Thursday, June 09, 2005

YELLOW IS NOT OUR COLOR by Els Thu Jun 9th, 2005 at 21:02:22 PDT (From my wife's Daily Kos Diary.) I do not have a magnetic yellow ribbon on the bumper of my sliver blue 1987 Honda Prelude.  I do, however, have two bumper stickers in the back window.  One supporting Brad Carson for Senate and the other supporting John Kerry for President. I never took them off after the election.  At first, it was probably more a sign of grief than anything else.  I was traumatized by losing. I had invested a lot of emotional energy in hating Bush and hoping I lived in a land of sane people.  But time moves on, and grief...especially over politics... lifts. As I am basically an untidy and less than energetic person by nature, the act of not removing the bumper stickers speaks about as much to my inherent lazyness as it does to my politics. Which is why I hate magnetic yellow ribbons.  After all, there is nothing so loathsome in others as our own faults reflected.  Magnetic yellow ribbons are both indolent and removable, like the rainbow sticker my former sister-in-law put in her rearview window with cellophane tape. A dollar nighty-five at the checkout or $2.99 to "super size" it.  Slap it on and boom, you're patriotic.  It's like going next door to borrow a cup of meaning.  In their original incarnation, the yellow ribbon was a wistful testament to faithfulness. Today's mass market version is just shorthand for pigheaded and proud of it. My little pagan friend with the charming but bemused husband and a three month old baby has one on her mini van. I haven't the heart to tell her that she's sporting a symbol of the lazy self-righteous right. Several of my co-workers have them next to their fish stick-ons and W oval stickers.  When I pass them in the parking lot I can feel the smugness rise like mist from their cooling engines. Now is where I have to admit I often think about defacing the W stickers or removing their yellow ribbon cousins and slapping them back on upside down.  I rather enjoy the mental image of all their luck running out of these horseshoes with their knees crossed. But I'm a grown up.  These are not my cars.  I don't vandalize them. They, however, could not resist messing with me.  Sporting an aging Kerry sticker has apparently irritated a parking lot neighbor. Because this evening when I went out to my car the sticker had been carefully peeled from the rear view window and reapplied on the passenger side window.  I assume it was a man because the marks of large, nailess fingers stood testament to the amount of time and effort it took to take me to task. My father fought in World War II.  He  lied about his age and joined the Foreign Legion at 17, serving in North Africa. When the United States joined the war he spent the rest of it shooting at young German men no older than he.  He was shot and his best friend killed trying to drag him back through the mud to safety. He was a writer who spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of the war in stories and plays and poetry.  And in the end the horror of a "just war" killed him.  He took his own life at 1974 at the age of 52. And some asshole from the magnet brigade thought I needed to be lessoned in appropriate bumper sticker speech. So here is my message: We mourn the dead.  We honor their service.  We do not support this war. Yellow is not our color. Meanwhile, on the streets of Tulsa, patriotism is cheap. 12:48:59 PM    comment []

FIREFLIES AT DUSK Annie Beagle and I went for a walk at firefly time. I saw many of them this evening. They gather in shaded areas, and in and around flowering foliage. A severe stormfront passed over Tulsa a couple of days ago. We didn't get much rain, but had very high winds, and quite a display of lightning. A lot of trees lost limbs, or were knocked down altogether. The neighborhood park has many great old trees, oaks and walnuts mostly. The elder of the lot, a huge walnut, was undamaged. But there was another old tree, one that had an old scar of lightning strike that opened out into a large hollow. The trunk was half dead, but limbs still leafed out.  Well, it had been broken by the wind, the trunk ending in jagged splinters at about my head height. The rest of the tree was lying on its side. It was full of fireflies blinking on and off. One of my occasional obssesional activites is making walking sticks out of suitable pieces of wood I find while walking. I decided to bring home a stick from the tree, to remember this elder brother. I selected a length of limb that was mostly but not completely straight, and that had the proper heft. As I held the limb in my hand, feeling the roughness of the bark, thinking about sanding and oiling the wood, something extraordinary happened: Two fireflies landed on my arm. I don't know about you, but I have never had that happen before. They glowed on and off, on and off, and then opened their wings and flew away. I stood there until Annie yanked on the leash. I have to admit I felt blessed. 1:17:30 AM    comment []