Sylvia Boorstein

Sylvia Boorstein is one of my favorite writers.  She writes non-fiction about Buddhist life and practice.  She has a book called “Don’t Just Do Something, SIT THERE!”  To me, that is a brain-catching title.  Somewhere in her books, she has a chapter called “Nobody’s grandmother is a Buddhist!”.  Those words came from her eight-year old granddaughter when the girl discovered her own grandmother was a Buddhist.

I think one of the difficulties Americans have is that Buddhism does not have formal joining ceremonies, according to what I read yesterday.  It has beliefs, convictions, practices.  Once those are understood, anyone can believe, be convinced, practice.

My experiences with Buddhist topics began when I read about college classes in relaxation.  I thought, “What, students come to class and just relax?”  Well, yes.  Some people, at many ages, need to improve their ability to relax.  They may need, or come to value or improve their ability, to relax, to be comfortable with themselves and their minds.

Ameta Center and Buzz

The Mid-State Technical College in Stevens Point has a building in the Business Park called the Ameta Center.  It was built, as I understand it, mostly to house training for medical technicians, specialists needed to use medical technology.  

When we watch “The Closer” and its follow-up “Major Crimes”, we do see gun fights and physical violence when a suspect attacks officers or others.  But there is a member of the crew, Buzz, who is a technologist.  When the investigation team is thinking about some criminal misdeed, Buzz is called upon to tape sights and sounds connected to the investigation.  Buzz is constantly called up to freeze, enlarge, repeat a scene.  His part is a good example of how a technologist, familiar with and comfortable with audio and visual tools that enhance memory and analysis of key events, is an important worker in multiple fields today.

Over-powering presence

We spot her walking in and a quiet sense of awe flows over us.  Such elegance, such grace.  Good thing I am not a buck.  I would be chained to follow her everywhere.  A young doe came into our yard this morning.  Sure, she is cautious with a kind of caution that is smooth and knowing.  Hope she comes again.

Sometimes

Sometimes, I need to know exactly what was said. My hearing is poor, especially for decoding speech.  We had the family over for lunch for Father’s Day and Lynn asked me to sweep the floor.  Later, she said, “Did you sweep ?” but I thought she had asked “Did you sleep?”  Just that 2nd letter: sweep, sleep, steep,seep.  It matters. Often, when she senses I am missing something she said, she spells out the word but I often can’t tell what letters she said.  This time, I did hear that W and I realized what she was saying.

Dad Day, Summer Solstice

I read that men come from a woman’s body and they spend their lives trying to get back in.  Indeed, the sex drive can be a burden to anyone as well, of course, as a source of pleasure: immediate, parental, satisfying, fulfilling.  I imagine there will be plenty of salutes to fatherhood but I add mine here.

Tomorrow is also the day of the summer solstice, when the earth is positioned to get its longest day in the Northern Hemisphere and marks the beginning of summer on the North side of the equator.  Have a good summer, Dads, Mothers, Children.

Federal holiday

Today is the holiday “Juneteenth”, celebrating the end of slavery in the US.  I have a book “Slaves without Masters” by Ira Berlin about free Blacks in the American South before the Civil War. I am not very surprised that there were black people who were not slaves in the South before the Civil War but I had never thought about the possibility.

I knew about a New Yorker article, possibly in 1997 by Malcolm Gladwell, about the best runners and sprinters being Black. The book “The Great Stain” by Noel Rae has valuable information on sex between slaves and owners.

APS

I was once told I had a blood clot from my hip to my heel.  Then, a hematologist said that I had antiphospholipid syndrome, better simply called “APS”, and that I should take blood thinner regularly.  I do and am doing well.

When I was five years old, I discovered my father and me in our family car driving to my aunt’s house.  When we got there, my mother came to the car before I even got out and informed me that my 6 year-old cousin had died.  He went to the hospital to have his tonsils removed and developed a fatal blood clot that went to his brain and killed him.

Dishwasher

We have a pretty good machine and I buy expensive pellets of wash chemicals.  But one thing it doesn’t do is empty itself.  The dishes, glasses, bowls and silverware have to be put back in the various places we keep them when the dishwasher is finished.   That task is for a pair of hands connected to a brain that knows where things are kept.

There are times when the meal was simply too big: too many diners, too many sorts of dishes and too many of each type to fit into a single load.  So, we run the machine more than once but that means, again, that the first load has to be emptied before loading in the 2nd load.  For a good many years, we did it all completely by hand.  We didn’t own a dishwasher.  This one has shown itself to be worthwhile and is one of the machines that gets run the most.

Humming birds

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.  The state bird of Maryland is the Baltimore oriole but I had never seen an oriole before moving to Wisconsin.  Likewise, I had heard of hummingbirds but not seen one until Wisconsin.  I wanted our brass structure for support of climbing vines right beside our dining room window when it came time to plant a dropmore honeysuckle vine.

You can see that each flower is trumpet-shaped, ideal for a humming bird with that long bill.

We read Sy Montgomery’s “The Hummingbird’s Gift” and learned that the little birds expend so much energy and have such small bodies that they need to eat five to eight times an hour.

We were part of Elderhostel tour of Cuba and in one of the many gift shops, a handcarved real-sized wooden hummingbird caught my eye.  It hangs in our dining room now.

Storing and locating

The book by Judith Flanders, “A Place for Everything” and the book by Deirdre Mask, “The Address Book” have some commonalities that don’t stand out.  When you have bound books in large numbers and someone builds shelves for them, you soon run into the problem of finding that book that happens to be on your mind.  In a somewhat similar way, when you have buildings along avenues and streets and you want to do that modern thing and deliver messages written on paper, you run into the coding problem of using a short code on each message as to where the message should be delivered.  Some places in the world, even with many people living close to each other, still don’t have addresses.  If you have an address, respect it and be proud of it.  

My wife was a school librarian and later taught school librarianship at a university.  She got into that activity at a time and place where people were creating “slide-tapes”, recordings of speech meant to be played in conjunction with the showing of a set of slides.  School librarians were confronted with the problem of storing and then finding one of the collected items when needed.  She wrote her doctoral dissertation on similar work being done by the US Dept. of Agriculture’s library of new types of materials.  Often, new types of material have physical characteristics that require new types of storage, labeling and tools to locate them.