Book Meme

My blogging friend anno tagged me with this very simple and fun book meme, which tends to say a bit about the reading tastes of the tagee. But I issue an immediate disclaimer, since my reading tastes are wildly eclectic. The book I picked up was actually the one nearest me, but it is one that Otto is now reading at my recommendation. I recommend it to you too. Here is the tag:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

“And I wanted these people to feel like it wasn’t just me, that there was a bunch of other Americans back home concerned with helping them.” “He slipped me a big roll of rupees,” McCown says, “and asked me to act like a big boss from America. So I hammed it up...”

These sentences are from the inspiring true story of Greg Mortenson and his lifetime work bringing schools, especially those for girls and women, to the remote areas of the lower Himalayas:

Three Cups of Tea
One Man’s Mission to promote Peace...One School at a Time

If this looks strange it's because I stole it off of Amazon

I intend this to be the last tagging list that I will publish. I enjoy answering tags, but it seems to me that there are too many of them bouncing around the blogsphere, with numerous duplicates and repetitions. I thank everyone who has shown an interest in my life, and I am happy to answer tags - just not to pass them on.

Here is my list of tags for this book meme:

Mary Anne
Josie
Tea Leaves
Tumblewords
Maggie May

Lucy and Retired and Crazy, I'll fill out your memes on my next post.

Quitting

QUITTING

Just yesterday I asked Otto to reach across a bunch of boxes that sat on the floor of our bedroom waiting to be sorted, and to take down the 1920s Martin guitar that has become part of the wall decor. And that’s all it has been for many years. It’s hard to believe how long it has been since a guitar was like a second soul to me. It was often propped by my bed at night. Letting melodies flow from it was as easy for me as breathing.

Yesterday I held the guitar tentatively and let my fingers try to remember something. Anything! My right hand was happy to oblige, easily reproducing the finger picking patterns at which I used to be so proficient. No problem there. But ,oh, my left hand! I produced a number of jarring discords with it before something clicked in the automatic part of my brain and I heard a C chord then a D and F. I couldn’t get beyond these most basic chords, and then my aging fingers rebelled at the painful pressure of holding down the strings. When I turned my hands up to see the pads of my fingers, I found deep grooves which persisted for several minutes. And to think that I once had such calluses on those finger pads that I had almost been denied an exit visa from Brazil. An examination of my fingerprints had led an official to conclude that I must be a criminal who had filed off her fingerprints to conceal her record.

Guitar was my passion for several years. I wrote songs and Otto, who had taken up guitar at about the same time that I had, joined me in programs where we played and sang. Below is a picture of us in the 70’s with grandchildren Josie Smith and Byron Shock giving a performance of my songs. They had been written at the behest of the local Council of Churches for the Unicef Year of the Child.


I will tell another time about memorable performances, once over Bulgarian radio after the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile. But the Sunday Scribbling prompt is about quitting, not about my love affair with the guitar.

I quit guitar just as I have quit every other temporary passion that has consumed me for a few short years. I’m not apologetic about it. I think it may be my attempt to cram many lifetimes into one. And I don’t quit because I’m tired of one activity but because the next leaves none of my leisure time free for the previous one. My children (for whom I never lost my passion!) are aware of this and tease me about it. Let’s see. Here are a few of my temporary but intensely practiced activities starting before most of you were born:

piano
water-color landscapes (painting them)
humorous poetry (writing and being published)
science fiction stories (writing and being published)
macrame
guitar and song writing
crayon abstract drawings
singing in choruses
stained glass
translation of Portuguese poetry into English (published)
novel (AI is a Three-toed Sloth)
polymer clay jewelry (Fimo)

There are sporadic bursts of other enthusiasms. And lots of things I never quit, such as working for peace and social justice.

And there are the things I’ve had to quit because of the physical changes of aging, such as the longs walks through all of my city, seeking little known paths and parks.

And what is my current enthusiasm? Blogging. Of course!

Crayon Abstract
"Of Moons and Springs and Dragon Wings"

DIRE STUFF

I ran across Mad Kane's blog with a humor prompt this week. It's to be a warning or cautionary limerick. While waking up this morning (a slow process) I came up with the following three. Check out Mad Kane

BURST BUBBLE BLUES
You loved your McMansion so neat.
It’s adjustable mortgage was sweet.
Who burst the bubble?
You’re caught in the rubble
And sleeping outside in the street.

CAUGHT IN THE WEB
h TEE t p COlon slash SLASH
On the web net/coms mingle and clash.
Some are wise, some are porn,
Some are old-fashioned corn
And you have to winnow the trash.WHO’S A TERRORIST?
This flight is your highest priority
Yet you share the fears of majority?
The true fright (it’s mine)
Is that long shoeless line
Of passengers queued for security.

Dramok

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "soar"

Dramok

DRAMOCK

That almost silent whoosh of air is Dramok,
prince of dragons,
dark body limned with luminescence,
riding the night sky
searching -- searching
for Trog, beloved bride,
she of the iridescent scales--
dead long ago.

Trog

His dragon mind can't comprehend that eons have passed.

An ice age (not the last one)
felled him with its sudden chill, and he has lain
inert and dreamless, entombed in ice
until a chance event of warming wind, a ray of sun that angled
into the crevasse where he lay
thawed and wakened him.

To him it seemed a single night had passed.
He longed for night again with orienting stars to guide him home.

But now the very stars betray him.
Earth's slow precession had made of them
false beacons that lead to unfamiliar landscapes.

And what of the stars below?

He remembers the sparse and scattered fires
of the hairy ones, small bipeds such as those encamped
within the entrance to the dragon cave, scorned but tolerated
by their noble dragon hosts. Their fires were pretty, like dragon breath.

But now great starry clusters light the ground
or move in files, as ants do.

A different world. Somehow
overnight
he was transported to a different world.

An empty ache moves in to fill his dragon heart.
He longs for home and Trog
but would greet any dragon, even his greatest rival,
with open wings.

On and on he flies.
By day, chameleon-like, he turns to green and rests unseen in forests.
At dusk he takes the darker colors of night.
Non-dragons share his sky, swift winged giants
whose roar could have drowned out even Myroc
fiercest of dragons. But where is Myroc now?

His wings beat out a sad refrain: Where is Trog? Where is Trog?

To us he seems to be
only a shadow against the stars.

Telephones

The staff of the Free Church circa 1970.
Rev. Dick York is the man with the wild hair under the 1st "H" of "Church".
I am 3rd from left, back row, also with wild hair.

The Sunday Scribblings prompt today is telephone. I have never liked telephone conversations. I would much rather see the person I am talking to, their facial expressions and gestures which are such a vital part of communication.

Therefore it may be a surprise to learn that for several years of my life, in the late 60s and early 70s I was the head of a “switchboard” to the largely hippy community in Berkeley. Yes, that involved being at the telephone myself for at least several hours of every day.

This is how it came about: Otto and I, with son Stan, arrived home to Berkeley in August of 1969 after a year of sabbatical leave (Otto’s) in Australia. We had missed the “summer of love” in San Francisco, but the word of it had spread nation-wide, and Berkeley, just across the bay from S.F. , was crowded with a motley congregation of young people - the genuinely idealistic who felt that they knew a better way of life than their capitalistic uptight parents, runaways from abusive homes, drug users, pacifists protesting the ongoing war in Vietnam, and others just here because it seemed like a fun thing to do. All of them needed beds at night and food to eat. Some of them needed the services of doctors, dentists, lawyers, drug counselors. And some of them just needed a hug now and then from a concerned adult. The majority of them took up street residence on or near Telegraph Avenue in the immediate vicinity of the University of California.

In response to this needy group, all of the south campus churches and a number of Telegraph Avenue merchants had banded together to hire Dick York, a young Episcopal priest, as a street minister. He was lent a vacant house owned by the Presbyterian church. It was to be called “the South Campus Community Ministry”. It was soon dubbed by the street people “the Free Church.”

As a middle-aged volunteer, I was astonished at how I was immediately accepted by the predominately young crowd who dropped in to ask for help or just to sit down for a few minutes to visit with one another or with me. Glee Bishop (who later married my son) had already assembled a directory of service providers, but I had to constantly use the telephone to find out who was available or to scout out new sources of help. In the course of time I became Switchboard manager and had the responsibility of several telephones and other volunteers who manned them. The switchboard room was also the drop-in room, which meant that I was also the person in charge of seeing that Free Church rules were obeyed. The rules were “No Dropping, No Holding, No Dealing, No Smoking Grass,” and, soon after I started working there, “No Knives” was added after an incident involving one. The staff had decided that we would be of most use to people we were serving if we adopted a policy of complete confidentiality. No police were to be admitted to the building without a search warrant.

But this Sunday Scribblings prompt was “telephone” not Telegraph avenue culture. Suffice to say that there were hundreds of calls to be made daily, especially since we tried to find a bed somewhere for everyone who needed one. Many people, from university professors to a janitor in a junior high school, had offered to open their homes and provide “crash pads”. But every nightly placement required a phone call.

The scariest phone call I ever took part in was as I was training, Bob, a new volunteer, with him on one phone and me on the other. It was near midnight and we were the only people still in the building. I planned to go home soon and leave Bob on the relatively light overnight shift. I had been there since 9:00 am and was tired.

The phone rang. We picked up our receivers and heard a wild party going on in the background, loud music, much shouting, then a frightened male voice:
Voice: Help! Help! He’s trying to kill me!
Bob: Do want the number of the police department?
Voice: I can’t call the police!
Me: Where are you? We’ll get help to you.
Voice: I can’t give you the address.
Me: We can’t get help to you without an address.
Voice: But I don’t know where I am! Help me! Help me!
(I write a note to Bob to call the police department and ask them to trace the call).
Me: Do you know what street you’re on?
Voice: Oh my God! Oh my God! He’s got a knife!
Me: Call someone else to the phone. We’ll get the address from...

and then there is a despairing scream and the caller’s phone goes dead.

And there is a subsequent article buried in the back pages of the local newspaper about the body of an unidentified stabbing victim found on the sidewalk in the 2200 block of Oregon street. It was discovered by an early morning jogger on the morning following that phone call. Ironically, that was within two blocks of our Free Church.

No, I don’t like telephones. But many telephone calls can bring relief to someone, though some cannot. And I could tell maybe a thousand stories based on the six years that I worked many unpaid hours a day at the Free Church switchboard.

Daddy in South America

A typical page from Daddy's South American snapshot album.
As you can see, he wasn't particular about the order in
which he arranged the pictures

My favorite book when I was a small child was a snapshot album of my father’s adventures in South America. At the age of 24, my father, Allen Sterling, was sent by the Carnegie Institution at Washington to South America to measure terrestrial magnetism. During the course of several different trips between 1916 and 1919, he covered much of the continent and was the first white man into various regions of the Amazon basin and tributaries of the Amazon. He traveled by raft for much of his work along the Amazon, by conventional transportation when it was available, by donkey-back over the Andes, and set up surveying sites from the inhospitable desert of northern Chile to the mysterious land of Tierra del Fuego.

This is Daddy in bleak northern Chile

Even more fun for a small child were the stories he told of his adventures. His only companion on his rafting expeditions was an indigenous man, and their only common language was Spanish, which neither of them spoke well. Daddy considered him one of his dearest friends. Daddy never met a fellow human that he did not approach in friendship and expect to receive the same in return.

One story that I liked, however, was of an evening by the river when Daddy felt apprehensive about the activities of a tribe near his tent. When he and his companion went to the small village to meet their neighbors-for-a-night, they found them in a frenzy of shouting and waving of weapons as they also drank great quantities of the local brew. It looked as though this might be the prelude to going on the warpath. So what did Daddy do? He bought up every spear, every gun, anything that could serve as a weapon. The not-very-sober celebrants were delighted. They had made a fortune. They continued their noisy celebration far into the night while Daddy and friend slept on top of their new purchases. By the sober light of morning the tribal members realized, as daddy had anticipated, that their weapons were needed to garner food. They were happy to buy them back.

Daddy’s mother had made him several flannel night shirts for the trips. In one small settlement along the river. the local inhabitants had obviously had some contact with civilization. Several of them had items of manufactured clothing. They did not, however, have actual money and had apparently acquired them through barter. One woman was wearing only a skirt made from pounded bark. For that skirt Daddy traded one of his nightshirts, which she immediately proudly donned. The bark skirt is still in my cedar chest, but archeologist Myrtle thinks she has found a museum setting for it.

The woman with the small child in her arms
is wearing the pounded bark skirt.

I will write about Daddy’s adventures from time to time. Stay tuned!

Down to Details

Otto and me surrounded by just a few of
those who attended the Smith family reunion at Asilomar
last August. Back row, Son Stan with daughters Josie and Daria.
The great-grandchildren are Summer Bishop, Jon Andersen and Baxter Bishop.

The prompt for Sunday Scribblings this week is “family.” My mind is spinning among the multitude of approaches I could take to this subject. There are human families and animal families and, scientifically speaking, families of animals. I might discuss family size with reference to the population of the earth, which has tripled within my lifetime, or the pressures on the modern family that have resulted in increased rates of divorce..

I guess I’ll take the approach that I suspect most Sunday Scribblers will take. I will talk about my own dear personal family. Except that, even here, I must choose between the parental family in which I grew up,

My father Allen with my brother Allen.
My mother, Pearl, with me.

and Otto’s and my own family. All right, I choose the latter. But who said that even that is a simple choice, given the four generations our family comprises?

Smith Family Passport Photo, 1959
Back Row: Phyllis Otto Joe, Otto
Front Row: Sterling, Stanford, Candace

So I narrow it, and narrow it, and narrow it. (You don’t want to go through all of the steps!). I finally arrive at the subject of gifts for our multitudinous family, for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, births. I need a marked calendar to remember the dates, and then I forget to look at the calendar.

Just yesterday I realized that I had missed great-granddaughter Summer’s tenth birthday, which was April 28. I sent an electronic late-birthday greeting, but the gift is yet to be chosen. And, during April, I also missed the birthdays of Ruthie, Anna and Gwen. Where has my mind been? I thought April was just beginning. Time passes faster all the time!

Maybe I should just resort to the following strategy, adopted when grandson Ian’s January birthday was over-looked. I made a card with the following verse (and the proper enclosure):

ODE TO IAN

I didn’t forget you. Honest, I made it
from DEC into FEB with no JAN. I mislaid it,
or else someone stole it to fence or to pawn.
Today when I looked it had vanished, was gone
just when I thought it was time to begin it,
gone with your birthday buried within it,
gone in an instant, quick as a wink,
while I wrote a verse or you skated the rink.

You know what I think?

I’d better just change the words at the head
of this verse to OWED TO IAN instead.
So I. O. U. something clever and nifty
or useful, or frivolous birthday gifty.
But if I choose it you might have plenty
of it already - so here’s a twenty,
I hope you’ll spend it on fun or a show
or somewhere you have been wanting to go,
event or place that will give you a lift
that I can’t wrap up as a birthday gift.