One resolution for fifty years

When I graduated from college fifty years ago I made a resolution: I will not let my education end here.  I will try to read 100 book a year the rest of my life.  I have tired. I have a little notebook with what I read and how well I did on my resolution.  One year at 15 in the late spring, I marked it "unfinished". Every other year is complete. Recently I told someone that I think I've averaged about 65 a year. But why guess? 

I just sat down with that little notebook, a piece of paper and a pen and, guess what?  I DID average 65 a year! But it was hardly a regular 65. I surprised myself as I looked at my record.  After college I got off to a slow start for a few years mostly not over 50. But then came the '70s and -- wow-whee! for almost the whole decade I DID read 100 books a year, one year as high as 113.  I was the mother of young children settling into a small town.  I joined a book group and I had time to read although gradually getting involved in community volunteer activities  Through the '80s and '90s it dropped precipitously.  I had moved to NYC, was writing plays thick and fast, taking classes, working to support myself.  I didn't quite manage a book a week. But in the last ten years I'm truly averaging 65 a year. This year it was 67.   Note, none of this includes magazines which I read voraciously or newspapers. 

So that's my story of a long, long term resolution.  Total: 3334.  Not really very grand. There is SO Much more I'd like to have read.  I'm not done yet.  A new year starts tonight and a new page in the notebook.  That is the ONLY resolution I make.  It's been a good one and truly my education did not end way back then.  My grandson just gave me that huge tome I did not read in 1989 when it won a Pulitzer Prize, Godel, Escher, Bach. I'm going to have a good at it.  I have not yet read Proust, that hole in my reading may never be plugged.

The quiet days

I didn't even know typewriters existed when I was that age, but I would have loved one.  And now I love my lap top where, as I learned way back a bit older than this little girl, not from a typing teacher  but from a piano teacher, I hold my hands as if I have an orange against my palm. And I have never stopped typing once I learned. 

Many a typewriter has died under my hands and a few computers also -- worked to death like a good old plough horse.  On one site alone, in the last three years, 750 word.com, I have typed over half a million words as a daily diary/meditation.

Today begins "the quiet days" the few days between Christmas and New Year.  I will continue my big work of the year about which I have not written here and will write no more until it's finished -- first draft, I mean -- and I will write these blogs and emails and a few things on the Swap-bot site and who knows what else.  I'm thinking of a poem that began in my mind last night.

The hubbub of Christmas day was over.  The noisy children from age one to four had left, the grown or nearly grown children from 14 to 26 had gone, except the oldest. Most of the dishes were done, most of the shreds of paper were in a garbage bag. Silence and the echos of the day blinked like tree lights. I went out into the fresh, chilled air and walked two blocks home with a distant, placid white moon above the bare trees, with colored lights trimming houses on both sides of the street and very little traffic.  Ah ... quiet ... and it will be quiet the rest of the week.  Just me and my very quiet little laptop, and sometimes my somewhat noisy sewing machine as I start to quilt a top that has been pieced. The refrigerator has plenty to sustain me.  And I have aplenty of books and magazines.  I'm content.

Noel, noel

Very good wishes to all who are celebrating Christman today.  Some parts of the US have a white Christmas and many parts do not.  We do not, we have rain.  The "s" words were used -- snow, sleet -- by the predictors but so far just rain. We would have been happy with a dusting of snow, we don't want sleet with so many people driving here and there to gatherings.

Our family, which currently contains two little boys under three, has hit upon the perfect agenda: We breakfasted at 9:00, open gifts after that, slowly with much noise involved as noisy toys were unwrapped.  Played with the toys for a good long while.  Now, tired kids have gone home (less than two miles away) for a nap and may be joined by Mama and maybe Papa too.  Then we will remeet at Great-Gramma's (that's me) where there's a piano and we can have a sing along for half an hour and then back to grammas for dinner.  The break is the perfect idea!  I'm enjoying it alone, quietly.

Good wishes for a celebration that is both lively and happy  or if not lively, calm and serene.  I hope all will be safe today and take some time to contemplate the good things in your life.

New Season, same old planet

The world didn't end although the Mayans as a culture are long gone. I've heard some remnants of their culture still exist in Central America. And 12-12-12 was just a date.  But the equinox is here and the days will become imperceptibly longer for the next three or four weeks. Then they will be perceptibly longer.  What a nice thought! 

I was a changable day to befit a changing season. I awoke to a whistling wind, then the rains poured down.  For a short while the sun came out and then the darkness came early as fog.  I have been thinking of end times, dooms day and prophecies largely because I made the mistake of going to a movie early enough to have to sit through the previews of "coming in 2013".  An assault on the senses and sanity.  Of 6 or 16 or  60 previews -- I thought they would never end -- the majority were apocalyptic stories.  Humanity has died off, been invaded by the tecnologically latest body snatchers, or is about to be destroyed one way or another -- except that there are heroes -- familiar heroes in new guises. Superman and, believe it or not, the Lone Ranger with a very well spoken Tonto.  Not being the primary demographic for popular movies (16 year old boys) I was appalled.

And worried.  It seemed to me these movies deal work by inducing a fear reaction and then, I suppose, a release from tension as the heroes vanquish the forces of evil, or whatever.  I'm too old to ever want to find out and I may never again go to the multiplex in the mall. But what of those boys with an addiction to fear and release -- the pumping adrenaline, the high of excitement, the need to experience it again and again.  Not always do they take their need to the cineplex, sometimes they act it out, sometimes with an automatic weapon, sometimes turned on their peers, sometimes turned on their parents, sometimes turned on small children. And then the ultimate release from the fear, ultimate shirking of responsibility, turning the gun on themselves or suicide by cop.  Yes, Joe Bidden, if your committee wants to know about violence in America one place to look is at the cinema.  There are others, of course, we are a multi-violent society.

At Last?

Do we have to  have 20 martyred children to even talk seriously about this country's gun problem?  Seems like it, doesn't it?  We've seen so many movies and television shows with scenes like this picture, the gun pointing right at us, that we have lost the sense of reality, the sense of danger, the sense of fear. We think it won't happen to us -- or to anyone we know, certainly not our children or  grandchildren. How would you feel if that was the last thing a child you love saw?

The assault rifle ban will probably be renewed. But will anything else happen? Will Vice President Biden's committee file another easily forgotten report? Will the NRA and Second Amendment-er continue to do as they please?

This is a country has strict laws about car seats for children, about flame retardants on children's pajamas, and the safety of toys.  But every year many children are killed with guns, sometimes a child kill one another with guns, too often children kill their parents with guns.  It's time to find a sense of balance.  I loath hunting but I would not argue that people should not be allowed to hunt or to have hunting rifles if that is a sport they want to pursue.  And I recognize that in our dire economy the country has many people who eat meat only because they can shoot a deer or two -- yes, city dwellers, many people live in the rural parts of this country where deer are both plentiful but sometimes pestilential.

Let's stop getting salving our consciences by passing laws about how to make car seats for babies and think about laws to get military, mass-killing mechanisms out of homes, off the streets, away from our children and away from those who are emotionally unbalanced.

The Messiah

A very different concert than I heard Tuesday evening.  Last night's performance of The Messiah was more professional and finer music; but I enjoyed the fun of a community Christmas celebration as much as I enjoyed the performance of Handel's music with period instruments, the local symphony orchestra and a very fine chorus. The soloists were just a step below the other musicians except for the bass-baritone. 

This performance was in a very large, modern Catholic church, a short distance from  a large traffic rotary (these abound in Massachusetts) where ten or twelve large trees were decorated with medium size white lights. The nearby village style mall also had its streets lined in small white lights on smaller trees. Everything felt like Christmas before we even went into the church. It was chilly in the church and the pews were hard despite padded cushions.  But the music was grand and familiar. 

Especially appropriate, the conductor spoke briefly before the performance saying he would dedicate the performance to the people of Sandy Hook School and that "we feel a sadness for which we have no words.  But we have music."  With that in mind I noticed that the first aria was "Comfort ye, my people."  I have heard The Messiah often on the radio and several times in concert halls but I had not heard it before in a church.  Although I actually prefer a modern symphony's sound, this is a moving piece of music, not the least because of the echoes of the King James translation of the Bible.
English, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, even in America, seems to me to have had a majesty  and clarity it did not have earlier (as in the Chaucer I've been reading) and as it doesn't have today.

Hell in a Handbasket

[Source of photo: http://zionstrumpet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03...  ]

I'm not talking about America only although that's what the illustration says.  The usual cliche is "the world is going to hell in a handbasket" but sometimes it seems that America, which likes to think of itself as THE world leader, is headed there fast and pulling the rest of the world along.

I'm on this tack today because I've been thinking about the film mentioned a few posts ago: The 11th Hour.  It's message is that ecologically the world is truly a quarter mile (or a quarter of a century) from hell.  The ecological messages are dire and I believe they are entirely correct. [Go to that post and click the link to being able to see the film free on the Internet.] We, individuals are a part of that ecology too and we as a group are suffering along this road. We are eating, drinking, inhaling and taking drugs, both physician prescribed and recreationally, things that are very bad for and are changing our physical, emotional and mental being in the world. We have epidemics of diseases only a few people had before: asthma, autism, Alzheimer's -- and that's just a part of the A list. We have PTSD and "personality disorders" that were much rarer fifty years ago. 

And that brings me to today's headline that makes me want to shout at some idiot who wrote it and seems to expect it to explain something: That the shooter of 20 kindergarten children had "a personality disorder." Murdering small children is something other than a mere personality disorder!  The rash of shootings (five in the last six months) and each more horrible than the former is a societal disorder.  A symptom of something awful in our world.  There have always been madmen, always been murderers but this is bigger than crazy individuals. I do not believe in supernatural forces; I believe in natural and societal forces and in volatile, often violent, mental states. We, the human race, have concocted a lethal world so complex there can only be partial answers.