Tag: Humor

Social status versus social value

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

You see the lists from time to time: America’s richest individuals or families.

You also see how proud people are about finding loopholes to cut their own taxes or lobbying for another advantage over the rest of the public.

Seems we’ve had it wrong. We should be according that respect to America’s top taxpayers. Yes, let them compete for the status of being the most generous Americans, the ones who step forward for their country. We could even break this out by occupation, for extra Top Ten lists. I’d even be in favor of having a monument in Washington inscribed with their names.

Let the rest of them be considered shirkers.

A LIVELY CAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of our favorite TV comedies has been Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Canadian series about a small, struggling Muslim community the fictional prairie town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. I’ll let those of you in other faith traditions weigh in on the parallels, but I suspect you’ll find each of the show’s characters already existing in your own congregation.

You’ll also see many of the same dividing lines and tensions. Traditionalists versus modernists, for instance, or those bred to the faith versus converts. There are even the basic questions of identity and self-identity or motivation and discipline.

As I look at my own Quaker circles, I sometimes see a line between those drawn to the hour of worship itself and those drawn to the peace-and-justice witness, such as gender and racial equality, global non-violence and fair trade, prison reform, environmental concerns, and the like. Sometimes the difference shows up most sharply in the announcements that come at the end of our period of silence – those who want to leave quietly, savoring the calm, and those who instead urge us to attend all kinds of lectures, discussions, demonstrations, fundraisers, and other gatherings in the coming weeks.

Sometimes the lines even cross.

SUMP PUMP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

I’ve learned to listen whenever we get heavy rain. Check to see that the jerry-rigged sump pump is still upright and its line’s not clogged.

Yes, indeed: too much rain, and the sump pump kicks in. Or else the cellar floods, along with the furnace.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

CELLARS VERSUS BASEMENTS AS A DIMENSION OF NEW ENGLAND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Where I grew up, we had basements. They rarely flooded. Some were even finished into spare rooms, with TVs, carpeting, or best of all, a pool table. Here in New England, most of us instead have cellars, where water seeps through the walls after heavy rainfall (some even spurt).

And so, under the house, confusion. Mold. Dampness. Leakage. Not the order of a basement, with dry walls and solid floors, but a cellar. With small garden snakes and a sump pump. Rick, our carpenter, says you find the soul of a house there. Its support. The wiring – we’ve removed many strands of stray threads overhead, each staple a bear of resistance. It wasn’t the same as the secrets we found in the kitchen walls, the 1928 newspapers, during that renovation, but secrets all the same. You sometimes read about bodies being buried in the cellar. Instead, we have trenches along the wall – and maybe some stray tree roots. I need to replace the bottom stair, the one broken from rot. And soon, I would hope, the sump pump itself with something smaller, more powerful, and more reliable.

Yes, an old New England house is always a project. Even one only little more than a century old.

FROZEN FISH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Our antique fish weather vane has long been something of a puzzle. It’s a rather attractive piece of copper, but these things don’t come with instructions, and the parts didn’t quite seem to come together. So it’s sat around in a corner of the barn just waiting for the day it could swim in the air again — or maybe simply on an indoor wall as an ornament. Still, finally getting the roofs over the barn and kitchen re-shingled this fall before the weather turned bad provided a stimulus for action.

The first challenge was trying to figure out how to connect the rod to the roof. As I inquired at one hardware store after another, I kept getting the same response. “I don’t know, it seems like there should be a simple way to do it. But we don’t have anything like that.” A few clerks suggested places that turned out to be dead ends. And as I looked at all the cupolas under many of the vanes around town, I realized that even with a cupola, you’d still have to have some way of attaching the vertical rod.

Finally, after a bit of online surfing, I came across an answer — a store, in fact, we’d passed many times in the coastal town of Wells. Weathervanes of Maine turned out to have a nifty little adjustable roof mount for $30 that fit our needs quite nicely. The store, by the way, has row after row of shiny new weather vanes — roosters, horses, eagles, moose and bear, ships, dragons, pigs (yes, flying pigs), and many more. If you’re ever driving along U.S. 1 there, stop in — it’s quite the destination.

Still, the connection to the fish itself still didn’t seem right. And again, nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. So it was back to Wells, where a fancy soldering job did the trick. Our fish could now face the wind. And, as you can see, more.

Where we live in New England, vanes are useful predictors of weather. While our prevalent wind is from the west, wind from the east or the south comes in over the ocean, where it loads up with moisture we encounter as rain or snow. From the north, of course, means colder than normal — a pleasant touch in summer but a nasty bite this time of year.

I’m quite happy to have the fish provide a modest and useful crowning touch to the barn. Or, as I sometimes announce, “The fish has turned.”

ONE PHONE CALL TOO MANY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalists learn the importance of covering all the bases they can before the deadline cutoff. You learn the risks of running a single-source story. Even when you’ve talked on record to several people, you’re urged to make one more phone call. Just to make sure.

Sometimes, that’s when the reporter tells an editor, “There’s no story.”

“What do you mean?”

It was simply a rumor. It didn’t happen at all. The problem was fixed long ago. The guy we were going to praise has a serious drinking problem. The person who called in the tip is a crook or simply dishonest. You get the picture.

As for what had seemed to be a hot story, there was just one phone call too many.

POLICE CALLS, 10 P.M.

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

“Have you read Crime and Punishment?” the guy at the next desk says on the phone. “I think you’ll like it.” A little later, I hear, “It’s by Dostoyevski.” Still later, he turns to the editor at an adjoining desk, “She’s into chick lit.” Meaning the small-town police dispatcher.