Monthly Archives: April 2021
Mister Rogers? I love you.
How I came to love Fred Rogers, and why I didn’t at first.
A note to my blog followers: I’m sorry you’re getting all these emails about new posts that are actually old posts. What’s happening is, I’m migrating my Medium.com content over to my blog. I haven’t earned much traction over there (or much money) because I haven’t put much energy into it. So while I decide whether or not I’m going to continue on that platform, I’m making sure everything is backed up on the blog. I’m sorry! Thank you for subscribing! Please be patient! Gesundheit!
Mister Rogers & Me
There was Children’s TV before I knew there was such a thing; public television existed, but hadn’t reached the prairies of South Dakota, where I spent much of my first ten years. By the time we lived in a town large enough to have PBS, I was eleven years old — far too old for any of the lessons involved. Even so, I loved the frenetic nature of Sesame Street, the rhythmic phonics of The Electric Company. I’d secretly switch over from Gilligan’s Island to public television, watching for the songs, animation, puppets, and Morgan Freeman’s beautiful voice.
The undersaturated retro simplicity of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood did absolutely nothing for me. The strange hand puppets? The dinging trolley car? An unapologetic opera singer? And above all else, someone with the last name of “McFeely”?
No thank you, I was not having it.
Mr. Rogers embarrassed me, to be truthful. The cardigan. The sneakers. Feeding the fish. And my god, the songs. His voice reminded me of my grandmother singing hymns beside me in the basement of the First Church of Christ Scientist in Aberdeen, South Dakota. When he came on, I’d switch back to whatever other rerun was on during the day. Something like Green Acres.
And then at age 14, I was left behind by my parents during a move. I wouldn’t live with my parents again until I was almost 20. I couldn’t afford a TV during those teen years, but I kept current with the state of children’s TV through my much younger brother, who watched a lot of Nickelodeon. The early Nick was commercial free and full of animated European shorts.
I loved it.
I moved back in with my family in 1980, the year Mount St. Helens erupted and covered the city of Portland with a rain of volcanic ash. My parents sent my younger brother to stay with grandparents in Minnesota for a month, until the ash settled down. He was eight years old, and baffled by an afternoon ritual there in Minnesota. At 3 PM, my grandmother would call him in from wherever he was playing, sit him down in front of the TV with a Wonder Bread and Cheez Whiz sandwich, and turn on Mister Rogers.
We did not grow up with Wonder Bread, Cheez Whiz, or Mister Rogers. But we were raised to be endlessly, achingly polite. So my little brother sat down and ate the sandwich and watched the show, not really liking either one. He endured this wonderful, awful pairing without a peep of protest. Was it a relic from my uncle’s childhood?
Probably.
I dismissed Mister Rogers, and went on with my young life. When I was twenty, I enrolled in the local university and got a job as a nanny to augment my BEOG money. I worked for a doctor, watching her three kids after school into the evening. She told me they all sat down at 3 PM for snacks (carrots, cheddar and Triscuits) and Mister Rogers.
I probably scoffed. Mister Rogers?
I remember the warm twinkle in my employer’s eyes, her sweet and squirrelly smile. “Oh,” she said, “He’s so gentle.”
This employer taught me many things when I was 20. She taught me how to prepare chicken and fish and brown rice and magnificent salads, lessons I put immediately to use. She taught me how to relax on beach vacations, which takes practice. She tried to teach me that intelligence would be the most important attribute to seek in a man, and I eventually did learn that one, but not for a while. And by example, she taught me that a single woman in her forties and fifties could be vital, attractive and pursued, a lesson I wouldn’t realize the importance of until I was in my forties and fifties.
She also taught me to watch Mister Rogers.
The keyword was gentle. He was gentle with his viewers, and his viewers need to be gentle with Mister Rogers. We need to quietly anticipate the regularity of his entrance, his changing into his cardigan, the occasional plucky toss of a shoe from one hand to the other. We need to mildly care that the fish are hungry, and that he enjoys answering that hunger with just the right pinch of food. We need to approach Mr. McFeely with interest, since he delivers items of interest to Mister Rogers. We need to listen to the songs, because they contain surprising and beautiful messages about the anxiety children feel when they discover that boys and girls are a built little different from each other. We need to wait patiently for the dinging of the trolley, since it’s going to deliver us to the Neighborhood of Make Believe.
I had more fun than expected while visiting the Neighborhood of Make Believe with my young charges. I learned about the traits, the voices and the psyches of each and every one of the hand puppets; Daniel Tiger’s fearfulness, King Friday’s pomposity, and the selfish, grabby narcissism of Lady Elaine Fairchild. I experienced all kinds of happenings, but my favorite was an opera about a cow who wanted to be a potato bug. See some of it here. It was the very worst, and the very best. I couldn’t believe how perfect it was.
Only one of my own children loved Mister Rogers. And she was the child I took to see the Mister Rogers documentary. We watched this wonderful portrayal of a singular, strange man who shared his personal vision of love and kindness with the world. I had a shiver over his attachment to the number 143, because I fear that this formerly chubby child only felt lovable when he weighed exactly 143 pounds. He was prescient, he was kind, and he believed he was doing important work.
Guess what? He was.
I am so sad that that “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” was completely shut out of the Oscars. But I’m not sure that Fred Rogers would have cared. He was too busy with his imagination and his belief in kindness to care too much about awards.
But it would have been the best acceptance speech ever.
I have a coffee cup problem.
And I’m not sure I want to solve it.
I’ve written before about stuff; how much I have vs. how much I need to have. My house is very organized but it’s FULL, and no one wants any of this stuff when I die, so I need to get rid of it. I’m working on this attachment to material possessions problem, I really am.
But I can’t get over this coffee cup thing.
There is a two-door/three-shelf cabinet in my kitchen where, I suppose, a more NORMAL person would store her dishes. All of her dishes. In my house, all three shelves hold coffee cups.
The first shelf holds single mugs, many of them English. The English, with their love of tea, make a damn fine mug; lightweight, medium-sized, fired almost to a porcelain state, and capable of holding the hottest beverages. They also look adorable and quaint and jolly. I have English mugs that date back to the 1970s, and they last forever. People know this about English mugs. In fact, some of mine (the Hornsea mugs) are worth $50 a piece, according to Etsy and eBay. Which just gives me more of an excuse to hang on to more mugs than I can ever drink out of in my life.
I don’t use my Hornsea mugs. In fact, I have them stashed in another cabinet in the dining room so they don’t get chipped. But we’re not going to discuss those other mugs that have been deemed collectible. We’re just going to talk about the mugs in the kitchen cabinet.
Not all of the single mugs are English. One is a “Write like a m0therfucker” mug (some of you recognize that from Dear Sugar) that used to be my day job coffee mug. But at some point I carried coffee into a big meeting with our very conservative company president and realized I was drinking out of a mug that said “m0therfucker” on it, so I brought it home. It sits with others I’ve deemed sentimentally important. Mugs are emotional, I tell you. I made myself get rid of ten mugs earlier this year, just ten, mind you. I was restocking my father’s estate sale and I certainly had enough mugs to spare, but you’d have thought it was Sophie’s Choice there in the kitchen.
I still have too many mugs on this shelf.
Do any of you need any mugs?
Because above the shelf with all those single mugs, there are mugs in sets. I have three pairs of matched mugs, which seems very cozy but is silly because my husband is not a coffee drinker. When he drinks hot tea, he has his own mugs he brought into the marriage. I consider these mugs acceptable but not exceptional, and they sit on the first shelf with all of my superior mugs. I mean, he only has two mugs. Some people who live in my house are sane.
There’s a set of six Japanese stoneware mugs I break out for book group, because one of my book groups has a lot of tea drinkers. So apparently I think it’s nice for them to all be confused by which mug might be theirs.
Does anyone need a set of nice mid-century stoneware mugs?
I know a crazy lady who six to spare.
Next to the mug sets, there’s a special category of mugs that are gorgeous, gigantic, gleaming vessels of great beauty. These mugs are far too large for hot drinks. They are so large, your coffee is cold by the time you finish filling the thing. These mugs only work for drinking water all day at your desk.
My company makes them.
Every few years, I buy a new one at the employee store because it’s so damn beautiful, and it sits on my desk for water, until a new one comes out that is also so damn beautiful, and then the old mug joins its brethren in my kitchen cabinet. I sometimes find these at thrift stores and I can’t leave them languishing in their gigantic gorgeousness. So there is an actual half-a-shelf of these monstrous beauties in my cabinet.
Do any of you want one of these? They also work great for soup.
The top shelf in my coffee cup cabinet is hard to reach. One side of the shelf is mostly empty, except for two fine English porcelain tea mugs that are beautiful and useless, in that they get too hot to touch when they are full. One has a cat sitting in a rainbow garden, and one has inchworms inching greenly and cutely around the bottom. Both of these mugs are lovely and fine and utterly useless.
Do any of you want them? I need to get rid of them.
The other side of the cabinet has Christmas mugs. Yes, it does. No, I’m not kidding. There are maybe eight in there. I have no idea why, since they are only applicable for like three weeks per year. Some years, I forget to take them down, so they sit up there, unused, for two years.
No one can have any of my Christmas mugs.
I still scan the mug rack every time I go to a thrift store.
About once a month, I find a mug I can’t resist. It might be perfect for my sister, who doesn’t need any mugs, either. I also find mugs for my daughters, who don’t want or need any more mugs. I know this. They know this. But I say, “I found a mug you might like,” and they protest, they have enough mugs, and I nod, because they are absolutely right. And then I get it out and I see a familiar expression of appreciation and longing flit across their faces.
The mugs go home with them.
I’m going to tell you the worst part of this whole thing. I only drink coffee out of one mug, and one mug only. It’s handmade, from Orcas Island Pottery, one of the most magical places on that magical island. I paid quite a bit for this (worth every dollar) and consider it to be the One True Mug. And it’s the only one I ever use for my morning coffee.
I was thinking, could anyone care about this coffee cup problem of mine? And then, in a meeting at work, one of my coworkers brought up the box of mugs she has out in her garage, waiting for one of her cabinet mugs to break so she can call them into use. And my manager chimed in about her special mugs made by her artist friends, and how she is going to put up a shelf to display the most “important” of the mugs! So I realized that I am not alone! We are all weird about mugs!
Pssst. Wanna mug? I can make you a deal….
(P.S.)
I went looking for this blog post because I wanted to link to it from this other blog post, and I couldn’t find it. And I looked high, and I looked low, and I even emailed my friend who runs the blogging platform I use, because my blog post had up and disappeared, and he looked for it and he couldn’t find it either. But of course, I then remembered that I’d posted this on Medium, and not here on my blog, so I had to sheepishly apologize for wasting his time. He forgave me, and I decided to add this post to my blog so that I never lose it again.
Thanks, Bill.
Parks & Points Anthology: I’m in it!
This one’s a beauty.
My poem, Spire Rock, is included a new print anthology, Wayfinding, edited by Amy Beth and Derek Wright. This is a collection of poetry inspired by America’s public lands; national parks, monuments, wildernesses and wild places.
Praise for Wayfinding
“When visiting national parks, we mostly rely on our visual senses to record the memory. But the poetry in Wayfinding touches other senses, wrapping the reader in bird chirps, campfire smells, and cool earthen textures. In doing so, the poems lure us into the interior journeys that shape our emotional connections to the parks.The poetry, written by mostly published and award-winning poets, walks paths through dank cedar forests and red-walled canyons, below upthrusts of granite and through the soggy wetlands of the mind, reminding us that our park experiences are all different, yet all part of what the wild offers. The words focus our attention on both the inward and outward journey on public lands. They nudge us to experience the parks more fully–to slow down to let all of our senses engage with often-missed wonders.”—Becky Lomax, author of Moon Guides’ Moon USA National Parks: The Complete Guide to All 62 Parks.
I’m proud to be included, though my early years as the daughter of a forester didn’t exactly make me an outdoorsy person as an adult. But I do love the wilderness. I can’t wait to read adventurous poems written by far more adventurous people than myself.
Preordering information is here: WAYFINDING
How to Cure Yourself of eBay During a Pandemic
I’ve bought 44 things on eBay since the COVID-19 quarantine started.
Am I the only one? I can’t be the only one. But I cured myself, and I’m going to tell you how I did that. But first, let me tell you how things got out of control.
It started with clothes. I began working from home last year with a strong commitment to sitting down at my computer at 7:30 AM each morning, showered, dressed, and wearing makeup, shoes, and accessories.
Yeah, right.
That lasted a month.
Jeans were tossed aside early on. The one outfit I could consistently coax myself into was leggings and a knit Old Navy swing dress. I had a couple, but thanks to eBay, I soon had…many. Probably too many. I could go in there (there being my closet) and count, but that might be really disheartening. There are more than a few, thank you. Isn’t that enough?
Fine, I’ll go make a count.
Fourteen.
Okay? Are you happy, now? There are fourteen Old Navy knit swing dresses in my closet (well, one of them is currently on my body), and when this all started, there were two. I gave another two away because the stripes weren’t flattering, but I refuse to count those. So, fourteen.
And you know, with my Mary Jane-type Dansko clogs (of which I have four pair because I like to overbuy whatever works for my feet), I really have a look going on. I put on a scarf and earrings and I look so kicky and middle-aged and also sort of like a chubby toddler who has gotten into Grandma’s accessories.
Will I change my style when I go back to the office full time? Jesus, I sure hope so. But I so rarely wear anything else. When I do mix it up with, say, jeans and a not-long top? A stranger looks back at me from the mirror.
It isn’t just clothing.
I collect things. Many things, but I go wide in collecting, not deep. There’s some axiom that “Three things is a collection,” and if that’s the case, then I have quite a few collections sitting together in my home.
I have four glass paperweights on a windowsill. One was inherited, one was a gift, one was a souvenir, and one was thrifted. That’s all I have and all I probably ever will have, as far as glass paperweights go. But I like them, so I keep them.
It gets weird on my hutch, but not because I’ve gone deep into one thing or another. Still, going wide adds up. Three pieces of Marcrest pottery. Some eight or so various pieces of froth/drip pottery from Hull and Pfaltzgraff. Some Denby plates. Three Howard Pierce ceramic animals. A little of this, a little of that.
But I have FIFTEEN vintage honeypots on that hutch. I don’t want to count how many small, poorly painted, ridiculously cute made-in-occupied-Japan ceramic dogs are scattered around the house. So I can go too far.
I have lost control in quarantine.
I blame eBay for allowing me to go off on strange purchasing jags, including a particular style of Fitz & Floyd figurines from the 1980s (they are really neat in a Lisa Larsson knockoff way). I have picked them off with steely precision when they came up for bid. They are cute, but they are also cutesy.
What did my husband think, watching me liberate all these gewgaws from their protective bubble wrappings? Did he think I was nuts? Or was he just happy that I was happy?
I was happy until I bought two that didn’t quite fit with the general aesthetic. They were too blue, and they ruined everything, so I donated them and called myself done. And so far I’ve stuck to that, but I’ve bought other things. Just a couple. I’m trying to keep myself in check.
But finally, I went too far.
I like handmade coffee mugs. I have…a few now, as opposed to when I wrote a Medium piece about my mug problem. I buy the mugs at thrift stores, though my “one true mug” was purchased at the pottery place on Orcas Island.
I also like mice and rats. To be clear, I don’t like mice and rats themselves, so much as I like representations of them. I love me some Hunca Munca, and Brambly Hedge books, and that kind of nonsense. I was born in the Year of the Rat, so, I have a lot of rat netsuke (Oh, I forgot to talk about my netsuke collection, didn’t I. That one is kind of deep).
So when a certain item showed up on eBay, I thought, “Wow, that looks interesting! This item combines my love of artistic representations of rats with my love of handmade pottery coffee cups! I should bid on that! This will be cute!”
Guess what. It isn’t cute. Not at all.
It. Is. Monstrous.
It’s three times the size I thought it would be, and horribly realistic. It’s huge, and detailed, with inset glass eyes and a gross, bumpy tail for a handle. The head of the thing is easily six times the size of a real rat’s head (and I know this because of course we have had pet rats over the years). Real rats have disturbing pink tails, but aside from that they are very smart, and sweet.
This thing is a nightmare.
I sent photos of it to my sister. Once she stopped bawling with horrified laughter, she said (diplomatically), “I guess I’m having some trouble seeing why you thought this might be cute, no matter how big it was.” I told her I had somehow conflated it with the first netsuke I ever bought in 1978, a round rat which fits nicely in the palm of my hand and brings me joy.
I thought this gigantic rat mug would bring me similar joy. It doesn’t. It brings me horror, and a degree of shame and self-loathing. How could I have bought such a thing? Any sane person would banish it from her home immediately.
I kept it.
I have it prominently displayed on my hutch. It’s over there right now, leering at me over its left shoulder (imagine, a coffee mug with shoulders) with its glass-eyed, whiskered smile. It is doing some important work, there on my hutch. Every time I go to eBay, and I get the urge to bid on something, I make myself look at this monstrosity, instead.
And that’s how you cure yourself of eBay, during a pandemic.
(P.S.)
In case you were wondering about my netsuke rats, here they are. Yes, I know some of these are reproductions. Additionally, I know that some of these things are not netsuke.
This is but a fraction of the netsuke, but every netsuke and netsuke-adjacent item I own fits in this card box, with my glasses for scale. I can live with it.
Wait. You’re saying, that’s it? We read all this garbage about all your garbage, and we don’t even get to see the hideous rat mug in question?
Okay. Fine. Here it is. Just imagine sipping your tea from this thing. Keep in mind that it is fully nine inches from stem to stern.
