by Judy Handley | Jul 8, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 189: Celebration of Life, Final Pottery Class for Ollie
Date: Friday, July 8, 2022
Weather: Another Beautiful Summer Day; High 79, Low 64 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
At noon I went to the Concord Curling Club for a celebration of life for my friend Olga Mitchell’s husband, Peter. I only met Peter twice before the pandemic hit. He passed away in January of 2021, so the celebration of life was postponed until now. Both Peter and Olga were originally from Canada, both had PhD’s in physics, and both spent their lives working in the Bell Labs in New Jersey. But outside of work, Olga was an avid skier and a stunt pilot while Peter was a curler. Today many of the attendees were curlers with Peter in Canada, New Jersey, and here in Falmouth where Peter and Olga spent their retirement years. Peter was a force in the curling world at both the local and national levels. Today was beautiful celebration of his life. On the back of the program there was poem that I will copy at the end of this log. So beautiful.
I left the celebration and took Ollie to Somerset Creamery for an ice cream cone before his final pottery class in this session. He has another week of classes the first week of August, but we needed to celebrate this week. When he saw the ice cream cone he said, “How can this be a small?” I agreed. It was a small cone with a mountain of chocolate ice cream atop. But he had no trouble wolfing it down. While he was in class, I drove home to have lunch and then returned later to pick him up. When I arrived, he was still sitting at one of the wheels practicing.
Then I got to see the pieces he made this week of which he was very proud.
The Barn Pottery really was once a barn, but it has been transformed into a great space for pottery classes.
After saying farewell to the instructor, Kim, we headed home as Ollie’s friend Simon was coming for dinner and an overnight. Ollie said that even though he is enjoying his time alone without Jonah, he really misses him. He was excited to have a friend over for tonight.
Poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
by Judy Handley | Jul 7, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 188: July 7, 1942
Date: Thursday, July 7, 2022
Weather: Sunny, Breezy, Warm; High 76, Low 61 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
If a day can be described as delicious, then today was just that. The sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly. There was a steady breeze. It was not too hot, not too cold, just right. Jed posted a copy of the today’s weather on Facebook this morning and said, “This is why people come here to Cape Cod for the summer….” And this is one reason why people who live on Cape Cod love it here. But instead of taking advantage of the perfect weather, I spent the day inside thinking about Mark Daniel Handley who was born 80 years ago on July 7, 1942. An early morning text from my son steered my thinking. Justin sent a link to an article about The Limits to Growth that he remembered hearing his dad talk about from time to time.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-infamous-1972-report-that-warned-of-civilizations-collapse/
Justin was correct. Mark did often talk about the 1972 report, The Limits to Growth published by the Club of Rome. It was the result of a study that used a computer model to simulate the consequences of human action on earth’s systems. The question was, “What is the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources?” The answers published in The Limits to Growth report captured the world’s attention. It stated that unchanged population growth and resource consumption would dramatically worsen the conditions for humanity within forty to fifty years. And that was fifty years ago. My question this morning was, “Have population growth and resource consumption dramatically worsened the conditions for humanity in the last fifty years?” I’ll let you answer that question for yourself. Unfortunately, at the time, this report was seen as a doomsday scenario by many. In the current article Justin sent, it states that The Limits to Growth model described scenarios in which humanity either reined itself in and got more sustainable and equitable, thus flourishing, or humanity continued letting capitalists plunder the planet and our civilization to its death. It outlined serious consequences to our actions. But by the 1980’s Reagan era, people were no longer talking about limits. Reagan’s personal response was that there are no limits to growth. We could have it all. Really?
I met political activist Mark Handley in 1973. The following is an excerpt from the Prologue to my book-in-the-making, The Voyage of Windbird. “There he was . . . the man of my dreams. I just didn’t know it quite yet. He was standing at the check-in desk at the Cross Keys Inn in Baltimore when he first caught my eye. I was there for an Eastern Public Television conference to give a presentation on how to help teachers better utilize instructional television programs in their classrooms. Surely, he wasn’t there for our meeting; he didn’t look like the rest of us. Even though the year was 1973, there were no hippies in public television management, at least none that I knew. At this conference, all the men wore blue suits with conservative ties and I and the other two women at the conference were dressed in suits. But this guy, he was wearing herringbone bell bottoms, expensive bell bottoms, mind you, but still bell bottoms. His shirt was sprinkled with little blue flowers like those on feed sacks in days past. His wool vest didn’t match his shirt or his pants. It had geometric designs in shades of tan and brown. His hair was a little too long and he had a beard. I walked on thinking he could not be part of our group.” A few hours later, I found out differently.
In the late 1960’s, Mark had returned from a two-year stint as part of a team setting up an instructional television system for the US government in American Samoa. He had returned to a country deeply divided by the Viet Nam War and in 1971 he joined a newly formed group called Movement for a New Society. At that point in my life, I had no idea we needed a new society. I was clueless. But Mark was hardcore. He had become close friends of one of the co-founders of Movement for a New Society, George Lakey, and somehow through that connection, he met Dana and Dennis Meadows, who in 1972 published The Limits to Growth. I never met any of these people because hours after I first saw Mark, we knew we were meant for each other. And only seven months later, we had sold everything we owned, bought five acres of land next to a national forest in northern Idaho, and were building a log cabin where we would live without any modern conveniences, including electricity. We believed there were limits to growth and we were trying to do our part to reduce consumption. Things changed, however, when we found out we were going to have a baby. We only had $250 of the $7,000 we started with and there were absolutely no prospects for employment for us in northern Idaho. We continued for the next ten years to try and live in a sustainable manner, but in 1984, we returned to what others called a ‘normal’ way of life.
So, these are the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head all day and I have a proposition for you. If you knew Mark, I propose you give him an 80th birthday gift. Think of just one thing you can and will do to reduce consumption starting today. Your gift can be something small like making sure you always turn the lights out when you leave a room or taking shorter showers. Or it can be something big like limiting travel in a fuel consuming vehicle or changing your diet to eat more vegetables which are more sustainable than more meat. And if nothing else, I do hope you will read the article linked above. Whatever you do, think of Mark when you do it:-)
Mark’s farwell parties 067
by Judy Handley | Jul 6, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 187: Joys of Summer
Date: Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Weather: Mostly Sunny; High 81, Low 61 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Clam chowder, strawberry rhubarb pie, gardening, time for kids to pursue special interests, baseball games . . . these are some of the joys of summer. The weather today was sunny and hot, the kind of summer weather I love. This morning I spent time gardening and I made clam chowder from clams that were the product of a clamming expedition by Peter Baranowski and his son who was visiting this weekend. When I was done, I sent a message to Peter telling him I had chowder for him just as I got a phone call from Karen saying they wanted to deliver a piece of homemade strawberry rhubarb pie to me. Great trade! In the afternoon, I took Ollie to the second day of his pottery class. When I took him home, I announced that I had a pot of clam chowder for him to share with his mom and dad. Jonah is away at camp and Sam does not eat clams in any form. But since clam chowder is Ollie’s favorite food in the world, he was so excited he hugged the pot. And I think Heather and Jed were even more excited. They were all going to a Falmouth Commodore’s baseball game. They wanted to take a picnic dinner, but they had no idea what it would be. Clam chowder was the answer. Then I came home and spent an hour reading, something I rarely do except at bedtime. But this new book is a summer read, The Nantucket Hotel by Elin Hilderbrand, a prolific ‘beach read’ author. I figured it is fine to take time to read a summer book any time during a summer day. It was a perfect summer day, and I did not spoil it with house cleaning. Those cobwebs are still there. Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow. Maybe not.
by Judy Handley | Jul 5, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 186: Summer and Dust
Date: Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Weather: Partly Cloudy; High 72, Low 68 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Tonight, I was having dinner with Sam and Ollie and at the start we held hands and I said, “Now it is officially summer.” Sam asked me what I meant by that, and I had to explain that I should have said “Now it is officially summer vacation for me.” Obviously, summer officially arrived on June 21. But because school didn’t end until June 29, because the boys headed to Maine for a few days immediately, and because we then had July 4th, Camp Oma didn’t begin until today. This is the tenth summer that I have been doing Camp Oma. It is going to be very different this year because the boys are older and have different needs. This afternoon, Heather and Jed took Jonah to the Mass Maritime campus for a ten-day Advanced Studies and Leadership Program, a residential college-like experience for 7th and 8th graders, and I took Ollie to his first of four 3-hour-long pottery classes. It still doesn’t feel like summer weatherwise, but today’s activities did make it feel like the first day of summer vacation to me. The updated Camp Oma has begun.
Somehow, I managed to skip spring cleaning this year and for some reason, I woke up this morning in a frenzy because this cottage needs to be dusted. There are cobwebs everywhere. Then tonight I was checking my Facebook feeds and I came across this quote, “You come from dust and you will return to dust. That’s why I don’t dust. It might be someone I know.” Perfect. Maybe those cobwebs can just stay here. Then I started asking myself, “Why are they called cobwebs, not spider webs?” Here’s the answer I found when I Googled my question. “Spider webs are called cobwebs because the old English word for spider was coppe. Turns out that cobwebs are only produced by Theridiidae (cobweb spiders) and Linyphiidae (money spiders) – all others should be just known as spider webs.” I kept searching and found that I might have a species of Linyphiidae called Neriene radiata. This is a filmy dome spider that is a sheet weaver. Whatever they are, we have learned to live together since I moved here. They are prolific, producing cobwebs faster than any spider I have ever encountered. Good excuse, but maybe tomorrow morning I will do a little cobweb removal.
by Judy Handley | Jul 4, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 185: Fabulous Falmouth 4th Fireworks
Date: Monday, July 4, 2022
Weather: Beautiful Day; High 80, Low 64 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Falmouth’s 4th of July fireworks tonight were fabulous.
Near the end, things got a bit frenzied and some of the fireworks went off at barge level making us wonder whether things had gotten out of control.
If not, then it was just spectacular. But if so, hopefully everyone on the barge was okay and there was no damage. Either way, it was great to have fireworks again after a two-year hiatus due to Covid. Heather and family, plus myself, had front row seats on Bristol Beach which is right next to Falmouth Heights Beach, but much less crowded.
I made one tactical error, however. Jed biked and I took everyone else in my car and parked too close to the beach. It was great getting there but getting out was a traffic nightmare. Next time I will definitely park much further away and either walk in and out a mile or so each way to avoid a traffic jam like tonight. Or better yet, bike from Heather and Jed’s. Jed had no problem and got home quickly and safely. Live and learn.
by Judy Handley | Jul 3, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 184: Did Nothing Until 5pm
Date: Sunday, July 3, 2022
Weather: Cloudy AM, Sunshine Mid-Afternoon; High 78, Low 61 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Success! I managed to do nothing until 5 pm. I did stop at the Baranowski’s on my way home after dropping Sam at work. I got see their son David and his family and Shadow got to meet their dog, Duke, a Berniedoodle puppy. He will be one in September but is three times the size of Shadow.
Then I did nothing until I picked Sam up after work and drove him to Gillette Stadium where he met up with Heather, Jed, Jonah, and Ollie who drove from Maine for a Revs soccer game.
They sent a text after the game saying they had a great time and even got to watch a fireworks display after the game.
Thankfully, Heather is feeling much better.
After dropping Sam off, I drove back to Bruce and Jane Woodin’s as a late arrival to a wonderful dinner party with other friends from our dining-in group.
When I arrived, everyone was just finishing up dinner on Bruce and Jane’s deck. The deck looks great with all of Jane’s summer flowers. They saved food for me, but Bruce insisted on fixing a fresh burger. That seemed like a lot of trouble to me, but it was delicious, as was his strawberry sheet cake with strawberries for the red, blueberries for the blue, and whipped cream for the white.
Before we left, Bruce introduced us to his newest ‘pet’—a one-year old horseshoe crab. So tiny and so cute.
Using a special microscope attached to a monitor, we were able to watch Spike eat his dinner. Thank you, Bruce and Jane, for a lovely evening.
Then I got to see the pieces he made this week of which he was very proud.
The Barn Pottery really was once a barn, but it has been transformed into a great space for pottery classes.
After saying farewell to the instructor, Kim, we headed home as Ollie’s friend Simon was coming for dinner and an overnight. Ollie said that even though he is enjoying his time alone without Jonah, he really misses him. He was excited to have a friend over for tonight.
