My Overall Impression

The internet sent me this picture. The internet knows better than anyone how long I've been looking for cute summer-weight overalls. And if they look this good on a tall, slim, elegant young woman, just imagine how good they'll look on me!

Just imagine!

In retrospect, I should have been suspicious from the name alone. Sexy Slim Thin Jeans Wide Leg Jumpsuit. I mean, that doesn't even make any sense. That's just a bunch of trending modifiers plucked at random by people who don't speak English. Hot Thigh Gap Brazilian Microbladed Boyfriend Suit would have been equally descriptive. Plus, the garment was cheap as hell. And you know what that means. That means a tiny young Asian person churns out a hundred of these every day for a packet of dried fish.

I knew that. I bought them anyway. I haven't been able to find the pair of overalls I've been looking for, not even in the pattern books. This looked like a winner. True, the size chart is in centimeters, which always make me look fat, but I punted a little--they ran from small to extra-large, so I went Medium. It should have worked.

I wasn't looking for anything snug. Basically, I like to be able to walk around inside my overalls, but still have them drape attractively, suggesting that I have a shape in there somewhere. These I can walk around inside of and invite the book club, too. Heck. I could have sex inside these overalls on the cross-town bus and nobody'd be the wiser.

And they don't just run wide, or, as the name suggests, thin slim jeans wide. They actively shoot out for the horizon just below the hip. I'd need to wear three pairs of jodhpurs to fill them out. Forget those skinny-ass weasels: I could trouser a fat pair of badgers in this thing.

I hate going through the rigmarole of returning things. It doesn't come up often because I buy so little online. I was just going to slog through the site for return instructions and decided to try them on one more time. And lo!

Why, I think I could just take these in at the side seams. Way in. And straighten out the part that would make my thighs look like giant pitas. What's that? There's a side zipper? I could stand these babies up and step into them without touching the fabric, but it needs a side zipper? Screw the zipper. I don't even need to take it out. I'll just fold it along the seam and sew it up, zipper and all. A few judicious snips and I'll have a matching duffel bag. Which is good, because I'll be needing a new place to stash the badgers.

Know Your Enemy

On June 19, 2019, a convoy of log trucks, big rigs, and tractors shrouded the State Capitol in a fug of diesel soot and blasted their air horns to protest proposed climate legislation. As a demonstration, it didn't make the case for the status quo very well, but it wasn't meant to; it was an unmistakable middle finger raised to those perceived to be threatening their livelihoods.

The loggers and truckers were supported by money from timber and trucking executives, but it would be a mistake to assume the demonstrators were paid actors. These are real people understandably concerned that their ways of life are threatened by the efforts to eliminate fossil fuels. They just want to survive. Which is what they have in common with climate warriors.

"We will no longer stay silent about politicians that try to legislate us out of a job," Timber Unity PAC (TUPAC) wrote on its facebook page.

Politicians are an easy target, assumed always to be venal, even when they are duly representing those who elected them. And those constituents are assumed by many hard-working Americans to be fey baristas and hemp-wearing arugula farmers. But it is children who are in the vanguard of climate warfare, fighting for their future. For any future.

Any log trucker looking to mow down a few of these perceived enemies would have scored big at the climate rally in Portland last Friday. Thousands and thousands of young people showed up, but not one was interested in running people out of a job. Instead, they are trying to prevent extreme capitalism from running everyone, truckers included, out of a livable planet. It's a matter of perspective. Working men and women often see the world through a lens as narrow as a wallet, but children are not so constrained.

It's always been easy to mock children for being foolish and idealistic, a term that usually stands in contrast to "realistic." Realism is what is left when the clarity of youth gets sullied by circumstance. We grow inward as we age. But that doesn't mean the idealists are wrong. Maybe it never did.

"They just want to get out of school," people sneer. But every one of these marchers already knows more than those who belittle them. That is why they march for "climate justice." And what is that? It is the recognition that those who have profited the most from the catastrophe we face will be affected the least. And those who have gained the least will be hit the hardest.

That is why every iteration of the Green New Deal insists not only on transitioning to clean energy, but strives to direct new economic opportunities to the poorest communities; and it includes elements such as fair living wages, and guaranteed health care and education for all, even if it scuffs up the purses of the wealthy.

Authentic gray-haired hippie, bottom right

The cohort of gray-haired hippies at the climate rally recognized the spark of youth and idealism and marched alongside in support and approval. It was easy to make fun of us back in the day too; the peace sign was the "footprint of the American chicken." We protested a pointless and devastating war in part because its consequences were personal, true. We lamented the slaughter of innocent Asians in a way we might not have if we were not being lined up for sacrifice ourselves. And sure enough, as soon as the immediate threat was lifted, we swarmed Reagan's new capitalist casino and scooped up all the money we could. But it doesn't mean we were wrong to protest. We weren't.

These children aren't wrong either. And their idealistic souls will remain intact because there is no more fool's gold left for them to plunder. They know the facts. The facts are that we are stripping our living planet of what is needed to sustain it, and yet our leaders are still doubling down on disaster. We must stop, or die. Hell yes, that's going to shake things up.

There's nothing simple about it, except the pure and absolute imperative for it. When your house is on fire, it's not easy to jump out of the window, but you must to survive. People working for climate justice might give you a net to jump into. What you don't do is try to put out the flames with gasoline.

The New Wardrobe

I told you about our chief chickadee Studley Windowson and his new duds. The boy is all freshly feathered out for the next year. What is a feather, anyway? Feathers are the fanciest thing you can make out of keratin, a protein. Not you personally. All you can do is make sparse and peculiar outgrowths of hair, ratty fingernails, and dandruff. We humans might dye our keratin or paint it but we don't make magnificent spiraled horns out of it or anything as spiffy as feathers. We have to compensate for our feeble keratin skills with art, music, and certain kinds of comedy.

Or by swiping feathers off a bird that wasn't done with them and sticking them on ourselves. Historically, nobody waited for the feathers to fall off the bird, but instead plucked the animal, such as the egret, nearly into extinction, which is a shame, but damn, the hats were fabulous.

Keratin isn't living tissue, which is why you can, if you have a super nice cat, clip her claws more than once. But because it isn't living tissue, it can't renew itself when it gets worn out. So the feathers fall off the bird periodically and the bird starts over.

Once you've made yourself a feather, you'd best take good care of it. You have to preen it, and nibble at it, and straighten out the little interlocking side shoots off the shaft, and keep it in good condition, so you can fly properly or repel water or stay warm or whatever you need your feathers to do. But eventually there's going to be some wear and tear. And so, the feathers will have to be replaced by brand new ones. A warbler that never molts will end up being a sad little golf ball with bristles and stubs, just parked on the ground waiting to be someone's lunch. I assume. It doesn't happen.

Some birds molt once a year. Some birds do a half-assed job of it once a year and a whole-assed job later. Only a few do a complete molt twice annually, and those are the ones that really beat up their feather allocation by flying through windmills. Ha ha! Not really, just dense vegetation and such. The birds that fly through windmills quit molting altogether.

Studley is a once-a-year man and as such he looks as good now as he ever has or will. Some birds drop all their feathers at once, such as your duck, who is then temporarily flightless and moves to the center of the pond and tries not to get nabbed by anything, which is why it's called a "duck." (The goose has the same issue but knows how to defend itself, which is why it's called a "goose," and you shouldn't turn your back on it.)

But most birds are more methodical. They'll drop their feathers and replace them in a particular order and that way they can stay in the air, if they've a mind to. Crows in August show grand gaps in their wings and tails but they're never actually grounded. They're a little irritable though because they're vain and they know they look like crap. They'd totally make egret feather hats if they had the materials.

For many birds, the sexes are differentiated by their outfits, and many also look different as babies than they do as adults. A particularly annoying form of bird looks different after every molt for several years in a row. This is utterly fine if you are a talented birder and can squint at a distant dot and confidently (some would say arrogantly) mark it down as a three-year-old herring gull as opposed to, say, a two-year-old herring gull, a junkyard scrabble-pigeon, or an eye floater. Gulls in general earn their keep in the birding world by being difficult to identify but theoretically solvable. Normal people can get back at birders by calling all these birds and their distant kin "seagulls," which drives birders crazy. Keep that in your back pocket. They'll correct you, and you'll just shrug at them because you don't care. They'll feel superior and impotent at the same time, sort of like liberals.

But that is all just one more point in favor of Studley and his cohort. Not only do Studley and Marge look alike, but they stay alike all year long, and produce children that look just like them. That, there, is a considerate bird.

The Resplendence Of Studley

What with the ravages of extreme capitalism and the collapse of ecosystems and the rise of fascism and the complete surrender of the masses to the plutocracy, I know visitors to this site have one overriding question: How is Studley Windowson doing?

Studley is, of course, the primary chickadee in the Price-Brewster domain, who, in spite of missing some toes, has worked his fuzzy buns off year after year to produce successful progeny. He and his wife Marge both are models of industry but their efforts have never been assured. Last year they gave it a couple good tries and either gave up or moved on, but the favored nesting box outside our window produced neither chicks nor dees. The year before was also a wash, and not for lack of effort. It's not that easy to turn an egg the size of a Tic-Tac into an operable bird.

So this spring we decided to help out by offering live mealworms. One of the things climate change has affected is the availability of insects and other food at the proper time for feeding bird chilluns, so it was possible we really were improving prospects, but mainly we were hoping we could get them to land on our hands, and in that we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Marge never went over to Team Mealworm but Studley was all over it, and right now. The day after he made his first dodgy feint at our hands out the window, he saw me in the garden and got right in my face. Hey. Mealworm Lady.

June Studley

For weeks, as the peeping in the nest box grew sturdier, we kept the mealworm train going. It was a fair transaction: Studley got quality groceries for his kids, and in return he healed the human heart, one and a half tiny feet at a time. Then what?

I am proud to announce that Studley and Marge created at least one new chickadee out of nothing but bird schmutz and valor. We didn't see it fledge. We came home to discover Studley all excited as  hell and one short-tailed chickadee blundering into the wisteria upside-down like Woodstock. For weeks, proffered mealworms went directly from Studley to the new hire, who says her name is Dee Dee. He and Marge flew into a nearby fir tree and lots of cheeping came out, so we assume more than one chick made it into the world, but later all we saw was Studley and the one kid. If the rest survived, they might be following Marge around. I hope that's what happened.

Eventually, Studley quit visiting every two minutes at beer thirty, but was perfectly happy to request mealworms by the bird feeder, or out the original window. The kid kept hopefully flapping at him but after a while Studley started eating them himself. He earned them. And you should see his new suit!

New Studley

Breeding and providing take a lot out of a bird. Once things settle down, they have to refurbish their outfits. Studley was recognizable not just because of his mashed left foot, but because he had a bald spot, and a mottled face, and the beginnings of a hound's-tooth check in the ascot region, and was kind of skinny, but given enough personal mealworms and a talent for the molt, he's a brand new bird. He's shiny and round and pink around the edges and ready for anything including Marge and winter. And Mama's got a new tub of mealworms.

Have A Nice Rest Of Your Day

We're all thinking too hard about what we say and how we say it. We have a wonderful language, English: it's sly, it's supple, it's wieldy. But we're larding it up.

I get why. I understand that we might want to think a little more carefully about what our words really mean, or used to mean, or could be interpreted as meaning. And we certainly don't want to offend inadvertently; another word for "politically correct" is, arguably, "considerate." Maybe we can increase awareness with our word choices. That's all good. So why does it sometimes make me want to drop some nice anvil-sized Anglo-Saxon chunk into my prose?

Take a recent article in The Oregonian. The headline refers to the "homeless." A few phrases in and we're talking about the "houseless." Okay: point taken. Someone might very well consider his tent or station wagon his home, and we're not here to shame. Later in the same article, it was "people experiencing homelessness."

This is where I start to feel prickly. I understand we need to avoid suggesting that homelessness in a person is a permanent or innate condition, although that is nothing I would have assumed, but we're starting to grow barnacles of clauses on a perfectly understandable phrase. I personally don't attach any more or less judgment on "homeless person" than "person experiencing homelessness," and maybe some people do, but I think there's some value to being able to toss off a sentence and get all the way to the end of it without sirens of righteousness going off. Can't we just talk?

People even overwork greetings. I've heard many fellow curmudgeons bristle at being told "No problem" when they thank someone. I never thought bringing me a cup of tea would be a problem...why can't you just say 'you're welcome?' Well shoot, sugar. It's just a new convention. "You're welcome" didn't arise as a response to "Thank you" until 1907. Probably before that people said "It was my pleasure to be of service" or some such fanciness. "Goodbye" used to be "God be with ye," but sometimes you just want to cut it short and walk off, okay?

So why now do I keep hearing people tell me "Have a good rest of your day?" Do we really need to acknowledge that half the day is gone already and may or may not have been a good one but we sincerely hope that all goes well from now on? Is that really necessary? We're overthinking this. I know people mean well, but this is English. The whole beauty of it is we have a gigantic unrivaled mongrel vocabulary and we can still be right snappy with it. We can herd bison with it or chase rabbits with it. We can fling it around any which way.

That's why a phrase like "tiny-fingered tangerine shit gibbon" is so satisfying. If we spoke French, we'd have to sit through "Monkey with the long arms, of the fingers minuscule, of shit, orange." If we were German, we'd cram the whole thing into one Capitalized word and glue it up with spittle. The first is like doing thrust-and-parry with a baguette: you're pretty sure someone's insulted you, but you're also pretty confident you can take him. The second is like having a side of pork dropped on your head. It's too much. English is spare and bright. English is punchy. We should celebrate that.

Apostrophe abuse is the least of our problems.

And so I end with a small, bold suggestion. When I was growing up in the '50s in Virginia, "colored people" was what the neighbor lady said when she was feeling polite about the Nigras. Obviously it had to go, and it did. We've cycled through a few ways of saying the same thing since then. Often as not, now, we say "people of color." And that has expanded to include not only black people, but many more varieties of human, such as Latinos, or Pakistanis, or Pacific Islanders. Which makes it a pretty useful phrase, especially in an environment in which non-white people share common...concerns. Where they struggle to power through the rage and fear of a dying majority, and the scoundrels who exploit them for political gain.

But I submit "people of color" is clunky. We're not French. It's been at least forty years since I've heard anyone under the age of 80 call someone a "colored guy." Seems to me the stain of derision has worn off. Is it still too soon to bring back "colored people?" Yes, it does imply that the default Person is white and everyone else has to lug around a bunch of modifiers, but so does "person of color."

To my ear, now--not sixty years ago, but now--it has a warm, jolly sound. "White" is cold and bloodless and sterile, and the shoe fits, so I'll have to wear it--but "colored people?" That's a bowl of goodness. That's sun and song and laughing on the front porch and fellowship and family and home cooking drifting from an open window. That's community. And that's English.

Into The Frying Pantheon

My friend Sara is a food goddess. I've seen her work. I remember she was right here in Dave's kitchen when he expressed his culinary philosophy ("I have no fear of butter"). They bonded instantly.

Sara can go into a market, a roadside stand, or, probably, a clean dumpster, size up the possibilities in a nanosecond, do an efficient flavor triage with her big brain, nab this off the shelf and pluck that out of the ground, bang everything into a series of pots, and invent something swoony every day of the week. Recipes do not alarm her. She’d think nothing of pestling a trilobite in a homemade mortar, whimpering it in wine, reducing, draining, and severely beating it into a juiced raisin vinaigrette, just to make a thimbleful of the first of twenty ingredients in a dish. She could make a salad out of lawn clippings and you'd beg for seconds. Look. If Sara had been in the Donner Party, everyone would've looked forward to the funerals. All right?

And, this being the age of the internet, she's also inclined to post photos of what she's eating, just some perfect thing she dashed together out of scavenged items. Lentil entrails. Eau de dough. Whiskey barrel scrapings. She's not lazy.

So if she posts a picture of something yummy that doesn't look quite out of my league, I'm tempted to try it. This happened recently with her Courgette Fritters. Oh! I had questions. One, what's the recipe? And, B, what's a courgette?

Fortunately, the internet came through for me in a way my six years of French classes did not. She was frying zucchinis. Oh boy, I thought. Zucchinis, I can come by. Zucchinis will waltz right into your house if you don't lock up. Sara was particularly fond of the "favoured Nigel Slater version." I should've been forewarned by the bonus "u" but I went ahead and looked it up in all confidence, even though I've never Nigel Slated in my life.

Well, shit.

Mr. Slater has an entire barking pack of courgette fritter recipes. He has regular ones, and auxiliary ones, and traveling ones, and ones for the Queen, and spares. I checked again: Sara had specified his buttermilk courgette recipe. All righty then!

Trouble. Right away trouble. Sure, zucchinis are easy to come by, but this recipe also called for milliliters and grams, and they are in short supply around these parts. The oil needed to be heated to a temperature that doesn't exist in this country. Also, the courgettes were to be sliced into rounds no bigger than a pound coin.

I search my memory, which is breezy territory. I lived in London for nine months, almost fifty years ago. I do remember that when I came home, I thought our coins looked like play money. So the pound coin was substantial, for currency, if not squashes. I went ahead and decided my zucchini fritters should be about a quarter-inch thick, which dimension I, as a quilter, am very intimate with, and also that it doesn't matter because I'm not a dab hand with a knife anyway and they'd just have to come out how they come out. Whatever points I lose by being short of grams would be made up for by my tossing off "dab hand" like that.

Nigel Slater might be a big deal with a gang of recipes watching his back but I doubt he has a single quarter inch in his kitchen. Or even his kitcheun.

Raisin Brand

Dave eats wood for breakfast.

I'm not actually sure of that. He eats Raisin Bran, and it always seems to give him splinters. We didn't have Raisin Bran when I was growing up. We were strictly a Cheerios and Frosted Flakes family. My college boyfriend's mom introduced me to Raisin Bran and it made me wonder what else my family had deprived me of. I would've moved in with her on the spot but then she brought out a platter of chopped liver and I loved Mom and Dad all over again.

Anyway it's nice to know they still sell Raisin Bran, although the brand has succumbed to the American demand for a paralyzing number of choices. You can get Regular, or you can get it with Frosted Banana Slabs, or Fruit Pucks of various provenance, or Golden Gooey Grain Globules. All still contain genuine splinters.

What finally got me interested in the cereal was the little game they printed on the back of the box. It really brought me back. Yes! It's Spider-Man, and he's in the city, and you're supposed to find the little cameras, the green shirts, the tiny spider-men, and the backpacks! In spite of evidence I had other things to do, I spent some time looking for them. It's not hard, but neither are the other games they used to print on cereal boxes. We loved them. We had time for them. There might be a Treasure Hunt game and you cut your little playing piece out of the box and move it along the path, and try not to land on the shark or the pirate. Or there might be a maze and you take your pencil and scribble your way out.

The games were like the things they'd print in Children's Highlights magazine. To this day if I see the cover of a Children's Highlights I can close my eyes and smell a doctor's office. You might have to look at apparently identical pictures and see how many differences you can find. (Somebody is always missing a foot.) You might have to hunt for all the things that are wrong with a picture. It helped pass the time and block out the Antiseptic Aroma Of Doom in the waiting room.

Dang it, we had real games back then. We didn't hunch over no damn phone. We were down on the rug with real winks to tiddle. We had real metal Chinese Checkers boards and the marbles went bang bang bang bang. We had real pick-up sticks that really could take an eye out.

So the Raisin Bran box brought me back. It was old-timey. The more I looked at it, the easier it was to peer into the past, where kids wearing jaunty caps and knickers rolled hoops with a stick, or flang cowpies. My land! If I looked a little harder, they were squatting in loincloths in the sun tossing knucklebones from a sheep. Looked a little harder and...

Oh crap. The directions on the Raisin Bran box are to cut out the Spider-Man character from the box. Then download and open the Suit Up With Spider-Man app on a camera-enabled mobile device. Then scan the character to use it as a controller in the game.

And just like that, the smart phone is back at the breakfast table. Screw that. I already found all the items. Old-school.

(Looking over my glasses.)

The Rescue Poot

We don't know how old Pootie is. He joined the household in the '80s, but, as Dave pointed out, he already seemed to have some history, with a lot of preferences as to the way the world should operate, and if a lot of those preferences aligned with Dave's own--a fondness for basketball and chocolate, say--that just goes to show he was going to be a good fit. I do know my friend Margo and I first spotted him downtown, in a store, where he was sitting in a basket of identical dogs. You could look at them as a litter, I suppose, but knowing the Poot, it was probably more of an entourage.

He was a force from Day One. Anyone could see that. Margo certainly did, and shortly went back downtown to the Arfnage and scooped Petey out of the basket. So Petey lives with Margo and Pootie lives with us.

I'm not going to say Petey lives a cushier life but there's no question she doesn't fling herself headlong into it quite the way the Poot does. There is photographic record that Pootie was once blond and fluffy, but after seven Cycle Oregon tours and countless adventures in far-flung locales, and lots of time in the sun to work on his beige, he's a changed dog. He's even gone a little bald like his hero Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at least enough to show stitching. Petey, on the other hand, has not let herself go. We don't see her as much as we used to and it's always shocking how fluffy she is.

But it's not for lack of love. Not only is Petey a solid member of the Margo household, but Margo's niece Valentina has taken a shine to her as well. In fact, Valentina adores the entire Pootie franchise and even has a Friend Of Pootie hoodie that, reportedly, is rarely off her long enough to have hygiene applied to it. It's the niece, now ten, who discovered that, like herself, Petey is as much a Trail Blazers fan as Pootie is a Lakers fan. Which is odd in that she lives in California and we live in Oregon, but you're not going to get anywhere arguing loyalties among stuffed canine basketball fans. Valentina only gets to hang out with Petey on vacations.

Pootie, Petey, and Price Bugle

Anyway, we walked into an antique mall the other day where Dave spotted an old baby carriage right by the front door, filled with stuffed animals and dolls. And, said he, a Pootie clone right near the top.

I picked him or her up. "Man, real close," I said, "a knock-off at least, but not quite right. Pootie has a rounder face. Doesn't have this much of a muzzle." Dave said Pootie the hell did too. "I have drawn Pootie thousands of times," I said, with exaggerated patience. "I think I know what his face looks like." Dave harrumphed. We turned the animal around and up and down and Dave settled him back into the carriage, on top, to improve his prospects.

But by the time we'd seen everything in the store and were ready to walk out the door, I realized that even if the new fellow was not the same, he was certainly Pootular, and in any case we couldn't just pick him up and admire him and talk about him and then put him back and walk out the door, because that would surely crush the little guy, and we're sensitive to that kind of thing. So we fished out the three bucks and took him home.

Where I discovered he really was a member of the Pootie Posse. Pootie's muzzle just looks flatter because he's had some fur loved off.

Margo saw it right away. You can hardly see a difference between the new guy and Petey. The new guy is blond in front and a little beiger in back, is all. We realized the little dude has spent the last thirty or so years propped up in a window, and then abandoned. But someone's life is about to turn around at last. Someone's going home with Valentina.