My Day

This morning, the plan was to go to the Black Creek village wide rummage sales.  I needed more blue jeans to get me through the camping season.  I put on some weight this winter, and only three pair fit me, not enough when I figure on being at a campground for weeks at a time.

Gary decided to go with me, but when he drove through Black Creek and kept going, I knew there was something else going on.  Sure enough, we went to the Van Patten Road marsh to see what birds were traveling through. He knew I wanted to welcome the yellow headed blackbirds and perhaps see one of my favorites, the ruddy duck.

As we drove down the road approaching the marsh, two blue-winged teal took off, the first we'd seen this spring.  Next we caught sight of a redhead duck and I knew there would be good birding.

Sure enough we heard the yellow headed blackbird:  grawk-grawk, not as pretty as the song of the red winged blackbird, but then the yellow headed variety should be cranky since by the time he shows up, the best nesting spots have been nabbed by the red-winged blackbird.

Then we saw them, the pelicans.  There were about two dozen of them, just hanging out on the dikes.  Nearer two us was a solitary swan, but it was too far away to determine if it was a tundra or trumpeter swan.  The tundras flew in and out in March so my money is on the trumpeter.

Other birds in the water were coots, northern shovelers, mallards, pie-billed grebes, hooded mergansers and Canada geese.  On the dikes we saw killdeer, red-winged blackbirds and sandhill cranes.  Flying overhead were tree swallows, and one immature eagle.

With all that, it was 10:30 before we got to Black Creek.  We went to five or six rummage sales and I had only bought one pair of blue jeans when Gary tired of it.  Time to go home, he said, nothing here.

So he drove us home, but I was not ready to quit.  I went back for just one hour at the sales, but in that hour I had what I needed.   Four pairs of blue jeans, two sleeveless shirts, perforated paper to print out business cards on my ink jet printer.  The Black Creek library was having a book sale so I stopped in for what I call a "bathtub book".  I mostly read my books on a Nook these days, but taking an electronic book into a bathtub, or at the beach, is not a good idea, so I selected a mystery by Walter Mosley, one of my favorites.

All my purchases came to $6.25 and now I'm ready to go to Laura Lake for our first camping trip of the season.  

On my way home, I spotted a rose-breasted grosbeak on a telephone wire.

Then I cleared another path through my gardens.

Not much wrong with a day like that. 

Story of Pi

I am reading the Story of Pi by Yann Martel

The hero of the story, an Indian boy, decides he wants to be a Christian, a Hindu and a Muslim, all at once.  He is baptized by the Catholic priest, gets a prayer rug so he can face Mecca and pray four times a day, and visits the ashram for Hindu stories.  When he is found out, he is told by the holy men of each religion he can only have one, but he doesn't understand why that must be so since they don't really contradict each other. I rather like the idea, myself.  Why not take the best of each and celebrate God in every way possible?

"These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.  They should direct their anger at themselves.  For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.  The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.  Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush."

Maybe some of our fundamentalists should consider joining each other's religions.

*****
My latest short story "Love and Eighties" is now at Black Coffee Fiction.  http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com

The next in the series is "Love and the Nineties".  I knew right away what "Love and the Eighties" was going to be but have not a clue about the Nineties.  I guess I will go back to my old standbys, my scrapbooks, and see what was I was doing during that decade.  Surely there are stories there.  

Big Shoulders

I'm working on my next short story, "Love in the Eighties", and my research aided by my memories brought up the big shoulder fashions.  They became popular through television series like Moonlighting, Dallas and Dynasty.  Cybill Shepherd, Linda Gray and Linda Evans went sashaying across the screen with skinny hips and shoulders made bigger with pads.  They looked so top heavy.

The theory was that with feminism movement, women going into the workforce wanted to look more masculine and tough, hence the need for wide shoulders. That was nonsense, because in those days almost all the designers were men, who to my way of thinking wanted to see how ridiculous they could get women to look.

I am not a beautiful woman.  My body has many flaws.  I have a big nose and as I've gotten older, I've had wrinkles in odd place, a double chin, and a belly I'm not proud of.

But I've always been proud of my pretty shoulders, with delicate bones and slender arms.  During the Eighties, all the dresses and jackets came with those awful shoulder pads.  I tried cutting them out but that left wrinkles and puckers in the material that required dressmaking skills.

I understood why  Cybill Shepherd liked the style.  She had chubby shoulders.  But mine were pretty.

That is when I began to shop in re-sale shops and rummage sales.  I found clothes that were classic styles with fine lines that fit me perfectly.  Though I knew how to sew, I was teaching in those days, far too busy to make my own clothes.

I gave up on any idea of being fashionable and haven't been since.  I dress for myself, for comfort and style.

I wonder if women in the 1980s wound up destroying their photos or at least hiding them from their children.

Gary

Gary had his annual physical a little over two months ago.  He had some unpleasant surprises.  His bad cholesterol was high.  His good cholesterol was low.  He had high blood sugar and high blood pressure.  He was overweight.

He told the doctor that before taking statins, he wanted to have a couple of months to see what he could do on his own.

First, he went to the Internet and researched.  He wanted to find out what foods he should be eating, what he could do to get those figures where they belonged.

First he began to read labels.  He worked on his cholesterol first by cutting fat from his diet. We ate fresh fruits and vegetables and cut way back on meat.  We ate more fish.

Then he began to count calories.  

We had been visiting the fitness center sporadically, now we went three times a week.  While I used the recumbent bike, he used the treadmill.

Today, Gary got the results of the blood work he had done on Friday.  After two months of his new regimen, he's lost eight pounds and improved all his numbers dramatically.

He isn't where he wants to be yet, but he is on his way.

Now it's my turn to have my annual physical.  I wonder if I will do as well. 

The Libraries Changed

There was a library in the Seymour High School but it wasn't all that different in content from the old Seymour library.  It was when I got to college that things got interesting.  The library at Oshkosh State College, later UW-Oshkosh, was new and the librarians were trying something new, filing books according the Library of Congress system instead of the Dewey Decimal. I briefly worked there as a student and found the system so confusing.  I understood that an enormous institution like the Library of Congress needed an expandable system but no one could find what they wanted without some assistance from the staff.  

I think the system was soon abandoned.  I've never seen anything but the Dewey Decimal System since then, no matter where I lived from Los Angeles to Chicago, not in public libraries, not in university  libraries.

For three years in the 1980's, I worked at the Muehl Public Library here in Seymour in the building that followed the fire station library and preceded the present one.  The checkout system we used hadn't changed much from the one Miss Tubbs used.  We stamped the books, we stamped a card which went into a drawer and sent the patrons on their way.  It was there that I began my storytelling career by handling the children's story time.

I began to travel around the United States and into other countries, mostly performing in libraries.  I began to notice the changes as computers took over.  First it was the checkout process which was speeded up with scanners. Next the old card catalog was abandoned in favor of the computer.  Gary found this upsetting.  He had loved the old card catalogs and claimed the computers would never take the place of the old card drawers.  He like browsing through them, looking for books, much as he wandered through the book stacks.

We soon found out we could scan the library holdings on a computer screen just as well and when the libraries formed systems, it was even better. In time, we had our own personal computers and could access the library records. We could find books all around Wisconsin, order them and pick them up in a day or two.  Libraries now included books on CDs and videos.

Now I have a Nook electronic reader and seldom go to the library unless there is a special program, ordering library e-books from this personal computer.

Libraries keep evolving. Seymour has come a long way from that old library upstairs from the fire department.  Where will it go next I wonder?

My First Library

The first public library I visited was in a big room over the Seymour fire station in the 1940's and 1950's.   Downstairs were the city's two fire trucks which seemed impressive to me, though by today's standards they weren't much bigger than Gary's van.  These days, those old trucks are the antiques in the Burger Fest parade.

Next to the entrance to the fire station was a simple wooden door that opened to a long, long staircase.  We climbed higher and higher until we reached a pair of double doors, opened to reveal stacks of books.  Magical, precious books.  We turned a corner and there she was, Miss Tubbs.

Miss Tubbs was everyone's idea of what a librarian should be.Her white hair was pulled into a bun on top of her head.  She was an old maid, or did spinster sound better?  No career women back in those days, she was someone no one wanted.  She was pale, with reading glasses she peered over to stare down on the little people at her desk, clutching their books.  She seized them. In her hand she had her pencil with a date stamp clamped to it..  She checked out the books, marking the date due on a slip of paper glued to the inside cover. She removed the card from the paper pocket beside the slip and marked the due date on that, too. That card went into a drawer in the desk and I scurried away. The books were treasure, but you had to get past the dragon first.

But that was only during the summer.  During the school year, my teacher, Mrs. Koepp, brought boxes of books from the library.  She was on the library board and was able to bring a fine selection to supplement the small library we had in the one room school out on French Road.

As I got older, I learned to use the amazing card catalog at Seymour's library. Whenever I looked through it searching for a specific book, I found myself going forward and backward through the drawer to see what other wonders might be found.  

My father later told us that he, too, was afraid of Miss Tubbs.  Even when my mother worked as an assistant librarian, he refused to go into the library.  It was up to my mother to gather up the westerns he liked and take them home.

It turned out that Miss Tubbs wasn't such an old maid after all.  She had a lover, a married man.  When his wife died, he married his Eleanor.  They went off on a honeymoon and she died there.  Years of waiting for a few weeks of bliss, it seemed.

But I still remember her fondly as the old dragon who kept the treasure trove that was my first public library.  

Back to Gardening

After days and days of cold, we had a lovely Sunday.

After church, I set to work in a small vegetable garden. There I have my asparagus bed, with a few spears erupting from the ground each day, as they have since the end of March.  Each summer, I grow zucchini squash there.  There's too much shade in the area to get much zucchini out of it but the vines keep down the weeds and the flowers are rather pretty, too.  I added some sugar snap peas this year.

Though I ordinarily wouldn't plant any seeds until the Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, this has been an unusually mild spring.  The soil is warm to my fingers.  It feels ready for planting.

But I still am too parsimonious to use expensive seeds.  Instead, the sugar snap peas were left over from 2011 and the zucchini seeds were on sale for ten cents a package at a bargain shop.   If they fail, I haven't lost much.

As it happens, I planted peas and onions in my "big" vegetable garden over a week ago and they are now coming up.  So are the sweet peas so Gary and I put up trellises for them.

Tomorrow, I plant okra.  Okra is seldom grown in Wisconsin because it requires too long a growing season, but this year, I may have an extra month of growing time.  Gary, coming from Illinois, loves his okra, so he would be delighted to grow some here.

I have around forty garden beds.  I now have about twenty cleared and ready for more planting.  I'll keep at it through the end of May, then let summer take over the gardens.