Yet it’s old friends that prompt me to urge others not to give up friendships casually. Friendships that grow over decades become like old-growth forests, treasures in the lifescape.

So it is that currently we celebrate an old friendship. There is no pat way to do such meetings, but I can tell you periperally about this one.

1. Select a place to meet, a place that is pleasant, a place that doesn’t burden any one with extra work.

Detroit, seen from Windsor, Ontario

2. Time to sit and talk. Time to walk and talk.

The Sculpture Gardens in Windsor

3. Cafes that accommodate two-hour meals, occasional laughter and even aloud readings’

4. Local recommendations always.

4. Galleries to visit and art to to talk about.

Nude by the river.

5. Stories and more stories. Memories. Personal reports. Questions. Ruminations. Love.   Into the evening.

Old friendships that grace their senior years and ours.

We have met more or less midway, in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit.

Memories bridge the many years we have known each other. It is good to be together.

The despised entrepreneur does the same thing. I am referring to the impoverished unskilled sometimes homeless member of the “last, the least and the lost” who ventures to get cash by means other than panhandling.

– He comes to me at Massachusetts and Delaware. He says he lives close to Cathedral (a school in town), his car has been towed, he needs $22 more to get the car out of the garage.

– She sobs at the front door. She was referred by a neighbor on N. Bolton on the other side of Pleasant Run. Her mother died. She wishes so much to attend the funeral. Could she do work, anything, to get cash for a ticket.

– On a rainy night, I encounter a car at the intersection, pulled cockeyed toward the gutter. A man approaches on the passenger side. I lower the window. He ran out of gas, he says. He’s got a child in the car. He needs cash.

– He confesses his poverty. In this Christmas season he wishes so much to buy his grandchildren gifts. He needs $200.

It’s easy to feel abashed when we fall for these stories, followed by irritation toward these “rip-off” entrepreneurs. All the while we may be party to the societal acceptance of so-called honorable entrepreneurs who get us by pennies on the dollar when we allow ourselves to be suckered by capitalistic excess and deceit.

– The hamburger from the local fast-food, grown on fields that once were valuable forest lands.

– The dental service, cosmetic at best, priced at a premium.

– The ball point pen designed to last for only a few weeks.

– The roofing job done shoddily.

This blog is not intended to besmirch entrepreneurship, nor to justify the tactics of street thieving. I am merely pointing to our acceptance on one kind of entrepreneurship and rejection of another.

PS    I wonder what plan I might devise if I were 75 years old, out of house, out of health, out of food, out of money — with people dependent upon me.

In her older years my mother said to me, “We tried to do our best.”  My father, often unable to find words, said much the same thing.

We five children, especially in our teens and young adulthood, may have snickered upon hearing those words. Snickered or grimaced, but none of us had the gumption to explore with our parents the wherewithall of their parenting.

I know now that they were obedient to the authorities over them: (1) the Bible, (2) the church, (3) the nation, and (4) community mores. Never did they doubt those authorities.

They lived according to personal ideals: (1) work hard, (2) treat the neighbors and even the tramps well, (3) “Let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay,” (4) be clean in thought, in word, in body.

What they understood about the family systems and thought handed down to them, I do not know. I am aware, however, that Mother was her father’s favored and that Daddy was his father’s unfavored. I know they were instinctively farmers and marketers, simple people who didn’t go to school beyond grade 8, generally suspicious of wealthy and highly educated people, strong believers that the earth is six thousand years old, and altogether removed from blasphemy.

I did not know and could not know their confidence level in raising their first children. Were they ecstatic when their first child was born? Were they a tad fearful as they cared for us? Did they live in anxiety lest any of their children would die?  What kind of disciplinarians were they in those early years? Why did they treat the fifth child differently from the first? How did they want to parent differently from what they experienced as children?

Without too much effort (which I have not deliberately made in my adult life), I might have recognized the pressures they lived under. Conforming to the church, getting a job (Daddy began as “hired help”), paying bills, bearing the taunting of relatives for not raising tobacco, suffering crop loss, hearing their children’s complaints.

Much easier for me is remembering what I thought they did wrong, which at this moment I feel no need to rehearse. In some of those crisis moments, they were being consistent. In some cases they were caught in the blindness of their own humanity. But never intentionally mean.

Mother’s words were profound. “We tried to do our best.”  I believe her.

Nonetheless there is a seeming unrelentlessness for children to hold their parents to an impossible standard, a standard informed by revised world views, updated data, situation ethics, changed social habits and evolving social institutions. That is, we judge them by a measuring device not available to them.

Furthermore, where they goofed, their errors may be said to come from the dark side of their virtues which we might not be able to fully appreciate.

Moving on, then, to our own parenting. Alas, we are surprised that our children can recite their own complaints about their parents. Those grievances, sometimes annoyances, are deeply felt, legitimate and consequential.  All I can say is “We tried to do our best.”

Now we see our children in parental roles. I admire them. I encourage them. And I hope they develop the grace to bear the words later on from their children about their own occasional failures.

This rumination prompts me to revise my thoughts and my words about my parents.

But more significant is the change in my weeding.  On the farm we raised potatoes, up to a hundred acres of potatoes. Many a summer day we walked the low rows, cutting down or cutting out thistles. When we got to the end of one row, we saw the hundreds of additional thistled rows. As I recall, there was no delight to be found in that weeding.

Today I’m a different kind of weeder. Like Pirsig who gave his full attention to one minute part of the motorcycle — a chain for example — an attention claiming his eyes and ears and sense of touch, so I approach weeding.  I focus on the immediate area, let’s say the four square feet where i am working, not the huge lawn and garden to be weeded.  I focus on the immediate territory — the soil, the insects, an occasional snake, the chickweed, the red roots, the wild garlic, the run-away mint. That’s where I work, doing it as well as I can. When finished I admire the spot and then move on.

This very day I pulled weeds around trees at Winter Wood. Here is a huge walnut with its feet in chickweed.

I rather enjoyed pulling the chickweed, although I was disappointed in not seeing any snakes which had many holes under the weeds. I don’t know how long it took me — I wasn’t watching the clock.  The camera showed the tree after the weeding.

The camera, by the way, said “Oops. The tricycle turned into a bush!”

While weeding — just at a pace appropriate for thinking — I thought.  One thing I thought:  to a farmer who wants only turnips, the calla lilly is a weed.

After five hours of weeding I barrowed the remains to the burn pile …

and returned home to a shower.  I’d not be unhappy if I had to weed again tomorrow.

We have a plot between the street and sidewalk, a plot immediately in front of the house, a plot between our property and Shirley’s and a plot out back.  I suppose it totals 750 square feet. Each year I try to reduce the size by 20 to 40 square feet.

The problem isn’t the mowing.  I have a muscle-driven American reel mower, somewhat like the ones we had back in the 40s. To mow the lawn is not an unpleasant chore. It takes me maybe 20 minutes.

The problem is two-fold: cost and environment.  The cost has to do with seeds, weed killer, fertilizer and water.  I once heard that we Americans spend more on our lawns than Africa does on its total agricultural enterprise.

The environmental issue is presented convincingly in the May issue of National Geographic. Dan Charles, NPR reporter on food and nature (and native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) authors a world-wide study of fertilizer with a focus on nitrogen. He reports on China, Africa and of course the United States. “Once spread on fields, nitrogen compounds cascade through the environment, altering our world, often in unwelcome ways. Some of the nitrogen washes directly from fields into streams or escapes into the air. Some is eaten, in the form of grain, by either humans or farm animals, but is then released back into the environment as sewage or manure from the world’s growing number of pig and chicken farms.”

His article sends me over the edge.  I intend to find ways to stop using bought nitrogen, although I will likely spread blood meal around particular plants. I want to increase our harvest of compost which is nitrogen rich. And I shall continue to reduce the size of our lawn until I can cut it with a hand scissors.

The facts of distance and numbers crush my brain. The Milky Way, the galaxy that “contains” our solar system is 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter. This galaxy is populated by 200–400 billion stars and at least as many planets. Hubble’s view of outer space now prompts astronomers to estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies.

Oh, and then there might be parallel universes.

Added to this incalculable size, the universe features incredible sights beyond our ability to imagine. You have probably seen some of these photos, but I shall re-print several stars and galaxies which I can’t name.

Stunned by this immensity and beauty, we return to see our marble, our gorgeous planet earth of which we are stewards for a few short years.

“Then sings my soul… .”

“M is for the million things she gave me,
O is for the … she’s growing old
T is for the tears she shed to save me
H is for her heart so pure and bold
E …
R …
Put them all together they spell Mother –
the name that means so much to me.”

Ella Kreider Good Hess (1913 - 2001)

Instead of a million, I’ll list several things Mother gave me.

1. Life
2. Knowing as a young child she was the most beautiful person in the world
3. A warm lap mornings on the kitchen stove door
4. Tears, upon seeing the German prisoners
5. A love of school
6. Kindness to road walkers
7. Baked beans
8. Enjoyment of people
9. Disposition to be a teacher
10.Ability to laugh at herself

As we arrived in Indy, “the rains came down, of yes the rains came down …”

I parked the Civic in the mall underground (fearful of another hail storm), then we walked until we had to take cover by buildings.

We eventually got to Victory Field where we checked in via soggy home-printed tickets. I was pleased to show Sirvan a large tarp and to explain in as much detail as minutes afforded about the heating plant in the background.

Rowdie tried hard to please. Even Sirvan was delighted by Rowdie’s signature on his outfielder’s glove (not brought from Germany).

Finally the rain stopped, the groundskeepers came out and the small crowd cheered as though a home run had been hit.

But I admit, I thought all of my pre-game explanations and descriptions to Sirvan were for naught. You might play football and soccer on such a night, but baseball?

Sure enough, they limed the lines, the pitchers warmed up (“in the bullpen” I explained to Sirvan), the umpires emerged, five young women sang the national anthem — “PLAY Ball!”

We sat behind the catcher — see the net — but Sirvan hoped a ball would arc over the net. No luck. Shortly after this sharp hit to right I told Sirvan than before long we all would stand and sing.  He looked at me as though my cold feet had numbed my brain.  Surely enough, at the middle of the seventh inning, we all sang “Take me out to the ball game.”  Sirvan was ready for that altar call.

An exciting ninth inning (the Indians won) had us hooping and hollaring. Then Sirvan was surprised once again when the field was cleared and we were entertained by fireworks.

Sirvan summarized the evening.  ”Oh my god.  It was awesome.”