I’ve fulfilled the most important of my New Year obligations. I’ve eaten all the holiday chocolates so we can start 2023 eating healthy. Sure, it made me a little speedy for a few days, but that helped me complete another first-of-the-year task—making Happy New Year cards to send to friends/family. This task wouldn’t have existed here in January if I’d gotten around to making Christmas/Solstice cards in December, but I didn’t. And I really needed all the chocolate I could get my hands on because my design for this year required multiple steps.

First I had to write a greeting with passable calligraphy. Luckily, my standards for my own calligraphy are not high or I’d still be working at it. I had to carve and print multiple linoleum blocks and slice construction paper into one inch strips with the paper cutter. There was some surprisingly tricky paper folding, and I had to squeeze out blobs of rubbery glue to hold miniscule googly eyes. And after several days of this, there was still the signing and addressing of envelopes. The chocolate ran out before the project, but I made it.

But I felt a little flat after I slid all the stamped cards through the mail slot at the post office.

Then a friend saved me. He sent a video of a Jesse Jackson speech from 1988. Hopeful, uplifting, inspiring words! and so welcome in this cynical political climate.

So, my top New Year’s resolution is to maintain hope and encourage some smiles. Maybe my silly cards do both.

Facebook is a disappointment.

I thought it would be a good site to see faces of friends and family and their friends and families and photos from their vacations or their new haircuts or hair colors or pets or gardens. A place to read updates on the Doings of friends and acquaintances and favorite authors. A great source of inspiration from artists of all kinds.

But – alas! – politics.

And religios jingoism.

Were I more tolerant and less impulsive, I would ignore fact-challenged political memes. But sometimes I don’t. I am guilty of posting links to point out fallacies and offering explanations with context and background. And what thanks do I get? Abuse and insults. Probably what I deserve since no one has ever replied “OMG! You are SO right!” and I’ve never replied that way either so what did I expect? No one’s mind is changed by Facebook comments. Facebook is set up to elicit reactions, not thoughtful discussions. (Apparently, so am I.)

So when I see a meme such as: “When you kneel down to God, he stands up for you. And when he stands up for you, no one can stand against you.” and my better angel prompts me to ignore it and scroll on down the page, I find myself further roused by “Heaven has strict immigration laws. Hell has open borders.”

My eyes skim over these sentences and my brain leaps into arguments. This simplistic stuff can drive me nuts.

One of the entities generating these memes calls itself God, as if it is the sole manifestation of the category. So when I blocked that particular Producer of Memes, I blocked God.

Why can’t we all stick to personal news on Facebook? That would bring us all closer together.

But don’t expect me to stick to it. The political stuff I post is spot-on and everyone is grateful when I share it. And MY religious views are not offensive.

Right? Right?

Memorial Day

Driving to the veterinarian’s office to pick up pain meds for our elderly arthritic Lab, I saw something I had never seen before — a front yard full of patriotic inflatables.

Super-size blow-up Christmas decorations are a common sight around here, rising from the ground even before Thanksgiving. There are more Halloween inflatables every year, and even Easter inflatables are not an uncommon sight. But patriotic inflatables? That’s a new one, for me anyway.

Plus, it’s May and isn’t Memorial Day supposed to more somber than celebratory? The 4th of July is weeks away. Assuming no incidents involving sharp objects, will plastic Uncle Sam still salute passing traffic through July?

Back at home, trying to describe this display to my husband and a son and his wife, I remember there were six or seven figures but can only remember two of them — the above-mentioned Uncle Sam and a giant red-white-and-blue top hat.

“What else was there?” I say. “What else could there be?”

Gleeful suggestions of “Mt. Rushmore!” “George Washington!” and “Abraham Lincoln!” are rejected as not quite hitting the mark.

“A plastic blow-up American flag!” Hilarious, we all agree.

“A tank!” is not found specifically patriotic.

“Fireworks!” is an inspired suggestion and sets us off in all directions (pun intended) with “exploding fireworks” pronounced the funniest and Uncle Sam riding a rocket that literally explodes as it zips into the sky as the most outrageous.

My husband attempts to change the subject to a baseball game he watched from the stands earlier in the day, a young pitcher who hit a ball high into the air where it wavered in the wind and —

“Apple pie!” our son says.

“Yes! An inflatable apple pie!”

“With a baseball smooshed right in the center,” son adds.

Three of us laugh and laugh. Husband/father is not amused. Baseball is serious stuff.

But so is everything else. This has been hammered home during these months of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the January 6th coup attempt. These are serious times.

The next morning, my husband points out what an appropriate metaphor red-white-and-blue patriotic inflatables are. Plastic. Full of air. Basically empty and likely to deflate with a sharp poke. Like so much of what passes for patriotism these days.

For months, it’s been too hard to write, too impossible to believe I have anything worth saying. Am I just virtue signaling? pontificating out of blind ignorance? I can question myself into immobility.

In the meantime, I stubbornly hang our flag on clear days, even though I refuse to pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth. I cling to the ideals the flag represents with the hope the collective We will yet carry that standard into a state of liberty and justice for all.

(P.S An exercise, if you wish. Can you identify examples of privilege folded into this text?)

Do you remember old songs with pleasure? Really old songs? One hundred years old or more?

I do. I don’t know why I remember them or where I first heard them. I’ve never been a fan of barbershop quartets and I wasn’t in the school choir. But I’ll sometimes hum that big hit of 1892 — “Bicycle Built for Two.”

My last piano lesson, pre-coronavirus, was February 1, and I have been practicing the same two assigned pieces every morning since then, right after I pull the quilt up over the bed and before breakfast. After weeks of daily exercise, my fingers fall smoothly on the right keys for all the chords, without crashes. The harder piece begins to sound like music. The other piece is a march so even through fumbles, a steady rhythm saves it. 

But I have to practice something besides those two pieces.

Happily for me, a friend, learning I was taking piano lessons, passed along her childhood copy of  The American Song Treasury – 100 Favorites and it was right on top of my piano, staring me in the eye.  Almost every song inside is familiar to me.

But not some of the words. A cheerful tune does not guarantee cheerful verses.

Sure, things are great for Daisy Belle and her anonymous groom on that tandem bike, but what’s really going on in “There is a Tavern in the Town”? Turns out it’s not a jolly drinking song at all. It’s a song of betrayal ending with a grave.

And that haunting waltz, “After the Ball is Over”? It’s the heartbreaking story of a man’s true love, lost to him through his own mistrust, and how she died and he never loved another — as told to his little niece. Now there’s a bedtime story any little child would enjoy!

“The Man on the Flying Trapeze”? The handsome aerialist steals the singer’s girlfriend. “Listen to the Mocking Bird” is a tearjerker. The Sweet Hallie of the song sleeps in the valley and the mocking bird sings over her grave. Oh, also weeping willows (of course). “Camptown Races” glories in the joys of gambling. “Billy Boy” is about a child bride, unsavory (to say the least) from today’s perspective. But the tune is catchy.

Nursery rhymes can be problematic for me, too. Is Bobby Shaftoe trustworthy? What the heck is going on with the Spanish nut tree? Where do I stand on the politics of “Goosey, Goosey Gander”?

Because I never learned to carry a tune, I don’t condone these verses with my own voice. Why wreck a good tune with off-key singing?

If only I could refrain from thinking, the music would sound even better!

Good produce did not grace my childhood.  We had bananas and red delicious apples and two kinds of vegetables: canned or frozen. Mama’s choices were limited. She didn’t keep a garden and she didn’t have a car to search out better grocery stores or summer produce stands. 

There were watermelons, of course, and those were wonderful. And for a few days in the summer ripe pears fell from a tree in a neighbors’ yard. We kids brushed the wasps off and ate around the rotten spots with juice dripping off our chins.

After I married, my in-laws supplied us with bushels (literally) of fresh vegetables. I took up gardening, too, though not on the same scale as my in-laws. Green beans snap louder when you pick them from your own vines. And we live close to a farmers’ market piled high with all the produce I don’t grow. And, oh, the fruit! The glorious fruit.

In our kitchen, right now, there is watermelon, three kinds of peaches, nectarines, small yellow plums, apricots, blackberries, red raspberries, blueberries and sweet, plump cherries.

Spring through fall is a parade of fruits at Lakeside Farmers’ Market, from the first strawberries through the last kinds of apple. The peaches taste better every year. To smell of a ripe white peach is reminiscent of a rose. It is no work at all to eat three of the little donut peaches in a sitting.

Today, in our own back yard, birds are plucking elderberries off the bushes, the figs are fattening, and the persimmon tree sports squat green globes. Egg-shaped fruits ripen on  the passion flower vine, but our June apples are long gone, baked in a pie.

Are you feeling depressed and discouraged from an overdose of The News? Are your brain cells discombobulated from Too Much Screen Time?

Cleanse your mental palate with a peach! Savor a miracle of creation. The right peach can rekindle your appreciation for the world.

A friend’s email begins: “Thank you for your real mail note sometime ago.”

I am sorry that my friend feels her email message is somehow Less Than a snail mail note. If an infrequent email is the best way for her to send me news of her life, she can be sure I am happy whenever that email pops up in my inbox.

Of course, “real” mail has the distinct advantage of being tangible.

Real mail can be crushed in anger and lit with a match. It can be ripped up in frustration — used as lining on the bottom of the parakeet’s cage — soaked in tears or treasured for years.

My own emails can take on a cold tone I never intended. My friend of the email above, in contrast, writes in a way that even Comic Sans MS font cannot diffuse the warmth and personality.

Email is great for factual messages — date, time, place — but usually too dry for nuance. A group email to my bookclubs is so much more efficient than individual phone calls.

Text messaging my have the same built in limitations as email but it also has easy-to-use emoticons, the hieroglyphics of the modern age. A smiling cat face humanizes any message (sometimes inappropriately!). And texting is so immediate, so of-the-moment, that it can’t be beat for sending out a “We are running five minutes late” kind of message. Take THAT, snail mail!

It’s nice to live in an age with so many choices, but, I confess, I do like snail mail. A handmade card, a lovely paper, inked script in lavender or orange — snail mail can be a small treat for the senses.