|
My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
|
10:51 a.m. - 2005-05-31
Stuff is good, people are better. Unless they are the kind of people who believe owning stuff makes them better than people who don't own stuff. Then they are just noogies. I'm going to mention people and places which deserve linkage, but it's early and only 61 degrees and I'm waiting for the house's shadow to move over the veggie patch so I can go out and plant carrots and tend my wee crops. I've only got a few minutes so please excuse my bad manners and lack of proper linkage. Melissa got me started at Freecycle. I signed up a couple months ago, but didn't check the postings very often. Then I got an update from the moderator of our group chiding members for doing skuzzy things like berating donors who didn't give their offerings to them. Other nasty people are listing stuff they want to sell. Hello? This is Freecycle, the whole point is to offer things for the taking and in return sometimes you take other people's stuff. FOR FREE. Yet even more tacky people are going around gathering as much stuff as possible and using it as garage sale fodder. I was totally grossed out. The moderator also reminded people they don't have to write lengthy 'poor me' biographies when contacting donors. A simple "I can use your whatchamacallit. I'd be happy to pick it up at your convenience. Thanks." would suffice. Apparently some members think they are on Queen For A Day and think by going on and on about their pathetic miserable lives will mean they'll not only score the original item, the donors will bring it to their house and then give them the contents of their wallets too. Yes, some people are begging for cash on Freecycle. Yuck. However, the update got me back to the postings and I saw an offer of old steam heat radiator valves. These would be handy for Mike to have, there's the occasional client who wants to keep their old style radiators when they do a renovation and valves are hard to come by. I contacted the donor. She wrote back saying she'd be happy to let us have the valves. We hooked up by phone and made a date to pick them up. Turned out that she's not very far from us. Even better, she's a farmer. The family farm is nearly extinct around here and it was a big delight to take Wolf to a real farm. Aside from a massive veggie garden our new farmer friend doesn't do ground crops, she raises livestock. Milking goats and fowl. The chickens and guinea hens have the run of the place. Wolf thought the guineas were too funny. He was a little nervous around the kids. The baby goats were nibblers and Wolf was afraid of being bitten. I happily scratched and patted those little cuties and didn't mind the nibbling. The breeding bucks were ginormous. I didn't know goats got that big. The farmer offered us eggs along with the radiator valves. We couldn't take her up on the offer right then, after our visit we were off to IKEA, but I gladly told her we'd come back later in the week and take some eggs off her hands. Farm fresh eggs! Yum! We talked about veggies and she said she'd be happy to get some of my hot peppers. She doesn't raise them, but her mom loves spicy stuff. So how about that? I'll be giving some of my produce to a farmer! Guess this makes me a farmer too. In a very limited suburban sort of way. A farmer with a Chanel manicure. Heh. Speaking of uptown farmers, I was sad to hear about Eddie Albert. He was 99 though. He had a pretty good run. Green Acres was by no means out to change the world, too surreal for one thing. But I've been wondering what happened to the socially relevant sit-com. Remember those? Of course the granddaddy of them was All In The Family, but so much of the TV I watched as a kid had thoughtful sub-text beneath the pratfalls and canned laugh track. Shows like Good Times, Barney Miller, and Chico and The Man, they were about something. They challenged stereotypes. They jousted with smug complacency. They were funny, but they also made you think. For all the screaming about 'values' going on right now, I don't see anyone stepping up and offering anything of value. Instead there's crazed bullshit about gay Teletubbies. There's screeching and preaching about how horrible it is that SpongeBob says it's okay to be friends with people who aren't exactly like you in every single way. The 'moralizers' want that show yanked and this advertiser boycotted and that producer beheaded. All I ever hear from them is hate and anger and outrage. There's more to morality than vendettas and being offended. You don't build a better society by knocking everything down. The one thing they are right about is that kids learn from watching. When I was a kid I watched Archie Bunker deliver a eulogy with an ill-fitting yarmulke on his head. A eulogy for a friend who Archie never knew was Jewish. I watched his face crumple as he talked about why that was. I watched George Jefferson move into his penthouse in the sky. And confront his own bigotry when his only son married a girl who was half white. I watched the Sweat Hogs admit one by one that the sexual conquests they bragged about with Hotsy Totsy weren't true and I watched them apologize to her. I watched and learned. I learned about friendship. And loyalty. And the marvelous freedom and enrichment of looking beyond color and religion and seeing the actual people who populate our lives. In all their colors with all their creeds in all sorts of different family units. I learned that love was everywhere and how little those artificial barriers set up by a mean spirited and uncaring society matter. In turn I have taught those love lessons to my own kids. The children of the screamers and the pontificators and the boycotters are watching too. Wonder what life lessons they are learning? Love, ~LA
|
