Local, Personal

This story manages to be uplifting and discouraging at the same time – about Joan Pick, a retired scientific advisor on energy efficiency.  She hasn’t flown since ’71 or even been in a car since ’73, except for one trip in an ambulance and another in a funeral car.  No TV, no heating, no cooking.

Her personal mission in life?  To be a “pioneer of personal energy efficiency.”

It raises some super-sticky questions:  Like what IS sustainability and is does anyone even come close to it? Are most of the changes we’ve made so far just feel-good measures that don’t mean much?  After all, most of us are sure as hell still on the grid. In other words, compared to Joan Pick, are we all frauds?

Photo and original story from EcoStreet.

To the people who live here, inaugurations are a big annoyance if you don’t like the incoming adminstration or a very cool thing AND a big annoyance if you do.  So there you have it – for locals life is all screwed up for a week or so.  But waaay more than for the Carter and Clinton inaugurations I’ve seen, nobody I know minds a bit.  Euphoria’s breaking out all over the damn place.

Inauguration Day Plans

For us the conversation starter of choice for the last 10 weeks has been to ask each other whether and HOW we were going downtown on the big day, and local newscasters can’t get enough of it, either.  Almost daily we hear alarming new crowd estimates and the prediction that it’ll take us four to five hour to get home via public transportation. The Porta-Potty-to-human ratio is announced and we calculate the outer limits of our bladder control.  We hint at invitations to stay with close-in friends, or to use their parade-route office as a home base for the day.

Then this week we learned that all the bridges into D.C. would be closed, leaving Virginians creepily isolated from the North, and we all feel a bit under attack.  And the big open question – the weather – is now a known factor and the news is not good.  Could be worse, sure, but the expected HIGH on Tuesday is 31, and it’ll be in the low 20s when people gather on the mall and along the parade route…to wait for hours.

So after 9 weeks of scheming and dithering about my own plans for the day, the answer is:  I’ll gather in a nice church hall near my house to hang out with like-minded friends and neighbors.  We’ll eat, drink, and watch the whole thing on a big screen.  PERFECT!

Dems from Other Places

So I say let the out-of-towners take my place downtown that day – God bless ‘em!  They go to a lot of trouble and expense to get here, and lucky me gets to see a few of them that I know.  In the gardening world that includes one gardenblogger – Mary Ann Newcomer the Idaho Gardener - and my new friend at Gardeners Supply Company in Vermont – Maree Gaetani.

Photo:  On Tuesday some lucky people will be standing on the balcony of the Newseum where I was last month when I took this picture, and they’ll have a pretty awesome view of the parade.

Seen on a Georgia bumper

A family wedding took me deep into the belly of the South – to South Carolina. Not exactly battleground territory.   Conservative enough that it DID cross my mind someone might see my bumper stickers and slash my tires or otherwise vent their anger at my politics.  Then to my surprise, THIS car brought out my own inner tire-slasher.  Gathering photographic evidence proved satisfying enough, as did high-tailing it home.

Also of note were billboards for “The World’s Largest Tobacco Outlet!!” and more than one smoke-filled restaurant, still.  And topless truck stops right there along I-95.

But that’s all minor stuff compared to Spanish moss, magnolias, 75-degree sea air and family.  Especially the bride, who belted out “Me and Bobby McGee” accompanied by the awesome Bee Bop Hoedown Band out of Roanoke, Virginia.  

As I told Christopher C of Clyde, NC, when it comes to blogging memes I’m a virgin (no jokes, please).  But because he “tagged” the GardenRanters in a nice way and practically begged us for a little more information about ourselves, I promised him I’d play.  And while this meme calls for 6 “random” things about the blogger, I notice that participants list 6 potentially interesting things because truly random things might be how many toothbrushes they own and similarly forgettable details, so to hell with that.  Anyhoo, here goes.

1.  For readers who’ve noticed me asking about every social event “Will there be dancing?” here’s the story behind that.  It started, as it does for so many girls, with ballet, tap and “modern jazz” but then progressed to swing, Cajun, Zydeco, Texas two-step, contra, squares, Appalachian clogging, African, assorted ballroom, and other categories I may be forgetting, and Israeli folk dancing could be in my future for all I know.   I used to write about “participatory dance” for DanceView Magazine.

2.  I also used to be an adventurous world traveler but trekking in Nepal – in January no less – and then touring India ALONE cured me of that particular obsession.  Now I’m a total homebody.

3.  To prove the point, my only sibling has lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for 7 years now and I’ve only visited once.

4.  I did have ONE terrific business trip -  to work at the World Court in The Hague, after which I spent a fun-filled weekend in Amsterdam on my own dime (thus staying in a $12/nite flophouse).

5.  In my career as a court reporter in D.C. I’ve had lots of boring assignments and a few really juicy ones involving famous people, important events or scandal.   Want some names?  Okay – Monica Lewinsky, Bill Cosby, Claus von Bulow and Liv Ullman come to mind.

6.  Warning to parents of preteens and teens: This story could keep you up at night. At 12 or 13 I routinely climbed out my bedroom window to joy-ride across the countryside with a bunch of neighborhood hellions, but never got caught.  My dad found out about it decades later from my sister and was FURIOUS.

There, I think I’ve answered the meme without getting in trouble with anyone or telling on any of my husbands.

All the media hoopla over Father’s Day reminds me of something I recently learned about my dad from a relative. 

What I already knew is that Dad and his 3 sisters were raised by a single mother in Richmond, Virginia, but spent summers visiting relatives in the country.  And it was country stories that he loved to tell.  Like the popular menfolk custom  – and I’m not making this up – of friendly fart-making contests.  Cane-bottom chairs with the cane removed somehow helped, I seem to remember.  Oh, yeah, I come from high-class stock all right.

But what Dad never told me was the reason the kids spent every summer in the country with relatives, which is that his mother couldn’t afford to feed them.  That would have seemed unimaginable during my lifetime except that just recently reports of food insecurity for untold Americans are reaching us, and  it’s suddenly imaginable again.

But back to Dad.  Other Greatest Generation dads might have told hard-luck stories about surviving the Depression, but not this one.   What we heard about were his triumphs as a newspaper boy and about playing his violin for weddings and on the radio – for “good money”.  I knew that his “Ed Harris Dance Band” played all the fraternity parties and paid his way through college.  And that scholarships made it possible to get a Ph.D. in psychology – way back in 1949 when it was a new and suspect field.  And that he made sure his kids didn’t have to work their way through school.

Dad died a few years back at the age of 86, but I can still wish him a Happy Father’s Day, right?