Herban Sprawl

10 August 2010

The old Sprawler is tickled pink. Our neighbor with the tree that was all over our roof (and hers) called tree cutters and has had the miserable thing trimmed back. This means I do not have to fret and worry about Big Kitty taking matters into his own hands from atop our steeply pitched roof. I can’t say this has been a particularly nice looking haircut, but I don’t much care. As long as it no longer is in a position to provide a squirrel launching pad or landing strip and isn’t rotting my timbers, its looks are immaterial. Besides, it’s an ugly Bradford pear anyway.

I got the guy’s card, though, because he owns the company and is not even remotely related to another tree guy who charges a lot for only passable work. This gentleman was delighted to discover a mutual dislike of the other guy. Here’s the story from my end.

Several years ago my elderly dogwoods needed serious grooming. Brain told me the name of a really good arborist. Got that?  An arborist, not just some good old boy with a bucket truck and a tree chopper attachment. He came out and looked over the trees very carefully, examined the bark, tugged on a limb or two and gave me a price and the date he could show up. The work was good and my trees really did well for a number of years thereafter.

It was time for them to need another grooming, and so did Fred, our corkscrew willow. I called the arborist, but he wasn’t the one who answered the phone. It was the father of a kid I had taught when he was in seventh grade. Turns out he’d bought out Rob’s business, kept the name of it and even the phone number, but didn’t let on in the yellow pages that the business was under different ownership. Reluctantly I had him come out to deal with my trees, which meant that little monkey of a kid of his was going to be hanging in my trees. Ugh. They did a passable job. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was passable.

Here is what I learned today. The same guy owns several different tree companies around the valley. All have different names and phone numbers. According to these guys, when there is an insurance job, three estimates are required. So an unsuspecting customer calls three companies, gets three estimates and all three companies are owned by the same guy. Hmmmm

I was taken aback to say the least, so after they left, I did a little homework on the internet and discovered the guy owns something like six different tree businesses. They are all registered with the Better Business Bureau, too. He also claims to be an arborist. Of course, he isn’t the one doing the work, so arborist owner or not, no real arborist touches the customer’s tree. You may think I’m splitting hairs here, but having watched a true-blue arborist at work and comparing it to a tree monkey, there is a huge difference.

This brings up the matter of ethics. Does the Better Business Bureau know this guy bids against himself on insurance jobs? Is this really kosher? What protection is there for a customer who calls what she thinks is a different tree service and when they arrive to do the work, she discovers it was the same tree service who did a so-so job once before? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like this is a matter of truth in advertising. Why have six different companies with six different phone numbers?

I have no answers - only questions. My own experience with the guy is that unlike my favorite roofer, who is cocky because he’s so darn good, this one has nothing to recommend him. When I tell friends who ask who I have used, I can only say who NOT to use. A breakdown in the tradesman-client network is never a good thing. At least I now know that before I call a single one, I should look them up with the BBB to learn who owns them.

Meanwhile, Fred, according to the guy who was here today, is nearly dead. I am really sorry about that. Fred was barely a shoot when our friend Fred planted him 23 years ago, and he’s been a great tree, offering a lot of shade in the hot summer months. He’s been trimmed and groomed twice, but now he has a lot of dead limbs. I really don’t want to lose him. The same goes for our ancient dogwoods in front. They are pink, and in spring when they are at the height of their glory, they look like one huge bubble bath. But, they have a lot of old age issues, as do we all, and I know that we’ll have to take them down one of these days.

It’s like that with trees. BS Squared was a maple we dug from the wooded lot owned by some friends in Charlottesville. We planted BS Squared in front of a cute house we rented and today she is a very pretty tree, making for a quite picturesque front yard. Over the weekend, I realized there are a lot of oak saplings at the Oak Grove in Verona. A board member gave me permission to bring in my shovel and a bucket to take away a little tree. I’m thinking it might be nice to get a little oak started in front, and perhaps by the time it takes hold and starts turning tree-like, it will be poised to replace a dogwood.

And so it goes. One tree after another, and due diligence before calling one single tree guy in the phonebook!

21 May 2010

I was in the middle of trying to figure out why my African violets were looking so puny when the phone rang. Some guy with a south Asian accent being friendly and wanting to talk to me about a much lower mortgage rate. Eh?

I blew him off.

A while later, no closer to understanding the plight of the African violets, I took to the Great Goddess of Information, the internet. The phone rang. I absent-mindedly picked up the phone. The same guy, the same company, Mortgage Solutions calling to “help” me lower my mortgage payments.

“Look, Kiddo,” I said rather firmly in that seventh grade teacher voice that occasionally surfaces when I am exasperated, “we are on the National Do Not Call List, so you have no business calling. Get the hell off the phone and do not call me again, capice?”

I don’t know that it helped any, but I’m left scratching my head wondering how stupid anyone would be to flagrantly ignore that kind of thing. My guess is that somebody is dopey enough just often enough to make it worth their while to try it anyway.

My pal over in the Independent Republic of Salem has been running in circles with SunTrust over a mortgage for one of his clients. He needs to call Clarice and get Clarice to transfer his call to someone with some authority. I wonder if all the mortgage people have been affected with some kind of seasonal mortgage lender disease that renders them brainless.
I’m no closer to a solution for the violets, but I’m going to repot them with fresh African violet potting mix and hope for the best. I’ve had these plants a long time and I’m kind of attached to them. I hope it isn’t some kind of seasonal affective disorder for these things, too!

3 May 2010

The Commonwealth has entered into the rebate for Energy Star appliances program and our fridge, of legal drinking age and then some, certainly isn’t easy on the power bill. I decided to see what Consumer Reports had to say.

For all the bells and whistles that are out there, I have come to the conclusion that rebate or no, energy consumption be damned, we’re better off waiting until this one just plain expires. It isn’t that CR had anything revealing to offer, it was the customer reviews that told the tale.

We’re all pretty much past the stage where we replace an appliance just because there is something out there that is so far above what we have had and I believe, if the reviews are any indication, people who do so wind up bitterly disappointed. If they hadn’t just spent upwards of a grand on a new kitchen appliance, it wouldn’t hurt so badly, but when none of them in that price range garner raves, it is pause for concern.

It was at that point that I decided to review the stoves. Three years ago I bought a new Maytag gas range. My local independent appliance dealer is a nice guy and his staff is truly wonderful. So, I dropped in when Rah told me my elderly Amana range was ready for last rites. They had a low end gas range with five burners. Five on a standard-sized stove is ridiculous, I thought, but I was willing to consider it.

I went home and pulled out the pots and pans that I routinely put into service when I am doing a big cook. With my standard modus operandi pre-Mardi Gras dinner party gear in the trunk, I showed up. They stifled a few guffaws, but learned that someone who is serious about cooking has some basic needs. The five burner thing wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. In fact, it was the most useless feature I could ever imagine. Nothing else, save a two quart  - or smaller - saucepan would fit anywhere else while the middle burner was in use.

Consumer Reports advises us to never buy features we don’t need because all they do is drive up the price. But here is the rub. If you want a convection oven, you have to buy the five burner model. Only thing is, I didn’t find that out until the four burner model was delivered. No one in the store bothered to point out that I sacrificed what could have been a great feature when I eschewed the useless one. But it gets better.

A week into the new stove’s llife, I realized the oven was off and that the clock didn’t work right. In fact, the clock kind of reset itself at will. I called the store. Rah came out and replaced the whole digital mechanism. That one didn’t work, either. The oven was still off by five degrees, plus or minus, depending on which side of 350 you were looking at. The clock still played around like an errant seven year old. Rah came back. Mechanism number 2 was also a dud. We’re on #3 and I’ve given up. I have a chart for the oven, keep a pair of thermometers in the oven and I deal with it. Maffa resets the clock when she comes and the minute her back is turned, it thumbs its nose at her and resets to whatever time it has decided it wants to be.

The hottest burner has a hot spot. I have to constantly turn my saute pan around so it doesn’t get ruined. The feature of having a regular burner in front and a small, simmer burner in back is stupid if you want to use a two burner grill pan. It’s impossible to set the two burners to an equal temperature.

Who designs these things, anyway?

So, following the fridge review let-down, I decided to see if the stoves had gotten any better. What I learned is that I could have paid about $600 more and gotten a GE Profile whose burner knobs melted down on the self-clean feature! The customer complaints across the board on the ranges were pretty damning and I began to see that even the high end ranges - the ones I had been lusting after but couldn’t bring myself to buy - were duds.

I’m beginning to think that our sense of outrage is being wasted on politics. I think we need to rethink things. It’s our products that need revamping. It used to be you could find a reliable, “run-of-the-mill-made-in-Kewanee-at-the-stove-factory” stove for a decent price. They made all the brands and models there. The only thing that differentiated a Tappan from a Magic Chef was the detailing in the design and the shape of the knobs. The appliance store ran specials at the end of the model year and you could buy a decent stove for what it was actually worth. You rarely needed the serviceman. Not anymore. I have Rah’s cell phone number, for crying out loud!

The design isn’t even any good. The new ones with the continuous grates are amazingly bad. The grates are porous and impossible to clean. Y’know, people, those went out when they perfected enameling the cast iron grates for a really good reason. Why are they back? Three racks in the oven? Why? It’s almost impossible to bake anything well with something on two racks.  Now, in all fairness, with a convection oven this can work fairly well, but from what I read, not all convection ovens are created equal, either.

We have iPhones; we have digital technology that is better than our wildest dreams. But we have absolutely lousy kitchen appliances. No wonder people don’t cook anymore.

22 March 2010

We enjoyed a lovely day yesterday, and I got a lot done in the front yard. I had cleaned up and was about to try out Ellie Krieger’s recipe for Shrimp Fra Diavlo (So Easy cookbook) when Big Kitty and I stepped out onto the front porch to admire my handiwork and to discuss a couple of ideas we had. There was a tribe of noisy young people accompanied by some equally boisterous adults stampeding down our little street. They were holding #10 envelope shaped something or anothers and BK and I popped inside in a big, fat hurry. We closed the front door to signal our disinterest in whatever it was they were trying to hawk.

This morning I opened the door to discover one of those things STUCK to my storm door window. First Baptist Church was trying to tell us how very welcome we were at their establishment for the veneration of a cult hero. I tried to peel the thing off and it left a mess, with the message on the backside still visible from inside the door.

Let’s just say I went up in flames and leave it at that.

I had errands to run, and while I performed my ablutions, I considered the insult that was still stuck to the door. Years ago I had gotten a letter in the mail courtesy of a woman at work who used our contact sheet to proselytize, and come to think of it, it was around this same time of year.

I still had part of the offending junk mail and lo! I beheld their phone number so I rang up. I informed the woman who answered that I had a thing stuck to my door, it was left by someone from their church, I was offended and since they’d made the mess, they needed to send someone out to clean it up. She took my name and number and address so “Someone can call you back.” I acidly informed her I did not require a return call. What I required was a person from that church to deal with the mess.

I left to run my errands, and when I was locking the car door upon my return, I realized the elderly Jewish lady across the street still had one of those things stuck to HER door! Oy gevalt!

Up the hill, someone has a sign in the yard informing all that they should come see them about attending their Baptist church. A sign in the yard like a political sign or a For Sale sign. Yep.

Mythology of many different civilizations includes a god figure that is killed off and then comes back. The ancient Mideast is rife with those kinds of stories, and they exist in Greek and Roman mythology as well. So that whole resurrection business, which was pretty hard to swallow even when I was forced to be confirmed in the nice, liberal United Church of Christ (aka Unitarians Considering Christ), certainly is amusing to me now in my dotage.

It’s an important part of the Christian liturgical year, and to the faithful it carries great meaning. But then there are the Baptists, who are forever trying to shove their version of religion down your throat. For a group who pride themselves on their religion, they are amazingly devoid of A) any semblance of diffidence regarding respect of other people’s beliefs (or lack thereof) and B) disregardful of that verse in Matthew when Jesus told his followers to exhibit better manners and to pray in private.

This kind of thing obviously frosts my shorts, but I’m not the only one. They have gotten their hooks into a nice Episcopalian girl of my acquaintance and the entire business is rather vexing to those of us in her family circle. She was looking for a little social life and now her Facebook page is full of her new convert blither. She doesn’t have a clue, having led a rather sheltered life up until now, and because she wants to fit in, she’s busy writing her personal Jesus story and planning to be baptized. Her parental unit was experiencing a moderate case of diaper rash over this, and when he realized she was eliminating certain things like hair salon visits because she didn’t have money, it finally sank in that this was a serious case of cult-like behavior.

I’m all for freedom of religion, but I am also in favor of freedom from religion. No one should have to sit in the hairstylist’s chair getting grilled about religion and pressured about one’s personal beliefs. (I changed hair stylists, by the way.) No one should have to receive religious literature unbidden through the mails. Likewise, when the door-to-door people come calling, one has the right to leave the door closed or to tell them to please move on. Personally, I find that door-to-door thing to be in poor taste, but I’ve gotten my share of free Books of Mormon that way. (Now talk about some wild mythology!)

And no one should have religious junk mail glued to one’s front door. Any bets on whether First Baptist will man up and come clean off my door? Any bets on a forthcoming apology? Trust me, if they haven’t shown up tonight, they’ll be getting another call tomorrow…but I’ll be asking for the senior pastor!

10 September 2009

Big Kitty and I were having our daily dinnertime discussion and he was chuckling about the poor French who are being advised to eschew their traditional cheek kisses. It seems the French public health people are pointing out that this could be a swine flu spreader, and old habits are dying hard. Those cheek kisses are their way of being polite, for pete’s sake!

At the same time, I read in today’s paper about the college professors who are battling the ignorance of their students when it comes to classroom decorum. I have news for them. This is something public school teachers have been grousing about for much longer, and we’re sorry it’s only just now hitting college level, but now they have a better idea of what we’re up against in trying to educate young ones.

Big Kitty and I were remarking on the demise of public civility in general. Even here, in the South where it’s more important to address some lady as Ma’am than it is to keep one’s elbows off the table, the incivility is rampant and rather disconcerting for old ladies like me. That an old duffer like Big Kitty, whose language is nearly as bad as my dearly departed father’s was, noted the lack of manners came as no surprise. He’s a bit old school when it comes to some things. Can’t get him to write his own thank you notes, but there are some issues the guy is downright picky about.

Anyway, we oldsters were cluck-clucking, as oldsters are wont to do, and the subject of cell phones came up. My big gripe is drivers who are blab-blabbing as they meander through parking lots in trucks big enough to carry the 81^st Airborne. His big gripe is people who wander aimlessly in stores, pushing a shopping cart, which then becomes as dangerous as those trucks they have in the parking lot.

If I hear “I have to take this” one more time, I might snatch somebody’s Blackberry and hurl it into the nearest water feature. No, Honey, you don’t have to take this. You can let it go to voicemail. Ain’t nobody going to have a massive breakdown if they can’t speak to you this second. The other one is sitting with someone who keeps checking that damned phone the entire time you are trying to have some civil discourse on a topic of mutual interest. I want to say, “How about you just go on and have lunch with your text buddy and I’ll just slide on out of here and run to T.J. Maxx.”

Then there are the ones who carry on conversations in the check-out line at the store. My cashier friends at my friendly Food Lion and The Fresh Market get kinda worked up about those situations, but they are too mannerly to just stop the line and wait for the person to hang up. I feel their pain, and they feel mine. The only person who doesn’t feel pain is the pain him or herself!

The college professors are insulted by the familiarity with which the young people address them. Shocking, but there it is. We are past the age where parents are mortified by their children’s poor manners. Even in the South where you are Ma’am whether you like it or not.

I have no solutions. I’m having one of those days that Holly Golightly described as the mean reds. Yapping about something I can’t do anything about is a good tension reliever, but a ten pound box of dark chocolate covered Fannie Mae caramels would be even better. (I’ve given up on Frangos. They aren’t as good as when they were made by the Marshall Field candy makers. Quality’s in the cellar where the candy kitchen ain’t no mo’.) If one of you has some good ideas about restoring civility to this country, call Barack on his Blackberry. I wonder if he interrupts meetings with “I gotta take this…”

My friends and I have been having a lively and interesting discussion about the use of Paul’s writings for weddings. I threw the subject out there to see what others thought and I’ve enjoyed the responses. It’s also been fun to toss in my heretical point of view, as well.

The passage in question happened to be from a letter allegedly written by Paul to the Ephesians (5, 1-2 and 22-31). According to my Harper’s Study Bible, there is ample evidence that this wasn’t written by Paul, but rather by his followers according to what he taught. So, technically, we are speaking of Paul once or twice removed.

Nevertheless, I have no use for Paul (or his disciples) as the be-all and end-all that Protestant preachers want him (them) to be. My friend Kay says that for a Jew during his time, Paul was expressing some liberal ideas. But if you read a little farther, in Ephesians 6, 5 -8 Paul tells slaves to obey their masters! Oops. Not too liberal, in my opinion.

So we have been dissecting this concept and it’s been interesting that the feminists are definitely against the use of Paul, and the people who have been raised as Southern Baptists are trying to skirt the issue by saying Paul spoke of love and respect.

Bishop Tony Hash commented, “Hmmm though not the best reading, if you continue further to verse 25, Paul teaches the husband to love the wife as Jesus loved the church. Through this perfect love there is no subjugation so Paul contradicts himself. In true love no one is higher than the one you love so in reality the wife is in control in the husband’s eyes!” I had to laugh at that one. Talk about circular!

But was there a church for Jesus to love? Technically, not. Jesus was a Jew and all he was trying to do was cause the hierarchy of the Jews to behave better toward their disadvantaged brethren. He was against the way the Pharisees treated the rank and file Jews, and he was vocal about it. Was he the Messiah? I doubt he thought so. Humility seemed to be his strong suit. All he was suggesting was that if people followed what he was teaching, everyone would be better off.

Did Paul really teach what Jesus taught? It’s hard to say for sure, given when the gospels were written and when Paul had his big conversion. What we do know is that Paul was a higher up in the Judaic scene, so he was a learned man. He was also a zealot, and those are the ones that scare the heck out of me. Where Jesus was trying to improve Judaism, Paul was doing what Paul wanted and saying it was in Jesus’ name. In Jesus’ name, I enslave you.

Paul’s conflicted feelings about women were apparent in the translations of his writing. What I don’t understand is why modern Protestant ministers seem to be so enamored with Paul. You can’t just pick and choose from his writing and decree him a great religious leader. You have to look at the entire body of his work, and if you do, you see that he was a moralist. At the same time, he blamed others, namely women, for leading men astray.And, if the evidence is correct, who’s to say that the followers of Paul might not have kicked it up a notch?

Why do ministers keep drilling on the same passages that are so wrong-headed in the treatment of women? You have only to live in the Bible Belt with Southern Redneck men who think it is their duty to beat their wives into submission, or to rape their wives when their wives won’t submit themselves sexually, to be mighty wary of the words of Paul. We don’t have to lead men astray. They do a mighty fine job of it on their own. You hear me talkin’, Paul-baby?

Moralists like Paul are appealing to literal believers because they offer simplistic answers that don’t require independent thinking. Believers can just go through the motions without challenging anything and be perfectly content. BGF once tried to explain the trinity to me. I waved him off. It’s not that I don’t understand it, I explained to him, I just don’t believe in it. I gave it plenty of thought when I was supposed to be memorizing pieces in the Evangelical and Reformed catechism. The other kids were doing this rote thing, and here I was, thirteen years old and driving the elderly minister insane because I didn’t believe in ghosts.

But back to appropriate wedding readings. I don’t approve of Paul. Period. But if a young couple can’t get married without something from Paul, why not Colossians 3, 12- 17? I’d leave out 15-17, but then I’m not Christian.

The passage talks about loving and forgiveness. The hardest thing any couple has to learn how to do is forgive. Forgiveness is tough. The trick, though, is letting go. Grudges have a habit of getting stuck in our craws, and it’s way too easy to leave them there. Forgiveness while letting go is a huge challenge. All longtime married people agree this is the one thing they’ve had to work at the most.

When the aunts rebelled and decreed their niece wasn’t getting married to the tune of Paul, it was because we three are feminists who came up when women were thick in the fight for equality. That fight still isn’t over, but younger women seem blithely unaware of what it was like in the day, and they don’t seem to understand that a bunch of male legislators have the power to set us right back to square one…men who will quote Paul the entire time they are doing it.

My mother had it right, and she wasn’t quoting Paul – “Forgive and forget,” she’d say. She wasn’t alive when I got married, but it was a lesson I never forgot. That’s the verse I’d really like to be reading to these young people.

19 August 2009
In today’s Times, they ran an editorial cartoon that really hit home for me. Signe Wilkinson of The Philadelphia Daily News depicted a balding, fat old duffer signing up to send a petition to President Obama. The caption was “No Insurance Coverage for Abortions!” In the duffer’s back pocket is a big bottle of Viagra.

I went over the edge at the annual insurance meeting for my husband’s company. They are covering prescriptions of Viagra - only 4 tablets per month. However, they are NOT covering birth control.

It’s discrimination no matter how the religious wrong or anyone else wants to paint it. The message is clear: men can screw all they want and the insurance industry will cover the cost of a questionably safe drug to make sure they can. However, they won’t voluntarily cover birth control for the likely side effect suffered by the partners of those poor hard up men.

What angers me is that my husband’s company also employs a number of younger men. The assumption is that their wives don’t need birth control, or that they are working and get insurance coverage at their own places of employment. This is not necessarily the case. There are also younger women at the company who are of child-bearing age. What about them? The older men get a benefit they are denied: sexual freedom.

In all this shrieking about the government interfering with the insurance companies’ ability to continue to gouge the public, we hear a lot about abortion, but nothing about birth control. Reproductive rights are still a matter of suspicion among the religious wrong. Women need to be kept at a disadvantage, after all. Lord knows, if we weren’t, we’d be sexual jezebels, now wouldn’t we?

I’m irritated because I see the Democrats starting to back down. Millions of Americans need this and they are getting chicken. It’s deja vu all over again. They missed their big chance when Bill Clinton tried to fix the problem, and now they’re going to blink and be voted out with nothing to show for it.

Yes, our taxes will rise to cover this. But anything worth having is worth paying for. And in the end, you really do get what you pay for.

It’s hot out. I put on my shower caps and came inside to hydrate. Simon yawned at me turned over and swabbed off a few scents he didn’t like before conking out again.

If someone calls you a chameleon, it’s time to examine your social skills. It no longer means you are adaptable to any situation. No indeedy. It means you go where you aren’t wanted, are difficult to convince to leave and return without an invitation.

The above should give you a hint that I have been digging up chameleon plant - again.  That miserable stuff was under the lavender, and unfortunately, I accidentally dug up a Fat Spike lavender plant. In a sense, it was probably a good thing because I needed that space for some daylilies, but I am not putting those in until I see if more chameleon pops up. I want an empty space so I can get them drunk on Round Up! The damn stuff has also infested a Munstead lavender, which doesn’t send up those graceful spikes. And, truth to tell, that one is probably about to be a past tense lavender, too. But it can’t go just yet because I have to have lavender in that bed. It’s the Detectives’ Garden, and the lavender was planted for Miss Marple, for Pete’s sake.

Anyway, I was in here, cooling off, resting my back, swilling limeade, and here came some other chameleons…Jehovah’s Witnesses. Middle school-aged Jehovah’s Witnesses, at that. I hate turning away kids. Their feelings were hurt, and it’s what happens when they get sent door to door. Somewhere down the line, even though their elders are responsible for placing those dear children in that position, I’m going to pay for hurting their feelings. I hate that.

Big Kitty is toiling away with his sanding wheel, and his occasional curses, combined with mine, are the result of appreciating the hard work in which we  are engaged in the same vicinity. Chameleon gets dug up with a fork and the Japanese weeder. Old paint gets removed with a steel bristle wheel. Either way, it’s worth a few bad words along the way. The cats are awake, unhappy about the racket, but forgiving because they know that fresh paint will make their porch much nicer, which is what they absolutely deserve just for being our cats.

But that chameleon plant….

The raging discussion among AAUW members has to do with the proposed changes in the organization’s membership requirements. At the present time, in order to become a member of the American Association of University Women, you must have graduated from at least a two year degree program. So an A.A., R.N. or bachelor’s is all you need. You don’t even have to be a woman. Now they have decided that the key to declining membership is to eliminate the education requirement.

It’s a dumb idea.

The organization was founded about 125 years ago by educated women who sought other educated women with whom they could share time. The idea was to promote education among women and make it more acceptable in general society for women to attend college for something other than the M.R.S. degree. As time advanced, it became a good place for educated women to hobnob with other educated women outside of their home lives. As one of my older friends told me, it offered her the chance to have adult conversations - no kids and no P.T.A. talk, thus ending the kind of isolation many college grads felt as they lived through the 1950s when they were expected to be stay-at-home moms.

For some reason, the organization has become irrelevant to younger women. Perhaps it is because they have greater opportunities elsewhere. Perhaps it is because they are overscheduled with loading kids into SUVs and trucking them off to one activity after another. Or perhaps the problem is that some branches are set in their ways and aren’t as welcoming to new members or changes in their activities that meet the needs of a younger generation. Whatever it is, they decided upon opening up membership to anyone, regardless of age, and now we’ll be known only by the letters, not the words.

It’s a dumb idea.

My niece, who presides over an urban branch, notices the shifts and also, being the pragmatist, says we should defeat that motion at the convention and move on. It will not solve the problem of bringing in new members, and we need better solutions to expanding membership.

My spouse’s opinion is that if AAUW seeks to close the gap in economic parity for women and girls through education, then it cannot talk the talk without walking the walk. To eliminate the education requirement, he thinks, will gut the  core purpose of the organization. I think he’s on to something.

The Roanoke Valley Branch is thrilled when we gain younger members. We’re happy to include activities that appeal to them. A case in point is that we have some movement to provide support for the women returning to college through the Hollins University Horizon program. A younger woman is spearheading that, and she has our 100% support. The branch extended a gift membership to the Virginia Teacher of the Year, who finally got a chance to attend an event - our annual meeting where we awarded our six $1500 scholarships. She was blown away by that, and realized what I had been badgering her about - AAUW can be of assistance with her program for girls, G.R.O.W. As her duties as the T.O.Y. wind down, I look for her to become more active. A gift membership was also extended to a young lawyer, who has already been networking.

The point is, we’re going out of our way to identify young women, and to give them the extra incentive to join, we’re getting the ball rolling during the reduced membership fee period. It gets them in the door, and once we get them hooked into activities that are meaningful for them, our branch will be awash with fresh ideas and renewed enthusiasm. We love our young women! We want them to stick with us to work for the kinds of things that made Lilly Ledbetter a household term.

Eliminating the membership requirement of a degree isn’t going to get the branches who are stuck in the mud out of trouble. Their organizations have to undergo some deep soul-searching and face the question of what if. They have to decide if it’s worth it to stay mired in the same old. They have to adjust to change, but no one said the change had to challenge our belief in education as the way to equity for women.

I’m in the demographic that is between the young women and the elders. I haven’t been involved for as many years as I have been eligible, but for the few years I have been in the organization, I’ve seen the need for new blood. It is a point of pride that my niece leads the Chicago branch. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I was shopping for appliqued Florence Eisenman dresses for her! I have encouraged our T.O.Y. to get her friends to come along with us. We have a lot of work to put on our annual book sale, and we also need to be preparing for a day when that sale is no longer feasible. Younger women bring a different set of ideas and perspectives to such problems, and it is that which we value, and are actively seeking. If other branches aren’t seeing the light in that regard, then changing the membership requirement isn’t going to help.

So, it’s a dumb idea.

And with any luck, AAUW women who follow this blog will chime in - not just to me, but to the leadership of their branches and to the delegates who will attend the convention in June. Demand better answers from national AAUW leadership. This one is a cop-out, and they know it. They know what we know.

It’s a dumb idea.

Holly Golightly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul Varjak: The mean reds, you mean like the blues?
Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long, you’re just sad that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Paul Varjak: Sure.
Holly Golightly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s, then - then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

---

The mean reds. Been fighting them for the past few days. Holly Golightly had it right when she said it’s good to go to a place where you feel like nothing bad can happen to you. For Holly it was Tiffany’s. I have a place like that, but it’s too far away for a quick fix.

Feeling unsettled is difficult and it’s like a leak that wears away an integral support. There is that persistent drip, drip, drip that makes you crazy, and suddenly, when the floor caves in, you realize that drip had damaged the joists and now there is nothing you can do about it that won’t be costly or utterly complicated and frustrating.

Today I engaged in some really serious retail therapy. Unfortunately, due to the issues surrounding middle aged spread, it was long overdue and completely necessary. I should feel better, right? I have one more thing I don’t have to worry about (what to wear), but did it chase the mean reds? Nope. Talbots to me isn’t like Tiffany’s to Holly.

There are inexplicable things in life that happen, and when they do, normally we learn to live with them and go on. When they affect people we love, we offer help and do what we can to alleviate the bad stuff. Sometimes the mean reds set in because somewhere in the world, someone we love is suffering or in pain. We feel this kind of fear, we move along and wonder when it will revealed…when will we learn what is going on that has caused those miserable mean reds?

I have a friend who is ‘talking to grief’ and trying to keep her perspective in a gut-wrenching situation. I have an elder who is becoming very fragile and I am hoping he will hold out until September when I can see him again. Just one more ‘I love you” and one more hug and maybe I can let go. There is another elder who is frail and doesn’t really know what’s going on. I can’t wish away the loss. And yet another elder who is cutting himself off from the pack, which worries me. Helpless from this many miles away, I try to maintain the connections, express the love and care, and hope for the best. Then comes a day when the mean reds grab hold and just will not let go.

I’m thinking I really need a visit to my Tiffany’s…the place where nothing bad can happen to me or mine.