Izaak Jansz. de Wit, after Wybrand Hendriks:
Echtpaar in een boeren interieur
[Couple in a farmer's interior] (1794)

" … we continue forward somehow."

Some dates seem to attract events. My father and nephew were, for instance, born on the same day/month, January 15, and that became an annually celebrated anniversary greater than the simple sum of two birthdays. My first wife's younger sister was born on Norwegian Independence Day, Syttende Mai ("Seventeenth of May"), elevating that anniversary into a super holiday for that Norwegian family. What one says on such days tends to be the same, ever older stories, grown perhaps even more remarkable with each retelling. For the Muse and I, September 15th must undoubtedly be our most prominent anniversary. It's the day we met twenty-seven years ago, and it carries ever greater nostalgia and significance with each passing year. This year, additional significance attached itself to the day when The GrandOtter, The Muse's granddaughter Sara, gave birth to our first great-granddaughter, making us both great-grandparents.

Such significances always seem unlikely, though double occurrences cannot be described as rare.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Unknown Artist: Legalized Plunderers, from Puck (1880)

" … fly coach with their constituients when on the people's business."

The Muse and I last night attended a neighboring county Democratic Party's annual celebration dinner featuring a visit from our spectacular United States Senator Maria Cantwell. A visit with her when she was visiting Walla Walla in June yielded The Muse a senatorial letter of intent for an important Port project and me an appreciative interest in my Blind Men and the Elephant Book. We attended the dinner in hopes of continuing the conversation we'd started and also to revel in what is turning out to be a genuine banner year in the history of our Democratic organizations. The dinner was held at a union hall, where we learned that Biden's term has resulted in a record number of apprenticeships and jobs. That county's economy's on fire!

We were seated at a table with a couple of former school teachers who retired from the Seattle suburbs and moved over into the less urban east of the Cascades.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Margaret Fisher: With a Sense of Humor (20th century)

" … Presence isn't quite ready to make sense to us again."

I feel moved to consider Senses in this story. Not the usual sight, smell, taste, hear, and feel, but a parallel or even an orthogonal set familiar to everyone: Insense, Outsense, Absense, and Presense. I could throw in the sense of humor, too, and any others that might only come into focus once I start this consideration. I propose this plotline because The Muse and I experienced a shocking Absense over recent days, the sudden disappearance of a presence that had come to kind of define us. Loss seems ordinary enough. We slough off plenty in our regular day-to-day existence, and life itself depends upon death. Everything we consume except milk, honey, water, and air depends upon something dying for sustenance, so we're certainly not strangers to Absense.

The steelhead filet I carefully grilled over hot coals before dinner last night disappeared shortly after that, never to return.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Preston Dickinson: Self-Portrait (c. 1926)

Qualifies As A Feeling?
I mostly feel lucky even though lucky probably doesn't fully qualify as a feeling. Further, luck must be utterly out of my control, or else it's not really luck because luck if it's governed by anything, must be ruled by randomness. One might harbor feelings about impending luckiness but only experience luck once it happens. How often do I "feel" lucky without experiencing an actual manifestation of luck? How frequently do I experience luck without having a premonition of its arrival? Both questions seem as unnecessary as they are unanswerable. I might cringe when Friday the Thirteenth comes around, regardless of which day of the week it lands on that month (Thanks, Walt Kelly!), but I cower for nothing more or less than randomness. Not to downplay randomness, for it was probably the force that resulted in us. It routinely produces unlikely results if only because we cannot calculate the likelihood for most results. We might be equally blessed and cursed by randomness, just as lucky or unlucky as we expect to be, depending primarily upon our expectations, which are rarely random and most often focused on feeling luck as if luck even qualifies as a feeling.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Unknown Artist:
Ivory and Brass Folding Shoe Measure (1738)

" … I feel deeply sorry for that absence."

I recently happened upon a Neil DeGrasse Tyson video where he explained how, in high school, he acquired his first calculus textbook. He admitted that he initially felt utterly intimidated by the gibberish he found inside. He explained that the jump from algebra to calculus is greater than from arithmetic to algebra. Even so, as weeks went by, he came to catch himself understanding ever more of the previous gibberish so that within that quarter, he'd come to rely upon those previously baffling formulas. This seems the typical testimony of anybody's mastery. It tends to grow upon them slowly, perhaps eventually leading to a flash of realization. Not everyone finds mastery, though, and those who don't often remain baffled about why they couldn't experience that shift.

I was making small talk when driving The Grand Other to school yesterday.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Unidentified Artist
[after Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn]:
The Blind Fiddler
-Alternate Title: Blind Fiddler, Led by His Dog
(1631)

" … all will shortly be Revealed."

And so it came to pass that after a weekend drying in the late summer heat, the new concrete porch portal watched the crew return to remove its forms. Screws whirred out, and pry bars separated painstakingly-prepared form faces, oiled chamfer strips and insets intact. Over a scant couple of hours, the place had a new face, one that was in no way familiar. By morning's end, after all those boards had been loaded into a trailer, the yard was bare for the first time in almost a month, and our new home stood before us. The concrete was darker than it would seem by week's end, as Pablo, our concrete contractor, explained. The finishing had already begun. Each edge would be sanded or ground, imperfections filled with a putty-like substance, then sanded or ground again. They will repeat this process until no blemishes remain. It's painstaking work again, back-breaking in its own way, requiring delicacy this time rather than brawn.

The new face seems massive.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [boy sitting in woman's lap] (c. 1950)

" … just run-of-the-mill reassurance."

I have proudly possessed a string of Lap-Sitting cats. My current one, Max, finds me most mornings, drowsy and tentative, sitting and staring out the library window. He tries to hop up stealthily, but that's generally beyond his ability. He tromps around the place in those pre-dawn hours. I can hear him coming from clear across the house, for his are no mere little cat's feet. He most often enters from the upstairs window, landing at the end of the hallway with a definite thump before proceeding down the hall to the stairs, which he makes ring with each step, down into the entry hall before turning through the dining room and into the living room where he finally fails to sneak up behind me. He can still surprise me with his timing, though. He suddenly appears on the chair arm, sometimes managing to get tangled up with my arm, whereby he aborts the attempt. He'll sometimes slink away then and not return, but he often mounts a second try, landing off balance in the vicinity of my lap. He often requires a little nudge and some guidance to find a comfortable position before settling in for some serious Lap-Sitting.

I adjust my schedule for these visits, which usually seem far too brief.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Ruscha:
Angry Because It's Plaster, Not Milk (1965)
©Edward Ruscha, Fair Use

"Thank you for your patience."

My Greatness must have evolved in me, for I was not born Great or, indeed, born to Greatness. I believe that something, not Greatness, was, however, inborn in me that helped me achieve what nobody who knew me then would have foreseen as my emerging Greatness. The preconditions must have been there, however unnoticed, because leopards never change their spots. Nobody knows how leopards first acquired their spots, only that once possessed, they're never lost. I suspect that Greatness carries a similar distinction because it knows no comeuppance. Once emerged, it's present. Once noticed, it's no longer tacit. It becomes the defining attribute of anyone who owns it, though some insist that Greatness owns its incumbents. Either way, I say it's Great to experience Greatness. Those who have never experienced their own Greatness couldn't possibly understand. Whatever Greatness anyone who's not Great ever notices isn't even distantly related to what that one with genuine Greatness experiences. I'm shocked when anyone even mentions my Greatness, for how could they possibly know of what they speak? True Greatness comes through suggestion: the great must introduce themselves to the unwashed. Some insist that Greatness is exclusively a function of auto-suggestion, though I strenuously disagree, as would anybody possessing the Greatness pedigree.

I'm impressed with how language evolves out from under even its strictest adherents.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Ruscha: Chocolate
[Series/Book Title: Assembling, vol. 1,
Henry Korn and Richard Kostelanetz, compilers
Brooklyn: Gnilbmessa inc. (1970)

" … genuinely qualifies as work worthy of shirking."

The final fortnight of each quarter, my thoughts turn to Assembling. If disciplined in my writing that quarter, I will have completed ninety stories, each written under the presumed aegis of that quarter's theme or stated purpose. This quarter, I've been writing Grace stories, though not every piece necessarily seems on topic. If I squint, I can see how I interpret each piece to have fully satisfied its theme, though I seem like an over-insistent assistant district attorney prosecuting my case. Assembling involves bringing each story together in one place so that it might appear to be a manuscript where I can number pages and list chapters in a Table of Contents. The manuscript amounts to the least helpful form for every purpose except one, that of publishing.

Given that I have not published any of the stories I've been creating over the last twenty-nine quarters, I've primarily considered Assembling an optional activity.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

The Muse's rendering of our finished porch remodel.

"Those without the patience of Job experience the amateur's impatience …"

When creating something, the creator must somehow tolerate a lengthy period where that something does not yet even distantly resemble the end product. The difference between amateur and artisan might be measured in the distance between their patience. Impatience seems the constant companion of the amateur and forbearance, the artisan's eventual nature. The patron's left wondering if their investment will ever pay off. Pablo, our concrete contractor, aspires to be the artisan he only occasionally is yet, though he's coming along. Yes, he did get a little ahead of himself when pouring that first footing and failing the following four inspections. His comeuppance tried everyone's patience, especially his. We ended up with a footing so over-engineered that it will still be here through centuries hence. Whoever tries to turn The Villa into a teardown will curse our existence.

Preparation for the Big Pour consumed more than a week, with constructing forms and fitting them with wooden strips to produce insets and beveled corners.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Russell Lee:
Boys on sacks of wool, Malheur County, Oregon (1941)
United States. Farm Security Administration

Almost Exclusively In The Dark
The dust turns to talcum powder as August becomes September. School starts, and I volunteer to show The Grand Other how to ride the bus, but the bus route closed down due to road construction work. I drove her to school, reveling in the opportunity to influence her. I feel compelled to offer her the benefit of my experience, even though she doesn't seem to appreciate my attempts. I know my influence won't be immediate, though it might prove insidious. Grandparents are widely recognized for their insidious nature. We plant seeds we know we'll not see flower; our indifference remains our probable superpower. Few things cannot be improved by the judicious application of sincere indifference, and I can see and raise any indifferent move our granddaughter might attempt. She suffers from the certainty that she can see right through me, but I am not nearly as transparent as I probably appear to her. I'm dense and defensive from a longer lifetime of engaging. I can't quite remember the certainty of my youth, but I considered it considerable then. I earned my comeuppances, and while I'd hope The Other might benefit from them, I understand the rules of this game preclude her directly learning anything from me. That's why I go subversive. She cannot see and might never perceive, though the possibility will always remain. Decades from now, one of my odd comments might finally find its mark. Like everybody, I live almost exclusively in the dark.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Russell Lee:
Scooping and sweeping dried hops
from drying room to adjacent room
where they will be baled.
Yakima County, Washington.
There is approximately twenty-five percent
dryout of hops (1941)
United States. Farm Security Administration

"You guys figure out the exact measurements between you."

I am an Approximately person. I do not deal in preciselies. I broadly estimate impacts and generally thrive. I do not appear to have the sort of mind that derives details. I see impressionistically. To my mind, Renoir and Monet painted with photographic clarity. Details lose me. I take measurements to immediately forget them. When Pablo, Our Concrete Contractor, asks my opinion, I refer him to Jesse, our Structural Guy, or Joel, Our Carpenter, for I cannot seem to retain a memory of exactly what we decided when we discussed design. How high the supporting wall should be poured does not reside in my head. I might notice when a disagreement emerges, but I will not be the one resolving the question. For that, we need to convene a conversation. I called Jesse and Joel after it seemed Pablo was measuring from the wrong surface. I could neither confirm nor deny a problem. I held suspicions. I'd also insisted that Pablo call Jesse and Joel. I was trying to encourage some conversation. Why is it so hard for people to talk with each other?

It would have been an excellent idea for us to detail the design of our front porch refurbishing before we started demolishing its past.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Juste de Juste: Pyramid of Five Men (c. 1543)

" … closed on Tuesdays forever."

My pioneer forebears would have counted themselves uncommonly fortunate had they been able to make twenty miles a day for a month. That would have gained them about what I drove yesterday in just eight hours. FiveHundredMiles seems like a vast distance. We rarely drive more than three hundred miles in a day, and even then, we feel the miles when we arrive. But I needed to run a couple of errands in Portland, and the schedule suggested I might spare no more than a day, so I decided to try. I'd initially figured I'd drive alone since The Muse's schedule's more crowded than mine, but the night before, she sheepishly asked if she might tag along. When I assented, she quickly cleared her schedule. "You'll have to be ready to go by seven," I cautioned. Over and back in a day works best when accomplished in daylight.

We got away by eight.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Elihu Vedder: Fisherman and Mermaid (1888-1889)

" … I prefer to do my own ironing."

I am, like all males, Helpless in many ways. All men avoid developing certain skills for a wide variety of reasons. I, for instance, cannot dust. I tell The Muse it's because my failing eyesight cannot discern dust from whatever it’s covering, but since my cataract surgeries left me with nearly 20/20 vision, that reason lacks believability. I still stick by it, dusting being, by personal affirmation, beyond my calling. Nor do I sew, although tailors are often males. My mother was a very talented seamstress, so I probably inherited the genes, and The Muse likewise sews like a pro, so I don't lack a qualified mentor. Yet, I'm sure that sewing remains far beyond my skill set. I am also nobody's auto mechanic or technical support. Anything with many moving parts requiring a precision hand lands outside my skills, abilities, and experiences, or so I insist.

I probably drew my competence lines for reasons other than my lack of fine motor skills.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

Johann Theodor de Bry:
Little Village Fair (16th-17th century)

"The less than generous sociologist in me steadfastly refuses to see the resemblance."

Last week was Fair Week in the Valley They Liked So Well They Named It Twice. The Southeastern Washington Fair and Rodeo has been an annual event since the eighteen-sixties. It was a highlight of every one of my summers growing up, occurring just when the new school year was starting. We'd begin the school year the Wednesday before Labor Day, then take the following Friday and Monday off. No better way to start a new school year than with a four-day weekend! That Friday would be Kids' Day, and we would flood the fairgrounds to ride the rides, eat the food, and win goldfish that were inconvenient to transport home. We'd wear Rosellini for Governor buttons and dutifully tromp through animal barns and pavilion displays. In its day, the Fair seemed a pretty perfect portrait of our small city's personality, from the Saturday morning parade to the parimutuel horse racing.

The Fair seems less grand now.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz

H. R. H.: Pen Pictures of the Leading Events of the Last Week, from Chicago Tribune
(Published Feb 26, 1893)

" … they are not incorrect."

I solo worked our candidate's booth at the fair, casting for and reeling in potential voters. I'd learned the technique watching The Muse last year when she was running for the position of Port Commissioner, an election she went on to win. The Muse is a naturally gifted retail politician, which means she can attract attention and gain support. Not every candidate comfortably projects themself onto others, and not every potential voter necessarily appreciates a candidate reeling them in. She'd ask innocuously: "Are you a voter here?" The answer winnowed out the many out-of-town visitors to our fair. Anyone answering was hooked. Many remained oblivious, almost invisible, as they moved through the crowd. She could usually tell if someone was conservative because they'd turn their head a quarter turn away, deliberately not seeing her there, casting into the crowd. They'd become deaf, too, suddenly unable to hear her question.

Those who responded could be reeled in with a follow-on question, and some would soon find themselves engaged in good-hearted conversation.

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz