2009 September 13

We begin a New Year in the Big Room.

We begin with a goodbye send off to our middle schoolers who are moving up to the Turning Tides.

We'll play our old game, Big Room Questions 123.

We'll do some weaving,

And get out our journals

And sing.

We'll set our intentions for the year.

We'll make some final butterflies for the Houston Holocaust Museum Butterfly Project and read some poems.

Our objectives for the Big Room program are, as always, these:

Explore Ethics and Philosophy

Compare and Survey World Religions, great and small

Create building blocks for a Personal Theology

Develop a Unitarian Universalist Identity

Main Street

I really had no choice in the matter.

I knew my town had to have the word "Springs" in the name. "Springs" just has to put a bounce in your step as you walk down Main Street.

But the front part of the name?

I really wanted to have a bit of sophistication in the town's name. You know, as though I'd really thought it through...

But it has named itself and I can't change it in my mind at all. It is what it is:

"Hopeful Springs"

and that's that.

Summer End

Oh such a flurry of activity.
We are getting ready to begin a new year in the Big Room.
We've purchased a couple of new things to play with, and are still tidying up and organizing art materials and books.

This year's topics to include:
New Year Celebrations around the world...they all aren't on January 1, you know...
Fresh starts and new beginnings
Seasons
Holidays
Holy Days
Calendars...that's right...they aren't all the same you know...
Orreries, orbits, revolutions and rotations
What We Can Do With a Penny
Weaving
Wonder Cabinets
Life Changing Journeys and the Wizard of Oz


When does it all Start?

September 13!!!

Main Street

Weeks and weeks ago, Wendy asked me this,

"In your imaginary town, would you have a street named 'Main Street'?"



I of course didn't have an imaginary town. I didn't think I needed one. Has it ever occurred to you you needed an imaginary town?



Dream House--yes. But I just can't go there now.



Dream Town? A whole town?



Holey Toledo...what a mind virus it has become. A good one though. At first I resisted, knowing it would become an obsession. And how many obsessions can one brain handle?



So it starts with a Main Street running east/west. Parallel to Broadway where the movie theaters (2) and the community theater and the restaurants and the art galleries are. And the art supply store...which has the widest array of paintbrushes...fitches and filberts and flats and rounds and sables a person could imagine. Pinstriping brushes, Japanese sumi brushes, woodgraining brushes. Brushes for gold leaf. Pots and jars of brushes. I can't even get started on the paint and the canvas and papers.

The County Courthouse would be on the corner of Main St. and Finch Ave.

All the north/south streets are named for birds and trees, actually. They are not all "streets" though, They could be avenues, lanes, ways, drives or places. It just matters how they sound.

There is no Elm St., since Adam's allergic. Also no Mulberry. Pity since they are nice names.

Of course Sycamore Drive has sycamores planted in the parkway. All the tree streets are graced with their named trees.

At the far north of town...wandering off east into the hills where the bird sanctuary is would be Thoreau Place. Below it, Emerson, and Alcott and Hawthorne, and Fuller and the other transcendental friends.

Mid town east/west would be Jefferson, Adams, Priestly, Paine, Franklin and Washington...

Somewhere, I haven't found it yet, is Bradbury Street.

Near the community College we have Tesla, Einstein, Newton, Leonardo...

At the south end of town, by the hospital is Nightingale, Blackwell, and Barton. The mental health center is at the corner of Dix Lane and Sequoia Drive.

Ten years ago, I would have set my town in Western Massachusetts. But I really believe now it is in So. California. A ten minute drive to the beach...a State beach for 50 miles, no houses or stores or nothing along the coast. Okay, it's mythic.

There is so much to consider. Are we a two high school town with a cross town rivalry? Or do we only have enough teenagers for the one?

I don't know the town's name yet. I do know the center of town has been around since the 1900s. The neighborhoods are all different 20th century revival styles...Tudor and Spanish and adobe and Norman and craftsman. 50's ranch and modern out at the edges of town...not much built after that.

Where's the city park?

Kristin thinks it's time I draw a map.

I can't wait to see her town.

Tell me about your town.

My big fat pile of library books--about Time

So, in my little dilettante way, as an appreciator of Science, I picked out a few library books on the subject of Time.
That's because it is plain mystifying to me that time runs in one direction only.
You know, "the past is history, the future is mystery."
We take it for granted, it is all we know.
Time is a river.
Time marches on.
I just want to understand why.


There is actually a good deal of scientific debate about the whys and wherefores of time's arrow. Everything else in the language of physics (other than time and entropy) works equally well backwards and forwards.

So I have to tuck into a book by Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene every now and again. And I think I kind of get the gist of things for a while, but when I try to explain what I think I just read, I realize I just have to start all over.

But I must say this one, How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies is really wonderful. Just the ticket for my summer reading marathon.

Part of what I love about it is the design of the book itself. It's slim and unintimidating.
And the title made me want to flip immediately to the end to find out if there was a schematic for such a thing...because I am both a skeptic and a sucker.
The graphics are simple and elegantly designed to convey some hard to picture concepts.
And the font is a lovely sans-serif (no little lines that complicate the typeface you usually see in newspapers and books)
Which makes me happy.
Because reading complicated stuff is easier when the words are easiest to make out...(like the way green highway signs have lovely legible white letters without serifs, so you can read them at 70 mph) Because I have really bad eyesight.

My Big Fat Pile of Library Books--Dandelion Wine

There it was on the Middle School reading list.

The best summer novel ever of all time.

I hadn't read it since I was a teenager.

I remembered the part about the new tennis shoes

that felt like marshmallows and made you run faster than all get out...faster than antelopes and gazelles.

and able to leap high and wide, with your feet in total springy comfort.

But by the end of summer, they would just be a regular old pair of shoes.

My own father one time made some dandelion wine in the basement.

I do recall gathering flowers for the project. (my dad was big on projects...weaving and knitting and homemade lamps...radio control aircraft...needlepoint, ham radio...all undertaken with the precision and discipline of an engineer and the soul of an artist)

Anyway. The wine was too sweet and odd for my taste. The main ingredient was figs, not dandelions in his recipe.

Here's a recipe for dandelion wine which is heavy on the citrus and relies on a full 6 cups of sugar. I guess it takes a hearty amount of some sort of sugar ro make wine.

It might be good, but I don't think I ever want to try dandelion wine again. It could never taste like an August day. Like a day in the life of Douglas Spaulding in the summer of 1928.

(My brother and I one time made beer milkshakes but that was a different novel and a different author and a different story)

I do love this book.

I love it better now than when I was in high school. I am sure I would have entirely missed the point when I was in 6th grade.

I think I'll read it every summer until I die.

It's all about waking up and finding life and death and youth and old age and danger and comfort.

My big fat pile of library books--Stargirl

Stargirl--


So I'm reading off the Burbank Middle School summer reading list. Most of these books I'd missed since they mostly were written post 1974.
And holey-moley!
What a golden age of kid lit we are living in!

In the hands of any writer other than Jerry Spinelli this story would be predictable and cloying.

But oh.
Oh man, that Jerry Spinelli.
Stargirl has nestled into my heart, I love her so. And I love Leo Borlock, who loves Stargirl, too.
Non conformity.
Kindness.
First love.

I can't tell you how sad it is to read that there is a Stargirl movie in the works. I just don't think this is movie material. I fear they will get it all wrong. Stargirl is the opposite of Hollywood. I was rather hoping for "Stargirl, the non conforming Stage Musical"
I've been recklessly pitching the idea around...
I'd so love for kids to be able to put a popular story onstage, that is a musical, that is neither "Annie" nor "High School Musical."

No offence to Annie or HSM...it's just that we are living in a golden age of literature for young people...and none of it is on stage by kids for kids.