A WEAVER, APES AND MARTINSVILLE

martinsville

A day of many changes sitting still. At one point, looking at emails, it might have been the word weaving, a friend from earlier years came to mind, someone I'd not seen in 40 years, thereabouts. Thought I'd google her name, see if something came up, figuring there'd be a good chance of it. She had a website, a weaver. She was getting into weaving in the last years I knew her. I saw she'd been doing some really interesting work. I knew her whole family. I remember a time at a Christmas time cocktail party her parents put on. It was in the Sixties. They were playing jazz on the record player. We decided to put on the current Mothers of Invention album, We're Only In It For The Money. It got sufficient response, or reaction, to make it worth doing, then it was put aside. Her mother and dad were both terrific people, both Xcellent artists in a time when art didn't sell except to their friends. They held it together through thin and came out to the good. They were some of the people I hated with all my heart to leave behind when I came to the mountains. I didn't believe I'd be here more than five years. Mountain culture turned out to be a quicksand for me. I fell into it, and all that went before fell away, very much like dying. I got an email back just before I wrote the first words above, saying she thought I was dead. LOL Almost. Here is her link: www.louisehalsey.com


Among my emails today was one from somebody at a website called nanny.net. It's a website for professional nannies. I almost dismissed it as spam, but something about it didn't seem like spam. Thought I'd take a look. It was from Debbie Denard at nanny.net with a link to an article on the website that was called 10 Lessons Parents Could Learn From Apes. I figured this was someone who saw what I'd written about the documentary of the chimpanzee named NIM who was used in a half-assed "experiment" to teach him how sign language. The "experiment" was all askew without any, any understanding of the chimp and he ended up in a cage in solitary confinement forgotten. I was glad to see this list of 10 lessons parents could learn from apes. I knew upon reading the sentence it would be the image of ideal child raising, because I have seen so many four-leggeds raise their babies. It looks to us like they're not communicating, grazing side by side, but they are. The love between them is the same as among humans. Debbie evidently connected with my compassion for NIM and concluded I'd like to see the 10 lessons from apes. They can be found at: http://www.nanny.net/blog/10-lessons-parents-could-learn-from-apes/  NIM was taken from his mother, who lived in solitary confinement in a small cage, having babies and getting them snatched from her hands when two weeks old. Her despair when her baby was taken away was awful, and even worse that nobody noticed, and anyone who might have noticed would not have cared. It's just an ape.


In childhood I was trained to believe animals were not sentient beings. I didn't get it. They had eyes and ears, a mouth, feet, guts; stand them straight up and their skeleton looks awfully like ours. That was one of the many things I had to retrain myself about as I went on my own, out of the belief system of church, school, home, television, everybody; ie, everybody in my world. The undoing of the belief systems began on the flight away from the city of parents in a book someone I'd only met gave me for the flight. Albert Camus. The Stranger. By the time the plane landed at Norfolk, Virginia, it was a new me. I had connected with something like had never happened in my life. I had not changed yet, but that was perhaps the seed that grew. Two years later, it really was a new me. I was anything but what I was supposed to be. Git-er-done. That's where it started. I think of it as the beginning of self-awareness. The beginning of conscious non-conformity. The beginning of following my own light. Not the fullness of it, just the beginning, the very beginning, like when a seedling pops out of the ground and opens two round leaves to the light. Like, Oh.


Justin and Crystal returned from a weekend at the lake in SC where he caught a 41lb catfish. He had the tv record the Martinsville race. I went over and we watched the cars go round and round from about dark til 1. Martinsville is a half mile track. By the time they come out of the curve into the straight stretch they're doing 60, then a straight stretch of pedal to the metal, then brake to the metal for the curves. I like that at the lower speeds when cars tap one another it's not a death-defying roll end over end in flames. They lose traction, skid around in a half circle and take up at the back of the pack. This one had the slickest end I think I've seen. One of the slickest. Gordon was in front by inches, Jimmy Johnson was on the outside of him in a curve, Clint Bowyer attempted to pass below them, Johnson swerved down into Gordon, they both went sideways, Bowyer went sideways, and Ryan Newman slipped through the hole opened when Bowyer lost traction. It was an opening made for him, a hesitate and you're lost moment, and he took it. Good race. 497 laps of watching cars run in circles, then in the last laps it turned into a Martinsville race.

  

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