Local, Personal

Remember all the cheerful articles I’ve written about becoming a D.C. Master Gardener?  I wrote excitedly about the classes, then missing everybody when the classes are over, about starting to create an organization of Master Gardeners, and then changing our name to DC Urban Gardeners, independent of the city’s Cooperative Extension Service at the Univ. of D.C.  But finally, we started working on Projects, including the news blog those stories are on, and our website.

Well, the time to be coy about what’s really going on is over.  (Only readers of our blog saw the clues.) Several of us, after trying to correct a really awful situation from within, have gone to the top.  We’ve written to the City Council, the Deputy Mayor for Education, and the acting president of the university.  The encouraging elements here are the new mayor and an evolving City Council who are focusing on the university, holding hearings, asking for input and apparently willing to see heads roll.  So at the urging of a staffer at the Council, we’ve submitted testimony for their oversight hearings.  I’ve copied my testimony below the "Continue reading" at the end of this article.

I’ve gotta say it’s weird, and not in a good way, for hands-in-dirt volunteer gardeners to find themselves in a role we basically hate – the whistleblower.  But because we’re just volunteers we have nothing to lose – at least we don’t THINK they can hurt us for speaking up.  Funds for good urban projects are limited, dammit, and we’re just trying to correct this total waste of taxpayer money.  Actually, it’s worse than that because in this case city employees are working against the mission they’re tasked to complete.

Now there’s nothing left to be done, except wait to see if anybody gives a damn – anybody who can do something about it.
 

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Oberlin did it again – this time being awarded the top spot by Sierra Magazine.  Again just ahead of Harvard, exactly where they’ve always wanted to be.  Congrats again, guys.

There’s nothing like grand architecture as a backdrop for just about any plant.  So even after living here 35 years, I have to stop and admire the view.  It helps to not think about what’s going on inside.
 

Yes, I attended my high school class’s big four-oh reunion this past weekend, and here are some preliminary observations:

• Where are all the fat people?  Or, for that matter, the bald guys?  Is the Class of ’67 just super-fit, or are the not-so-fit just declining to show up for inspection?  I gotta say, people looked GOOD.
• The guys lined up along the dance floor to watch the women dancing solo. Some things never change.
• When a guy introduced me to his wife as “my second-grade girlfriend” I suddenly remembered how much I liked him.  We traded a few drug stories and bonded all over again.
• Lots of couples had met in high school, married, and are still together.  They even looked happy.  Go figure, and congrats to them!
• Others of us had traveled a bumpier road.  Lots of us.
• I loved hearing people scream that they’d seen me in the New York Times or on CBS.  Others screamed “OMIGOD, You wrote ‘Golden Girls’!!!!” and gee, I wish I could have just nodded and said yep, that’s me.  But no, I’m the humble garden writer, not the rich, famous TV writer. But no matter – I love that they wanted me to be that successful and famous.  It’s great to know the old gang is cheering me on.
• To understand the context in which one classmate wore a bikini T-shirt to the event, remember we were at a fairly fancy country club and “party clothes” were specified on the invitation.  But she thought it would be a hoot to wear the tacky beach T-shirt and a hoot it certainly was.  Who says you have to act like  a grandmother just because you’re old enough to be one?
• Speaking of which, the guy I used to sneak out with at 2 a.m. to go sailing across country roads at 100 miles an hour, with no driver’s license in sight, now has 8 grandchildren.  But he’s still cute and a great dancer.  So there.
• This being the Richmond, Virginia, left-wingers furtively huddled together and inquired in hushed voices about other lefties and with whom, on the other hand, we should avoid the subject of politics at all costs.
• A member of our 7th grade girl gang complained that we’d all been mean to her because her clothes didn’t have the right label and we confessed it was only because she was cuter than all of us, and that seemed to help.  Maybe some old wounds were healed.
• My old swimming teammate and I were bragging about our trophy-hogging performance (best relay teams in the state!) when others spoke up to remind me I was the fastest runner in our class.  Year after year, apparently.  Thanks for the memory, y’all! That’s one I hope I don’t forget.  (Though I must say it’s saddening to remember why I didn’t pursue whatever talents I might have had at running – no women’s track team existed.  This was pre-Title IX, ya know, and our “athletic” options were limited to cheerleading or twirling a baton.)

We may all meet again 10 years from now or in just 2 years for a big 60th birthday blow-out.  I say: Why wait?

Oberlin grads must be happy to see this – Grist Magazine reporting that it’s the fifth greenest college or university anywhere.  I know they’ll all notice it’s listed just ahead of Harvard, a spot most Obies have always considered its due on any scale, small-school pride being what it is.  Anyhoo, here’s what Grist has to say about it:

Oberlin College
Hoping to get an ober-view of energy use, faculty and students at this small liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, collaborated in 2005 to create a web-based monitoring system in some of the dorms that shows how much energy and water is being used, giving students real-time feedback that can help change their consumption habits. Last year, students worked with Cleveland-based CityWheels to create a car-sharing program on campus. The college’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is housed in a pioneering green building that opened in 2000. Oberlin also boasts Ohio’s largest solar array and is transitioning to 100 percent earth-friendly cleaning products.

Sounds great and good for them (with or without my measly alumni contributions) and it’s not really a surprise, given Oberlin’s ultra-left credentials.  But I have a little story about that.

Anybody read The Road from Courain by Australian-American writer Jill Kerr Conway?  Well, her next book was True North, which covered her life in the U.S., including her 10 years as president of Smith College.  What’s of interest here is the part of True North where Conway compared two schools that were established during the 1830s, one all-women and one coed, those schools being Smith and Oberlin.

Now because Oberlin was the first coed college in the U.S. (as well as the first racially integrated one), this is a pretty big part of its pride in the world of progressive thinking.  Damn right!  And if you spend four years there you hear this history recited repeatedly, and I used to brag on it myself.  But then I read what Conway found in her research.

I have no direct quotes and I won’t be rereading the book just to find them BUT Conway found out that  women were admitted (just a couple of years after the school opened for the purpose of educating male ministers) for three purposes:

• So that female students would be available to do the darning and other domestic duties for the male students.
• So the young ministers could find suitably educated wives.
• And one more reason just as obnoxious as these two that I can’t remember, but you get the point.

Man, history can be inconvenient, can’t it?  Coz Conway just blew that whole progressive origins thing right out of the water and even had me worried that that their underground railroad history might turn out to be tainted, too.  (So far, so good on that score.)  But Conway’s point is that entire educational program was then designed for men, with women as an afterthought.  I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised to find these conditions when I arrived there as a freshman:

• Women had curfews; men didn’t.
• Men and women paid the same for room and board, but men had maid service in their rooms and women didn’t.

SHOCKED?  That’s probably because you’re young and sexism wasn’t nearly as blatant by the time you came along, right?  Do tell, readers.  But now you see why I’m an equal-opportunity cynic.

Photo credit: Oberlin College.