Fun and easy to make...

My kid, Syd, is a genius.  He coined a phrase that has become a family saying:  “Messes are fun and easy to make.”  This inspires many crafting explorations.  Today’s expression of this phrase took the form of making potpourri.

 

I am moving.  This means I am in the process of packing.  Some items are easier to pack than others.  One of the others happened to be a bouquet from Brent’s and my wedding, carried by our dear friend Elizabeth.  It was the same as my bouquet, but I tossed mine according to tradition, so she gave me hers and I kept it, dried, on the top of one of my bookcases.  But flowers that have been drying for 13 years are brittle.  What to do?

 

Internet to the rescue!  It turns out that making potpourri is not hard and I had everything I needed already.  Win!

 

Here is the bouquet, before.

Here is a bouquet of dried lavender that my sweet friend Jackie gave me.

 

Here is the jar of potpourri making and the lavender essential oil I happened to have on hand for keeping the studio smelling nice.

 

Here is the mess I made removing the petals and flowers from the stems.

 

And here is the resulting jar of potpourri, which now has to sit for a couple of weeks.  Much easier to pack and full of lovely memories.

How I got out of jury duty, but not out of duty, and the jury is still out on my behavior

Today I had to report to jury duty.  I don’t exactly mind jury duty, in principle.  I think of it as part of being a good citizen.  In practice, it always comes at an inconvenient time, it involves sitting in uncomfortable chairs for long periods, and, this time, I got to do it in a socially-distant fashion wearing a mask.  And all of that was the easy part.

 

I showed up before 8:30, when my call time was, because I am pathologically early for everything.  I went through the metal detector, filled out a health form, submitted my summons to the nice lady behind the plexiglass, filled out an in-person version of the form I already filled out and submitted on line, and sat.  I read.  I played with my phone.  I took an illicit photo of the wall of the jury assembly room.  About 10:30, they gave us a short break from the nothing that was happening.  Not too long after we returned, they announced sixteen randomly-selected names to go to the actual courtroom.  Mine was one of them.

 

The judge was an older white man with thick silver hair.  He gave a lengthy speech about the history of the Constitution that was deeply white and Eurocentric.  I did not expect to be lectured.  And I did not particularly want to hear yet another version of American history that glorified the improvements made over English law while ignoring the very real dispossession and genocide against native peoples, the capture and forced labor of African people, and the fact that all the improvements didn’t apply to black, brown, or female people.  It was the beginning of the deeper discomfort of the day.

 

The trial was a criminal matter.  The defendant was a young black man.  He was represented by a young, white public defender in a rumpled suit and rumpled beard.  The prosecutor was also a young white man, but clean-shaven and slightly slicker.  I began to feel more anxious watching the white apparatus surrounding a black defendant.  Then it got worse.

 

The defendant was accused of domestic violence.

 

Please note:  I did not get seated on this jury, so I heard no evidence of any kind.  I did not even hear the details of the alleged crime, just that the man in front of me was accused of violence against a domestic partner or parent of his child.  What follows is not about his guilt or innocence.  It is about my thoughts, inferences, emotions.  I hope that the jury that hears his case deliberates fairly and that justice is done.  I know that I would not be a good agent of justice in this matter.

 

Why?

 

I answered honestly, when asked, if I could hear the evidence impartially.  I could not.

 

I am not a survivor of domestic violence.  My ex-husband never hit me.  I think, in part, this is because he succumbed to the alcoholism after the divorce.  He came from an alcoholic family headed by a cop father.  He and his sister learned not to call the police when his father hit his mother because it did no good; the cops who came did not want to run in one of their own.

 

Alcohol lost my ex-husband all contact with his children.  They will not speak to him.  On the last day he spent with my younger son, he got so drunk that he had to be hospitalized, swearing up and down the whole time that he hadn’t been drinking.  I picked up my son and dropped my ex at his place.  His girlfriend was there, nervous.  Later that night, she had to call the cops because he beat her up.

 

I cannot be impartial about domestic violence.  I cannot pretend to be impartial in a system where the defendant is quite possibly on trial at least partially due to the color of his skin.  I cannot feel like it is fair for a bunch of white people, judge, lawyers, and me as a potential juror, to pass judgment on a young black man.  And, had I been called to listen to the testimony of the victim, how could I hope that this collection of men would choose to give justice to a woman?

 

I wrote on the questionnaire, the one I filled out twice, that I felt our justice system is skewed against people of color, women, and poor people.  That was before I heard even the outline of the case to be tried.  I feel it even more now.

 

I am not impartial.  None of us are.

Fall Reading: Five more books

I admit I don’t have a lot of good things to say about extremely hot and smoky weather.  Here is one of the few:  I have at least been reading.  Five more books to write about this time.

 

I devoured Louise Penny’s newest book, All The Devils Are Here.  I just want to hang out with her characters.  I don’t even much care what they do.  In this case, the Gamaches are in Paris along with their grown children, grandchildren, and impending grandchild.  There is a murder, a complicated plot with many twists, and a satisfying conclusion, but it is the little stuff that makes me love this and Penny’s other books so much.  My only complaint is that the rest of the gang back in Three Pines makes such a brief appearance, but that is just a quibble.  In a world where so many books are full of truly disagreeable people, it is a gift to spend some pages with charming, smart, good people who like to eat and swear and love.  Now I’m back to waiting for the next one.  Sigh.

 

I finished two (two!!!) more of the nonfiction books from the 2020 to-read list.  Freedom’s Frontier by Stacey L. Smith was an important and terrible read.  I went to fourth grade here in California and thought I had a sense of California history.  My knowledge needed some updating and it was not a pleasant process.  The book examined how California history was shaped by the ideas of white settler colonialism, systematically working to keep out or exterminate the native peoples who were here first, the Mexicans who were here before California became part of the United States, the other Latin Americans who came for the Gold Rush, the enslaved and freed Black people, and the Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders.  Grim reading and truly shameful.  I recommend the book, even if it is hard.

 

The other nonfiction book was Educated by Initiative by Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert.  The authors studied in great statistical detail that I cheerfully ignored the effect of initiatives not on the creation of laws per se, but on the cultivation of an educated and engaged citizenry.  The arguments were clearly written in readable, approachable prose.  It is not the fault of the authors that the subject bored the heck out of me.  Here is the one-sentence summary:  initiatives increase voter participation, particularly in non-Presidential election years, and thus are a useful tool for the promotion of democracy even if initiatives are also used by special interest groups and political parties.

 

Then I continued to revisit the world of Anne Shirley.  I read Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery.  I am still enjoying Anne’s adventures, but I also feel some frustration with the way her relationship with Gilbert works.  It feels fake that Anne doesn’t realize how she feels about him and that he hangs around waiting for her.  Fake isn’t quite the right word.  Scripted?  Our romantic heroine can’t have an untroubled path to true love because that would not be thrilling enough.  Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon or something.  It’s not that I don’t want them to be together; it’s that I want them to be real with each other.  I’m halfway through the books now; I’ll see what happens next with them.

 

Fall total:  6 books.  Year to date:  75.

A different book post: Peter Pan

I was thinking about thimbles the other day.  That was where the trouble started.  I probably own one somewhere, but in sewing as in most stuff, I tend to skip the protective equipment and get on with the work.  This means that my direct experience of them is negligible and the associations they evoke are literary.

 

People who are not as obsessed with Alice in Wonderland as I am may not recall that at the end of the caucus race, Alice is tasked with giving the prizes to all the creatures.  She ransacks her pockets, finding enough comfits for all of them, but then the Dodo says she also needs a prize.  She gives him her thimble, which he then presents back to her as her prize.

 

But there is another thimble that lurks in my memory.  It’s in Peter Pan.  Here’s the quote, from when Peter and Wendy meet:

 

“’Surely you know what a kiss is?’ she asked, aghast.

            “’I shall know when you give it to me,’ he replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble.”

 

I could have searched out the quote and left it at that, but I didn’t.  I had read all of Peter Pan at some point in my childhood, but a quick double-check of the shelves confirmed that I did not own a copy.  Well, I do now.  And, having re-read the whole, I am almost entirely appalled.

 

Times have changed and culture has shifted for the better in some places, obviously.  But the problems are deep.

 

Peter is held up as this enchanting being and he is awful.  Just awful.  He is everything that is toxic masculinity, violent, insensitive, cocky, self-centered.  And everyone lets him continue in it, admires him for it, and regrets when they can’t follow along his path any longer.

 

Wendy and the other females in the book are not better.  They suffer from toxic femininity, if that’s a thing.  They compete with each other for Peter’s attention and can only view each other with jealousy and suspicion.  They offer mothering as a gateway to what they hope will be romantic love, but they are constantly disappointed because Peter, in his narcissism, will never concede that he might need them or love them.

 

Then there is the way that violence exists in the book.  It is portrayed as exciting and inevitable and totally without consequences.  The pirates and the lost boys do not mourn, they do not regret their deeds, they see no mess or complication.  It is not real.  This is not a world where actions have reactions.  No one’s choices matter, except if they exhibit some weird public school constructed notion of Good Form, which pretty much comes down to the right clothes and showy bravery in stupid situations that should not have happened in the first place.

 

I don’t even want to write about the racism because I don’t want to repeat the stereotypes and slurs.  They’re in there.  They suck.  Stay away.

 

In Alice, Alice journeys through a place where the inhabitants are often not nice to her, but she learns things and thinks things and discovers things.  In Peter Pan, a horrible person encourages other people to go on being horrible and to regret having to give up bad behavior.

 

The only ray of hope is to be found at the very end of the book:  “…and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”

 

May we teach our children to have hearts to stop this horrible cycle.

Last of the Summer Reading

Welcome to September!  That means, among other things, that my summer reading log is finished.  I had hoped to add a couple more to the list, but those in-progress books will have to go on the fall log.  Even so, I have five books left to talk about for summer.

 

I finished out Tamora Pierce’s Lioness books (In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Lioness Rampant).  I enjoyed them all.  I also particularly enjoyed that each of the books in the editions I bought had some of Pierce’s reflections on the books, which were her first, now that time has gone by and she’s written a lot more.  As a reader, I could see that she had developed over time, since I read some of her later books first, but her honesty in discussing how and why that development occurred was fascinating and encouraging.  Every time I read one of her books, I think I say the same thing, which is that I wish I had met them when I was younger.

 

I did meet Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery when I was younger and I loved her.  I was a little worried that I might not like her again now.  But she remains charming and hilarious and imaginative.  The kind of writing in the book is not something often encountered these days, being much more ornately poetical about the world’s beauty.  There are flaws and things that have changed over time, but on the whole the love that suffuses the book wins.  I have the rest of the series on my to-read shelf.

 

The non-fiction selections I am plowing through continue to be depressing and educational and useful.  City of Inmates by Kelly Lytle Hernandez chronicles the history of incarceration in Los Angeles and discusses it as a tool for settler colonialism.  Jails and prisons controlled poor and/or nonwhite populations from the beginning and continue to do so in the present.  This is not a good thing.

 

Summer reading total:  27 books.  Year-to-date reading total:  69 books.