First Monday with Characters

March 25, 1942 - March 31, 2014

Edited by Morris Dean

Jack Cover, in memoriam
Jack died one week ago today, at home, in Raleigh. His obituary in the Raleigh News & Observer mentions some activist work of which he was rightly proud and which he liked to recount:

Jack was honored to be a delegate to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, where he became acutely aware of the church's injustice to LGBTQ members. He served two terms on the Board of More Light Presbyterians. He campaigned vigorously for More Light in the last fifteen years of his life, seeking equal treatment for LGBTQ members within the Presbyterian Church. Jack learned to knit just so he could make rainbow scarves [he's wearing one in the photo] for awareness of More Light issues. He was a strong supporter of peace and justice causes, and was disappointed that he was too weak to risk arrest as part of the NAACP-organized Moral Monday protests during the summer of 2013.

    One of the last things my wife and I heard Jack say, when we visited him less than two days before he died, was his reply to my wife's asking him how he was doing. Jack said, "I think I'm going to make it." Humor never failed him, right up to the end.

Tom Lowe, in artful resistance

March went out with a bang – a very rare for the Bay Area thunderstorm, with big enough shock waves to set off car alarms throughout Berkeley. This month, I’ve mainly rested on my laurels – which are looking rather crumpled – photographing other friends' creative work.
    Another picture of Gracilia’s tulips [right], lest we forget that Spring has sprung.
    A nice surprise in having an old image used as Betsy Edwards’s Facebook photo, shot on National Hunger Day in 2006, Oakland chic if you will.

    March inaugurated an “Artist of the Month” series in my building, with the work of Mitsuko Stein.

These are not painted, but assembled of cut/torn paper, I’m so in awe....

    This month features the watercolors of Anita Missin, including this wedding costume recalled from her years in Egypt.

    They are twisting my arm to be the Artist for May, but so far I’m resisting. We’ll see about that....

Susan C. Price, in much thought

Art continues. Sometimes it is the shopping for new art supplies that is the most fun. Actually getting my body and hand and mind and eyes in front of the easel is ...more problematic. If i had an atelier...full of worker bees, I could just say, "I'm envisioning something with burgundy and neon orange, based on this photograph of my shadow...start it and i will come in and do some stuff to finish it"...I could be verry productive that way.
    I have added some of my painting and photographic designs to a Spoonflower.com "virtual store." They take anyones designs and reproduce them on the desired type of fabric or wallpaper or wrapping paper. The wrapping paper is $15 a roll, seems a tad on the high side to me. I ordered a "sampler" of my designs on some jersey and silk fabric. The quality, and colors are great.
    Now....what shall I do with this? I don't have a sewing machine (yup, they can be rented by the hour not too far away) and i dont usually wear prints. Just solids. Sooo what am i thinking? I dont know...just another way to entertain my brain and maybe someone will be interested.
    If you ARE an entrepreneurial type and reading this, you are likely screaming, "Put some work, energy, and MARKETING into this!!" But i realized that's what it would take and i also realized...those are not things i want to do. I would like folks to like my stuff and be willing to buy it...but i dont need the income (thank heaven)...and so.....

    .....ooh too much thinking...i think i'll go sit down and read about traveling to italy

The Rogers, in hope of better times

The month of March has gone and not soon enough for me [Ed]. I know that there are others happy to see this month pass into history also.
    At the beginning on the month my wife Janie' s right hand began to shake. It shook enough that we decided to see a doctor about it. The doctor told us she has Parkinson’s. We spent that first week worrying and looking up everything we could find about it on the Internet. We still know very little, because no one else seems to know all that much. It's not going to go away so we will deal with it.
    I went to the store and upon my return two men and Janie were running around the yard like chickens with their heads cut off. A small trail of smoke was coming from the wiring leading into the house. The two men who saw the smoke and alerted my wife, one a neighbor and the other a passer-by, had sprayed yellow crap all over our kitchen. The fire was in the insulation and their spray had done nothing to stop it. I cut the main and hit the flames with the hose. All ended well, or at least the house didn't burn down.

    After news from the doctor and the fire we decided we needed a place that we could go for a couple days a month and get away from everything. At 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning we drove to Pundarenas, a small beach town about 40 minutes from our house. We booked a nice hotel for the following Wednesday and Thursday nights for $50.00 a night, then drove home.
    We arrived home to find we had been robbed. We had been gone for only three hours. They stole three computers and my flash drive with all my backups. They stole some of my wife's jewelery and knocked a big hole in the back wall. We have replaced one computer, which I am using to write this.
    We did not make it to our getaway that week. However, not to let the thieves control our life, we went the next week. Had a friend keep an eye on the house and had a wonderful time.

    Some of you may remember the article I wrote titled, “The gringo who stole the cat.” Well, our cat is gone. She disappeared right after we left to go to Puntarenas. We believe something in the jungle got her.
    There were a few other things that happened back in the States that will cost me money, but that is normal. The other crap that happened in March is more than happens over a year to most people.
    Anyway, I welcome April with open arms and hope my report next month will be full of happy events.
                        Waiting for Pura Vida, Ed & Janie

Paul Clark, aka motomynd, in short supply

With all we've had going on [after a severe ice storm in March], this is my first check of email in a week or maybe more, so I thought I would drop a quick note before heading to Virginia.
    Thanks to a clean-up crew of eight spending a day with three trucks and a Bobcat loader, we can now get in and out of our house without clambering through downed trees. Not nearly as much fun now but more convenient. All interior repairs now done, exterior damage patched, new roof to be done in a couple of weeks. I probably have another 60 wheelbarrow loads of small limbs and tree debris to roll into the woods before the yard is safe and navigable again.
    Little guy has settled into 9-10 hours sleep out of every 24 hours, but he gets half of it during the day and therefore only half at night. And when he is awake he wants interaction. He will chat and play for two hours at a time. He isn't yet three months so I of course have no clue what he is jabbering about, but I play along because I surely don't want to discourage him. Not convenient, but fun. I may yet learn babyspeak.
    In our quest for a "family vehicle" that would haul all five of us, we looked at SUVs and a Subaru Forester, but neither my wife nor I can stand to drive anything with an automatic transmission, and it is almost impossible to get a decent gearbox in a modern front-wheel drive vehicle with a transaxle. So...we found a 1988 Volvo wagon that – miracles upon miracles – is rust free, and I have been working on it: New shocks & struts, motor mounts, transmission mount, belts, hoses, etc, etc. Irony is it has a safety rating higher than most of the new junk and gets better gas mileage. And as you know it is still a retro cool car in Cali. I'm pondering "woody" side panels...
    In other words, I've been going 20 hours/day and have barely had time to look at the computer except to research car parts and run my little eBay business. Should be back to the world of the "normal" living in a week or so.

Ralph Earle, in summer verse

Lines composed a few feet above the lake in Duke Gardens

Fourth of July, exotic ducks beg us
for food, shaking their feathers,
paddling to the ledge where we lie.
She says the lines between my eyebrows
have vanished, those canyons, those ravines,
those legal tangles, ropes dropped to
my children, nets to snare old friends,
feelers like the antennae of a moth.>

Desire and wanderlust faded, I have become
the explorer I once was, bound across the water
toward the prairie whose tall grass
curls like smoke from a distant camp.

The Neumanns, in repair

Pineapple Girl has spent the entire month of March in the yard having much needed work done. As is expected with any project on a boat, the scope of work expanded rapidly. Once all the old layers of bottom paint were removed, blisters were found. This is where water has penetrated the outer layer of gel coat into the laminate layers. The blisters were all fixed, then a new barrier coat and new bottom paint were applied.
    We also had a new port shaft fabricated and installed, as the coupling joint to the (persumably) original had failed and had already been repaired to the point there was no way to fix it again short of a new shaft. Unfortunately the haul-out sling damaged the external exhaust tubes so those had to be repaired as well. And of course it rained in March, adding about a week and a half to the time in the yard.
    We are looking forward to using the boat in April!

André Duvall, in festival

On March 22, I participated in the West Tennessee River Ring Handbell Festival, at which 125 ringers gathered to ring hundreds of handbells and handchimes. Each choir prepared between three and five pieces of music in the months leading up to this event. At the festival, all of the choirs rehearsed the pieces together for several hours under the guidance of a clinician. This year’s clinician is a big name in the handbell world: Sondra Tucker is a nationally recognized composer of handbell music, and is Organist at Church of the Holy Apostles in Collierville, TN. So, the festival also serves as a workshop on handbell technique and musical expression. At the end of the day, we performed all of the selections, and I played organ on the final piece. One of the special techniques employed in one of our pieces is called the Singing Bell. A wooden dowel is rotated around the rim of the bell, producing a beautiful humming tone similar to the effect of running a wet ringer around the edge of a wine glass.
    The week of March 31, a friend and I will be performing a recital of music for voice and piano at Rhodes College. The program includes works by Beethoven, Fauré, Dvorak, and Mozart. We will also perform selections from this program on another local concert series in town this weekend.
    I will also be spending time with my taxes!
    The trees in Memphis are just now starting to turn green, and flowers are starting to bloom. I am looking forward to many visits to our wonderful parks and gardens in the next two months, including Overton Park, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, and the Memphis Botanic Gardens. The neighborhood I live in also hosts garden tours this time of year.

Allen Crowder, after a tough one

My March 22 fight in the Battle in the South in Wilmington was my roughest one yet. It went to the third round and was a close fight. My opponent was a well-rounded boxer and did an excellent job keeping videos of his former fights offline so I couldn't study his moves. He told me after the fight that what got him was my roundhouse to his thigh. He said he didn't exspect it. I landed a bunch of them, then finally got him to submit with the standing guillotine choke.

Chuck Smythe, attending his wife

Alas, my wife broke her leg skiing. It can’t be casted, so she is immobile, and I am madly care-giving, for many weeks to come. She is in rehab, and with a much better attitude than I would have.
    This buddy of mine sent a vacation picture:

GloamingTorres

Morris Dean, around Santa Barbara
    My wife and I were in California for about a week last month. The focus of our itinerary was attending the 69th Santa Barbara International Orchid Show.

   Also on our itinerary was the Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary, "a...non-profit organization...dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of unwanted, abused, and orphaned companion parrots," which my wife had seen featured in the television nature program Parrot Confidential in November.

   We also visited the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, in the mountains overlooking the city. All of its flora are represented to be natives of California. Our morning there was so pleasant, we hope to visit again.

   Below the botanic garden lay Old Mission Santa Barbara, "established [in] 1786...the tenth of twenty-one California Missions to be founded by the Spanish Franciscans," and perhaps located there because of the creek we had seen in the botanic garden that runs near the mission's site.

    Just above the mission, between it and the botanic garden, and also on the creek, was the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, one of whose faculty (Daniel L. Geiger, Curator of Malacology – the study of molluscs) had given a workshop we attended at the orchid show on growing orchids in a terrarium. (Yes! it's possible, as Dr. Geiger had demonstrated as a hobby, largely motivated by the experts' having told him it couldn't be done.)

Catterpillar of a Monarch butterfly

    And, of course, we also visited some of our family, including my sister in nearby Oxnard, and her dear Chihuahua Belle, who lost an eye a few years ago owing to a scuffle with my sister's daughter-in-law's two Corgis:

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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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