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Showing posts from April, 2017

Found in Pomona

Antique Row here in P-Town is slowly shutting down. Every year we loose a few more stores as dealers retire or owners pass on. According to friends who've lived here longer the real hey day for Antiques here was the 1980's and 1990's so when I moved here in 2001 I'd already missed out on the good times. Oh well, I've had a lot of great finds at the stores. Here are a few: 1. A brilliant blue Chinese vase. I am sure it is made for the tourist market, it is small with fake looking marks on the bottom, The color is striking and the form is very sweet. It is perfect for holding geraniums that bloom so plentifully here. Finding it cheered me up tremendously on a bad day. 2. A gold-tone beaded necklace with a small bird charm. It went perfectly with every outfit and I wore it almost daily until it broke and I couldn't find all the beads to fix it properly. 3. A Franciscan Duet coffee pot. Everyone loves Starburst, but the same molds were used to make two other d

Happy Ruination Day!

On top of being Good Friday this is the day Abraham Lincoln was shot, the Titanic struck an ice berg and one of the worst storms in the dust bowl hit. Gillian Welch wrote about it . For various reasons this has been the year I have needed the Resurrection to be real, which means I also need Death to be real. One with out the other is cheating. Today is the Day of Death. I used to wear black every Good Friday from my Holy roller days in college to my moody contemplative days during my 20s. I made Holy Week play lists and contemplated the crucifixion. The one Holy Week practice I have maintained is reading T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets" every Easter season. This year I have found an extra measure of comfort in it as I have read it as a love letter to suffering. Everything is transient. Nothing really sticks around and to get better first we must get worse. I attended a funeral of a respected spiritual leader recently and the man who gave the homily read from The D

A Little Bit Like Bread and Wine

During snack my son spent most of the time feeding me his Cheerios and grapes. He ate a fair amount, but about half were offered to me. Some he offered and took back, smiling, a baby joke. This is our usual routine before nap, but it occurred to me today was Maundy Thursday and what we were really having was communion.   Once I heard a woman share a story about having a homeless man bump into her tray of food at a Burger king as she was settling down to eat breakfast. He knocked her coffee onto her french toast sticks. She was mad enough to ask him pay for a new breakfast. She scanned the Burger King and saw the man sitting with a friend. As she got up she noticed the homeless man's friend wore a priest's collar, and that the homeless man had also knocked the priests coffee into his breakfast. The priest was sitting, eating the soggy breakfast acting like nothing happened. So the woman went back to her seat and ate her french toast ticks reflecting to us that they tasted &qu

Happy 101st Birthday Beverly Cleary

Congratulations Mrs. Cleary! Ten things I learned from Ramona the Pest: 1. Henry Huggins can help you out and thats okay. Sure you walked into the mud puddle and got stuck and lost your boots, and you Don't. Need. Help. but actually it is alright if you do. 2. Attack should mean to stick tacks in people. It should, and words should mean what they say. And I should mean what I say too. 3. Ramona would not tolerate her sister's friend treating her like a baby. Being talked down to is never alright. 4. If everyone is dressed as a witch, carry a name tag. Letting people know who you are is fine. 5. Sit here for the present. The core of me feels I should be rewarded for simply doing what I have been asked. I want the present for sitting, standing, taking care of the baby, and doing the dishes. In truth I have received my reward. 6. Dawnzer Lee Light. Yep. I think I know what I am talking about far more than I actually do. 7. There is a mush pot and we all end up there