Nov. 26 – Shop Small Business Saturday

/ still a dreamer

Here comes the onslaught – the endless ads and commercials on radio, TV and web -all promising you the perfect Christmas if you just buy from them. And who is ‘them?’ All the big box stores that have multi-millions to advertise, of course.

But while everyone is busy cramping about the crappy economy, they’re also busy running out to these same stores to get a deal. And this while the small businesses in your very own neighborhood are languishing and slowly shuttering their stores due to lack of sales. People … here’s the chance. Shop local!

“The 2nd annual Small Business Saturday® is a day dedicated to supporting small businesses on one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. On November 26, we’re asking millions of people to shop small at their favorite local stores and help fuel the economy. When we all shop small, it will be huge.” What a great idea.

How about it? Nirvana is not really at Wal-Mart, and by shopping at the small businesses in your town or county, you keep merchants alive who are trying so hard to bring you what they think you want. Got a car wash? Get some gift certificates for friends or family – who wouldn’t love someone else cleaning their car inside and out .. or detailing it? Gift and card shop? There’s always something special for a hard-to-get person, and you’ll most likely be buying Christmas cards. Have a favorite restaurant in your area? pizza place? cafe? Again – gift certificates to eat out are a real treat in this economy, and bound to please anyone. It’s not rocket science, just a shift in thinking.

There are so many options before blowing it all at a big box store. Help your local businesses thrive and get cool stuff for your gift recipients. And although Small Business Saturday is November 26, spread the wealth and expand the time frame. Think small – you’ll feel great.

In this post you see photos of just a small portion of the wide selection of what’s in store in a small business not too far from me. It’s primarily a card and gift shop with an amazing assortment of things inside; it’s called This `N That on the Corner, and it’s located at 38 Bridge Street in Milford, NJ. Shopkeeper Tracy puts her heart and soul into searching out great merchandise and also features local artists. You can come to my neck of the woods and shop here if you’d like – she’d love it! – or maybe take a look around your own neighborhood with new eyes.  The season of giving is upon us – happy small business shopping!

The Joy of Images

/ still a dreamer

One of my friends laughs at me when he stops by and looks at my computer. Why? Because my desktop is always different.

For the same reason that I have at least 6 calendars around the house, I change my desktop daily or have images rotating on an hourly basis. And usually on a theme. It’s a continual art show, and for whatever reason, it makes me happy. Right now, not surprisingly, my desktop theme is fall, and here is one of my favorite images from the photo folder of the same name.

Because my mind seems already primed to want to look at beautiful images, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my life engaged in photography, I am also quick to grab fantastic photos,  (copyright free, of course), and squirrel them away. But it’s not as time-consuming as it sounds. It’s really more of a drive-by kind of experience.

I have folders on all kinds of subjects. The only one that is potentially problematic is food. When I have that dark chocolate bark with almonds on my desktop … well, you can only imagine what happens.  Mmmmm … maybe I’ll put that up tomorrow.

The Slow Waltz of Fall

/ still a dreamer / 3 Comments

Even before the leaves surrender their greens for red and gold, there are other changes afoot – creatures prepare for the coming winter, some rallying in their final efforts to survive before their lives slowly wind down to a natural end.

Each year in this house I watch an orb-weaving spider weave a large and complex web over the top half of a kitchen window.

It doesn’t seem a very auspicious spot, as her prey would need to be flying through the web to the glass not even a half inch behind. Yet each year, through some species memory I can’t possibly understand, a spider builds her web here. She catches an occasional small insect, and each night rebuilds her web. With temperatures becoming chillier and less prey about, she becomes weaker from lack of food. With less silk to spin, her web becomes less detailed until at last, the strands are a broken tangle of fine thread, a shadow of her once articulated masterpiece. And then she is gone.

I found myself watching her, in quiet awe of her determination to survive in spite of the reality of colder nights and imminent death. Some lesson in life for me, no doubt.

Perhaps a week or so after the spider’s web had disappeared, a seemingly small monster – from this side of the glass – cast a large shadow in the same window. A Chinese praying mantis. Where had he come from? Last year, a green praying mantis hung out all season on or around my office window, where we had several conversations and a few photo shoots. But I’d never seen the larger and brown Chinese mantis since I’ve lived here. He did his monster shadow for the morning, and then flew about my front and side porches in the awkward way they do, like a helicopter with a broken blade. No doubt he was scouting out a last meal as well. He, too, soon disappeared.

As we moved into late October, anticipating Halloween, temperatures dropped, moisture gathered and froze, and suffocated the clinging leaves, dropping trees like so many sticks.

It was unexpectedly beautiful, but deadly, and the sudden snowstorm rolled long nights over the state, especially in my area. Halloween evening arrived and bundled children with chilled parents came from other towns to ours; they still had no power, but happily, here we all had our porch lights on, tombstones eerily lit, and plenty of candy.

I took a drive around my area the following day, where the severity of the damage was evident. It looked like a war zone. Barricades and closed roads were everywhere, but so much worse was the devastation of the trees. Magnificent elders had split and cracked like twigs, graceful limbs lay on the ground. It was heartbreaking.

And then, another sign of determination – the leaf which will not fall.

Many of the taller shrubs and a fair amount of surrounding trees still have quite a bit of their leaves. This tree? Only one stubborn leaf remains. I wonder did he win a contest this year with some other now-fallen leaf who could finally hold on no longer. Or is he a tall scout, updating the lower shrubbery on how advances the autumn. Or perhaps he’s simply the last man standing.

And then this morning … a thick autumn fog. It couldn’t have looked more lovely, an invitation to be lost for just a little while. I could have stayed until the sun shone through. But such is not my life.

A Way with Words – Heart Songs

/ still a dreamer

I’m wondering if E. Annie Proulx is an acquired taste. She is unique among authors I’ve read for any number of reasons, perhaps most importantly … does she have a way with words!

I first met Ms. Proulx when I read The Shipping News, and found her style engrossing, challenging to read, and simply like no other. I most recently picked up her collection of short fiction, Heart Songs. She writes about people we average Americans rarely, if ever, see, in this case the longtime residents of rural New England, whose lives and lifestyles are coming into sharp collisions with wealthier newcomers embracing the “country life.” In this regard, reading about the people in these short stories was something akin to watching the movie Winter’s Bone, i.e., seeing for the first time how a segment of Americans live, people of whom we generally have no knowledge. It’s fascinating, sometimes disturbing and frightening, sometimes heartbreaking. Yet Proulx is not asking for pity or judgment for her characters. They are who they are; she is simply telling their stories.

But oh! her way with words … “Often his razor tongue stropped itself on the faults and flaws of his dead parents …”; “The corpse of a less-wise raven lay beneath a bush like a patch of melted tar. The fox rolled in the carcass, grinding his shoulders into it. He got up, shook himself and continued his tour, a black feather in the fur of his shoulder like a dart placed by a picador.“; ” … his face dark as a smoked ham, eyes like bird’s eyes, orange and inhuman.”

Whose writing could fail to be enlightened by an author whose use of words is so intense, lyrical, and magnificently descriptive. If, in each thing we read, we hope to not only gain from the enjoyment of the story itself but also some wonderful addition to our own skills as writers, then E. Annie Proulx’s Heart Songs speaks volumes on how to say what we mean. And how to say it with an incomparable richness.

 

How Do We Know If They’re Meant to Be Ours?

/ still a dreamer / 2 Comments

Times come in our lives when we are ready to open our hearts and homes to a new animal. But how do we know which is the right one for us? The one that is truly meant to be ours?

A little over 13 years ago, one of my two pit bull terriers passed away from complications of cancer. She had been starved and brutally abused. She’d had a very high prey drive and was dog aggressive, but she thrived in my care, and in time, also did so with my other pit bull terrier, Chloe. Chloe was at the opposite end of the spectrum; she truly loved ALL animals. With Chloe then twelve years old, I wanted her to truly enjoy her golden years with me and without the competition of another dog. But I knew she’d love a cat, and I began my search.

Every day that I was at work in the large city shelter, I took my lunch time to look at the over 200 cats awaiting adoption, asking that I please be shown the cat that was meant for me. That cat wasn’t there. Or at least not yet. Not so coincidental to this story, by the way, was the fact that in the office adjacent to mine, worked a lovely man in his 60’s. He was about 5’4″, and his wife was about 4’11”. They were a petite and adorable couple, totally devoted to each other from the days of their young marriage. I told him how happy it made me to see a couple still so in love. He told me it was bashert, i.e., “meant to be” in Yiddish. What a perfect word, I thought, and how perfectly fitting for them. I, too, was on the lookout for bashert, but on a much smaller scale.

One day in early August, I needed to go into work on my day off. Traffic on my usual route was at a standstill, so I took the back way through the neighboring town. As I drove over the familiar railroad bridge, I passed what looked like a crumpled piece of paper, but intuitively I knew better. I backed up and spotted a 5 week old tuxedo kitten, waiting to be hit by a car or plunge to his death 100 feet below.

I managed to catch the terrified and elusive kitten, brought him to the medical department for a gentle baby bath for fleas, and then to my office. Too young for inoculations, he wouldn’t fare well in a shelter with so many animals, so I decided to foster him until he was stronger – in my office on workdays, otherwise, home with me. He was so tiny, I was afraid he’d got lost or stuck in the house, so I set him up in my bedroom in a large Great Dane crate, complete with bed, blanket, litter and food and water. He screamed bloody murder.

The next evening the same. I closed the bedroom door and let him out. He made a beeline for a comforting spot under my Chloe’s chin. Mom! For two more weeks I followed this routine, everyone suggesting I keep him. My reason for not wanting to do so was that everyone will adopt a kitten; I would take a middle age or senior cat, a bonded pair, a cat with feline leukemia, i.e., a hard-to-place cat. Someone would surely fall in love with him quickly.

Then it happened. I looked at this very verbal little pipsqueak of a kitten, nestled with his new adoring mom, and found myself saying things like, “Now appearing in the Shakespearean production of I Claudipuss ….” or coaxing him with Monsieur Claude, or “Where’s my Cloudy Paws?” You get the picture.

I had asked to be shown the cat that was meant to be mine, and it had nothing to do with what I thought I wanted, but everything to do with who needed me. And so we need to be open to our choices in animals. I do believe every animal that I have had was truly meant to be mine. Perhaps I saved his or her life, perhaps in some other way, she or he saved mine. Animals are our teachers and guides, and may come to us in the most unexpected species, breeds, time and manner. They may be brought to us, or we to them, but we must always listen to our hearts.

Today that teensy feral kitten is a long and lanky 16 pound cat with tuxedo markings, but with all the features of an Oriental breed – short, smooth coat, long face, body and tail, and oh, yes, the (sometimes very annoying) vocalizations. His names today are Claudie the Dog Boy, (for all the dog tricks he happily performs), Mr. Freshy McFresh Face, and just plain Claude or Claudie. But it was those first silly names that were the tip off,  (that and his instant attachment to Chloe), that he was meant to be mine, kitten or no.

It was simply bashert.