Saturday, July 16, 2011
SmokeSound: Where We Ought to Go; What we Ought to Become
SmokeSound: Where We Ought to Go; What we Ought to Become: "Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem. That is a remarkable thing to say. Government is the way we do things together. To despise government is to reject our common life. "
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Mall of America
I have an old book on my shelves, soon 20 years old.
The Acknowledgment at the beginning starts: "As I write these words in early Spring of 1992 in Washington, D.C., constructions crews in Bloomington, Minnesota, are racing to finish the world's largest shopping mall--a monumental agglomeration of retail outlets built around a three-hectare indoor amusement park. Its designers call it 'The Mall of America,' and if their projections materialize it will attract more visitors each year than Mecca or the Vatican."
Source: destination360.com
I moved to the Cities in July, 2002. An old friend from Tucson wrote on her Christmas card that year, "When I come see you, can we go to the Mall of America?"
"Hmmm," I thought. "I live about 3 miles from the Mall, and haven't been there yet." I finally went when my family came up from Iowa to do their Christmas shopping. I lasted for half a day, and had to flee. I drove back out to pick them up at the end of the day.
As author Alan Durning says in his book, HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? that mall has become "a sort of symbol for my native land." When my son came into town with his girlfriend and went to The Mall, they entered it at the same time as an entire busload of visitors from ICELAND who had flown in for 3 days, specifically for shopping. They were staying at a hotel nearby, and spent all their waking hours in the USA at The Mall of America.
Would I ever fly to Reykjavik, or Munich, or Tokyo, to spend all my time in a MALL?
I grew up on a small farm in Iowa. As a child, we went to town once a week, on Saturday night, when the stores were open in Lake Mills. "The stores" consisted of a Five-and-Dime store (where I literally had a dime to spend), a ladies' shop (called My Ladies), 2 grocery stores, a Federated store with household goods, a meat locker (Gunderson's Meat Market), a feed store, a hardware store, a men's clothing store (bought by my uncle when I was in high school), a few gas stations and cafes and Duffy's Drive In. If you wanted something that cost more than 10 cents, you saved your dimes until you had enough. No credit. No advances.
It was enough.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
I almost grieve at the insatiable appetites of our society today. We are fighting two wars, and have not had to sacrifice a single thing (except those families who've made the ultimate sacrifices). We've not been asked to do with less gas, or less food, or to give up sugar, or do without new rubber tires. We go on as though nothing is different because politicians don't want to be voted out of office for acknowledging the truths of the cost of war. We'd rather buy more STUFF than to buy health insurance; we refuse to pay more taxes so that all can have proper healthcare, as is done in the Scandinavian countries, and Canada, and France, and in most other industrialized societies. We scorn a two-cent gasoline tax but ignore the overnight jump in the price of gas that is ten times that much, while oil companies make the largest profits in history
I'd rather have a giant park where the Mall of America now sits. Not a big baseball park that costs $50 to buy a ticket. Not a football stadium that caters to the wealthy, and where a fancy hot dog can cost $11. I want a big central park with a skating rink and some baseball fields for kids and grown-up-kids, and a botanical garden, and trails for hiking and biking, and picnic tables, and a place to walk dogs, and a place for small concerts.
It could even have some shopping! An arts and crafts center for local artists and farmers of all kinds to sell their goods. Community!
It would be enough.
The Acknowledgment at the beginning starts: "As I write these words in early Spring of 1992 in Washington, D.C., constructions crews in Bloomington, Minnesota, are racing to finish the world's largest shopping mall--a monumental agglomeration of retail outlets built around a three-hectare indoor amusement park. Its designers call it 'The Mall of America,' and if their projections materialize it will attract more visitors each year than Mecca or the Vatican."
I moved to the Cities in July, 2002. An old friend from Tucson wrote on her Christmas card that year, "When I come see you, can we go to the Mall of America?"
"Hmmm," I thought. "I live about 3 miles from the Mall, and haven't been there yet." I finally went when my family came up from Iowa to do their Christmas shopping. I lasted for half a day, and had to flee. I drove back out to pick them up at the end of the day.
As author Alan Durning says in his book, HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? that mall has become "a sort of symbol for my native land." When my son came into town with his girlfriend and went to The Mall, they entered it at the same time as an entire busload of visitors from ICELAND who had flown in for 3 days, specifically for shopping. They were staying at a hotel nearby, and spent all their waking hours in the USA at The Mall of America.
Would I ever fly to Reykjavik, or Munich, or Tokyo, to spend all my time in a MALL?
I grew up on a small farm in Iowa. As a child, we went to town once a week, on Saturday night, when the stores were open in Lake Mills. "The stores" consisted of a Five-and-Dime store (where I literally had a dime to spend), a ladies' shop (called My Ladies), 2 grocery stores, a Federated store with household goods, a meat locker (Gunderson's Meat Market), a feed store, a hardware store, a men's clothing store (bought by my uncle when I was in high school), a few gas stations and cafes and Duffy's Drive In. If you wanted something that cost more than 10 cents, you saved your dimes until you had enough. No credit. No advances.
It was enough.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
I almost grieve at the insatiable appetites of our society today. We are fighting two wars, and have not had to sacrifice a single thing (except those families who've made the ultimate sacrifices). We've not been asked to do with less gas, or less food, or to give up sugar, or do without new rubber tires. We go on as though nothing is different because politicians don't want to be voted out of office for acknowledging the truths of the cost of war. We'd rather buy more STUFF than to buy health insurance; we refuse to pay more taxes so that all can have proper healthcare, as is done in the Scandinavian countries, and Canada, and France, and in most other industrialized societies. We scorn a two-cent gasoline tax but ignore the overnight jump in the price of gas that is ten times that much, while oil companies make the largest profits in history
I'd rather have a giant park where the Mall of America now sits. Not a big baseball park that costs $50 to buy a ticket. Not a football stadium that caters to the wealthy, and where a fancy hot dog can cost $11. I want a big central park with a skating rink and some baseball fields for kids and grown-up-kids, and a botanical garden, and trails for hiking and biking, and picnic tables, and a place to walk dogs, and a place for small concerts.
It could even have some shopping! An arts and crafts center for local artists and farmers of all kinds to sell their goods. Community!
It would be enough.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Crazy Quilts
This blog is called MANYQUILTS, from the days when I had time to do a lot more quilting than I do now.
I was living hundreds and hundreds of miles from my kids and my friends, and turned loneliness into creative energy, if not creative product!
Above is an Amish quilt, "plain and simple" as it says in the book by the same name, written by Sue Bender. Below you will find a "crazy quilt" made of favorite leftovers from old family clothing and other special projects. Bender's lovely book talks about How It Began: "Twenty years ago I walked into Latham's Men's Store in Sag Harbor, New York, and saw old quilts like that. Odd color combinations. Deep saturated solid colors: purple, mauve, green brown, magenta, electric blue, red. Simple geometric forms: squares, diamonds, rectangles... I stared at the quilts. They seemd so silent: a 'silence like thunder.' ... The relationship of the individual parts to the whole, the proportion, the way the inner and outer borders reacted with each other was a balancing act between tension and harmony. ... How could pared-down and daring go together? How could a quilt be calm and intense at the same time? ... How opposite my life was from an Amish quilt. My life was a CRAZY QUILT, a pattern I hated. Hundreds of scattered, unrelated, stimulating fragments, each going off in its own direction, creating a lot of frantic energy. There was no overall structure to hold the pieces together. The Crazy Quilt was a perfect metaphor for my life. A tug-of-war was raging inside me." (Chapter 1, PLAIN AND SIMPLE, a Woman's Journey to the Amish, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.)
I, too, love Amish quilts. I stop in Harmony, MN, every chance I get, just to look and feel and wish. Once when Conrad went to an Amish farm about lumber, I was invited inside the house to see a world of brown and gray, except for the glorious quilts that were hanging on every wall in various stages of completion. It was stunning. No electricity, no gas stoves, no vacuum cleaners, no dish washers, no indoor toilets. A world of hard work and a world of stunningly beautiful quilts. A world of contrasts. "Plain and Beautiful."
I often wonder what my life would be like if I had grown up in that Amish community. Hard, I think. Backbreaking work. Different problems to deal with. I don't think that women make their own decisions in that world. I don't think that life would be very simple.
My mother once made me a crazy quilt, lovingly stitched from clothing I recognized from my childhood. Easter dresses. Spring coats. The first gathered skirt I ever made as a 4H project. Old aprons she used to wear in the kitchen. Indeed, it was "hundreds of scattered, unrelated, stimulating fragments, each going off in its own direction." But those "unrelated" fragments were related! Each one brought back a warm and wonderful memory of a time gone by that shaped who I am today.
My life is a crazy quilt. I used to wish it were Plain and Simple. But it isn't. I'm the age that Paul McCartney sang about: "Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?" Every day brings its new challenges and problems. Students come to talk about their classes, their hopes, their worries. My colleagues wonder what changes await. My children call to get reassurance that whatever happens, "somehow it will turn out all right" even if it's not what they'd planned. Retirement funds dwindle with the economy. We all wonder if we'll have health care when we're old! So, I've grown used to this crazy life. It just isn't plain and simple. It's a Crazy Quilt.
I think I'll start making one this weekend!
Monday, March 1, 2010
Eleanor Roosevelt: YOU LEARN BY LIVING
"Learning and living. But they really are the same thing, aren't they? There is no experience from which you can't learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience ...I don't really like the concept of heroes because they usually disappoint. But asked whom I most admire, my answer always includes Eleanor Roosevelt. I've read many of her books; a very appropriate quote for today is from the book YOU LEARN BY LIVING.
I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself.
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words, it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to thing through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long fun, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility."
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Renoir - Best thing I read today
I will begin to post short pieces of writing from books or newspapers--things I wish I'd said myself! Sometimes I'll comment on them--other times I'll just let them soak in.
Right now I'm reading LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY by Susan Vreeland.
In it, Renoir says, "To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them."
A great review of Vreeland's book can be found at http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-luncheon-of-the-boating/ where it is explained what Renoir is thinking about before this painting is done: he sees that “repeating safe easy methods portrait after portrait, as he’d been doing lately, was suffocating him.”
At the following links, you can discover the names of the people in the painting. They come alive in the book I'm reading. What fun!
http://galleries.fototagger.com/link.php?action=detailimage&id=361&sort=0
http://www.phillipscollection.org/docs/education/lbp-kit_2.pdf
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)