How many times?

Okay, for today’s COVID Friday music, I have to go back to the master, Bob Dylan. It’s time we revisit “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and it seems appropriate to have the version sung by Stevie Wonder at Dylan’s 50^th Anniversary concert.

Crank up the volume.

Unexpected gift

A couple of Sundays ago, a friend left a surprise gift at my front door. There was a beautiful silver bracelet, as well as a bunch of flowers. I put them out on my dining table straight away:

And more than a week later they’re still brightening my dinners and my life in general:

Which, I assure you, I need, given what’s going on in the world. What a grace they are.

Who was that masked rider?

The past few days of fuckery from the White House have managed to drive the covid19 pandemic from the headlines. Or at least they’ve pushed the pandemic headlines further down the scroll.

However, I was reminded on one of my walks yesterday what the new “normal” is: instead of rosaries, fuzzy dice or silk-flower leis, people are hanging their face masks on their rearview mirrors:

School daze

When I graduated from high school, the ceremony was held in the Rose Bowl.

Yes, that Rose Bowl.

We shared the field with two other Pasadena high schools and the community college, but still, it was kind of a big deal. Not that anyone’s family could pick anyone out of the see of caps and gowns, but there was a ceremony, "Pomp and Circumstance" and receiving of diplomas and the whole megillah.

I thought about that when I came across this sign planted in front of one of the neighborhood houses:

I also thought of the millions of high school and college seniors who can’t even have the grands over for dinner or let off steam with their peers now that this stage of their lives has passed. They’ve got to settle for a sign in the front yard. Such strange times.

Gratitude Monday: Solidarity

I confess that I’m at a bit of a loss for Gratitude Monday today. The world spent the weekend watching American cities roil with rage against systemic racism, seeing cops arresting and shooting (rubber bullets) at credentialed journalists and firing tear grenades at peaceful protesters, witnessing white right-wing extremist agents provocateurs breaking commercial windows and urging protesters to loot, and listening to Cadet Bonespurs bluster at NASA about what he will or will not tolerate.

More than Motor City’s burning, folks; shit’s real for sure.

It’s like I’m reliving 1968, only via the internet instead of B&W TV. We’re 52 years on from Martin and Bobby, and 28 from Rodney King and we haven’t moved discernibly forward. We've got police riots all over the country.

Well, there was a moment, in Minneapolis, where Mennonites showed up in solidarity with the protestors, and I was reminded of the Catholic priests at the forefront of civil rights marches, and of the Quakers who held silent vigil outside the main Post Office in Pasadena every Wednesday for years to protest the Vietnam War.

I was also reminded of a quote by the late-Nineteenth Century Irish professor G.F. Fitzgerald—it was about Britain’s Irish “problem”, but swap out White America for England, and Black America for the Irish, and it seems pretty damned appropriate for these days.

“England, as we all know, never understands Ireland; the English are a dull people compared to the Irish, and require a tremendous row before than can be moved to do anything. Then, after we have blown up Clerkenwell Prison, or something of that sort, England rubs her hands and says, ‘the Irish want something,’ and flings us a new pair of shoes. The shoes, as a rule, don’t happen to fit us, and when we still grumble she gets angry and sais, ‘They are a good pair of shoes, and it is your own fault if they don’t fit; you are a most ungrateful, provoking creature, never satisfied,’ and turns back to her own business till we make another row.”

Well, chew on that, if you like. Today I’m grateful for the Mennonites showing up in peace and support. We need tens off thousands more of White America to show up and march with our brothers and sisters of color, or this is never going to change.

Not so sweet

For some reason I’ve been singing a lot of early James Taylor around the house. Mostly “Sweet Baby James” and “You Can Close Your Eyes”, but then it seems to me that “Fire and Rain” might be applicable to our times. So here it is, just James and his guitar, from 1970.

Child's play

On my get-the-hell-out-of-the-house walk yesterday, I was suddenly fascinated by the architecture of the play center jobber in the local tot lot. So here are some pix of it.

The overall structure:

Exterior of a little hidey-hole under one of the slides:

Interior of same:

Now, the piled-up cannon balls and barrel-o-gunpowder just made me wonder if parents ever actually looked at it.

Also, I note that the portholes are paned with strong plastic. I guess they didn’t want the local fire department called out every other weekend from kids getting their heads stuck in the holes. I also wonder if that was as-designed originally or if, somewhere in play equipment antiquity, the manufacturer got sued?

But now we get to the slides, which I found fascinating. There wasn’t a one that really looked the slides of my childhood. I mean—here’s this double-wide:

And this curvy one:

This other double one I found…uh, suggestive:

But the absolute take-the-biscuit corker was this one:

Seriously?

Hoods in the 'hood

I’ve noticed that people in the ‘hood have pretty well just parked their cars in the lot and abandoned them. Several have done so in violation of the maximum two cars per house, either with or without a parking permit hanging from the rear-view mirror.

But yesterday it occurred to me that one of the consequences of this (aside from possible battery death) is the undisturbed accumulation of dust. So on one of my excursions yesterday I shot a few examples:

It made me appreciate all the more the color choice of one of my neighbors:

That is basically pine-pollen green, and this stuff just disappears on it.

Forest and trees

It’s been a while since, out and about, I was able to take pix of vanity plates on cars. I have quite the cache of them, never fear—going all the way back to the Valley They Call Silicon—so I’ll never run out.

However, this weekend I walked over to Whole Foods and noticed this one:

As I was trying to work out whether it was something to do with Mobil oil (no “e”), or some kind of “to infinity and beyond” thing about mobility, I glanced at the actual vehicle:

Oh. Nevermind, then.

I do wonder about what mobile orthodontics might be, though. Not enough to inquire, having had braces all through junior and senior high school. I guess things have progressed since then.

Gratitude Monday: Honored dead

It’s Memorial Day, the national day dedicated to the remembrance of those who gave their lives in service to the country. For more than 150 years, the “service” has been specific to the military, but this year it seems much broader than that.

I don’t recall such an extension on Memorial Day of 2002—perhaps because the 3000 or so lost during the 9/11 attacks had been dead for eight months, and we were ramping up another hot war. This time, we’ve recorded 100,000 deaths in the last three months, and the meter’s still running.

(The numbers of both cases and mortalities are almost certainly underreported, for many reasons, both administrative and political.)

For years, the Washington Post printed the names and photos of servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whenever they had enough deaths to fill up the double-page center of the front section, they’d publish them. I don’t suppose many in the Shrub administration paid much attention, but it was important for people to see the names and faces of the fallen.

Yesterday the New York Times filled its entire front page with the names of as many covid19 victims as they could; one thousand. Names, ages, location. For some of the dead, they also include brief insights into their lives—sang in her choir, saved Jewish families from the Nazis, liked his bacon and hash browns crispy.

Inside the edition, Dan Barry writes, “Imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has now been wiped from the American map.”

That city is going to increase in population before we’re done this year; before we’re even done with the summer. And almost all of the deaths will have been needless, the direct result of our national government abdicating its duty to the citizens who elected them.

So on this Memorial Day, as the toll mounts, I am grateful for the journalists and editors who do their damned job, reminding us that the statistics—whatever kind of “per capita” matters to you—were lives cut short. They were mothers, grandfathers, sisters, sons; gifts to their families, friends and communities. They are lost to us now, and we need to remember that.