Monday Odds and Ends

This morning I found another hoodie in the park! My third one this week. I'm off to get 22 pounds of generic laundry soap, the powder stuff that I scoop with my favorite dented aluminum measuring cup - the one I use to scoop salt and sand in Winter. Maybe I'll wash the hoodie and bring it back.


Doreen my mail lady told me that Helen the lovely old lady who has white hair and always wears a lavender coat moved away but now she takes the bus up from Warwick to feed the stray porch cats she loved. This is keeping Helen and the cats happy.


My two favorite machines are our old washing machine we got from Mario and our 20 year old black Braun drip coffee machine I got from Tom's office when he left NYC. I think I like these machines because I feel like I am accomplishing two things at once while I use them! Maybe I should call my bicycle my other favorite machine but it is not a machine. I am the machine bicycling. I am not a multi tasker by any means. I am ridiculously myopic. I can't even talk while measuring ingredients to make a cake. I can't talk while driving. I can't have a radio on in the room while being on the phone. I can't use a portable phone. I can't use a bank machine without going VERY slowly. This is all because it's too much information coming in!! But slowly I am learning to sing while playing two hands on the accordion!!! Maybe if I can master that, I'll try to tap dance while singing and playing too!


Why didn't I take typing in junior high? I think I would've liked it. My mother was forced to take it and she hated it because her father wanted her to be a secretary not an artist. I don't blame her for hating it! I will try to teach myself to type without looking. I love sewing too. I call it girl's carpentry. Unfortunately sewing is another thing that got ruined for many women who thought they were supposed to like it. I happen to love it but I always feel bad when women have felt they were supposed to love sewing and baking and cooking and end up hating them. Perhaps we do more harm than good in our society.


Nearly everyone wants to be creative in their life. I believe we'd be a happier society if we realized this and encouraged it. If we shared what is most human about us we'd learn about ourselves and each other and probably have fewer problems with depression and alienation. We'd grow more as a people rather than oppress and repress. Schools could be more like bird sanctuaries and gardens rather than be prisons of humiliation and shame. I suggest we start with homemade food, homemade poetry, and homemade music. If we walked and shopped on foot in our neighborhoods and baked bread at communal ovens we'd have a good start. Park your car, unplug your TV, make some noodles with your neighbor! Sounds like a great plan to me.


When we first moved into our neighborhood 13 years ago we got local cream and made hand cranked vanilla chocolate chip mint ice cream and the local kids helped out and then we all ate it together out at our backyard picnic table. There was one girl named Crystal whose life was changed by making and eating home made ice cream. She talked about it for months afterward. Why not teach kids to churn their own ice cream and pull their own taffy! Don't eat food made by robots! Even junk food can be made healthy when you make it yourself with love.