Leaf - Stitch - Word

- Peeling bark

jelizabeth — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:09:58 +0000

It’s the Acer griseum (a maple) in our front yard, a nice small tree. Yes, it’s supposed to do that.

- Holly

jelizabeth — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:42:12 +0000

P.S. Although not bittersweet vine, these red berries are for you, Mom!

- At long last: grackles

jelizabeth — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:00:48 +0000

At long last — weeks after I had given up the hope that I would see them this year — they returned.

As I stood at the kitchen sink, drank from a cup, and stared absent-mindedly into the backyard, I faintly heard a chorus of chattering. I heard it before I recognized it.

My attention tracked the origin of the noise. I went to the door, opened it quietly, and peered up at the old trees. Ah, they were dotted and filled with the purplish, black birds. Hundreds of them chucked like pigeons and squeaked like rusted gates. Hundreds. From the trees in the front of the house to the trees in the back, a crowd of them swooped, and the swooping felt like a huge quiet breath inhaled by the sky over my shoulder: a pause, a contraction, a gathering of force.

Usually, their arrival coincides with Columbus Day. This year, I waited and waited and waited, yet they seemed to have passed by without stopping for me, or perhaps they had not passed by at all, which made me wonder: what is going on in our climate?

The grackles are very late this year. Still, they have arrived and will probably stay for a day or two. While their gang sound is chilling and seems to bring a portent, I am relieved by their visit.

—-

P.S. This video was taken by me, on the morning of November 16, 2009, as I stood on our back steps and looked up at the trees in our yard and beyond to my neighbor’s red roof. As you watch, turn up the volume on your amp, like Nigel, to 11, in order to approximate the effect of a sky filled with grackle sound.

- Getting too much done?

jelizabeth — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:01:02 +0000

In high school, I had a clerk’s job at the Leicester Pharmacy in the center of our town. It was about three miles away from our house. To get there, often I drove or got driven. Once in a while, I walked and took the lovely meandering way: up our street, down the dirt road that connected our circle to the newer Cricklewood development, out onto Pine Street, a detour through the old cemetery, and then back up Pine Street to where it met Main. If it was autumn, I’d kick the fallen leaves as I walked, in no hurry at all. As I strolled, I thought my thoughts. I hummed to myself, bothering no one.

Last Thursday night, one of my office mates Karen and I were talking about our teenager children as we tidied up the piles on our desks. Their lives, to us, seem to be like full-time jobs, plus moonlighting. Busy, rushing from task to task, sleepless. No time to think their thoughts. Like the present-day us.

About 12 years ago, when my oldest child (now 17), was a little boy, my friend Martha Mulligan and I were feeling the pressure from our culture to get stuff done, gracefully and in multiples. (This was before the GTD system was even a gleam in David Allen’s eye.) We felt ourselves to be failing more than meeting expectations. Mirthful over our own daily inefficiencies, together (and probably with Eric and Jimmy, too) we came up with an idea for a humor book, with illustrations, called Maximize Your Inefficiencies. Martha billed it as “the Dilbert for your home life.”

I still have the file. I dug it out.

Martha and I planned for 101 inefficient items, perhaps one per page. It would be like a coupon or flip book, the kind you can purchase on impulse at the counter of a book or gift store. I see in all the notes that we had more than enough material for this little gag book. I’ll list some here, in no particular order, so you can get the idea.

Have a kid.
Bake from scratch.
Allow food to dry on plates before washing.
Start a new project before finishing another.
Fix a mistake you made earlier in life.
Answer the telephone between 7 and 8pm.
Nightly prepare different meals for the different tastes in your household.
Buy only clothes with the care tag “Hand wash. Line dry.”
Get a low flush toilet. [Editorial note: this was in the 1990s, when the low flush technology had not yet been optimized.]
Answer questions on warranty cards. Send them in.
Go to more than one supermarket.
Create a web page for your pets.
Serve on a committee.
Sew a child’s Halloween costume.
Designate your dining room as a mail, craft, and gear depot.
Wear contact lenses.
Rinse out your returnable bottles.
Try recipes that feature trace amounts of exotic ingredients sold only in 8 or 12oz. jars.
Contest a $15 parking ticket.
Improve yourself.

And so on. (In the file, there’s also the draft of a scheme for organizing the inefficiencies into categories: Work, Health, Leisure, Food, Civic, etc.)

Why didn’t Martha and I ever follow through on this — finish and publish it? (We had even lined up an illustrator.) I can’t speak for her, but I know that I lost my belief in an idea for a book that we would put a lot of time into but that would pretty quickly find its way onto the remainder table or into a recycling bin. The book itself seemed to be one big inefficiency.

And yet I can’t say that I have since become the super efficient person that contemporary values seem to demand. Like so many people I know, I feel constantly that I’m falling behind in some sort of master schedule for all aspects of my life. (I have said, only half jokingly, that I’m going to die with about a week’s worth of outstanding items on my To Do list.)

Did I think about this — everything that needs to be done — when I was 17 and walking to my pharmacy job? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s possible that I was fretting about an upcoming band concert or my college application essays. It may be that there was nothing special about life then, in 1982 or so, and that the little scene that starts this post — of me kicking leaves and meandering through the Pine Grove Cemetery — says more about what I desire today than what I did or felt then.

- Twisted world

jelizabeth — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:58:24 +0000

Usually, we keep the cars unlocked when they’re sitting in our driveway. What would anyone want to steal, but a handful of change in the cup holder, empty water bottles on the floor, or a soccer ball in the back? An opportunistic thief, it seems, might also be attracted to a red bag full of first aid supplies for Grace’s scouting troop, of which I am the volunteer first aider. Bandaids, gauze pads, Benadryl, instant cold packs, surgical scissors, a CPR face mask: stolen. Today we replenished the kit. It costs $104 for supplies that fit this description, plus $20 for a discount backpack to hold it all.

On the MBTA Green Line, a man in nice pants, black scuffed vinyl shoes, and a puffy down Patriots jacket sat across from me, with his head bent over a notebook. Left-handed, he wrote a numbered list of principles in big block letters on the lined paper. The list, which was easy to read upside-down and across the aisle, had to do with campaigning, I gathered. “1. Door-to-door. Get the message out. 2. Phone bank. Waste of time. 3. Direct mail. Expensive, uncertain.” And so on. I feared, for some inchoate reason, he was launching the beginning of a political career.

Above ground at the Park Street Station, the street was blocked off with that yellow police tape. The whole intersection, blocked. People standing around. No cars. I looked and looked at my fellow bystanders, trying to make eye contact before asking someone to explain. No eye contact. I walked over to the hotdog stand guy. “Yes, miss?” he said to me as his glance landed on mine. I asked him what had happened. He answered, “A quite older woman was hit by a truck in the intersection. She passed away.” Oh, no. Still, I found it so strange that the gentle phrase “passed away” could be used for a victim who had been rammed by a truck.

In the rundown jewelry store on the corner of Tremont and Winter Streets, I finally got the battery in my watch replaced. Only $8.49 — what was I waiting for? For at least two months, I had been covertly using the digital display on my insulin pump as a time keeper. The jeweler’s assistant told me she sees everything out her store window, everything. The old woman who was hit by the truck had her “head cracked open. Open.” The assistant, who had heat-straightened brown hair and a very kind smile, cupped her two hands around her forehead as she described what she saw. I pictured her head like an egg, the shell opening.

I went to Starbucks to get my coffee. I’m not sure why, but I felt as though the barrista’s exaggerated friendliness was a way of making fun of me. Yet, he was quite friendly. What is it about me that’s so weird today? I asked myself. I felt suddenly paranoid about my polar fleece vest and sneakers and wished I had dressed snappier.

As I walked back up the alley, I could see through to Tremont Street. A parade of uniformed men carrying bayonets walked the wrong way up the one-way street. I was so focused on the accident, I imagined that someone had quickly organized a group of volunteers to commemorate the old woman’s death. Only later did someone say, as she squinted at me, “Because it’s Veterans Day?”

There were not many calls today to the InfoLine during my shift. Mostly, I helped collate and staple a new handbook on getting married, as a gay couple, in New Hampshire. I thought about how much photocopying and stapling go into every social revolution, and there I was, doing my share. I did listen, for a long time, to one caller in deep distress, who had been in his past a victim of repeated sexual violence, and who kept asking me, “Do you know of anyone like me? Has this ever happened to someone like me before?” Yes, I said, yes it has. I’m so sorry. All I could do was refer him to the hotline of a program that specializes in violence recovery; GLAD operates only an information line, and there’s a distinction. The caller hesitated. Perhaps, I intuited, it would take too much for him to make one more call. I hoped I could send a boost through the phone line as I forcefully murmured this: It was very brave of you to call today. Please, try to be brave enough to make one more call. I promise: someone there will help you.

On the train back to Brookline, I sat next to a woman with a blonde ponytail and in a sleek black coat who carried a huge canvas bag, a preppie one, with the name Eddie monogrammed on one side. She read The Economist, turning page after page. I remembered Jimmy telling me he never sees women reading The Economist. I saw one.

—-

Photograph of dolls created by Grace Guterman and George Ross.

- It’s Sunday.

jelizabeth — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:50:47 +0000

And this is rest and spirituality enough for me.

Task and tools

An unexpected fall show from the forsythia

Modest meter

Mums, late bloomers yet already on their way out

Giant hosta, felled by cold, rain, and shorter day

The last bud, mistimed, like a child awake and happy at 2am

The beauty of a blush on pale features

One of the annual pots, with a piece of broken tree bone

An emptied container, with a pot shard for drainage

Waves of Hakonoechloa grass, still green

Yellow at its most yellow

Rusty bells, near a sun perennial planted defiantly in shade

Seasonal game, set aside

Open space, red anchor

No style, only function

- I would read a book about pencils.

jelizabeth — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:44:32 +0000

For some reason, Grace, Jimmy, and I were talking about single-noun-subject books. What concrete thing interests you enough that you would read or write an entire book about it? Salt, for example.

Grace raised potatoes as a possibility.

“Pencils,” I said. “I love pencils. I would read an entire book about pencils.”

Yesterday, my library helpers found and brought this home for me. I saw the title, and my heart started to beat a little faster in anticipation. I opened to chapter one. First words: “Henry David Thoreau seemed to think of everything…” Ah, book heaven.

- Scary movie

jelizabeth — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:31:22 +0000

It’s Halloween; I’m alone.

It’s a good time to watch Jesus Camp, a documentary loaned to me weeks ago by my friend David, a fellow volunteer at GLAD.

“I heard it’s disturbing,” said Eli, when I showed it to him.

Perfect for tonight.

—–

P.S. The photo has nothing to do with the film. It’s simply a snap of the spooky moon in the sky over my house on this balmy, windy Halloween.

- Go far in friendship.

jelizabeth — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:15:40 +0000

If you want to go far in friendship, you shouldn’t laugh at someone when they fall.

–said by Grace Guterman, age 9

- Feedback season

jelizabeth — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:04:00 +0000

When it’s midterms for students, it’s midterms for teachers. (There’s something rather binge-and-purge about school, isn’t there?) In the past two weeks, since Columbus Day, I’ve been reading, commenting on, and grading the drafts of technical reports and scientific analysis papers, about 35 altogether. They’re long (average: 20 pages), but after the first few in a batch, I get into a rhythm. And while I don’t copy and paste comments from one report into another, I do notice similar issues and may make similar comments among reports.

I don’t claim any of the following lines as poetry. Here are some of the kinds of things I write or type in the margins.

This title is not informative enough.

Nice subheaders. Specific and informative. Reader gets some sense of paper from the ToC, which is good.

This seems to be your focus. I’ve highlighted the key elements: reader will expect to see these carried through paper. Style note: Sentence is clunky and hard to follow. It’s okay to develop it into two sentences.

While this is a straightforward and precise summary of your results, don’t do it here, for this tech report assignment. Save for Results. Instead, you might want to give a brief overview of the rest of the paper.

Do you carry this point through the paragraph? It seems like the rest of the paragraph returns to the focus on minimizing costs and optimizing results and is not concerned with the specific parameter.

Somewhere in your paper, maybe even here, it would be helpful to have a very brief overview of the Betts et al. experiment.

Nice work. This is clear and concise, and the description contains information that would help a knowledgeable reader duplicate your experiment.

This seems to be a placeholder for more precise language.

This is appropriate language for referring to a figure. However, you must also give a brief textual summary of what the reader will find in the figure, and the Results section should begin with a to-the-point statement about what was found. No suspense!

So, if reader accepts that static gassing-out is a more accurate measure, which is what I think you’re arguing for here, then reader may expect you’ll take this up again in your paper somewhere, because in essence you are disposing of sulfite oxidation as relevant in minireactors.

Always use penultimate comma in scientific and technical writing.

Can you be more precise than “more quickly”? Are there data? It seems as though you’re starting to analyze findings here, before you’ve presented them. Is this the right place for this in your report?

Text that introduces Fig. 8 goes here.

This has the ring of something that would be compelling for a reader to know earlier.

Ah, a provocative assertion/conclusion here. Reader wants to know more of your thinking. How can you take this further, say more?

The interesting thing about writing good comments is that they are made to disappear. As I write these on drafts, I hope each author’s thinking and writing are prompted by my remarks, instructions, and questions. These marks of mine disappear in the revision; they become merely ghosts, ones maybe that only I see, flitting around a student’s new words and newer version.