Reflecting

It was my grandmother who made a goddess worshipper out of me.

I could never say this if I thought she read my blog. My paternal grandma is Baptist now, known to almost everyone she associates with as either "Grama" or "Sister Terry," scolds my father about not keeping his family in church, is firmly teetotal with a strong aversion to any woman who wears "gothic" accessories, and is the only person in my family to date who cried bitter tears when she found out that I was planning to marry and have children with another woman. I expect she'd probably be horrified to hear me say it, but there it is: It was Grama who imparted to me the richly pagan reverence for the Goddess.

You see, my grandparents used to own a bed-and-breakfast in Mount Shasta, CA. My parents and I, and eventually my baby brother, visited them annually. The bed and breakfast is still there, although under different ownership; it was called Sisson House 1904 then, and consisted of the blue Victorian on the right. This house was where I took my first steps, made my first snowman, and experienced my first and only blizzard.

When we made our visits, in between leaping off the porch railing to get stuck in the snow, playing with the stuffed animals who lived in the old sea chest on the back porch, and making paint-with-water pictures for rescue volunteers who dug out the people trapped by aforementioned blizzard, Grama and I would take baskets to hold blackberries and walk to the place she called the Mary Grotto.

A quick Googling session later, I am nearly certain that the place she took me to must be the prayer site constructed by Mary-Ma McChristy in 1992, meaning the site was only a year old when Grama began taking me through the blackberry brambles along quiet side roads to the grotto. Given that its street address is provided online, it must not have been as isolated as I believed -- just a little public garden conveniently located off a residential street where a multifaith guru had recently placed a plaster garden saint.

But it seemed so ancient, so mysterious and sacred to me.

A favorite to share

This is my favorite poem. Like, ever. It's melancholy and faithful and beautiful and simple and eloquent. My last relationship before M? I knew we'd never work when I read her this poem and she thought it ruined the mood.

If You Hear That a Thousand People Love You

If you hear that a thousand people love you
remember ... saavedra is among them

If you hear that a hundred people love you
remember ... saavedra is either in the first
or the very last row

If you hear that seven people love you
remember ... saavedra is among them,
like a Wednesday in the middle of the week

If you hear that two people love you
remember ... one of them is saavedra

If you hear that only one person loves you
remember ... he is saavedra

AND when you see no one else around you
and you find out
that no one loves you anymore,
then you will know for certain
that ... saavedra is dead.


-- Guadalupe de Saavedra, 1973

From the department of "old news that has nothing to do with jewelry" ...

Children's dictionary dumps "nature" words in favor of the digital age

I'm mixed on this.

See, I had one of those kiddie dictionaries when I was little and by the time I was old enough to use a dictionary instead of going "Mooooom? What's this?" I had aged out of it and needed a real dictionary.

M said it well: "Some of them probably for the age group needed to go because of simple lack of exposure to them, but others seem odd to remove. It does make it difficult to encourage reading of some classics but I expect the child that would pick up Carroll or Dickens or Alcott might be less inclined to rely upon a Junior dictionary. And we definitely needed some of the updates. I am, however, highly amused at the new inclusion of 'common sense'."

The problem here is that today's child knows what an mp3 player is. They don't need the definition. Some of the deleted words -- "monarch," "allotment," "gorse," "porridge" -- those they might need defined. Which highlights the very basic problematic assumption of trying to tailor a dictionary to an age group. What, they need a book to define words that are already suitable to their vocabulary?

Another friend of ours found the substitutions "progressive." As for me?

I think she has a point, actually. But nonetheless: The real progression in terms of dictionaries, I think, is, instead of updating the compromised "not too scary" version, to teach children the coexisting values of "rich" and "quick." The rich dictionary remains the grown-up dictionary with the little line drawings and the flowers pressed on relevant pages. The one where every country has an entry and the language of origin, including blendings and uncertainties about the meandering path a word followed to become part of English, is listed in italics before the definition. The one that smells like an old book. As Giles said in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the richness comes through knowledge that is traditional, tangible ... smelly.

For a quick and easy dictionary, don't send them to a "junior dictionary" which defines the 10,000 words that Oxford figures will already constitute the youth's working vocabulary -- send them to dictionary.com.

So I guess my point is that I don't see the point to begin with.

To keep myself busy now that M has left for the opposite end of the country, I'm helping my father's tech guy image iBooks at the middle school where Dad is the principal.

First of all, I discovered that someone named Julius Lester has done YA novelizations of a certain Shakespearian tragedy that happens to be my favorite play ever.

Second, they are doing the most awesome thing -- the school has little botanical gardens. There's an all-organic, all-student-tended vegetable garden that donates hundreds of pounds of produce to Family Services, there's a custom pondscape and a propagation greenhouse in their little fruit orchard, they're moving palm trees around because the beds they were in are being converted to all-native flower beds. It is so incredibly cool. They're even talking about converting a disused classroom into a small natural history museum.

So that'll help me keep busy. I'm also trying to use up some of the stuff in my "tribal" and "wood/bone" bead boxes, since I keep buying it on clearance and never use it. It all tends to come out slightly Victorian spoils-of-empire, but y'know, I'm okay with that. It's all right if I keep a sense of irony. Right? Right.