When last we spoke, I couldn’t brain because I had the dumb. I decided to take the weekend off from blogging — and in fact from every sort of pressure or expectation for myself.
That’s harder to do than to decide to do.
It began nicely. Friday evening — softly drizzly, but peaceful — Ava and I wandered the town enjoying Christmas lights. Then I stopped into the grocery store to pick up ingredients for beef stew, my favorite fall comfort food. The old family recipe I adapted requires Kitchen Bouquet, a condiment from Mom’s day that I’m always surprised is still available.
As I turned to head down the Kitchen Bouquet aisle, I was overwhelmed by an attack of joy. The little grocery store suddenly struck me as a place of incalculable riches. Which in fact it is.
The store, with its well-stocked shelves of absolutely everything anybody could want, felt suddenly lit with a glow of abundance, the abundance only freedom can create. In what other time and place have ordinary people, even poor people, had so much as we do? As I walked past the endless variety of pickles, the salad dressings both corporate-made and regional-artisanal, the vinegars both common and cheap and exotic and dear, I had very nearly a mystical experience. The riches on the shelves seemed brighter than Christmas lights. I was overwhelmed with wonder by an otherwise completely mundane experience. Even now, two days later, when I think of that moment it’s as if all the glass jars were glowing from within.
—–
I came home, still floating a bit. Then Ava, the cat, and I sat out on the screen porch until there was no more light left in the day.
And not much later I was surprised to stumble across this paean to the prosperity of free trade by Kevin D. Williamson that echoed the love and wonder I felt walking through my small-town market.
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Saturday morning I awoke in the dark as I always do. But instead of picking up a book or opening the computer while enjoying my morning tea, I determined simply to enjoy the morning.
My favorite time of day is the half hour just before dawn when objects are defined, but colorless. Everything is shades of gray. Then with no sun yet visible, color gradually seeps into the world.
At least I say it’s my favorite time of day. Truth is, I usually miss it because I’m surfing the ‘Net.
Saturday it took effort just to sit still, sip my tea, quiet my speeding brain, and await the return of light and color.
One thing I realized is how many household lights blight the experience. The modem glows blue. The router glows white. The red-lighted switch on the power strip competes with the one on the space heater at my feet. Every household device seems to have a green- or red-glowing clock on it. Wireless headphones announce with a red glare that they’re charging. A button on the heat pump lights green to inform me it’s working.
I shut down all of them that I could and watched the morning arrive in peace.
—–
The only pressure during the weekend came when friends who are fostering a dog lured me to their house to meet her. They know I don’t want another dog. But they said this one was “once in a lifetime” and I really needed to see her.
They thought she was a lot like Robbie. I thought of all the reasons I really, really, really do not want another dog now — and drove out to their place, anyhow.
The dog was a two-year-old pit bull, maybe mixed with chow chow and who knows what else. She did have a lot in common with Robbie, though not necessarily always in a good way. Definitely a diamond in the rough. A sweet dog with quiet dignity, but fiercely protective and sketchily trained. I was picturing playing referee between two divas. One would start the fights and the other — younger, tenacious, and with broad bully jaws — would decisively end them. I was relieved to find myself not falling in love with her.
No thank you, I said.
It’s been a weekend for gratitude. But Ava, who has exulted in being the only dog since her bully-brother’s death has no idea how grateful she should be to me for making that choice.
Watching the dawn has been my favorite morning thing for much of my life. A great deal of my working life was spent up and out at that time too. Each day so different, and the dawn in the desert can be downright mystical. Here, I watch the first of the deer and rabbits begin their day then, and once in a while there is a ghostly fog to lend mystery and surprise. This morning the first light revealed the snow all around; nearly four inches of it fell yesterday. I couldn’t see any deer or other animals this morning, but their tracks in the beautiful clean snow let me know they are around. I’ll see them later.
When our family dog, K-ci, was alive, there’s no way we could bring another dog into our home. We have cats too and they tolerated K-ci but they would kill us if we brought another dog into the fold. K-ci died back in 2013 and it really hurt us all as he was much beloved and we decided he was our last dog…
how many household lights
“gadget-glow”
paean to the prosperity of free trade
I researched the fall of the Berlin Wall writing a story. (In addition to what I remembered from when it happened.)
My character manages a visit to West Berlin from Russia, to visit a friend of her father. But as she arrives she really needs to purchase cotton-wool and ribbon, which she fruitlessly waited in line for in Russia. So she confides in a hotel maid.
The maid takes her to a big store that even hotel maids can shop in, and points out shelves full of women’s pads already made up, and costing less than the cotton-wool and ribbon women in the East had to buy to make their own.
Turns out in the West, that generation of women had always had ready-made pads, and had never needed to make their own.
(It follows a true story told to me by a woman who had lived it.)
So my character, by hook and by crook, manages to marry an American and move to Texas. There, her new husband buys her two brand-new winter coats, even though she rarely needs even one.
Pit bull, maybe mixed with chow chow now that sounds like a major project to me, Ava will never know how lucky she may be. One thing for sure nobody would ever mess with you without going through that one.
“Pit bull, maybe mixed with chow chow now that sounds like a major project to me,”
Yup. That was my take, also. While I was there, the front door popped open and a neighbor dog the foster knows and likes came in. But she brought a stranger-dog with her. And man, that foster ran the new dog out of the house in about two seconds. Not many recent fosters would be that protective. After that she was also very bossy to the neighbor dog. Wouldn’t sit, either, not even for the homemade cheese biscuits I brought. It wasn’t clear whether she’d ever been trained to sit, but very clear it was going to be a challenge to for anybody ever to get her to do it.
She had very nice natural house manners, though. And a sweet personality.
What a great story about the Russian woman, Larry. I can picture the woman’s wonder at discovering that such things even existed, let alone that they could be had by anybody in inexpensive abundance.
I wish everybody who thinks so highly of socialism (as reportedly a large number of millennials do) could live though something like that. Only briefly. And then come back to appreciate freedom.
Maybe a bunch of tour groups for millennials to Venezuela?
Oh, wrong socialism?
The USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Cambodia etc. are the wrong socialism too?
All those college kids mean the good socialism, with all that free stuff?
Like the kind they are being promised.
🙂
From the summer of 1962 until the fall of 1963, my parents and I lived in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. At that time it was a city of about 100,000 and we were 3 of the 4 Americans in the city. There were no supermarkets. No department stores. Fabulous bread could be bought at the local bakery, if you were quick. Heat in the winter depended on buying chunks of coal, barely worthy of the name, to put in your ceramic heater. My deepest impression at the age of 12, was how everyone looked the same. Old women in black with headscarves, middle aged men with the same grey or black suit and the same ratty briefcase. All of my friends begged me for American jeans. Tito was the renegade communist and Yugoslavia was much better-off than countries “behind” the Iron Curtain, but there were still gun emplacements on the corner when he visited. Socialism is the most evil lie ever invented by the mind of man.
I have had the same experience in grocery stores. Marveling at how rich Americans are. Historically, an American on welfare is in the top 1% of all time.
Why are we so ungrateful? (rhetorical question).
Kevin Williamson’s article mentions the benefits of neglect: letting people tinker in garages to invent things,make music, etc.
I am reminded of something I read, about why the birth of the personal computer revolution took place in the late 1970s. It wasn’t just the microchip technology. It was the end of the Vietnam War and the military draft, that let people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates drop out of college, tinker with computers, and change the world.
Maybe a bunch of tour groups for millennials…
Otto Warmbier went on such a tour, pulled a minor prank, and returned in a coma. But I hear there are still college students signing up for North Korea excursions, and their parents are letting them.
Some people just refuse to learn.
I too love the near dawn time of day, especially in the cattails near a duck pond.
But “…when objects are defined, but colorless. Everything is shades of gray. Then with no sun yet visible, color gradually seeps into the world.” is every morning for me, until my caffeine fix is finished. Then, and only then, can I see in color, and stop growling to actually talk.
In the 70’s I had a college chum whose father worked for an American oil company in Russia. The American family decided they wanted to take a trip to Finland, and on the appointed day their Russian driver was no where to be found. Hours later, he showed up with the car stuffed with groceries he had somehow finagled through the black market. What did you do that for, the Americans asked. The Russian replied that Finnish are starving, so the travelers needed to bring their own food. The American laughed at him and made him unload the car. Later that day, when they crossed the Finnish border, the Russian driver went to a western style grocery store….and ‘he went apesh-t’, said my friend. The Russian could not believe the variety and the quantity of food available…in a store…that anyone could buy.