for granted

You should know that this semester, Tuesday will be a posting challenge. I am out, teaching, then again teaching, and finally, in the evening hours, selling stuff at a little corner shop nearby. So, I'm out of the house a very, very long time.

This should make it an exciting check of Ocean under fire. Like speed dating, where you only have a minute or two to impress.

I begin this round of crazy Tuesdays with a post on corn. Surprised? Here's why I'm corn-focused:











I found these people pushing corn and apples (and messages of sustainability) just down the hill on library mall. And the reason I title this post "for granted" is that we are so used to fresh corn and the bounty of apples now, that there actually wasn't a line for either. Even though both were free and it was lunchtime.





It's hard to appreciate bounty.

Today there was yet another day of warm, gentle sunshine -- the kind that warns you that there's only so much left... And yet, we go to work, we worry about this or that, we go home, eat a meal, go to sleep with little appreciation for what we have, and are about to lose.

Let me end with an assurance that, even though I passed on the free corn and apples…










… I did not take the warmth of the day for granted.

Labor Day

From farming machines on Saturday, to working people on Monday. From free time (can’t remember, when was that? Oh, that! That was illicit free time! I should have been reading!), to no hours to waste.

To have work, health insurance, health, more work – that is, of course, a good thing.

Except today, it’s easy to feel discouraged. One of those times when I’m in the “one step back” part of the course (or, is it that I’ve switched to “two steps back” for every step forward?).

Oh, I know. We all have disagreeable days – when the IRS tells us we did our taxes incorrectly (why are they picking on me? I’m not worth the money it takes to review my paperwork!), when worry about keeping up with the demands of the everyday make you shake, when surfing the Net brings no relief (quite the contrary – you wonder where people find such tremendous reserves of belligerence and fury) – we all have them.



When Ed suggests we take a spin by the Labor Temple, I first say -- no time! But by late afternoon, I change my mind. It’s Labor Day. My grandfather was a labor organizer. I’m one of those who thinks that people who provide labor have had an especially tough year.

Let’s go.





It feels good to be there.















I invaded the farming machinists' reunion on Saturday, and today I invade the gathering of another segment of hardworking men and women.
















I think I’ve had a very, very well spent handful of days.

whirligig of time bringing those sweet revenges

Here’s an interesting phenomenon: as you get older, days spin forward like mad and then, so that you can make sense of it all, they all land in quotes that your brain has accumulated over the decades. If I continue to blog for the next five, ten, twenty years, expect to see increased reference to anything from Beatles to Shakespeare.

This post is a bonus – I already have a notation for September 6th. But I want to bring up an omitted photo from the Thresheree (see previous post). Why? Well, see if it does anything for you.






Nothing? Sure? You don’t identify with the endlessness of mechanical genius? Of collector solidarity? Of Wisconsin’s garden tractor mania?

Still no great awakening? That’s okay. Me neither. But Ed loves it. So there’s that.

searching

I want out. It’s a long week-end and I don’t want to lose it all to days that, when I’m working, look remarkably the same. The academic year is just starting, but I’m restless. Most week-ends are slated to be work week-ends in one way or another. The dearth of unscheduled hours is making me nervous, unsettled.

I ask Ed for help with the day. An escape. I want to be dragged away somewhere. Anywhere.

We don’t go to the Saturday market. We pack up my bike and head out. To where the wild beasts (mostly chipmunks and rabbits and turkeys) roam and cranes and herons and hawks fly. Or stomp.





Ed suggests an end of summer country road biking loop. Past tobacco barns and soy fields. And goldenrod.



























Not too ambitious. Twenty plus miles and we’re done. Better. Definitely better. But still…

Not done yet! Hurry up, we need to be in Edgerton by 3.

We drive south. More tobacco barns. In this part of Wisconsin, you get the sense that tobacco – that coarse one, used for wrapping cigars – was once a very very big deal.













And now we’re at a makeshift parking lot, crammed with pick up trucks, SUVs, your basic big cars, so that Ed’s little Geo looks toylike and fragile. We’re here, Ed tells me. The annual Rock River Thresheree. Just how do you spell that? With lots of e’s and r’s.

What could be more Wisconsin…

Maybe you’ve not heard of it? Until today, neither had I. As Ed explains it, it’s a time for collectors of old farm engines to get together and share their stuff. This weekend is their 53rd reunion. And if you think that it’s just going to bring out a handful of enthusiasts, you would be so wrong.





It’s a huge event: steam engines, high crop tractors, caterpillars, john deeres, combines, plows, hit or miss engines – most spiffed up and lovingly preserved. Hundreds and hundreds of painted to a shine machines – fifty, sixty, seventy years old.





The air is thick with coal burning smoke. But this isn’t a bad thing. Not here. Not among steam enthusiasts.





The men (and occasionally women) behind the machines are farmers. They’re in overalls and grease stained jeans and for once, Ed is almost urban cool in his standard shorts and tee shirt.

We watch the machine parade.









For one full hour, machines grunt and sputter past us. Each is enthusiastically introduced, like in a contestant in a pageant, except here there are no winners, no best in show. They all get their moment in the hazy sun.

We stroll through the exhibits, and sales booths (wind chimes made of tools, kiddie tractors, spark plug collections and the occasional pair of cowboy boots)…





.. past tents with lawn mowers (Ed: can I ask you – what got you started? I mean, you have dozens of these… He points to rows of Reo mowers and blowers. My dad picked up one for five bucks… no one else seemed to be interested in them, so I thought I’d jump in) and shacks with sorghum syrup.









Ed takes time to look closely at the various engines and machines. But after just a few hours, I’m lost in engine haze. They all chug and sputter. They mow, grind, grade, they’re gold, red, green, operated by burly men and burly women, or at least women who look like they could plow down a cornfield if asked.

At this reunion, one that is not my reunion, I indeed find the calm that comes when you get to stare at others and remove yourself from your own singularly pathetic concerns. We stroll and pause and ask questions until I am tired and hungry.

We head back home to Madison past barns with tobacco leaves and fields of soy.

because

I admit it -- I have slacked. Or, more accurately, I fell asleep at the keyboard. Will you accept my apologies? I could tell you that it was a long, work-filled week. I would not be incorrect. However, I could also tell you that I went to an event where I ate and drank wine and sang and strummed the guitar and then got plum tuckered out by the ripe hour of ten. That would also not be incorrect.

because, because, the world is round...*

Let me offer this photo to support the first, or the second (gratis my friend Saul), depending on which theory you want to accept for this tardy-post evening apology.



* Beatles, 1969

partners

Maybe because it is September 3rd (the day I, once long ago, got married), maybe because I yet again began a semester teaching the law of marriage, or maybe for altogether different reasons, I thought a lot about the institution of marriage today. On and off, as I biked past a slightly misty early morning lake…





…and then later, when I strolled in between classes along State Street, and then again as I biked home, tired from too little sleep and too much thinking. I thought especially about why some people rush to marry and a handful resist it, and I wondered what it says about those who do rush or do resist.

I thought how the stated reasons (for plunging or for running in the opposite direction) are probably never the true reasons. But if I had to pick and choose, the best reasons (for plunging into married life) have to do, I think, with wanting to care for someone you love. (Because marriage is, after all, merely a set of legal protections that we confer upon each other.)

One curious idea that I had was that people who love being married are often not very good at it. And people who do not take to marriage are not very good at it either, leaving us with a very small sample of those who are, indeed, good at this marital union thing. Perhaps that is why so many marriages fail.

But I don’t mean to sound morose about any of it. In the years that you feel yourself to be successfully in a partnership with someone, life is very very good. Early or late in life, there for a while, or gone within days – no matter. Once you have experienced a good marriage, you know that there is nothing wrong with the institution itself. Only with those who at times, so imperfectly fall into its embrace.

class notes

I think everyone has a category of missing information: things any normal person in their range would know, should know. And yet – there you are: you haven’t a clue.

In my informal introductions to a new class of students today, I found out that one person had the unusual opportunity to stand on the stage with Bon Jovi. Did you talk to her? I asked.

I just don’t pay attention to celebrity names.



Yes, I’m back in class. Back on campus, back on the bike trails leading downtown. Back on Library Mall, thinking – it’s so much more colorful here when students are around.





Back in my office, late, late, watching students out on Bascom Hill (just outside my window) 'studying' in the barely warm evening sun.





I get on my bike and pedal home. The street construction is finished. The ride is smooth. Fast. At home I defrost lasagna and go over a new syllabus for another set of classes tomorrow.

the start of September

Throughout my entire Polish childhood, September 1st was perhaps the most consequential calendar date of the year. August 31st was quickly forgotten by the time September 1st came around. The new month was, for all, the beginning of the new school year. I, along with millions of others, would join the swell of young people making their way to szkola.

In the Warsaw of my childhood, not a single kid was dropped off at school by car. By second grade, you were certainly able to walk alone (or with friends). During first grade, the more protective parent would insist on an adult escort – typically a grandmother. A savvy grandma would let go of your hand early, so that you could walk in with your peers and pretend, for a moment, that you were older than your tender six or seven years.

We hadn’t the advertisements and store sales of big time America, but our papers and magazines still made much of this day. School's about to begin. In postwar Poland, education was hot.


That the hours spent in school were memorable is clear as anything to me now. I remember virtually every teacher I ever had between first grade and the last year of high school. (Contrast that with another reality: I attended various college and graduate school programs for some fifteen years, compared with the ten years I spent in elementary schools and high school. Few of my college or graduate school professors (the pre-law ones) are as deeply enshrined in my psyche.)

Kids, at their youngest years, are so impressionable!



[Here I am, in first grade. I'm reciting to the teacher (and oh, did I like my teacher! In my eyes, she was so... worldly!) the equivalent of "See Jane chase Spot." In the Poland of the late fifties, it was all about Ala (aka Jane) & As (aka Spot).]


Life has become less predictable now. School years begin in Poland and elsewhere on dates that no longer rigorously track the switch from August to September. This year, classes for me begin on September 2nd. Close enough. Starting then, I will leave a hazy imprint on the less impressionable minds of young adults. But today, I succumb to Ed’s proposal that we head out one last time into the countryside.

Picking up on my nostalgic thoughts of schooldays in the “old country,” we go north, to visit cranes.

But I don’t think of Poland here, at the International Crane Foundation of Baraboo, Wisconsin. I think how spectacular these birds appeared when we saw them over the waters of the Wisconsin River, back during our kayaking trip in early July.

Here, they are too used to the likes of us. Ed suggests waiting quietly and, unlike on the river, where all birds fly off at the mere dip of a paddle, these guys are happy to stare us down.















There are maybe a dozen visitors at the Foundation this afternoon. Two of them turn out to be my newly wed colleague Ann and her Meade. I look at her blog now and note that she has put up crane videos. And, that her day (their day) ended at the sushi place across from Sundance Theater. Such a small town.

Me, I'm just a few doors from Sundance this evening. At the shop, working the late shift. Selling stuff.

After work, Ed and I ravenously devour a very large pizza.

one last time…

I know, I know. Move on. No reason to mope. It’s a beautiful day out there.

(remember the first time I took the bike out in April? The trail had no sign of life. One solitary robin would send me spinning! A red bellied bird! Wow!)

Still, as I bike to campus, I get that shocking reminder that the the Fall semester is in full swing.

When you say Wis-con-sin…
You’ve said it all!




Oh, I'm not the only one getting ready for school to start. I've just done it more than the average person on campus. Take this student: how many years of her life has she eased into Fall thinking that this year will be the most perfect of the whole lot of them? Fifteen? Twenty maybe? Okay, multiply that by 2.5 for me...





At the law school, no one is stuck in the season that so clearly is no more. Me, sometimes I pretend I am still drifting out there, lightly, effortlessly, leisurely, but it's not true. My table has stacks of papers, outlines, drafts. I'm not alone. We're all reading, moving forward.






In the later afternoon, I bike to Ed's. I've not done the trip much this summer. No time. When did we play tennis last at our secret tennis playing venue?

Not this time either.

As I round the curve of my most favorite stretch of the bike path, I'm thinking how grand it is that this day should have such a beautiful sky. Because if you're going to be so neglectful of the outdoors as I have been this month, when you do go out, you should do it on an afternoon of perfect sky. Here, in Wisconsin, we have a huge, beautiful sky. That was my thought when I moved here in '79 and I've never changed my mind on that one.

(I've changed my mind on a lot of other things about Wisconsin -- including how "fun" it is to struggle through a cold long winter.)

...against a field of goldenrod, with the occasional puffy cloud overhead. The most beautiful landscape.





Ed helps me fill the tires (I have got to get the bike ready.. One more day and I am in my teaching schedule...).

(For Ed, the change in seasons means that there will be more cool days and less grass to mow. All positives.)

I linger as he shows a local developer various corners of his lot. Ed takes each day as it comes. The developer considers the future of this particular tract of land. Me, I just see the tall grasses and a demanding land, where plants, especially weeds, grow with great vigor and force.





Almost evening now. In the shadows of the trail, I glance up and I see it -- the inevitable encroachment of fall colors.





I bike home quickly. I'm due at the little shop for the evening.

Yes, evening. I need a jacket now. Too cold to just dash out. A sure sign that this is the very last hour of August.

yes, but...

It’s so often like that: a flight of fancy, followed by a calmer reality. This Sunday, it’s as if neither side won, but each made sure to assert itself.

The day begins. Even from my morning reclining stance, I can see that we're going to have a clear sky. Wonderful!

Oh, but it’s Sunday. I have to clean the condo, so that Monday can truly start with a clean slate. Bummer.

Still, as I finish the scrubbing and polishing, I note that the sky stubbornly holds on: blue, a deep, gorgeous, comprehensive blue. I suggest to Ed we head out to participate in a new (at least I think it’s new) Ride the Drive Madison event: major routes downtown have been cleared of automobile traffic, so that people can take to the streets on this one day!

Yes, but... my bike is back at the farmette -- Ed reminds me.
Okay, let’s walk the streets then! It’s not yet noon, we still have a few hours before I’m due at the shop.

But do I? No! I misread my schedule! I have a mere handful of minutes.

I'm not easily defeated. We hop on Ed's motorbike and head downtown. And I have to say, a small handful of minutes is better than no minutes at all. Because truly, it is a brilliant day. People are out and about -- great numbers of people at that. I see them up ahead, on the bridge, singing, dancing...





Closer: singing, dancing...




and biking...



or attempting to bike... or giving up and playing football with the dog...




I'm liking my home town...

Yes, but did you hear? We may strike a record low for a Madison August night: 37F. Ridiculous place!


And yet… a customer comes into the shop where I am working the afternoon hours. She’s friendly and speaks enthusiastically about the product we sell. Always a good sign. As I wrap up her purchases, we switch to reviewing the day’s weather. It's pleasantly warm inside the shop, when the sun is streaming in, but I note to her -- it’s kind of cool today, don’t you think?
Yes, but my aunt, she has been tracking these things for a long time and she heard the first cicada yesterday.
Is that a good thing? Or not so much?
Oh, it’s great! You get six weeks more of warm weather after the first cicada makes noise here. This August, the first cicada was very very late. Good news indeed!

Yes, uplifting. Wonderfully so. Six weeks of warmth? Wow. No buts. I'm flying.

short list

It’s surprising how easy it is to downsize life. I don’t mean just shedding possessions and moving into smaller space (though that, too, is really quite easy). I mean reducing your obligations and commitments so that there are very few left. Only the essentials.

I read the story in the Times today about a suddenly unemployed fellow who, at the age of 58, could not find a job and, therefore, experienced an emptiness that comes not only from an absence of work but also an absence of things to do.

Of course, I do not lack things to do. My work plate (broadly baked) is heaping. My daily tasks are finite, but demanding. And, I still worry about cooking a good meal at the end of the day.

But the list, while bloated and bulging in what it asks of me, has very few items on it. Numerically speaking, it is quite short. The inconsequential social engagements, the endless to-dos and should-dos are almost entirely gone.

And for at least a brief period (say, between age 56 and 56.75), I want it to be quiet.



As the late August day begins, with more clouds and insanely cool temperatures (did I ever feel hot this summer?), I think – time to go to the market. And it is the only thing that I do of note. The conversations I will have there may be the only face to face encounters I have all day (Ed doesn’t count, if only because the man’s face is hidden behind text or screen for a good number of his waking hours).

So, in celebration of humanity on this blustery day, here are the colors of the market. Inadvertently, I seem to have picked out the reds of the day. Who could blame me. Did I mention it is an October-like day here?