Radish of Bloom

Having trouble blogging. By the time night falls, I've forgotten most of what I did during the day, or else it has receded to the point where it seems unimportant. It was a perfectly beautiful day! The rain stopped, the sun came out, the temperature was mild and blandishing, and all the leaves came out and shook themselves free on their branches, like people shaking out fresh laundry and holding it up to themselves to see how it suits them. There are many flood emergencies around the state, but fortunately not where we are, and our basement is dry. Midland, where Dow Chemical hangs out, is being evacuated after two dams failed. I can't help asking why Dow Chemical, which has billions of dollars to spare, couldn't just FIX THE DAMS, since the state of Michigan apparently couldn't or wouldn't, and thus spare themselves the problems that will surely ensue now that their containment ponds have been flooded. But don't get me started . . . I'm just glad we don't live downriver from Dow Chemical. But Detroit does. Poor Detroit. Okay, this is just typical. I start out appreciating a beautiful day and end up contemplating more poison in the waters. La la la . . . . Anyway, we sat out in the back yard and enjoyed the day, and had a brief chat with our neighbor, who was out with their new puppy and a can of beer. She had taken the day off from her work-from-home job. A contretemps broke out among her three little girls, and she was called away.

Oh hey, it's Wednesday, and I remembered that people talk about reading on Wednesday, sometimes. I finished reading To Shake the Sleeping Self, by Jedidiah Jenkins, which I accidentally bought as an e-book when I was trying to buy it as hard copy to send to my daughter Tron, back in January. There's a story behind the story: long ago, when the kids were young in Kansas, we used to eat dinner together almost every night. Often there was just a 15-minute window between the Sparrowhawk arriving home from work in Kansas City, and the big kids having to go off to events and activities. But I still gave them a home cooked sitdown dinner every night. (Except Fridays, in the later years, when a local pizza place had cheap pizza night and we all had pizza and sometimes movies.) Anyway, I felt that dinner wasn't always as friendly and relaxing as it might be, as the big kids got into their teenage years. So I issued an edict that one night a week, we would have sandwiches, and I would use the time saved from not cooking a hot meal to prepare a delicious dessert, and everybody would (BY GOD) sit and eat it like civilized people while I read to them from an edifying book so there could be no unpleasantness.

I needed a book that was interesting and lively but didn't have any particular agenda, and I thought some kind of adventure or travelogue might fill the bill. Pretty much at random, I picked A Walk Across America, by Peter Jenkins. We all enjoyed the author's travels, but Tron in particular was enthralled by them, and read his second book in which he completes the journey. Jedidiah Jenkins is his son, so I thought she might enjoy reading how Jed traveled through the Americas by bicycle to Patagonia. On reading the book myself, I learned that apparently his dad the great traveler was not the earnest hiker portrayed in the original saga, but a hot mess who married and divorced repeatedly and caused much anguish with his absences and his triflin' ways. Since I'm now a connoisseur of human folly, this unmasking mostly made me laugh, and I enjoyed Jed Jenkins' much more honest account of his own ramblings all the more for it. It's lovely to travel while housebound! Maybe I can find some more interesting travel narratives. Much as I enjoy my back yard, I do need to get out of it now and then if only in my head.