Category: Eugene

Bin There, Doin' That

3/18/2013

Turn me into compost, Baby!

I'm lazy.

Not a huge revelation, but since admitting this to a friend last week, I've a had the opportunity to reflect on just how slothful I've really become.

Let's talk about composting, f'rinstance. I live in a region that is very conscious of—conscientious about—its stewardship of our natural resources. This isn't just noise at a governmental level; it's a cultural value that extends to the everyday of households. Homeowners are installing solar panels to capture heat; we swap out our incandescent light bulbs for the fluorescent variety; our waste is sorted before we put it out at the curb—a container for recyclable materials, one for yard debris, another for the landfill. The system works. My large barrel of recycled materials is emptied every two weeks, but my smaller-by-half landfill container is only picked up once a month. Even then, only rarely is it filled to capacity.

Five years ago I moved from a neighborhood house with a decent-sized yard to a lower-maintenance house with a yard so small I can't even call it a yard without choking on my own hyperbole. There's a strip of grass up front and a patch in back which is planted up with lackluster shrubs that I only have to tend to twice a year. It's a lazy girl's dream, allowing me to idle on the interior side of the windowglass with my cup of hot tea and not-much-to-do when the mowers and rakes and shovels and hoes begin their spring flights off the hardware-store shelves.

And so I now confess that my do-the-right-thing genes have been hunkering down indoors as well. For five this-house years, I've been tossing my vegetable scraps blithely in the trash can under the sink. Every slime-gray potato peel, each boomerang of watermelon rind, all the inedible rowboats of celery—the whole biodegradable shebang has been going right into the can that's emptied into the barrel that rides in the truck where it's dumped into a hole and compacted to a loaf that will last longer into the eons than that proverbial holiday fruitcake and all those other unkillable clichés.

Recycling kitchen waste is not an activity alien to me. I kept a compost bin at my last house. I'd made it myself with cedar boards measured and cut and configured in such a way so that the contents would breath. I filled it with kitchen waste and grass clippings and the autumn trees' dropped leaves. I didn't even begrudge the dogs their scrubbings when, after a wet mowing, they'd bound their way into the open bin, making chlorophylly green leprechauns of themselves. I watered the heap and fed it and turned it. I laced the black harvest back into the soil in the yard.

In my current life I've donated uncounted cat litter buckets to friends who've employed them for their own composting needs. When asked, I wrote a poem lauding the another neighborhood's composting efforts. And with each small gesture I've carved a notch in the expanding waistline of my own inertia.

Fiction writers talk about "consistent inconsistencies," those at-odds-with-themselves traits that legitimize a character's humanity on the page. I've tried to run this scam on myself, explaining that my failure to compost is one of those exceptions that proves the rule of my humanness. But a scam is a scam, and after a while, even I get tired of sniffing out the ones I'm selling to myself.

So last week I bought a compost bin. A recycled plastic one that took, if I puff the numbers, approximately 5 entire minutes to assemble. I installed it in the back patch, behind a threesome of pampas grass that, guaranteed come fall, I'll again be whining about having to cut back. And I'll admit I'm feeling a little proud of myself—for finally coming to do that which I know I should have been doing all along.

Oh, I'm not delusional. I'll be annoyed in short order, grumbling about how quickly my kitchen container seems to fill up, about the long walk down the stairs to empty it out. A clearer conscious does not shake off the lazy blues. But a life is about choices, I think, about trying to make the better ones—one slippery banana peel at a time.

(with thanks to my confessor, Q)

The author, with Kobi, self-composting

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Oh, Bother. Why Bother With Those Bitty Obits?

2/4/2013

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When word came this week that André Cassagnes, inventor of the Etch A Sketch, had died, a little dial twisted inside me, and a squiggly black line tugged at my heart.

I had never heard of Cassagnes, had never even considered that there might have been a real person behind that iconic, maddening toy of my childhood, behind tens of millions of other childhoods.

But here was Cassagnes—baker's son, electrical technician, man with a story—and were it not for his invention which has endured for over fifty years and the obituary reporting his death at the age of 86, I never would have heard of him.

When I first read the news of his death, I thought I'd end up writing about toys and games—even candy bars—remembered from my past, many of which have been reappearing in the stores these days in a sort of retro revival. But then I got to thinking about the obituaries themselves, how they are fading toward their own demise. And how it's looking pretty unlikely that they will ever be revived.

The good, local newspapers still print them. These notices of death are often the only means that one-time friends and distant family members have to learn about the loss. An obituary offers the practical information about arrangements and services, but it also provides a public record of an person's life. These records can be precious to generations to come, links to an otherwise inaccessible history, but in the present moment, a community that values its humanity does itself well to take pause, if only for a moment, and recognize the loss of those who have walked in its midst.

It's particularly sad to note that my own community newspaper, for economic reasons, has ceased to publish the standard obituaries. Sure, an option remains for loved ones to pay for column space to post a personally written notice. But while these paid remembrances can be heartwarming as well as illuminating, they are infrequently timely, and no replacement for those traditional postings, wherein each of the lost, regardless of means or history or social status, had one final chance to stand equally among all for recognition. For remembrance. The barest bones of our lives have become, it seems, as ephemeral as a child's scrawlings on an Etch A Sketch.

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The Fog of My Everyday

1/21/2013

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This week's otherworldly world view

I've been thinking about fog.

We've been living in it for five days now, the mercury hovering—28, 31, 29, 32, 30, night, day, no higher, no lower. Fog-frost on rooftops, fog-glaze on handrails, fog-moss in sidewalk cracks, fog-glass on maple twigs. The cold is a clap to the collarbone, knife in the waistband, ice to ankles. Floor to sky, the air is haze. Is blur. A view through gauze, through bandage. A mummy's view.

I've been thinking about fog. How delicious it is in a movie, the seat back high, armrests close. Silent and shadowless. Hovering, diffuse. White and something other than white. A character named Atmosphere.

I've been thinking about fog. How you can stand fixed in one place and still lose yourself to it. From whatever the direction, you step into the same. A cloud to be entered. A cloud to walk through. How wholly you must trust that there exists no ledge in there.

I've been thinking about fog. The Mississippi Delta kind of fog. Fog of steam. Fog of swamp. Fog like Saran, no way to breath through it. I've been thinking

about fog. Fog of mulch. Of decay. Fog of landfill. Fog of roadkill. I've been

thinking about fog. Fog of shower glass. Of breath on windowpane.
Of love in the back seat of a car. I've

been thinking about fog

I've been thinking

I've been

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Read All About It!

6/4/2012

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SWAT!

I was published this morning.

In the "Mailbag" (aka: Letters to the Editor) section of the Register-Guard, our local newspaper.

What fired me up was a headline which appeared a few days ago above an article about a trio of 20-ish siblings who'd been "spinning cookies" in their car, the driver allegedly drunk. The headline referred to the behavior as "driving antics."

Antics? Really? Dictionary.com, my handy ready-reference, defines antic(s) as "a playful trick or prank." To my mind, there is nothing playful, tricky or prankish about such behavior. And I imagine—would like to imagine—that most grown-ups agree with me on that.

Don't worry. However worthy a rant, I'm not going to lecture about drinking and driving. (I'll leave that to MADD, which has spent three decades working to get that particular message across.) My beef is with sloppy language—in this case, the sloppy editing that allowed a headline to equate reckless endangerment with playground hijinks.

I can't speak to what led the writer of that particular headline to miscast the word "antics," though I can theorize aplenty: Was it a lack of understanding of the actual definition of the word? Tone-deafness to the nuances of meaning? A biased perspective on the seriousness of driving while impaired? Perhaps it was a simple matter of economy, the word chosen for the purpose of meeting that day's space requirements. Regardless of the reason, the choice of one word over another can make a huge difference in the message we send.

Today's editor didn't have to print my letter with its stinging tone. But it was printed. I like to think that my message was heard. That it was important enough to pass along.

Our voices matter. Words matter. Choose wisely.

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Memorial Day Without the Memories

5/28/2012

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Adrian Vaaler prepares to play "Taps"

I'll just say it: I'm lucky. Lucky to have come from a family relatively untouched by loss from war. So on this day, Memorial Day, my gratitude pours more from my head than my heart. It embarrasses me to write that, but what's true is true.

My mother, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was a first-class patriot. She understood—and felt deeply— what this country symbolized, despite its imperfections. In 1943, she saw her husband—my future father—off to a Navy destroyer in the North Atlantic. He returned. So many others did not.

My mother bore her children in the prosperity of those post-war years, and we were the beneficiaries. She tried to instill in us her loyalty to the flag, but her history was not ours, the lessons already a generation removed. Informed and influenced by the particulars of my own history, my patriotism is more guarded, more cynical.

And yet there it stands in that last sentence, preceded by its own and unapologetic possessive pronoun: my patriotism. My patriotism, which brought me yesterday, as is has for the past decade or so on this commemorative weekend, to the grounds of the Eugene Masonic Cemetery to hear Taps played at noon in the Public Square. This cemetery, quietly managed to honor its location's natural history, is home to the graves of many of our city's founding citizens as well as veterans of 15 decades of wars. To my mother, who made me stand up for the Stars and Stripes, even when they were passing on a television screen, I will say that your lessons did not go unheard. To the women and men who never lived the future I was fortunate to have had, I say "Thank you."

THIS YEAR, 2012, MARKS THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF TAPS:

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Bin There, Doin' That

Oh, Bother. Why Bother With Those Bitty Obits?

The Fog of My Everyday

Read All About It!

Memorial Day Without the Memories

Nancy Carol Moody

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