Category Archives: Virtues and Views

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The forum gathers

The forum gathers.

Red Paw puts her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. “Told you so. Been telling you for 11 years.”

The small child/angel is sitting in a chair that morphs from regular boardroom chair to youth chair as she morphs back and forth.

“Nice job with the chair.” says Red Paw.

The two split and now there is a Small Child and an angel, sitting in two chairs.

Red Paw morphs too, into a bright red angel with a black halo and black bat wings.

The White angel nods and a feather drops. The feathers are bright white. Her halo is made of gold glittery pipe cleaners and attached at the shoulders.

Red Paw’s halo floats and seems to pull at the room.

The Quiet Woman sits in the fourth chair, with a cup of tea. “Anyone else?” she asks.

The others shake their heads.

“We are discussing the diaspora. Is it time to let them go?”

“Has been for 11 years.” says Red Paw nastily.

The small child nods.

The White angel says, “They want to believe what they want to believe. Let them go.”

“T, B, S, C, S, D, A, F, N, C, T, L, K, R and then next generation as well?”

All three nod.

The small child says, “They can contact us at any time.”

“They won’t.” says Red Paw.

“People can change,” says the White angel.

“And do they always?” says Red Paw.

“No.” says the White angel.

“I agree,” says the Quiet Woman. “We are done.” She brings a gavel down on the table, which rings like a singing bowl. The other three blur and melt in to her.

“We are done.”

_____________________

The photograph was taken 2016 or earlier when Halloween was on a Sunday. I dressed up and so did the minister.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: forum.

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Living together

Lichen are a lifeform formed from algae and fungi, which is amazing. Apparently they join forces when they can’t survive on their own and form a different creature. And it’s not just one kind of algae or one kind of fungi, but lots of them! I am reading Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s really quite amazing. I love science, it opens up the world!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lichen.

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Arty scores some ludes

Trigger warning: non graphic mentions of date rape, child abuse. A dark story for the Halloween season.

_______________________________

Mr. Smith is telling me about his daughter’s addiction to meth when the commotion starts.

He doesn’t seem to notice. I ignore sirens because the fire house is 6 blocks up the street, but I hear hooves. And people in the waiting room. Loud.

And Mr. Smith…. appears to be frozen mid-sentence. Uh-oh.

I am not frozen. I open the exam room door.

Artemis is there. Breastplate, feather headdress, inlaid turkish recurve bow, and she is not wearing a lady like toga. She is wearing armour. She is grinning at me.

There are lots of people milling around the exam room. Horses outside. I suspect 200. Or more.

“Quaaludes.” says Artemis.

“Ok.” I say. “Um.” I am thinking about the DEA. I get my paper prescription pad. Controlled substance, of course.

“We’re going to do a little pillaging.” says Artemis. “Kind of like date rape. Only in reverse.”

“Happy to help.” I say. “Uh, Bill?”

Artemis grins. “Well, he’s not the only one. You’d… well, you probably wouldn’t be surprised, would you.”

“No,” I say grimly. There are men in the waiting room too. That’s a bit of a surprise. I know two of them. Attended their funerals. Aids.

“I need enough for all 200 to…. well, discourage date rape and Cosbying.”

“So 600? Or 1000?” The DEA will throw me in jail. I write the prescription. Artemis touches it and it blooms in her hand, to 200 prescriptions.

“Don’t worry. The pharmacy is in Hades. The earthly DEA won’t have a problem.”

My receptionist is frozen too. I nod towards Artemis’s band. “I thought it was virgins?”

“We were all virgins once,” says Artemis, fierce. I can’t argue with that. She smiles again. “Thank you. We are going to have some fun. Sweet sweet revenge.”

I don’t really want details. My imagination is way too active. “Blessings.” I say.

“You too.” She turns, holding up the prescriptions. “Mount up!” Two women are riding velociraptors. Some of the horses have wings and other have horns. Three glow red and breathe fire. Some people are riding stags. They all have bows.

“You do need a bow.” says Artemis, looking back at me. “You’re a good shot.”

“Ok,” I say. I watch them leave in the air. The air starts looking a little thick and I go back in the room with Mr. Smith. I return to my position as best I can remember and then…

Mr. Smith is talking again.

__________________________

First posted elsewhere 2015.

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Doll culture

When I was married, my husband described my parents as “Time-Warp Beatniks”. That is a good description. We had no television until I was nine and my sister was six, because my parents disapproved of television. This lack made me even less social at school, even though I was never ever good a small talk. I still don’t understand the small talk code.

My mother disliked Barbie, so she conspired with her brothers. We had five girls and two boys in my maternal cousin generation. My mother got the four younger girls all 8 inch china dolls, instead of Barbie. The next summer, the younger boy got one too, since the girls were all sewing and building furniture and generally going to town with them.

I was also given the doll in the picture. She was my grandmother’s china doll, Katherine White Burling. I do not know who sewed the dress that she has on, possibly my great grandmother. The stitches are by hand and tiny. We understood that the dolls’s world was in the late 1800s and since this doll came with a wardrobe, we sewed doll nine patch quilts and my grandmother helped make demure pantaloons for our dolls.

My sister and I did manage to score Barbies eventually, though our china doll world was much more full. The china dolls went with us to Ontario, to Blind River, Canada, where my maternal family has shacks on a lake. We were all allowed to use scrap wood to build tables and chairs and benches and beds, as long as we PUT THE TOOLS AWAY.

Meanwhile, my paternal grandmother, Evelyn Bayers Ottaway, was a brilliant knitter. She taught me to knit at age 8, but it didn’t really take. I learned again in Denmark and still knit. Grandma Ottaway knit elaborate Barbie clothes on microscopic needles. I still have a few of them. They were in the late 1960s and early 70s and really beautiful. One was a tiny knit stole, with a mohair, lined with brown satin. My china dolls stole it from my Barbies. Or perhaps there was an exchange, I don’t know.

The hand sewing came in handy. I have had surgeons ask me where I learned to stitch. “Doll clothes,” I say. They tend to look confused at that.

At one point I had a patient here who was indigenous to the area and age 104. She told me, “When I was in my twenties, even if I dressed like the Caucasian women, they would get up and move to a different pew if I sat by them in church.” I apologized. She told me not to worry, things are changing. So in the photograph, the woman behind my grandmother’s doll is an indigenous weaver. There is a tiny baby on a cradle board. They are having tea together. That is wishful thinking on my part, but we are allowed to wish for peace and work for harmony. Two cultures, still trying to come together with respect.

Blessings and peace you.

__________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: culture.

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Fibbing Friday Silly Adages

  1. Cool as a caterpiggle.
  2. Is that a   heffalump in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
  3. Green as Groot.
  4. Wet your Walrus (and carpenter).
  5. Too many woozles spoil heffalump hunting.
  6. You can put lipstick on a woozle, but it will still be a weasel like worry.
  7. O what a tangled web we weave, when first we imitate Charlotte.
  8. Don’t throw the Winnie-ther-Pooh out with the woozles.
  9. Many hands make light of silly adages.
  10. It must be Groot, because Yoda don’t shake like that!

I have been not thinking about this for a couple of days, stuck on the first one. Oh, silly and nonsense go together, don’t they? Let’s play with some made up words! Many thanks to Winnie-ther-Pooh, Groot, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Pogo, Yoda, Charlotte’s Web, and all the many woozles, caterpiggles and heffalumps out there!

For Fibbing Friday, just under the wire!

What does the photograph have to do with this? Nothin. Heh-heh.

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city versus country

A friend comments that the country used to outnumber the city folk but now it’s the other way around, and that the split in our country is about values.

Hmmm. I am thinking about that. I am a city girl AND I am a country girl, both. We moved every 1-5 years and I was in cities and in the country. However, my family also had two anchor points. My mother’s family has shacks on a lake in Ontario, summer shacks. My father’s parents had a house on the beach in North Carolina on the outer banks. Wind and water in both places and we never watched tv in either place, because we were outside until we fell exhausted into a tent or into bed.

I don’t agree with my friend. I think we ALL share some values: that no one should go in a school and shoot kids, or a church and shoot people, or a store and shoot people. Right? We all agree on that if we are sane. That is a starting point. I read the mediation books when my (now ex-) husband was getting certified. The mediators start by trying to find the common ground.

I am pretty much equally comfortable in my small town, the woods, on the water and in cities. My friend warned me about Seattle being dangerous now. Well, it’s a matter of scale. I went to high school in Alexandria, Virginia and I lived at 3rd and Massachusetts in Washington, DC back in the 1980s. I was pretty careful just walking to the metro in that part of Washington at that time. I pay attention in Seattle, but in these cities I know what I am paying attention to. I ended up alone on a metro car once at night. A man got on at the next stop, looked around the car, grinned and came and sat next to me. I thought, oh, Sh-t, this is not good. I ignored him and continued staring at my book.

“Hi, what’s your name?” he says.

“I am reading.” I say coolly.

“Come on, honey,” he says.

I shut the book, stand up, and he lets me pass. I stand by the metro door until the next stop, get off that car and get on another car with more people. The car did have emergency alarms, so I could have hit one, but he let me by so I didn’t. I was kicking myself for being alone on the car, but honestly: what a stupid nasty male chauvinist threatening jerk. I shouldn’t have to worry about this crap. But after that, I didn’t get lost in a book on the metro because I had to pay attention to avoid being alone on a car. Annoying as can be.

My friend says he gets lost in cities. I don’t. I start building a map in my head when I arrive in a new city. It is completely automatic. If I am driving, it’s based on the highway. If it’s by airplane, it includes the airport, the hotel, the conference center. I have been to San Antonio once, but I stayed at a hotel along the River Walk and the conference center was towards the center and south. I could draw part of the city, still. I love maps!

I can’t say that I would be comfortable if dropped in a city in another country, necessarily. I was pretty happy on my trip in March, which was abroad. There are levels of familiar and what are the languages in common? Are there any?

What are these values that people might be split on? I read that people are polarized and can’t get along, but I don’t agree. I did Family Medicine in this town of 9000 for 21 years, and I had people from town, from the county and eventually from three other counties. I had nine people who had to take a ferry to see me. Talk about inconvenient for them. My people are all races, all genders, age zero to 104, all different stripes of politics. I don’t care what their politics are: I am there to see if I can maintain or improve their health. This could mean anything from encouraging exercise, doing a pap smear, diagnosing diabetes to discussing hospice and end of life issues or telling someone that I do not think they are safe to drive. This is not about “pleasing” people: recognizing opioid overuse in a person does not endear me to them. But it is about doing the best I can for people and with people. And isn’t that a value we all share too?

Now we have common ground, two areas to stand. Grow that space. Peace me, work for justice and kindness and peace to you.

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Playlist: Bands I have danced to

I have done two grief playlists. I will do more, but it got me thinking about other playlists. And we need distraction from grief too.

I am a swing dancer and jitterbug dancer. I lived in the Washington, DC area from 1985 to 1989 and then left for medical school. I spent a year being depressed about a breakup. The only time the depression lifted was when I went dancing. I started with contra dancing and then took a swing dance class. In the 1980s, we would have 400-600 people show up at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo Park in Cabin John, MD, for a live band and a lesson, in a no alcohol venue. We would dance our socks off for three hours. We barely clapped for the bands, but they didn’t seem to care, because they liked watching us throw each other up in the air!

Marcia Ball

Daryl Davis

(You could watch his ted talk, too.)

Maria Muldaur

https://www.marinij.com/2021/05/20/maria-muldaurs-joyful-album-for-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-pandemic/

Uppity Blues Women

Little Red and the Renagades

Doc Scantlin and his Imperial Palms Orchestra – at the Kennedy Warren Ballroom in Washington, DC.

I took the photograph of the poster this morning. It is from the 1980s.

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playing telephone

If they whisper from one end to the other, does it get garbled before it reaches the other end?

Isn’t gossip a sin?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: chaos.

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People at the Farmer’s Market

These were taken at the Farmer’s Market in Port Townsend in 2014.

People enjoying the sun and their treats.
I got to dance with this young woman!

I hope the Farmer’s Market is back this summer. I will still be masked in crowds, but I hope I get to dance!

A wonderful young dancer enjoying the band!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: people.