Reference Points

Bookmobile driving got me thinking last week. The trainer taught me to find and use "reference points" - which felt a bit like a magic trick. (Why I had never heard of this before, I do not know.) Now I keep my accelerator foot over the dark line that runs down the center of the lane. It's a kind of burnt oil line - so it disappears on new or little used roads, but still, it's a good reference point. "Own your space," the trainer lady kept saying. "Own your space. Good ... good... very good!" (as an 18-wheeler passes going the other way and I finally learn to own my space and not shy away from the enormous log-laden monster owning his space)

I got to thinking about how influenced we are by our reference points. For instance, I have known children who have only been used as pawns, or beaten, or otherwise treated very badly by adults - and so how do these children use such reference points? They shy away from the adult line down the lane. Why wouldn't they? It makes perfect sense. There are no kind, dependable, loving adults in the reference points these kids can use.

Or women who seem never to have known honorable men. Women whose mothers had no use except "using" the stunningly dishonorable men who find such women like yellow jackets find the fried chicken in a picnic. It's like such lousy (or worse, pathetic) men can smell the situation from across the forest. Be fried chicken, the yellow jackets will find you. Be a woman who has no use for a good, kind man, and the lousy ones find you. And the growing girls and boys who watch this? What are their reference points? Opportunism. Self-protection. Lots of danger signals. Greasy, weirdly attractive, symbiotic relationships. (from natureking: These are a Vespid wasp and are a member of the hornet family (vespula hymenoptera). They can be very aggressive when disturbed.)

Reference points. It's the point of this John Mayer song, played for me by my then-teenage son a few years ago ... when he started to see the effects of some really bad information some of his peers were using as reference points. It's the reason children don't seem to learn what we think we're teaching them. They're not looking at the driving manual - they're using the reference points.

More or less

I've been thinking today ... while driving the bookmobile with the nice training lady in the passenger seat, and not being afraid of it, and humming the tune to "driving along in my automobile" - mostly in my head - and watching the really summery summer day go by the windows ...

My Life: more or less

Things I have more of than I used to:

• number of pounds I carry on my 5'9" frame
• adult "children"
• accredited credits on my transcript
• really good friends
• really good teachers
• books
• pieces of decent writing done by me
• moments of bliss

Things I have less of than I used to:

• fears
• worries about stuff that's not really my business or my responsibility (things like any group's "agenda," or anyone else's errors, bad judgment or outright evil - my own crap fills my carry-on and I don't need anyone else's to pay attention to)
• laundry
• shame (because shame's just pride in dramatic clothes but penitence is freeing)
• well-polished surfaces in the living room
• pairs of jeans

There's only one thing on there that desperately needs to change. I need a couple more pairs of jeans.

Instructional posters as wall art

Here's another one I want!! (Thanks for the heads up, Melanie!) This one, the Ratio one from Michael Ruhlman (which I will definitely order at the next paycheck) ... I keep finding instructional posters. Someday I'm going to have grandchildren, who, I assume, will have more than one set of grandparents. We'll be the ones with the maps and instructional posters on the walls, and an open kitchen. And goats. And a boggling number of books to choose from. And a field to play in. And a stream. And a zillion-piece Fontanini nativity village to set up every Advent. (Is this daydreaming a result of a looming half-century birthday?) (click on the poster to go to its site. And note: you're (you are) going to its (not it's) site.)

Ode to Salt

(Neruda wrote this with line breaks - in translation, here is the poem without line breaks, written here for you to see while you listen to Philip Levine read it. The bolded font is where my voice breaks when I read it aloud. The beauty of these thoughts! Oh, Neruda! I want to greet you in heaven someday.)

In the salt mines I saw the salt in this shaker. I know you won't believe me. But there it sings. The salt sings. The skin of the salt mines sings with a mouth choking on dirt. Alone, when I heard the voice of salt, I trembled in the empty desert near Antafagusta. The whole salted plain shouts out in its cracked voice a pitiful song. Then in its caverns, jewels of rock salt, a mountain of light buried under earth, transparent cathedral, crystal of the sea, oblivion of the waves. And now, on each table of the world, your agile essence, salt, spreading a vital luster on our food. Preserver of the ancient stores in the holds of ships. You were the explorer of the seas, matter foretold in the secret half-open trails of foam. Dust of water, the tongue receives through you a kiss from the marine night. Taste melds your oceanity into each rich morsel. And thus the least wave of the salt shaker teaches us not merely domestic purity, but also the essential flavor of the infinite.

Bookmecca

Powell's today.

Two things to bring home with me.


One is a book of poetry and one is a poem of a book. Neruda, quite simply, makes me swoon. My Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies teacher, the incomparable Simeon Dreyfuss, used one of Neruda's poems in our course, and my love affair with the poet began. I'm seriously considering learning Spanish so that I don't have to read him in translation.

The other - Kristeva - is a book I have checked out from the library and realize I need to own. I found her by way of my Creative Nonfiction teacher, the incomparable Perrin Kerns, when I was having my end of the quarter personal conference with her. "What you're saying sounds like Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater." Have you ever seen it?" I went to the library on the way to my car, and brought it home with me. The whole volume is something I must have here with me every day.

In Perrin's office, the books are double-deep in the shelves. She's a lit and writing teacher, after all. I laughed when I saw those shelves. The school year is ended, but the learning is not. My interior shelves are starting to be double-deep with some very wondrous things.