Steel Lilacs

Several years ago during my madcap middle age, I edited the local weekly newspaper and in lieu of a munificent salary was given space to write an editorial column that was in many ways like this blog. That's to say, I could choose my topics and point of view; the editorial discretion exercised was mine alone. The name of the column was "I Was Just Thinking...," and usually what I wrote was about that random.

A year ago today (June 16), one of the short pieces published in the column was the following, and it's worth revisiting:

I am a charter member of a group whose meetings will never appear in The Digest [the newspaper's community events calendar]. We have no bylaws, no officers, no stated purposes.

In organization we are as amorphous as a floating crap game.

One of our number, in jest (I think), dubbed us the Worthwhile Women, probably because what we do individually is more worthwhile than anything we could do collectively.

What we do do is get together at haphazard intervals for lunch and talk, which is often enlightening, frequently absorbing, always hilarious. Essentially, we are like-minded people, who also like each other, keeping in touch.

Some of us work full time, some part time, some keep the home fires burning, one is a college student. We are all, in one way or another, involved. "Committed" sounds a trifle grim, but I guess we're that, too.

The last time we got together, one of the group came late to our lunch table at the far end of the restaurant. She excused her tardiness this way: "I asked the waitress up front if there was a group of ladies---a term I never use---having lunch here, and she said No."

Where our tardy colleague went wrong was in neglecting to ask, "Is there a bunch of women here whooping, hooting, and having a high old time?" The waitress could have pointed us out in no time.

I was reminded of that piece when, two weeks ago, I met the Worthwhiles for lunch, and our waitress seated us on the second floor of the restaurant in a far corner.

There's been a lot of water under our respective bridges in the 30-plus years since the lunch of which I wrote: one of our founding members died of lung cancer some 20 years ago; another is, as I write, gravely ill; three of us are widows; two of us are divorced and living with new partners; one is married. Some of us have divorced children; one child is transgendered. Almost all of us are grandmothers.

Since the time I wrote that "Some keep the home fires burning," all of us have been in the work force and now most of us have retired from it.

This is not to say that we have any more leisure for bridge games (which most of us never played anyway) or protracted lunches than we used to. Just getting six of us together at the same time and in the same place still takes a little doing and a lot of calendar juggling.

Louise takes frequent care of her 90-plus-year-old mother, as well as of an ageing friend who suffers from Alzheimer's. She walks everywhere in the village and is one of the few people I know who walks to the gym to do her daily workout. Her youngest is getting married next month.

Dorothy, a docent at one of the local museums, is a leading light of the historical society and served on the board of the adult daycare center. Mother of six and grandmother of 13, she and her husband take a six-week spring journey to the homes of their various offspring, most of them scattered along the Eastern Seaboard.

Nan, retired as a special-education teacher, still teaches English as a Second Language evenings and often pulls overnight duty at an inner-city food pantry. She is also the principal caregiver for her two-year-old granddaughter. Her sport of choice is kayaking in the Adirondacks.

Judy, one of our younger members, is a college library director and has no immediate plans to retire. She was, as we sometime Catholics used to say, a late vocation to librarianship and is having too much fun with it to quit. She is---surprise! surprise!---the Worthwhiles' archivist.

Kathy, our free spirit, is a certified yoga instructor and a published poet. Indeed, when we had lunch recently, ostensibly to celebrate our collective birthdays, she presented each of us with a copy of "InnerSessions," a collection of her verse and that of two other woman poets published by Aventine Press.

Then, there's Yours Truly, still writing (and still crazy) after all these years. I have a couple of pet community service projects, including fundraising for an AIDS orphanage in Kenya and for the local public library; take a weekly yoga class; garden when I can; read every chance I get. Sometimes, when I find myself hopelessly enmeshed in yet another home-improvement project, I fear that I am not the boss of me.

Yet, despite the life changes, we are all, to paraphrase The Eagles, still the same old girls we used to be, whooping and hooting included, still Worthwhile Women.

There is, in fact, an alternate history to the origin of the group's name. When we first started getting together on a more-or-less regular basis, what, if anything, we should call ourselves became a frequent topic of lunch-table banter. At length, Jeanne (now deceased) proposed Worthwhile Women because, she said, her husband had often declared that we were the only women he knew in the village who were worth the powder to blow themselves to Hell.

We still are. And the price of powder has gone up.

Gardening Ain't For Sissies---Or Pessimists Either

"The damage," said the garden center clerk, "is $158.14."

I think she expected me to flinch. Instead, I whipped out my bank card, inwardly congratulating myself that my cartful of impatiens, lobelia, vinca, ground-cover ivy, and assorted bulbs hadn't set me back another fifty bucks or so.

But then, I'm being conservative this year; construction of an expanded back porch enclosed with lattice to encourage morning glory and clematis vines, and a new front entry that will feature flower boxes on the facade and railings means I must hold my lust to wallow in the dirt in check. At some point, I will be bringing a landscaper into the project, so planting annuals is akin to whipping up the icing before you assemble the ingredients for the cake.

I have, however, permitted myself this splurge, arguing to my inner grownup that I can at least fill the flower boxes and have them ready to be mounted in their brackets. What harm will it do to have a hanging basket beside the front door until the builder actually breaks ground for the piers? (He just started at the back on Saturday.)

As I reflected earlier this spring while pruning rose bushes and tidying up last year's debris in the perennial beds, flower gardening is perhaps the most hopeful of occupations, the triumph of optimism over experience. Maybe this year the young lilac that has never produced anything but foliage will blossom. Maybe this year I'll crack the code of growing ornamental grasses. Maybe this year I'll harvest more of my John F. Kennedy roses than the Japanese beetles do. And, as my newest garden ornament depicts, maybe this year pigs will fly.

For those of us who toil in the soil, moreover, the dark clouds not only have silver linings, our plants needed a good soaking anyway. Speaking of rain, when a wild winter wind removed and absconded with the lid to the 40-gallon bin in which I store my peat moss, I discovered that the "peat tea" brewed in the open bin makes a nice tonic for newly planted containers. When I got too close to a peony with the Weed-Eater, I concluded that it really needed pruning and being reduced in area by a third would doubtless make it flower all the better next year. (Ah, the magic phrase "next year!" I wonder how many gardeners are closet Chicago Cubs fans.) My incredibly filthy hands and fingernails are an opportunity to try that lovely new lavender soap; my wicked thirst makes the sun-brewed tea positively ambrosial.

Like the sundial which records only the sunny hours, we gardeners are indefatigably cheerful and sociable creatures, never averse to leaning on our rakes to chat awhile. This conviviality begins in the nursery and garden center, where it is perfectly appropriate to survey the contents of the carts ahead and behind in the checkout line, and to inquire of the purchasers about growing conditions and what luck they've had with that species. Once home and out in the front patch, digging and delving are perfect opportunities to catch up on local affairs with the neighbors, garner the occasional compliment from passing strangers, swap pruning tips with the mail carrier and the Pennysaver deliveryman, remark on the birds, and converse with the cat, who is always keen to chase away the killer butterflies. (He is not so lethal with Japanese beetles or aphids, sadly.)

These distractions stem in part from a delightful malady known as Gardeners' Attention Deficit Disorder (GADD), which affliction manifests itself in the urgent need to fetch for a different implement because, gosh, I didn't realize that branch needed to be lopped or to unreel the hose because, golly, the plants in that container are all but gasping for a drink. Sometimes I stop dead in my tracks to ponder how well the vinca is spreading or to wonder where that purple coneflower came from. Look at the way the violets cover that patch---how did I get so lucky?

Lawn care, by the way, is not gardening because I can neither meander behind a mower nor carry on a conversation. Raking, mowing, picking up twigs---I just want to get it done so I can play in the dirt. Which is where I'm going now, probably to hunt for four-leaf clovers

Flag-Waving and Flag-Waiving

A week ago, on the official observance of Memorial Day, I crept early out the front door to hang my American flag. I knew if I didn't do it then, the day might pass without this gesture, the very least I could do to mark its meaning.

I assumed I was simply the first homeowner on the block to show my colors, but when I went out to bring in the flag before dark---proper flag etiquette, I was taught---I was startled to note that I was apparently the only homeowner on the block to bother. Not even the Republican town com-
mitteeman two doors down, who rarely misses the opportunity to plant political candidates' signs all over his front lawn, had put out a flag. The couple across the street, who used to hang a humongous American flag from the second-floor balcony over their front door, did not hang one of any size this year. They are, like me, vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, and only their Tibetan peace banner waved from their porch.

As I carefully rolled up the Stars and Stripes to store in the corner of the front-hall closet until the Fourth of July (I never remember Flag Day until June 15th), I wondered whether flying the flag on national holidays has become too politicized or possibly too banal. Am I becoming a knee-jerk patriot---a type of creature I detest---because I still do it?

I pondered whether my neighbors were simply more judicious than I in their choice of ways to observe the occasion; might I even see a profusion of flags on May 30th, the "official" Memorial Day? Well, no, I didn't. I didn't put mine out last Friday myself; I forgot.

To be sure, "flag-waving" has become a synonym for the type of patriotism that Samuel Johnson defined as "the last resort of a scoundrel" and that Ambrose Bierce maintained was such a jingoist's first resort. We've seen more than enough of that in the right-wing blogosphere's denunication of Barack Obama for not always wearing a flag lapel pin. During the Vietnam war, when anti-war protesters burned the flag and mistreated it in every way they could think of to symbolize their frustration with the government, legislators of conservative stripe attempted to make such "desecration" a federal crime punishable by a prison term.

The real desecration comes at the hands of those whose causes are in direct contravention of the ideals the Stars and Stripes stands for, yet who wrap themselves in its folds. It is easy enough to find photographs of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen marching in public with an American flag at the head of their column or of German-American Bund meetings where an American flag and a Nazi swastika flank the speaker's podium. The book jacket photo above, which is the subject of the book itself, was taken during America's Bicentennial Year, 1976, in Boston, the nation's self-described "Cradle of Liberty." The controversy was over busing to achieve racial balance in the public schools, where all students were presumably expected to pledge allegiance to the same flag. How's that for star-spangled irony?

Of Sam Johnson's often-quoted definition of patriotism, his biographer, James Boswell, felt obliged to explain, "...Let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."

"A real and generous love of our country..." That would be any of us, all of us, and reason enough to fly our colors for all to see. Naturally, my reasons for loving the United States of America and taking pride in her with a flourish of Old Glory may not be the same as yours---or my neighbors'---so some days I will put out my flag and some days not. For instance, I am sure I baffled the entire block the day Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. If I'd thought of it last fall, I'd have flown the flag when the Red Sox won the World Series...again.

Why not unfurl the flag for family birthdays---or Mark Twain's? Election Day, of course---and Inauguration Day, if your candidate wins. A couple I know hang the flag on the mailbox of their summer retreat to show, like the Queen of England, that they're in residence.

Pick your own special reason, run the Red, White, and Blue up the flagpole, and I'll be happy to salute it! This is, after all, the society of which Thoreau wrote, "Any man [person] more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one," and his birthday...well, I'll just have to look that up!