Brunch

 

Don’t tell my family.

Amish are deeply hesitant to get vaccinated for coronavirus, a stance that reflects rural mistrust of the government as much as it does any religious conviction.

I struggled in school

I read Silent Spring while my parents and their friends discussed women's lib and I announced in class the next week that maybe Earth is a woman who needs to be liberated from male oppression and nearly got kicked out of second grade.

Elementary school was difficult, and middle school proved no easier.

In parochial school, seventh grade, I got paddled (for real) by the headmaster (for real) for writing The Declaration of Independence from Homework on the freshly cleaned chalkboard after our Civics section. I found the punishment unwarranted; I had modeled it exactly from Jefferson; it was good writing. The headmaster's paddle was drilled with holes to "prevent an air cushion," he told me as I bent over in his office. He smacked me, hard, and it stung. A pause and then two more whacks in quick succession. I waited, but he didn't say anything. Two more whacks. The pause was longer this time. I turned my head to look at him, watched him studying my bent over frame. "How long does this go on?" I hadn't ever been paddled before. "Until you cry," his voice was gentle, as if telling the secret of the story. I sighed as I faced forward again. "We're going to be here for a while," I told his desk.

I figured public high school would be better, and by then they had gotten rid of paddles, so I came into my own.

In tenth grade I read 1984 in January of 1984 and was horrified. I started explaining to anyone who would listen that Ronald Reagan has been the chair if the House on Unamerican Activities, and that he had ruined lives while George Bush was the head of the CIA and he had ruined whole regimes, and my parents, by then very post-commune mid-Eighties conservatives got dewy eyed as I spoke and replied, "I know. Isn't it great, dear?" I got busted at school for trying to score a fake id so I could register to vote.

When I made money junior year by selling Bueller-Frye '86 campaign buttons, the real payoff for me was that it was an off-election year.

Senior year I read Drury's Advise and Consent and participated in a mock UN Security Council event. That spring, I circulated a petition to start a third party on the communist platform, saying American government was wildly ungoverned, corrupted by post-war military-industry and tele-evangelism; communism in America was the only ethical path for real equality in the land of opportunity.

I barely graduated.

Desperately Seeking

Back in 1996, when I spent late-summer through mid-Autumn in the Twin Cities, I worked at MicroVoice, a company that provided the personal ad creation and management for dozens of newspapers around the country. I know, I know: In this day and age it's difficult to imagine that if you were desperately seeking someone, you had to put an ad in the paper and hope someone saw it and liked it well enough to respond. It took time. It took money. It took planning. It took words. It took patience.

Folks didn't really have any more of that then than they do now, but now we have the internet, and we can frequently skip over that other-person factor altogether and go straight to porn or escort services. It's efficient even if it's lacking in other ways. MicroVoice isn't around any more, and that's sad, and even Fortune saw it coming.

I wrote about the experience of writing personal ads at one point, more as a reminder to myself of the dangers of wanderlust, especially when combined with rapidly approaching unemployment, and it turned into a celebration of the family that I had collected along the way. The piece isn't really a piece as much as it is broad brush strokes of personality, trying to capture the impressions of the members of my Accidentally-On-Purpose-Family portrait as they came to me, before they slipped away.

I read the piece in a workshop, and the part that has stuck with me are the ads themselves. For good or for ill, I'm writing a personal ad a day now and it's pretty hilarious, at least to me. I'm looking forward to sharing them with the Writing Group on Saturday. I have no idea if they will come to anything, ever, but that's not important right now.

the latest from the weed patch

This morning while i was in the garden checking on the tomatoes, the vacationing neighbor was shooting a high-powered rifle repeatedly. Now, i'm certain that he was merely working on his new sight, or perfecting his trigger, and certainly was not after the many trespassers on Deer Highway, but it really disturbed me that he was firing near the Pine Forest where the boys had recently been playing. I know we are allowed to shoot, but what are the guidelines for shooting near occupied land? Mo sent along a link to local ordinances in Virginia, and Craig is notably not on it. So i suppose a good old fashioned drop-by-to-say-hi is in our futures this evening. The tomato news is that while we don't have any ripening as yet (congrats, Mo), we have several on the vine that look quite lovely. And to think it only took 32 plants to get a few! The beans have a poor showing; after Graeme and I finished weeding the bed there are only a half-dozen plants at best. The peas aren't doing well either, and I'm wondering what we can do: do we weed and wait, do we tear it up and plant something else, do we make it the world's best cat box? I put the questions to Morris, who was most helpful and full of advice. So now it seems that we will be replanting beans and scrapping the peas, which is fine with me. The beans we planted were from last year's seed purchase, so we might need to get some more of those. I like the burgandy ones best, and some pole beans are always nice. I'd also like to get some delicata squash seeds in the ground -- they are my favorite -- but i have No Clue where to buy them (if i could find a squash, i'd buy it, eat it, and plant the seeds). Perhaps Agnew will have some. I also would like to get the pumpkin seeds in the ground for Halloween, even if we don't harvest them for actual eating. The beets from last year's seeds seems to be doing quite well, and if early shoots are any indication, we'll have beets by the bucketload. The spinach (curent season seed purchase) is duking it out with the weeds, and i'm not going to sweat that crop so much. It's a shame, since i'm big on spinach and was really looking forward to making some spinach-artichoke dip, so it looks like a trip to the market is in order. Mo says it, like the peas, are an early or late crop and that i should try again in the fall. I'm a fan of weed barrier fabric, but even so weeds would still happen. I'm not certain what the horses got into, but it has been coming up in droves in all our beds. The cow manure will be a godsend next year. We set out three new beds that we plan to plant with potatoes, so i'm betting we'll be in Agnew soon. Will pick up some seeds then, tear out the peas and keep in mind that cool crops doesn't mean "july." I have some onion seeds for planting in the fall. We also have some serious garlic going on, Russian Red and elephant varieties. We didn't get it in soon enough to harvest or anything, but will leave it in the beds over the winter for harvesting next year. With the deer being what they are (read: p.i.t.a.), i'm thinking of building a low garden wall. it's not fool proof or anything, but it can be pretty, and i'm seriously invested in the garden. It's silly in a way, but there is a lot of me in the beds. The boys and I go out every morning, and I've come to really look forward to the roses and flowers and vegetables. Since the roses and lilies were a deer buffet, the vegetables have been getting most of my attention (that, and all the weeds that seem to spring up in the beds overnight). I checked on the roses this morning, and it seems they will recover, but i doubt there will be much in the way of blooms for several weeks, if then.