Month: December 2024

Capitalism gone mad

| betweenstops

I live in a neighborhood that has a name. Which makes it a town within the big city.

In my town, there is a Safeway and there is a Lucky. I prefer to go to the Lucky. I’d rather be lucky than safe.

My son is needing something so we go at 8 pm. Next-door to the Lucky is a Rite Aid or is it CVS or does it make a difference?

My son decides he would rather shop there. I give in even after I explained that the grocery store has a better vibe which doesn’t make any sense to him.

We go into bright bright light. Brighter than bright. The store is Caverness. Huge. There are more than 21 aisles. It seems no one is in the store except my son and I.

We are going up and down the aisles trying to find simple things like toothpaste and Kleenex. We do this for a while.

We are in a vast wasteland desert of commercial products under lock and key passing by empty nail polish displays. It has a scary feel to it like a stranger might jump one in any empty aisle for any reason.

Even the minimally valuable items are under lock and key. It’s a giant store with no one in it. It’s capitalism gone mad. It’s creepy and crawley and suffocatingly artificial.

We finally ask the person at the register where to find the Kleenex and on my way to that I spy something on a lower shelf.

It is a translucent plastic bottle in a certain shape with a certain color blue label and I think to myself “I am out of rubbing alcohol, I’ll get that too”, so I pick it up.

Thank goodness, I have parked a little bit away so my son and I, in walking back to the car, have a chance to mutually acknowledge how strange the situation was.

When I get home, I realize I have witch hazel, not rubbing alcohol.

Christmas Lights

| betweenstops

I just taught an impossible children’s ceramics class today. But no matter. We made a lot of trees. I have a way (based in geometry) for them to be easy for any age to make and they look terrific.

Driving home in the dark I enjoy passing by the houses with the Christmas lights.

Looking at the white lights brings me back 26 years, when my sister died. For the funeral, I flew to her home with her three small children and her husband who was now her widow, and I was shocked to see the Christmas decorations.

I wasn’t sure how something so happy could juxtapose with something so sad. None of it made sense.

I had experienced a week before wanting something 1000% which I had never done before. I had never wished something with every cell in my body. I wished she would live.

But she didn’t and the lights were confusing. There was one kind in particular that I found especially irritating.

A string of white lights and every now and then it went down so that it was three lights in a row one below the next at various intervals. They really bothered me.

I don’t think they make them anymore. I don’t see them anymore. Maybe the electrical wiring was too confusing to survive year after year.

No ART at Public school

| betweenstops

Tommy (not his real name) has been working In the office for years. When he first came, he seemed a certain kind of proper and prim. They’re quiet as well from that background different from my loud one, which is what I assume gives him his ultra upright demeanor.

After having been the United States culture for long enough and at that the school long enough he starts to lighten up. He starts to become more “hood“. Whether he always was this and is now more comfortable showing or whether he has over the years become this, is not for me to know.

What I do know is that I am more comfortable with him this way.

As I am leaving the office, he says, “Hey Dana, wait a minute. I have something for you.”

Although we have become friendly over the many years by exchanging a sentence, or maybe two as I sign in, we are not friendly enough for him to be giving me a present. I wonder what’s going on.

He hands me a bag of art supplies that someone has donated to the school and hopes I can use them.

I am shocked that I am the one in the school of 600 students that the office associates with Art.

There is no art teacher. Neither is there a maker space teacher. There is no one there to show the kids how to make something with their hands!

I teach one class one afternoon a week and I am the one they associate with art. Tragic in my mind.

Offhand people say oh, there’s no budget for that.

They have no understanding that in art a kid learns how to listen to their inner voice. How to listen to themself. How to make decisions.

They learn how to get an idea and follow it through to completion.

If you don’t like sports, and you don’t like academics, you better have art in your school or you are gonna fall through the cracks.

Art builds confidence in oneself the way no other academic subject does !

What is a flower?