living small

Not long ago, as I pondered where I would go or what I would do if I was laid off from my job, and contemplating yet another move (depending on how you count it, I could say that I’ve moved anywhere from 4 to 11 times in the past four years), I began to research RVs. 

I thought perhaps that it could be a solution for my life:  having mobility, paring down my stuff even further (which I’ve written about a few times), yet having a sense of my own home.  If I needed to go to another new place, maybe I could just take an organized, familiar home along with me. 

Six months or so later, I know that I have a job for the coming year and am trying to convince myself to stay put.  But I still think a lot about the nature of housing, my environmental footprint, and how I hope to live in the future. 

After researching RV and trailer living (I now know the difference between A, B, and C Class RVs, travel trailers, fifth wheel trailers, etc), I started looking at all the other alternative types of housing.  Here are some of my favorites.

1.  A modern vardo, or updated gypsy van…some are beautifully crafted.

2.  My favorite wheel-less options are some of the gorgeous pre-fab yurts.  For more than five years now (yes, since moving to CA), I’ve fantasized about building a little compound of yurts.  Don’t laugh.  It could be awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. And finally, check out this ethereal earthsheltered home.   It is environmentally kind, and if anyone has a thing for Hobbit living…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related Gleanings:  Tiny House Blog, which describes a lot of fun designs for living smaller.

 

brain break

A friend of mine, B., has a special talent for punctuating serious comments with pop culture references, which is jarring and often hilarious.  After writing to me that he enjoyed reading about my recent thoughts on how we, in a consumer society, accumulate too much stuff, he wrote:

Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow has a blog about things you can buy to have a beautiful life like hers.  Maybe you could get rid of the thinking and learning parts of your blog and add more pictures of stuff to buy.

His comment actually made me feel a little sheepish about one of my “guilty pleasures,” which is the TV show Lipstick Jungle. Oh, to live the life of Wendy, Nico, or Victory! (No, I actually don’t envy a glamorous or celebrity life, but it was a fun soap opera to escape into with women my age who are dealing with career and love problems just like mine…………although mine doesn’t include a six-figure-salary, press conferences, private jets, designer clothes, Page 6, celebrity friends, etc.)

I blame my sister and Andrew McCarthy (who plays Victory’s love-interest, Joe) for this addiction. I blame my sister for telling me that it wasn’t as silly as it looked and it might be fun for me to watch and then I got hooked, and I blame a lingering nostalgia for my 1986 crush on Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink.

Alas, Lipstick Jungle has been canceled by NBC. I’ll have to find some other show to fluff my brain.

 

want and need

Upon re-reading my post from Christmas day, I considered deleting or editing parts of it, but decided to keep it intact.  The reason:  I am entertained by how my writing was affected by reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the weekend before Christmas.  (I highly recommend the book, but wouldn’t suggest it to many people as a “holiday read” by any means!)

For those who haven’t read the book, it is the story of a man and his young son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world; there is no reliable source of food, permanent shelter, or much comfort to be found.  The only things that sustain them are their survival skills, their love for one another, and an intrinsic belief that there are kernels of good remaining in a world of evil.  The story is simple but profound, and is told through a narrative that consists of stream-of-consciousness and spare and poetic description, often utilizing sentence fragments.  As a result, the book seems more like a prose-poem than a novel, and its haunting, stark beauty stems from that structure.  One of my favorite passages is this one, as the father cradles his son as they sleep, as he does every night in the cold and darkness:

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Upon viewing Christmas through the filter of The Road, my already heightened awareness of modern over-consumption (food, material goods) was definitely enhanced.  I struggled (successfully) against my impulse to buy my niece more “things to open” when I knew she already had more than enough.  And I definitely looked at gift giving with harsher judgment than usual as “wants” versus “needs.”

I am not rejecting beauty and plenty:  I think that that is too extreme.  However, I was reminded to embrace more gratitude for the love of my family and my friends, for joy where I find it, for a belief in goodness, and for all my needs being met in abundance.

**********

Related gleanings:  I can’t overlook the obvious tie-in of these thoughts to themes in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.  As a theater person, I’ve worked on that show so many times that I had become oblivious to it.  At the urging of a friend, I re-read the original story last year; it was a gift to re-discover the beauty and intention of the original text.  In a non-holiday-related book, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (also a post-apocalyptic vision of the future), I could see The Road as a precurser to the dark but more humorous future world created by Miller.

 

best gift exchange ever

I love making gifts, and I love finding meaningful gifts.  I have rarely had a lot of money to spend, and have often had little choice but to give “gifts of the heart” – homemade things, handcrafted things, and meaningful or needed things.  Even if I had a lot of money, I wouldn’t want to change this way of giving gifts.

For the past ten to fifteen years, at least, I’ve wandered through stores and been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to purchase. (I’ll write more about American excess soon, but this quiz is a good introduction to the topic.) During the same period, I moved many, many times, and also helped to clean out both my parents and grandparents long-time homes.  The moral of the story:  It is amazing what we acquire.   The result:  I am really turned off to malls, giant department stores, and buying new things in general, beyond what I need.  And when I can, I prefer to acquire used and re-purposed items (furniture, books, kitchenware, etc.). 

On this Christmas Day in a year fraught with disturbing news of the economy, I find myself thinking about my favorite gift exchange ever.  I worked for an arts council, where, of course, we were all underpaid.  The staff consisted of four women, and we discussed doing a $5 item gift exchange, but someone had the idea to exchange only handcrafted gifts.  Since not all of us were crafty, we began expanding the idea.  We ended up with no dollar limit, but instead had three criteria:  it had to be a found item, a handmade item, or a re-gift.

We had so much fun the first year that we did it the second year.  The range of items was bizarre and often hilarious.  One of my co-workers gave me a gift bag containing crafting projects she had purchased 10 years prior and never begun, along with stationery she’d never used and an ugly candle someone else had given  her – she dared me to pass it on.  Another co-worker gave me a pin that I had admired when she’d worn it; I treasure it to this day.  I also received books that people had read and were passing along, and homemade cookies.  It was so much fun to receive those things because they were all given with much thought and affection, and they were all gleaned from our own possessions. It was a wonderful and fun way to celebrate Christmas.

On this Christmas, I am hoping that everyone has plenty, and if you have abundance, the heart to pass it on.  Blessings to all!

 

Stocking up

The day before Thanksgiving, I stopped at Mike’s Truck Garden (a fruit and vegetable stand in Fulton, CA).  I’d seen low prices advertised on local apples the week before, and wasn’t surprised to see the place mobbed the day before the holiday.  I picked out some apples and a few winter squash, got up to the cashier and he said “the total is $4.44, which means it’s $2.22 for you today.”  And then I understood why the employees were saying “have a good holiday, see you in the spring” to everyone:  it was the last day of the season that they were open, and no matter what you purchased that day, the entire bill was half off.  Score.

I got in my car, drove around the back, and decided to park again.   This time, I brought in my shopping bags and got a cart.  I bought many packages of bulk food (nuts, seeds, trail mix, candy for Christmas stockings, etc), more apples and assorted squash, red peppers, green peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, cilantro, parsley, radishes, cauliflower, kiwi, lemons, limes, oranges, onions, green onions, red cabbage, green cabbage, grapes, spinach, green beans, and swiss chard.  My total was $80.46, so I paid $40.23.

I would have bought more, but I was mindful of what I could use for Thanksgiving and in the immediate future, and what I could preserve.  My  instinct (that I had to suppress) was to “rescue” as much of the food as I could.  (I think I could be an obsessive harvester/gleaner if I ever have a garden.)

When I got home, I called my mother, and asked her the best freezing method for much of the excess.  In my childhood, we had large gardens and numerous fruit trees, and we rarely, if ever, used “store-bought” frozen vegetables or fruit.  Every year, we dried culinary herbs, canned tomato sauce, applesauce, and assorted jams/jellies, and stocked the freezer with large quantities of tomatoes, green beans, peas, peppers, corn, peaches, and blueberries.   My sister and I were always being sent to the basement to retrieve items from the two massive chest freezers.

So I spent all of the afternoon before Thanksgiving (and into Thanksgiving day, as well) washing, cutting, and storing vegetables and herbs.  In the week and a half since then, my roommate and I have used all the fresh things, and I take pleasure in being able to pull a ziploc full of clean, ready-to-use cilantro from the freezer when making guacamole.

It turns out that it was an exceptional way to honor Thanksgiving.  At the most basic level, I am grateful for access to plentiful food and to have the money to purchase it, and for the means to preserve and appreciate it.  It also connected me to my family who I was missing  over the holiday.  My mother sent me the following email late on Thanksgiving eve:

I hope you got all your food “put up”.  I was smiling most of the evening thinking about you doing that and enjoying it.  It always brings back a warm glow of home and gives such pleasure.  Enjoy, enjoy.

Related gleanings:  Last week, a story was circulated about 40,000 people showing up at a farm in Colorado to glean the fields after harvest.  Also, as most of us are aware, a lot of food banks are low this year.  If you have the means, consider donating food, time or money to one near you; a good organization is Feeding America (formerly known as Second Harvest).

 

If Oprah or Obama jumped off a bridge…

I just read a New York Times article stating that during his Sunday night 60 Minutes interview, Obama mentioned having read a book on F.D.R. (he did not specify the author or title).   The NYT article, titled For Books, Is Obama New Oprah?, describes the resulting scramble among authors to identify which of the books Obama had actually read and referred to, as well as the spike in sales of similar books on a number of online book sellers.

By the end, the story had nearly brought tears to my eyes:  imagine, a president who reads, who is interested in honoring and learning from history, and who will–hopefully–help spark interest in the flagging cultural literacy of our nation.  This is huge for someone like myself (a museum curator, a theater person, a writer).  The fact that I was so moved is a symptom of how intellectually bereft our country’s administration has been the past few years–and it is internationally embarrassing that intellectualism is now considered extraordinary.

However…

I just wish it didn’t take Oprah starting a book club or Obama just mentioning a book in passing to ignite curiosity–and make it cool to be curious and smart–among my fellow citizens.  Now THAT would be change.

 

a child’s view

I read an article about Roald Dahl today, and was struck by what I prize most in creative people like him:  his ability to find a sense of joy and silliness in even the most bleak times, or even in the mundane.  The same is true for the work of Maurice Sendak (read an excellent New York Times article about him here); these two authors are able to tap into elemental fears and joys that all ages can relate to.  I find this ability even more poignant because both men had difficult, even painful, personal lives.

For years, I worked alongside my father as he wrote, produced, and directed children’s theater shows.  He–akin to authors like Dahl and Sendak–could access a child-like vision of the world, and could see the phenomenal in the ordinary.  We also talked often about his belief that it was important to not “water down” the villains.  It was fascinating to see children thrilled by being scared, but, through those stories, were shown how courage, bravery, and love could be a panacea to those fears.

In a time when news of the economy is worse every day, I think it is a good time to keep in mind the views of authors like Dahl, and to stay in touch with our child-like impulses:  to embrace the silly, to find joy in jell-o (read the Dahl article), to surprise friends and strangers with random acts of kindness and generosity, and yes, to even allow ourselves to believe that a bit of bravery will banish the “monsters” at our door.

 

the event must go on

I do believe in the adage “the show must go on.” I haven’t researched how or when that saying came into existence, but my guess is that it stems from the complete chaos that goes into getting a show on stage: so many things can (and do) go wrong that if we were to stop completely for any of them, nothing would ever happen.

I grew up backstage, and learned early on to recognize when directors, actors, stage managers and production staff possessed a certain wonderful talent: the ability to keep things moving while minimizing or fixing a problem, all the while having the performance appear seamless and professional to an audience. Problem solvers are “in,” perfectionists are “out” (well, not “out” exactly, but certainly can be maddening when flexibility is called upon).

(Aside: I’ll save a non-theater friend’s recent question of “Why must the show go on?” for a future blog. Short answer: it’s a commitment.)

I’ve been thinking about all of this since Saturday, after a little accident resulted in me sprawled in a parking lot wondering if my feet were broken…

Growing up in theater was excellent training for event management, which has been a component of my career since I was in college. This past Saturday, I was coordinating a book release party for my organization. The outdoor event involved setting up pop-up tents, rolling carts of tables and chairs from the building across the street and setting them up on a lawn, and numerous other tasks, all of which I’d plotted out and assigned to my volunteer team.

A member of the Junior ROTC was there early (they were leading the Pledge of Allegiance to open the event), and he kindly offered to help even though he was in uniform. I accepted, since my volunteer corps was struggling a bit with the pop-up tents (they are mostly retirees-one gentleman was even using his cane to help raise a tent canopy). The ROTC kid and I placed five 8-foot tables onto a cart and rolled it across the street, with him pushing and me guiding it from the front. As we rolled the cart into the parking lot, my shoe lace caught the edge of the cart, I lost my footing, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground with both my feet pinned under the cart. I don’t remember how, or how fast, I extricated myself, but I remember incredible pain and I may have been swearing.

The next thing I knew, I was standing there in a daze with the immediately attentive ROTC kid at my elbow. “Are you OK?” I couldn’t respond. “Ma’am, do you want me to call 911?” I shook my head no. “What can we do for you?” (A day later, I realized that he was asking if he and his friend could go for an ice bag or something, but my ingrained “show must go on” impulse took over; all I could think about was getting the event up and running before I went to the emergency room.)

I tenuously took a step forward, and almost passed out from the pain, but slowly hobbled to my car and leaned against it. I told him that the tables had to go to the center of the lawn, and then I opened my car door to get out the sandwich boards that were to be placed at roadside. I started to pull the top one out, but was struggling (because I shouldn’t even have been standing). As I pulled at one of them, there was a strange hissing noise and a cloud came out from under them. I realized what it was and yelled at the Jr. ROTC kid, who was still trying to help me, “Back up, back up! It’s spray glue – it will get on your uniform!” He did back away, and just kind of looked at me with his head half cocked, and I burst out laughing. “Oh my god, you must think that I am a complete crazy person.” He kind of smiled, and then made a move to take the sandwich board out of my hands, but it was sticky from the glue. He jumped back in a protective measure to spare his uniform, and I almost started laughing again. It was absurd – this kid was just trying to help – he saw me fall and get run over by a cart, then I wouldn’t even sit down after getting injured, and now I was getting spray glue all over his uniform.

I didn’t ever tell any of my volunteers that I’d been injured: I just made it through the event as best as I could, got everything put away, and then went for x-rays (nothing broken, just sprains and technicolor bruises). I’m proud that I could push through the pain and still be there to make sure the event went well, and greet city council members, and hear people’s stories related to our book, and make plans for the Girl Scouts to be more involved with our organization, and be interviewed for a video podcast. Some friends have said that it was kind of irresponsible not to go to the hospital right away, but I still feel that it was valuable for me to stay.

Before the Jr. ROTC kid left, though, he asked one more time if I was OK. I said yes, but that I was in pain. He just looked at me, and said “Yes, but you kept working.” I laughed and said “I had to.” He just nodded in agreement.

 

uh, good idea? crafting and advice…

In preparation for a move, I’m again culling my book collection (my sister is still swearing about a move she helped with in 2002 due to the abundance of books).  In recent years, I’ve instituted rules for myself before I acquire a book and grant it space on the permanent bookshelves:  it must be more useful than a book I could borrow short-term from a library; it must be a great work of art that I NEED to possess should I require immediate access to it; or it must have fairly high sentimental or aesthetic value (as an object).  Without the rules, I’d likely end up buried alive.

So, on this round, quite a few cookbooks, out-of-date home decorating and crafts manuals, and modern and juvenile novels have not made the cut.  So far I have two boxfuls to go to my local library’s book sale (anyone want some books?).

However, I decided to keep one particular crafting book, just for its sheer kitschiness (and a little bit of childhood crafting nostalgia).  To the right is an illustration from B. Kay Fraser’s “Decorative Tole Painting,” 1972.  Oh, the irony.

The other gem that I will never part with is Arlene Dahl’s “Always Ask a Man” from 1965. It is full of advice to women on beauty, manners, homemaking, and the general art of femininity.  There are literally hundreds of useful tidbits – here is a sampling of my favorite passages and quotes.

NEVER upstage a man.  Don’t top his joke, even if you have to bite your tongue to keep from doing it.  Never launch loudly into your own opinions on a subject–whether it’s petunias or politics.  Instead, draw out his ideas to which you can gracefully add your footnotes from time to time.  You may be well equipped to steal the spotlight, but most females would rather sing a duet than a solo.

Most of us agree that lipstick is an absolute necessity.  I, for one, even wear a touch a lipstick to bed.  I switch to pale peach or pink to match my sheets, blot carefully, and powder over lightly so that just a tinge of becoming natural-looking color remains.

Any girl with a modicum of common sense and tact can control a man’s actions, unless she’s out with a sex maniac.  Don’t accept the frequently proposed male theory that if he spends money taking you to dinner or the theater, you must pay him back by inviting him in for a nightcap.  He doesn’t have to be the man who stays for breakfast.

Give a girl a pair of pants and she sprawls in a chair, crosses her legs like a man, and becomes more aggressive in her speech and manner.  A girl puts a man on guard psychologically when she takes to wearing pants around the house.

There should be nothing that takes precedence in your day’s schedule over making yourself attractive and appealing for the man in your life…nothing, nothing is more important than keeping your husband happy, interested and in love with you.

Male movie stars were also consulted on their ideas of femininity.  George Hamilton said “A woman is often like a strip of film–obliterated, insignificant–until a man puts the light behind her.”  Wow.  And as a brunette, I’m proud to join the company of those who “can look like an angel while operating like the black widow spider,” or is “the vamp on the bearskin rug,” or should wear furs “of black or white mink, fabulous monkey fur, or velvety black Alaskan seal.” Um, yeah, maybe not so much for the furs.

Here is a page on the art of fan seduction, which is still appealing to me on a certain level, I have to admit!  Note one of my other favorite quotes from the book, highlighted in yellow.

Finally, this isn’t from my book collection, but I’m reminded of my favorite kitschy stitching blog, called stitchymcyarnpants.com.  Here’s another good idea regurgitated from another decade….if you haven’t seen these already, check out the link to see more wonderful ski-mask stitching projects, among many others!

 

doctors who paint, or write, or…..

When I was an undergrad at Hiram College, I was in the art department as an art history major. I was always interested in the fact that a majority of the studio art minors were biology majors, and no one could ever really provide a substantive answer when I asked about the link between the fields. Also at that time (circa 1990), my college was in the process of instituting a new center, which is now called The Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities.

In an era before either arts therapy or biomedical ethics was popular or more widely known as a field, I admit to being unfamiliar and skeptical about the link between literature and medicine (at the oh-so-sage age of 21). Even as a die-hard defender of liberal arts education, it seemed kind of random at the time. But I went to a reading of works by doctors, read by doctors, and was incredibly moved. The act of writing provided these medical practitioners with a tool to further humanize their experiences, as well as an artistic outlet for questions of how to approach loss, grief, fear, and even “miracles” from their perspective.

I read an article today that reminded me of my own pondering of the links between science and the arts, and it really brought some of these issues into focus. Titled “Art classes improve diagnostic skills of medical students,” it cites a study that showed that the medical students who studied art could diagnose their patients with greater facility than those who had not studied art. The key difference is that those with art training, even just a little bit, had a more developed skill of observation.

It suddenly made sense to me why all those biology majors were art minors: they, too, were trained as observers of the natural world, and the study of art is just observation from another perspective (more focused on the emotional and aesthetic, versus methodical). It especially makes sense when considering the interests of people who are drawn to a liberal arts education; they are people who already possess a natural sense of curiosity and a willingness to compare or challenge perspective.

And so, I step onto my soap box. Without the arts as an integral part of education and the resulting skills that such study develops, we have will have far less able doctors, scientists, teachers, lawyers, athletes…….