Spring breezes

From about the middle of May into around the middle of June is one of my favorite times of the year. The skies are often blue with puffy clouds drifting across. I think that I accidentally deleted a picture I took of the curtain blown by a nice breeze entering my bedroom where I lived in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood in part of 2017. I wanted to include that picture in this entry. That moment was so relaxing and reminded me of how my bedroom curtains moved on a June morning where I grew up in Kansas.

I took the picture above in Madison's Rennebohm Park, near my apartment. This scene and the weather make me wish that I could wash clothes in the morning and hang them to dry on the line, as I did at my grandmother's in Gettysburg. I loved the feeling of the whole atmosphere. As a way of keeping touch with that time, I wish that I could have gotten my grandmother's grey bag in which she kept her clothespins. The bag had a large hook that could be hung on the line so that it was more convenient to fetch a clothespin. I sometimes had to replenish the clothespins because my grandmother liked to use them to clip together things. Another reason I loved this is because of the smell of the clothes after they'd dried and knowing that I'd not used the drier, which consumes a great deal of electricity.

I've stayed longer in Madison so that I could take some training classes for faculty and staff. On Thursday, for instance, I took a workshop on what to do if someone feels suicidal. I asked the instructors about the ideas of that workshop's approach--QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer)--versus ALGEE in Mental Health First Aid. My impression is that ALGEE focuses more on taking the time to talk, but I'll need to look into the research.

For the time being, it has been better for me to keep my position in Madison as I also live in the DMV area.

Hillside in Lawrence, Kansas

Lawrence Ferlinghetti--born March 24, 1919--still alive
From ending of "The Astonished Heart":

"There is a great crowded bluff
 in Lawrence Kansas
 that looks a long way
 into the astonished heart
of America."

Published in "Open Eye, Open Heart" (1973) and "These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems 1955-1993" (1993)

The picture is during a graduation ceremony at the University of Kansas looking south from the football stadium to the side of Mount Oread. When I lived in the J. R. Pearson dorm, I often liked to walk across this area from the Union and nearby classroom buildings. Later on, I sometimes would buy a submarine sandwich from the Yellow Sub and sit on this hillside to look north at the valley where the Kansas River runs. This was especially great when someone was playing the carillon in the campanile. But I don't think I ever took a picture of that view. Most of the time I rarely I saw anyone else there.

There aren't many places in Lawrence that could be called a bluff. I think he meant somewhere on this large hill on which the heart of the campus sits or by the riverbanks. But I don't think the latter are high enough to be bluffs. I now wish I'd contacted him when he was younger to see if a specific site influenced him, maybe to place a small monument to poetry with this line or the entire poem inscribed on it.

White Horse Temple--Luoyang, Henan Province, China

In the 1990s I visited the White Horse Temple with my students at the Zhengzhou Textile Institute during Luoyang's Peony Festival. Founded in 68 AD, the temple is regarded as the first Buddhist temple in China. We also saw the Longmen Grottoes.

On the large incense burner, running vertically it says White Horse Temple (traditional Chinese characters--白馬寺; simplified-- 白马寺)

I decided to go to China to take a break from my graduate school program in political science at the University of Michigan since living in China would help me learn about the country, which was one of my specialties. I picked Henan Province because I'd shared an apartment in Kansas with Chinese from Henan and few foreigners  lived there. I was so caught up being with my students and Chinese colleagues that I didn't see another native speaker of English until about 1/2 year had gone by. When a teacher from Britain who was at another college knocked on my door, I was stunned. I wish I'd taken more pictures without identifiable people so that I could share them without violating someone's privacy.

I loved spending time in the department office helping my Chinese colleagues or in the classroom talking with my students when they were studying. (College students in China tend to have a home classroom where they study, although some like to go to the library or their dorms.)

In March 2017 I got a message that someone replied to one of my comments on another person's blog. The reply was this: "I wish that you'd update more." At first I thought it was from a third person and meant for the one who created that blog. But then I wondered if it was actually from the blog writer and meant for me because the person replied to my comment. 

I very much hope that she'll contact me, maybe by email or a comment to this or another post. I loved getting to know about her by reading her blog and looking at her website before she took them down.  I'm very unhappy with myself for not doing things differently.

Some thoughts about illusions

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." Tom near the beginning of "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams.

on bike path in Madison, Wisconsin, along Old Middleton Road (The first word is Life.)
I wonder what led someone to write this.

When re-watching online today a scene from "Come Back, Little Sheba," I found out that Shirley Booth played the mother, Amanda, in a CBS Playhouse version of "The Glass Menagerie" in 1966. The video was thought to have been lost; however, the unedited video was recently discovered and pieced together to replicate what was originally broadcast. Hal Holbrook played Tom (the son) and Laura (the daughter) was played by Barbara Loden. This was finally re-broadcast exactly fifty years later by TCM on December 8, 2016. 

 Baltimore, lawn in Roland Park neighborhood. I liked the colors of the leaves.

I didn't have time to watch the full version I found online, so I skipped to the part that especially affects me, when Laura learns about the "gentleman caller's" prior commitment. Loden's reaction of pain was visible to the audience but hidden from her mother and brother as she kept her back to them. In what might still be my favorite version, Karen Allen seemed to conceal her feelings more. As I jumped to some other scenes, I realized that maybe I want to wait to watch this with someone else to talk about it. I used to think about that kind of thing more often in the past, of waiting not to do something because I don't want to do it alone. For some reason I had once set aside a documentary by Errol Morris for that even though it wasn't especially meaningful to me. When I finally watched it because UW was screening many of his films, it was very painful for me to realize I was watching alone and I was glad that the theater was dark. 

Many things come to my mind about what the Tom character, who was probably based on Williams, says about illusions.  In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,  Dr. Bessel van der Kolk quotes this favorably: "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves" (Dr. Elvin Semrad [former supervisor at Massachusetts Mental Health Center] 2014: 11). But at other times he says that a way to deal with trauma is through imagination. I forget how he reconciles those two ideas. I think I've often used day dreaming of the future as a way to get by, but the dangers are not to take enough action and to fool myself. 

Another thing I'm reminded of is when I returned home from my freshman year in college during the Labor Day weekend and watched some of "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" again on some television station.  The Willy Wonka character doesn't seem to completely believe it when he sings "Pure Imagination"--"If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it."

Baltimore, outside stores along Hartford Road. They were closed, so I couldn't ask anyone about the chalk. 

Mulberry Trees

One of my memories that stand out to me of when we lived in Mechanicsburg, PA, when I was about four and five years old, was walking along the railroad tracks and picking mulberries, which we then took home to eat with sugar and I think some milk. After we moved to Kansas, I sometimes found some to eat along former farmlands, one by a vacant lot near our apartment complex in Shawnee and others near our Lenexa home.

This is a tree by a path than runs through Madison's Rennebohm Park, about a ten-minute walk from my apartment there. Madison allows foraging of fruit from city parks, but I make sure to pick just a small number so as not to hog them. Bicyclists, runners, and walkers go by and stop to eat some. The stains on the path are a useful sign that there's a mulberry tree, although that's one reason homeowners should take care where they plant them.

Even though this park has been close to me for about eight years, I've rarely walked through it. Whenever I head out to Hilldale Mall or Sequoya Library, I usually walk along Sheboygan Avenue.

Promoting fruit tree plantings on public lands for harvesting by anyone is becoming more common. The Baltimore Orchard Project runs a Mulberry Madness Festival throughout June to encourage the eating of mulberries. The city of Madison has started an Edible Landscapes program, which includes allowing and encouraging people to plant something edible on terraces (the strips of land between sidewalks and streets).

The view  from Segoe Road of the eastern side with evergreens when covered with snow reminds me of idealized winter scenes of my childhood, especially the cover of the "Christmas with Chet Atkins" album. I only have photos of this view without snow, as in the picture below taken from the sidewalk.