Going Back

After five years with little effective leadership, our church called a pastor who seemed to be ideal, and the implication from both the call committee and the candidate himself was that it was a done deal. The official call was extended --- the candidate declined!

The call committee got back to work, and this past Sunday announced the name of a new candidate --- the pastor who had served the congregation five years ago!

This was a big surprise to most of us, and my first reaction was that we can't go back to the past, even if that was good. This pastor was with the congregation for a long time and was successful and well-liked. When he left, many of us felt a bit abandoned. We got over it and moved forward though a year of an interim pastor, two+ years of a pastor who had many brilliant talents but no administrative ability, and now we're near the end of a one and a half year interim pastor. When our ideal candidate turned us down, we felt rejected all over again, and the prospect of spending another year, with a third iterim pastor, going through the search for another candidate, was very discouraging.

What the call committee and the church council have come up with looks good on paper. Our old pastor is nearing retirement age. He has brought his present congregation to a point where they need an energetic long-term pastor to guide them through a massive building project (a high-rise, city-center building in collaboration with a developer). We need a short-term, experienced pastor who can stabilize the congregation, begin to move us forward again, and help us to find the right long-term pastor. It looks like a good fit.

But I have negative feelings I can't quite understand. It may be the realization that we can't go back to our previous relationship. Both the pastor and the individuals in the congregation have gone through independent experiences, and none of us are the same people we were five years ago. Or maybe I am disappointed that we won't have the exhilaration of getting to know a brand new pastor and having high expectations --- at least for awhile. Or maybe I'm still nursing a tiny grudge that this pastor left us five years ago.

My mind tells me we can make this work. There will be adjustments on both sides, but at the moment, everyone is open and flexible. We'll see what happens.

I have a couple of trips coming up that are also about going back. The end of May, I'll return to Ohio for a sentimental journey. Since we sold our parents' house last summer, this will be the first time I'll visit my home town without a home to go to. Next week I'll be in Los Angles, visiting places we knew when we lived in the area 45 years ago, but also exploring new places. I plan to blog that trip, so stay tuned.

Vegetable Subscription

I recently signed up for a four-week trial subscription for a weekly batch of vegetables. This is CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, providing locally grown, in-season produce. I support the concept (and the stuff is fresher), but I also felt we were not eating enough vegetables, and having them on hand --- greens I'd already paid for and didn't have to choose at the supermarket --- would allay my diurnal anxiety about what to cook for supper. l'd subscribed to a similar program several years ago, but having to drive several miles to pick up a basket of mostly unfamiliar plant material, was not a success.

This time, I pick up my bag of veggies less than a mile from our house, and so far, though the quantities would really be more suitable for a family of four, I've been able to use most of it. We can always eat lettuce, spinach, celery, carrots, and radishes. Cabbage and beets are on the list for this coming week, and zuccini, broccoli and several kinds of potatoes will be coming later in the summer. Although it hasn't been mentioned, I'm also hoping for really good tomatoes. But maybe they only grow in Ohio and New Jersey.

Then there are the more exotic items. Cardoons are thistle stems, related to and tasting something like artichokes. I added them, chopped, to scalloped potatoes. Arugula, mixed with slivered leeks, sauteed with bacon, sprinkled with balsamic vinegar and grated cheese, was good over pasta. The "mystery bag" contained a few shitake mushrooms which were yummy in scrambled eggs. I think I've eaten agretti in Asian restaurants, but I didn't know what it was. It looks like pine needles and tastes a little like spinach. Purple carrots, while interesting looking, were not as tasty or tender as ordinary orange carrots. Parsnips were a pleasant surprise --- actually sweet. I'm afraid two big bunches of fennel will go unused; my husband doesn't like the licorice flavor.

So, on the whole, the experiment has been a reasonable success. I'll probably continue the subscription. And while I can't say we're feeling noticeably healthier, I'm feeling better psychologically for eating my vegetables and eating them locally.

Archive

I recently read an article that described the archives of two artists. The collections were not onlydocumentations of their lives and work, but were considered works of art in themselves. We're all familiar with the concept of an historical archive, a repository for the history of an institution or a person; the documents, photos and other kinds of records that are created as life goes on. These archives are of value to the subjects themselves if they want to review an activity, and to historians and scholars who want to understand and interpret the past.

I'm not sure I understand the concept of an archive as art itself though I enjoy looking through the detritus of someone else's life. Maybe it's a form of voyeurism or maybe it's a way to learn about and understand another person, even though I do it from my own viewpoint. But there are a couple of problems.

Logging the past takes time away from the present. It is a frustration to keep a journal because I can never be ahead; I'm always catching up. And taking time to write down what has just happened means I'm not experiencing what is happening right now. A very detailed journal of one's everyday life would include "and then I spent the evening writing in my journal." However, sometimes life happens so quickly and intensely that we need to sit back and reflect on it to solidify the experience.

The other problem is gathering, organizing and maintaining the archive. This work is usually done by someone other than the person or institution that created the material in the first place. An extreme example is the LifeLogging practiced by computer scientist, Gordon Bell. He records the minutia of his life: thousands of photos each day, every email, every phone conversation, every face-to-face conversation, every piece of paper that crosses his desk. He does it party because, with digital technology, it's possible to do. He also claims to be using the collection to investigate methods for organizing and accessing such a large mass (or mess?) of random information. This activity could be considered egocentric, especially since Bell hires helpers to collect and organize his life history. If it takes three or four people to archive the life of one person, who is going to archive the lives of the archivers?

I must admit that I've long enjoyed searching for tit-bits of information about my ancestors, and I'm presently excited about transcribing some recently discovered letters written almost 150 years ago by my great-great-great-grandmother. These letters and some additional related material will make an interesting story. Fortunately, there are only a few letters and that scarcity somehow makes them more interesting and precious than a thousand letters would be. It's tempting to hunker down and spend hours transcribing. But then I need to come back to earth. There's a real life out there, interacting with real people in real time.

The Japanese Dollar Store

We arrived a few minutes before opening time, and I asked another woman, also waiting for the door to open, if she'd shopped at the Japanese Dollar store before.

"Yes,." she replied with a smile. "It's like shopping at an old dime store."

I hadn't thought about it that way, but I realized she was right. For those of you who only know K-Mart and WalMart, they were preceded by the dime stores: Kresge's, Woolworth's, Grant's, Newberry's, McCrory's, Ben Franklin. The dime stores, also called 5-and-10 cents stores, originally sold a variety of items that cost about five or ten cents. By the time I was a child in the 1940s, prices had increased a bit, but it was still possible to buy many things for less than a dollar.

In our small town there were three dime stores. With a weekly allowance of ten cents, I spent many hours browsing the merchandise and deciding how to spend my dime. Toys? Jewelry? Nail polish? Stationery? I still have a very small, pink glass elephant, with a sticker that says, "Made in occupied Japan." Most dime stores included a candy counter with many kinds of candy displayed in glass bins. It was possible to buy ten cent's worth of chocolate-covered peanuts or whatever sweet took my fancy. The clerk would scoop up a little more than I'd asked for, then shake it, piece by piece into the pan on the scale, watching the weight until there was ten-cent's worth. (These spring scales were not computerized, of course, and I suppose the clerk had to mentally calculate how much ten-cent's worth of candy would weigh, given the price per pound.) Then the clerk poured the candy from the scoop-shaped pan into a white paper bag, twisted it shut and exchanged it for my dime.

Later, when I started a part-time job at fifty cents an hour, I'd treat myself to Saturday lunch at the soda fountain which was also a feature of the dime store. I'd order a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, toasted, and a coke for less than a dollar. Drugstores also had soda fountains, and once, for a brief time, my aunt worked at one. She'd serve us cherry cokes and phosphates, drinks made of brightly colored, flavored syrup and carbonated water.

Although the Family Dollar Stores and General Dollar Stores of today don't have candy counters or soda fountains, I still like to browse among the items costing a dollar or slightly more, and occasionally I find a bargain. But the Japanese Dollar stores are something else.

A few years ago, I encountered Ichiban Kan by accident, and was fascinated by the merchandise, apparently manufactured in China for the Japanese market. Many of the labels are written only in Japanese, and it can be difficult to tell what some of the more esoteric items are for. There are eyebrow razors and nose hair removers and other inscrutable tools for personal hygiene. I find the array of small plates and bowls in many shapes and colors very attractive, though I wouldn't like to wash or store so many pieces of dinnerware. You can buy plastic storage boxes for all kinds of food, and many specialized kitchen gadgets like rice paddles and molds. I always check the stationery supplies for unusual pens, portfolios, notebooks.

Ichiban Kan also has a good assortment of Japanese snack food, including "Remonade", the Japanese transliteration of "Lemonade", a carbonated soda in various fruit flavors, bottled in a unique glass bottle with a marble inside. The marble is pushed into the rubber-rimmed mouth of the bottle by the pressure of the carbonation and thus creates a seal. To break the seal and open the bottle, you push the marble down into the specially shaped neck which captures the marble so it won't go into the body of the bottle or come out into your mouth.

Ichiban Kan is a half hour from my house, and I don't get there very often. So I was delighted a few months ago to see that Daiso was opening a very large store in a near-by shopping center. Daiso, it turns out, is more accurately a Euro store; everything costs $1.50 unless otherwise marked. It's a lot larger and has a lot more stuff than Ichiban Kan.

There are many kinds of bags: handbags, cosmetic bags, cell phone bags. I buy a zippered foam envelope for my laptop. Browsing the housewares, I see colorful drinking straws, pleated paper cups and napkins, perfect for kids' birthday parties. The attractive plastic lunch boxes have inner compartments for various kinds of food. There are even several kinds of tiny squeeze bottles for meal-size portions of soy sauce. But I am puzzled by the lack of a catch or fastening on the lids of the lunch boxes. Then I discover the lunch box straps that hold everything together. These are decorated too; children would pay close attention to who had what kind of lunch box strap.

In addition to erasers in many shapes, there are notebooks of all kinds and sizes. The pencil caps in transparent jelly-bean colors, sprinkled with glitter and including a tiny eraser, are just what I am looking for. Two Christmases ago, I spent quite a bit of time in an unsuccessful search for colored staples. They have red, blue and green, in addition to silver staples at Daiso. Clips for stacks of paper? Yes, in coordinated sets; bright, dark or pastel colors. Wrapping paper to die for. Then there are the curious packages of colored silken cord and elastic cord in the sewing supplies, and Japanese-style bamboo brushes in the craft department. What about plastic bins for rice, plastic boxes for food and plastic trays of all kinds; cleaning supplies, toys and even little coats for your cat or dog? The hardware section includes little elasticized fabric "bonnets" for the bottoms of chair legs.

Now when I have guests, we head for the Japanese Dollar Store. When I feel the need for shopping therapy I can wander and ponder there for an hour. It's the kind of place where you stop in for one item and leave with two or three. But at $1.50 or $2.00 for each item, it's possible to spend less than $5 and go home with a satisfied feeling.