J Daniel Hess’ Blog

It’s no secret. Residents of 300 North Bolton think it’s a special strip.  People know each other. People care for each other. People even share their poetry and ladders and flour with each other.

Saturday there’s a community boil.

This week Jason and Leon and I bought a load of mulch. Jason added a number of quarts of pea gravel.  The group rate made the purchase feasible.

Jason hurried to move the pea gravel before it rained.

My first ten barrows of mulch went to the front yard. I'll wait until Leon and Jason get their ten before I get more. We'll share it equally.

It’s no insignificant thing to live where community is valued. I fully support our mayor’s attempt to strengthen communities, a way to make Indy a fine place to live.

I want a lightning thundering rain storm
not a distant sometimes rumble
or a caster’s “chance of rain”
but a trumpet tuba band
up from Evansville.

I want less than a nano second
between downbeat and boom,
a basso in full breath
shattering wine glasses
at T sharp.

I want a dark sky,
black billows that
flip on night lights,
dark enough to get out candles
for when the power goes.

I want rain to splash the avenue
scrub the curbs
flood the troughs
fill the barrels
and rouse Jack, late for his pulpit.

I want rain drops
full of nitrogen for seedlings
that open their mouths like little robins.
Rain, falling this way and that,
bidding birds deeper into the brush pile.

Let it rain on the house
and I’ll pay a tip of thanks.

The April 1 issue of The New Yorker offers fiction by Sarah Braunstein. According to the “Contributors” column, Braunstein won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her first novel is entitled “The Sweet Relief of Missing Children.”  I might look for that novel in hopes of getting a perspective on the short story in the magazine.

It’s titled “Marjorie Lemke” which is the name of the central character, a 20-year-old struggling woman who finds a job cleaning rooms at a local motel. But the large photo under the title shows a baby that represents Marjorie’s infant named Della.

There’s not much of a narrative in this story. Marjorie meets a man staying on in a room; his wife is a traveling union buster who is out of the room all day. Marjorie and the man become acquainted, then friendly, and eventually share a daytime bed.

This is not a story, however, about sex or morality or drugs, but all of them are in the story. Rather, it’s a study of Marjorie, whom a childhood acquaintance labeled a “Major Loser.” Indeed, pregnant at 19, she saw Clive, father of her baby, jump a train and leave town. She now lives in the basement of her aunt’s house. With a baby.

It’s the fiction-writer’s use of the baby that fascinates me. All through the story the baby is present — on the cart while Marjorie cleans rooms, in the room when Marjorie drinks in the attention of the man Gabe, at home nights when the baby cries from a sore gum. The large portrait of a baby coaxes me to think the baby and not Marjorie holds center stage.

Yet what is the function of this artistic inclusion?  Is it to show Marjorie’s sorry state?  Is it to show Marjorie’s inexpressable hope?  Perhaps there is no need for interpretation — you don’t draw a portrait of Marjorie without including her baby.

A rather nice day of life on earth.

1.  Good coffee.  Sorry to see that Notre Dame women lost to Connecticut.

2.  Jim is correct. Green Waves took the old computer (and batteries) and yes the chap at the back door was pleasant.

3.  The clerk at Office Max jollied the whole store into brightness. “It’s a good day and it’s going to be a good week. I feel it coming on!”  she said as she tallied the print cartridges.

4.  Twelve small goldfish (13 cents each) at Petsmart. And a small plant.  And food granules that sink. “The fish don’t gulp air when the pellets are on the tank floor,” she informed me.

5.  Post office.  A book to Canada.  Shucks, no green stamps available, only US flags. I wanted to ask the clerk if he has a sister. I once saw a woman in the neighborhood who looks just like him.  And smiles like him.

6.  Instead of buying a set of saw horses at Lowes, I uncovered Ben and Sam’s workbench in the garage that will serve just as well. Rearranged garage stuff like Mother used to rearrange living room furniture.

7.  Brought the cannas up from the basement.  Good shape.  Some green shoots. I planted the plot with about 20 tubers and have lots of bulbs left over. I’ll send a bag to Judy Alger. Shirley’s daughter took some and I’ll ask the urban farmers if they want any.

8.  No phone hucksters thus far.

9.  Jason wrote on Facebook — coordinating a purchase of a truckload of fine mulch for 300 block of North Bolton.  Eighty bucks for two yards delivered, not bad.

10. Washed the blue rags, actually left over surgical sponges.

11.  Sent a work report to a client.

12.  Took the car to Ed Martin. I asked for an oil change; the attendant showed me how to use a gauge that shows oil quality. Mine is at 70% potency, so no oil change. This Honda is getting about 40 mpg on the highway, 32 or 33 in town.  I look at this car and grin.

13.  Am looking every minute on the minute for rain. I’m disquieted about the dry April. Are we going to suffer an extension of last year’s drought?

14. The Pennsylvania photo in Facebook has brought warm comments from old Keystoners.

15. I don’t think my comment in church yesterday about the resurrection communicated well. At least one questioner afterwards seemed confused. I had said that I’m not interested in the debate about the physical resurrection of Jesus but rather find meaning in the sacred spirit alive in us today.

16. This afternoon I caught 30 minutes of the Manchester/United soccer match in England. Watching the strength, agility and accuracy of those pros prompted me to see why soccer (futbol) is the sport of the world.

17. Tonight in the college basketball finals, if Michigan wins, Joy claims the family brachets kitty. If Louisville wins, it’s Courtney’s.

18. My evening will be given to magazines and a book. Like I said, it’s a good day … with a chance of a thunder storm tonight.

When I saw Annie’s eagerness to connect with other children at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum …

… I chuckled in recognition of the passing on of genes — specifically those genes that help to make a person gregarious, people-oriented, outgoing.  She got it from her mother …

shown here at a Super Hero birthday party, who got it from her father …

the middle papaback rider who got it from his mother …

Ella, who never met a person she didn’t want to talk with. When we  visited her in the senior center, we’d sit for no long than ten minutes until she wanted to take us on the halls and lounges to introduce her friends to us. She’d strike up a conversation with a minimum of tinder.  She got it from her mother …

Annie, seated on the right, who enjoyed entertaining other church families on Sunday and her extended family whenever possible.  From Annie to Annie, then, its “howdy stranger, let’s talk.”

Step One.  Call Jim Showalter.  And that’s it, folks.

Jim grew up on a farm in northern Alberta where he learned farming and some mechanics and carpentry from his dad. He aced physics in high school and earned a physics major at Eastern Mennonite University. From that time on he has moved through and up the ladders of engineering. His specialty — figuring out how to solve a mechanical or carpentry or computer program problem.

I suppose I could have purchased a three-barrel rain catcher off the web. It was more fun to spend a Saturday listening and watching as Jim put a system together for me.

I set the old rain barrel out by the sidewalk with a “free” sign waving in the breeze. It was picked up in two hours. Next I cleared and leveled a larger area behind the garage.  Then Jim came.

He made the water entry area out of a bucket lid, a rubber hose and a screen.

He cut holes in the first barrel for water outflow and in the third barrel for a hose connection.

He is fixing to run a pipe down from each barrel into a lateral pipe connecting the three barrels.

After the lateral pipe was in place we turned the barrels upside down and set them on cement blocks.

He took pains to make all of the fittings tight, built in an overflow for each barrel, drilled a tiny hole into each outlet pipe to remove chances of the outflow causing a vacuum in a barrel. He hand made braces for the lateral pipe and created a gauge that will show how full the barrels are.

The connection from the eaves tough to the input barrel was easy for Jim. It would have taken me a day and a fever.

There it is with a forecast of rain tonight.

I’ve written previously about tipping points — that mysterious, unpredicted moment when a filling cauldron tips its contents. The image found its way to human circumstances as when a population shifts an opinion or disposition or habit.

There was a tipping point in the acceptance of the fact that the earth revolves around the sun.

There was a tipping point when the United States changed its opposition to going to war against Germany in World War I.

There was a tipping point in the support of the Civil Rights Act.

There was a tipping point in the Mennonite Church’s acceptance of divorced adults.

There has been a recent tipping point toward the acceptance of gays and lesbians.

The process goes something like this. A strong majority of the particular population holds to a certain view. The minority view may be rejected to the point of ridicule and even persecution. Gradually the opinion begins to shift.  Then at a point — perhaps at 30% of the population, 40% or some other percent, the once unthinkable becomes the new norm.

I wonder when we will experience the tipping point that make littering not only offensive but socially forbidden.

I wonder when we will tip toward a view of guns other than what is dictated by the National Rifle Association.

I wonder whether there will ever be a tipping point toward Chrisian/Islamic community.

Paradigms change and so do the times. I sense a tipping back to an oral society that was tipped by Gutenberg and others toward a print era. I sense a strong trend toward redefinition of the family unit, although I’m not sure in what direction the tipping point will send us. There will surely be a tipping point in global warming; again I don’t know where we will be tipped to.

Most curious of all is the likely fact that we are now existing within tipping points but don’t know it. Only later will we recognize the before/after difference.

You are probably aware of the backyard wildlife habitat program sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation. It certifies areas designed especially for  wildlife. The areas must offer food, water, shelter, and a place for raising young.

We don’t have a certified habitat but there are several features out back that birds and animals write biological blogs about.  There is an undeveloped strip between our properties and those on the street to the east. Winters, the children use the hill for sledding but in doing so must weave among mature trees.

On our side are tall walnut trees, several senior spruces and a thick euonymus ground cover.

To this area we’ve added a substantial pile of havenly brush:  christmas trees, fallen branches, prunings and some finer items such as leaves. Birds love it.

We haven’t been as successful in feeding birds. Sparrows and squirrels take over the table.  Our compost pile, while fairly neat, sets a smorgasbord for raccoons and possums. I scared a possum into sleep one evening when I caught him unawares.

Red-tailed hawks come around as do hummingbirds. Overhead sand hill cranes squackle their way to and fro the northland.

We aren’t intending to apply for certification. I am frankly more interested in continuing to reduce lawn grass until it’s small enough to cut with a scissors.

Yesterday President Obama said, “We can identify galaxies light-years away, study particles smaller than an atom, but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sit between our ears.”

He is asking for $100 million to fund the BRAIN initiative  (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).

How can I not applaud this initiative?

Several weeks ago we  drove to this house …

… where a relative, afflicted with Alzheimers, will probably spend the rest of her life.  There, close to her caregivers, she will exist with a healthy body and a malfunctioning brain.

To what extent does her brain function in “normal” ways?  What is her awareness?  Does she know a past tense, a future tense, or even a present tense? Does her brain remember faces, facts, words, or even her most favorite things? Did she know who took her for a walk? Did she know they love her? Is she able to love?

A college classmate, Joe Martin, who was dean of the Harvard Medical School for ten years, gave a lecture on the brain at my alma mater, Eastern Mennonite University. He described the synapse — the tiny juncture between two nerve cells across which some kind of impulses pass, somewhat like the firing of a spark plug. In the brain are millions of synapses. There, he suggested, will be a place to study the causes and forms of deterioration of the brain.

Perhaps I should volunteer as a lab specimen.  This morning I hauled the cardboard to the recycling center. I decided to return by the southern route. As I drove east on English Avenue I mindlessly repeated to myself the streets I would pass until the one I would use. The names came until I got to the last one. That name didn’t come. The street is a major one, two blocks from our house. I use it almost every day. Aha, I said to myself, here is a case of synaptical malfunction. The name was not available to me.  Only after I retrieved the name of our pharmacy at 10th and Arlington could I pull up the work “Arlington.” Of course Arlington Avenue.  It was there in my brain but for some reason — maybe the coffee wasn’t strong enough this morning — the firing didn’t take place.

A hundred million dollars. Sure, let’s fund the project.

Today between lunch and nap time we covered the table and brought out the paints — at their asking. I looked on with glee and admiration. Neither the five year old nor the two year old said, “Now Pop Pop, I’m not artist but … .”  No, they were into those paints with abandon, not intend on making folk art or fine art but just finger paints.

Two-year-old used her fingers, a sponge, a spoon and a roller. Was she aware of her placement of darks and lights?  Probably not, but she was pleased to send one of two paintings along home with me.

Five year old in her second drawing made a study of red. She worked on it a long time, sweeping first her finger and then her hand back and forth. Then she said it was finished.

I wish I had that spontaneity with paints.