baskauf click
We’ve recently planted a lot of trees in our yard: tulip poplar, red maple, Savannah holly, fringe tree, white marsh grapefruit and honeybell orange. I walk from one to the other, examining their buds, touching their still-smooth bark, dreaming their futures. On my walks with Trisket, it’s easy to keep my eyes on the ground, looking for broken pavement and other obstacles. But trees pull my gaze up to the beautiful sky. Whether I’m pondering or brooding, grieving or rejoicing, I feel blessed by the universe. I love trees.
Many thanks to Stefanie Nagid and Stefan Broadus, both with the City of Gainesville, for helping me find information. Here is a gift for you that I found on a morning walk:
Sunlight in branches,
Silence in birdsong:
Morning lace.
Unless otherwise attributed, all content is copyright Elizabeth McCulloch. You may use it if you include a link to this blog.
Oct 12, 2012
Like 66% of the country, I am a fan of Michelle Obama. My enthusiasm is extreme, however, and there’s a reason for this. In October, 2008 I had my first knee replacement surgery. For weeks afterward, I lay on the couch, heavily drugged. Twice a day I did excruciating exercises, but other than that I spent the time reading, sleeping, crocheting, sleeping, and surfing the Web on Joe’s laptop.
Already a fan of Barack and Michelle, I began reading everything I could about the campaign. And then I found a website devoted entirely to Michelle’s wardrobe. click Only the Oxycodone can account for my fascination. I pored over the pictures, read the descriptions, clicked on links to the designers.
Image from Mrs. O blog
You’d have to see the way I dress to know how peculiar this all was. I have several pairs of baggy pants, a drawerful of beloved t-shirts and half a dozen printed rayon shirts from Goodwill in my closet. These, with strangely-painted shoes, make up the bulk of my wardrobe. click I also have four long cotton dresses from Deva, identical but for color, which I wear for dress-up, sometimes embellishing them with a scarf. click But Michelle inspired me. For a brief period I added a wide belt and a costume jewelry brooch, two of her signature accessories, to my dresses.
Shirts and shoes
I had my second knee replaced in March, 2009, and my fascination with Michelle was revived. One afternoon, drugged and with nothing better to do, I made an intricate collage on a blank greeting card. It was a woman attired like me and Michelle (dress, belt, brooch), leaning on a candy-striped cane like mine. I wrote an enthusiastic note, expressing my admiration, and saying among other things that the collage was inspired by her, and Malia and Sasha might enjoy guessing the images I had cut up to make it.
I’m quite certain the card was promptly sent to the Secret Service for their Dangerous Loonies” file. But at the time I was sure her staff would select it to show to Michelle, and she would reply with an invitation for me and Amanda to visit her – she and I could have tea while Amanda and Sasha played in the new White House playground. Strangely, it didn’t happen.
Michelle and the girls on the playground – I haven’t been invited yet. Image:commons.wikimedia.org
Several years have passed. Like many lefties, I have been dismayed by some of Obama’s actions (drone warfare is unforgiveable), but I remain a fan. And Michelle has never disappointed me. I no longer check on the fashion website every week to see what she’s wearing, but I read anything I run across.
A few weeks ago Michelle Obama came to Gainesville for a political rally at the O’Connell Center, a sports arena.
That night I picked Amanda up after cheerleading at Girls Place and she said, “Grandma, Michelle Obama came to Girls Place and I wasn’t there!” I hardly believed her, but I went on line, and sure enough, the Gainesville Sun had 37 photos of Michelle Obama at Girls Place, mostly dancing with the younger girls to that inimitable song, Toody Tot.
Image: Rod C. Witzel The Gainesville Sun click
I was devastated. Girls Place is the most wonderful place you can imagine, full of love and empowerment, focused on “at risk” girls, mostly lower-income minorities. click Amanda goes there every day after school – she’s been going since kindergarten. But she had come straight home from school that one day, because she had two scheduled activities, and wouldn’t have time to finish her homework at Girls Place.
I was surprised by how upset I was. I’m usually good at letting go of what can’t be helped. But it really bothered me that MICHELLE OBAMA CAME TO GIRLS PLACE AND AMANDA WASN’T THERE! Then my friend Patti suggested I write a note telling her what had happened and asking if she would send a picture to Amanda.
So I did. This one was less manic than the collage card. I enclosed two absolutely irresistible photos of Amanda in Maine. I hope this note will not join the other in the Secret Service file, but will yield a photo and a note to Amanda signed by my very favorite First Lady.
Jun 1, 2012
A few weeks ago I went with my sister Luli and her friend Margaret to the North Carolina Zoo in Ashboro. It was the best day I have ever spent at a zoo. Certainly the weather helped: blue sky, a steady breeze, high 70’s. But it was the zoo itself that impressed me.
The North Carolina Zoo has the advantage of space and a temperate climate – almost 1400 acres in the rural Piedmont, an hour and fifteen minutes from Chapel Hill. It was built in the mid-70’s as the first natural habitat zoo in the U.S. designed by Dwight Holland, a painter and designer who directed the zoo for many years. In the 80’s it was expanded using a master plan by Jon Coe, a landscape architect who specializes in zoos.
The zoo has two sections, North America and Africa, about a mile and a half apart as the snake slithers. We began with the cypress swamp in North America, and the contrast with other zoos was immediately apparent. The first exhibit we passed was various carnivorous plants – sundew, pitcher plants, Venus fly traps. The signs had lots of information, but not so much as to be daunting, and the ranger there answered all our questions. I loved learning a bit about the animals’ environments as well as the animals.
COLORADOCARNIVEROUSPLANTSOCIETY.COM
About 1100 animals of more than 200 species live in habitats designed to mimic their natural environment and give them as much space as possible. All the habitats are behind glass; the larger ones with ample seating – benches and risers – to let us wait for the animals to appear. Walking from one exhibit to the next we were usually in the shade, and many paths were landscaped to feel like woodland trail. The most impressive habitats were the western prairie, with elk and bison, the chimpanzee habitat, and the 37-acre African savannah, with elephants, rhinos, ostriches, antelope and gazelles.
From a visitor’s point of view, the disadvantage of large habitats is that you may not see some of the animals up close and personal, or indeed not see some of the animals at all. We arrived at the prairie and climbed up to the top step of concrete risers. A vast expanse of waving grass and wildflowers was all we could see until Luli, our best spotter, saw what might be an elk’s head in the distance above the grass. A twitching ear confirmed it. A little later we realized that what looked like some sticks next to her were velvet-covered antlers. We waited, enjoying the fresh air and wild flowers.
Human families came by, the children clambered up the steps, looked around, and moved on. Then the female elk stood up from the clump of grass and ambled toward us along the perimeter of the prairie, walking the length of the glass and disappearing into the brush at the far end. The male followed her. He was molting and his shaggy winter coat was in tatters. Finally, a calf came along – we had had no idea it was there. We probably sat fifteen minutes watching for elk, and then we moved on, past an extensive poster display about the loss of the great prairies, and modern day attempts to use the land for agriculture while preserving what native grasslands remain. We stopped at another viewing point, and under a distant clump of trees saw a dark mound that was the back of a sleeping bison.
FOTOSEARCH.COM IMAGE k1110339
We had come on a Monday, to avoid crowds of children – I thought field trips were usually on Fridays. But the first thing we saw when we arrived were about seventy-five children from the Liberty Preschool, and we saw many school groups throughout the day, as well as parents and grandparents with preschool children and babies. Despite, or perhaps because of the long walks between exhibits, and waiting sometimes in vain for a glimpse of the animals, the children and hence the parents were calmer and better behaved than I have ever seen at a zoo.
Certainly the children acted like children – growling at the cougars, yelling “Wake up!” at the alligators – but they were far happier and less whiny than I usually see at zoos. They had lots of room to run, and weren’t tugging at their parents to move from one animal to the next. Spotting the animals soon became a game for them, far more interesting than watching a couple of bears or lions pace in a small cage.
We came to the endangered red wolves. Their habitat was shady – brown ground covered with dry leaves, a shelter in the distance, a pond up by the glass. We couldn’t see any wolves. A father asked his family – “How many frogs can you find?” Together we found eight huge bullfrogs in the murky pond. Then a little boy spotted two ears behind a log, and patiently instructed me – “over there, see, just past the big tree”- how to find the wolf. Soon someone found a small red wolf over by the fence and we watched him for awhile.
The Sonoran desert, in a huge glass enclosure, was as hot as it sounds. But it was fun looking for the critters – birds, lizards, snakes – and the designer had thoughtfully provided grates in the path that blew cool air up at us.
We had arrived at the zoo at 9:30. We were desperate for coffee and ready for lunch by the time we finished the North American section. We bought bad pre-sweetened cappucino and sat in the shade at the Junction Plaza, where they have the special attractions – animatronic dinosaurs, the dino theater, a carousel – and a tram to take you between the two sections. There was a restaurant, but Luli had prepared a picnic lunch – roasted vegetables, bread and cheese, grapes and strawberries. When we were through, we took the tram to “Africa.”
We walked away from the tram, rounded a curve and suddenly saw three giraffes eating from tree tops and two zebras grazing the grass. One family was more absorbed by the turtles swimming in the pond. At the chimpanzee exhibit we watched from a distance as a toddler chimp climbed repeatedly onto a nursing mother’s head. Each time she gently lifted him off and set him on the ground. Eventually another grown chimp, a male I think, came out of the woods and enticed the toddler away with a game of stick throwing.
TREEHUGGER.COM CREDIT: SHINY THINGS/FLICKR
At the lemur island, there were a couple of red-ruffed lemurs and six ring-tailed lemurs. According to various internet sources, ring-tails hang out on the ground while red-ruffed are arboreal. Lemurs have not been informed of this. The two red-ruffed lemurs had the good sense to race around on the ground, but all the ring-tails were up in a most astonishingly spindly tree, mere twigs. They leapt and climbed from limb to limb.
RED RUFFED LEMUR: DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST RINGTAILED LEMUR. PUBLI-DOMAIN-IMAGE.COM
I was pretty tired by the time we got to the savannah. We sat on benches on the large overlook. We saw one huge elephant far in the distance, and a couple of white rhinos, a kudu, a water buck and a Thomson’s gazelle a little closer. Canada geese were everywhere, voluntary residents.
When we all agreed we were through zoo-ing, Margaret looked at her watch. It was ten minutes to five, and the zoo closed at five! We had happily stayed almost eight hours, way longer than I usually stay anywhere, but now we had visions of spending the night in the African savannah. We went down to the service road and flagged down a truck. The kind driver radio-ed a ranger in a golf cart, who came to pick us up and take us back to the tram to North America, where we had parked. We saw many families walking, but he gave us a ride because we are old. White hair is such an advantage!
There are all sorts of policy and ethical questions in regard to zoos, of course. click How do we justify penning up animals for our edification, even with the most enlightened approach to zoo design? Why is the state of North Carolina supporting a zoo that very few of its citizens can get to or afford to visit? I can just imagine the legislature that passed that appropriation – I wonder who was the legislator from Ashboro!
I know (sort of) the counter-arguments: breeding programs, preserving endangered species, fostering respect for wildlife; jobs, tourism, economic development. Jon Coe, who has generously shared information since I found him on the internet, says, “Regarding the morality of zoos, we may fault the original animal collectors, but I see today’s zoo animals as “refugees from the human war of conquest over nature.” Most zoo animals (at least mammals) were born in zoos and couldn’t survive release back into the ‘wild’ even if any suitable areas could be found which aren’t already at full carrying capacity. I believe when zoos can deliver the kind of experience you and your friends had and the quality of animal welfare NCZ provides it’s animals, then they are justified. But there certainly are zoos and especially some private collections I cannot justify.”
JON COE, ZOO DESIGNER, WITH BONOBO. used by permission
I’ve told you about my favorite parts of the zoo. Some of the habitats struck me as small, and I don’t know about caging gators and other reptiles that aren’t endangered. I can’t sort it all out, and I don’t believe I have to have a carefully-reasoned moral stand on every subject. Sometimes I just seek my pleasures in the world as it is. If you like visiting zoos, the North Carolina Zoo is worth the trip.
ENTRANCE TO THE NORTH CAROLINA ZOO
Note: In research for this post, I became totally absorbed in Jon Coe’s website, where you learn a lot about zoos, and also can see his poetry and sketches from the field (ie wild areas few of us will ever visit).click
