Wild Life in Charlottesville

As I drove down Route 250 to town for my Monday job, a grown bear ran across the road in front of my car, This happened in a suburban area near Ivy.  The bear ran fast.  I had seen only three other bears this year, all in a more expected rural setting.

Out in the country where we live, we often see deer.  The young bucks have grown their furry summer horns and the deer are now turning gray for the winter.  

 A month ago I went into the back garden of my studio in Charlottesville to feed the goldfish.  The back garden is surrounded by a sturdy chest-high fence.  The gate to the garden was open.  A handsome doe was munching some trumpet vine in this enclosed space.  I talked to her softly.  She froze anyway.  I moved away from her and from the gate, supposing that she had come by the gate; she might want to leave the same way.  Without fuss, she sprang easily over the fence into an overgrown alley behind my neighbor’s house.  I wasn’t surprised to see a doe in Charlottesville; I had seen one across from the Quaker Meeting House earlier this summer.  I was just surprised to see the doe in an enclosed yard.  I thought my doe and the one on Forrest were only occasional strays into the city until today, when I saw a doe walk down the St. Clair Avenue sidewalk from Hazel Street at noon. I now suspect a herd lurks somewhere around here.

Besides these rare large city mammals, Charlottesville holds a variety of wild things. Skunks are all over the place, rarely seen, but often smelled late at night. In the early mornings I often saw a raccoon family walk down Locust Street, a main thoroughfare, when I lived in the city,.  A neighbor once worried after she saw an opossum on my balcony.  On my walk to work I saw a rabbit at the corner of Kelly and Farish Streets every morning.  I have seen another rabbit hop into my yard a few times.  

A woodchuck patrols the neighborhood now.  I saw him waddling across the wilder back area of my back garden.  A neighbor says that the woodchuck eats the tomatoes near the bottom of her plants. I walked down an alleyway one day recently and came upon a tall woman in an animal control uniform with a holstered pistol.  She asked me if I’d seen a woodchuck; someone had called to complain that a woodchuck was behaving oddly.  Just then a woman in gardening clothes poked her head into the alley and said, “I called; I’ll show you where he is.  I left; I didn’t want to know what happened next.

Hawks, drawn by birds at feeders, soar overhead and sometimes pose on tree limbs.  A group of birds arrange themselves on the electric lines over Locust Avenue at the top of the bypass ramp to look like notes on a musical staff.

It is wonderful and heartening that animals have learned to survive in the middle of this small city.  We have busy city streets, very little cover or water, and sometimes hostile property owners. We paved over the animals' habitat and wrested the land from them to begin with.  The flourishing of Charlottesville's fauna augers well for us all.

The Invisible Woman

In my aging in place group, a friend remarked on how annoying it was to be ignored because she was getting old.  She said that young people looked through her.  A man I know complained that now that he was old, the workers in his doctor’s office just didn’t see him, although his doctor eventually did.

Dorothea Lange was a great photographer.   Her pictures of the people of the depression, and the interned Japanese knock my socks off.  In a recent PBS American Masters special about her, Lange talked with enthusiasm of her role as an invisible woman.  After recovering from polio as a girl, Lange walked the streets of Hoboken with a limp and a camera; people became so used to seeing her that she became invisible to them.  She embraced two aspects of her invisibility – people’s acceptance of her as a part of their landscape, which made them unself-conscious, and the suspension of her own self-consciousness so that she became only an eye.

In a room full of words clattering off the walls, I often find myself contributing to the noise.  I attribute this to the middle child in me wanting to be heard; I am always embarrassed after I’ve flapped my gums to be one of a group.  A problem with compulsive talking is that one misses the sense of what other people are saying.

I’m with Lange.  It is a gift to be unseen and to see.  It is a gift to be silent and to hear.  The greatest gift of all is to lose the self-consciousness that interferes with connection to the creative Spirit. For me this invisibility to myself only happens occasionally; it is always welcome.

Back to Mint Springs

One of us has been sick; until last week we hadn’t visited our park for two weeks. 

For the last couple of evenings, we’ve returned.  The ponds are still there.  Deer browsed  in the apple grove at the mouth of the Park, some of them  with new, fuzzy horns. 

We saw a hawk on a dead branch on a live tree, statue still, guarding prey in the lower pond. Two cars were parked in the parking lot, but we saw no people.

Golden Wisps of cirrus ribbons in the east and solitary wisps of cirrus over the western hills slowly changed color to pink.  While we were on the dam,  geese flew over our heads, their hysterical honks breaking the silence.  They landed in the middle of the pond. honking and back-pedaling.  We counted nineteen of them, one short of the last count.  We saw feathers floating on the pond.

We walked from the dam to the middle of the new bridge.  We like to listen to the frogs there and look for turtles.  The cricket frogs have silenced now, but the green frogs and bullfrogs still sound.  Ox saw a muskrat, swimming under the bridge towards the greater pond.  A minute later we saw the silver wake across the far side of the pond then the muskrat disappeared.  This was our greatest thrill since the last beaver was removed from the pond a few years ago.  Yesterday Ox saw a turtle, playing dead man’s float with its nose at the surface until Ox spoke to it in a soft voice.  The turtle alerted, looked at him and dove to the bottom.

Our walks in the Park feed me equanimity and joy.. My soul shrinks without them.

The Plot Sickens

Years ago I read a mystery story a night.  After a year or so of reading mysteries that way, I'd read the first couple of chapters, guess the ending, and check the last chapter to see if I’d got it right.  This saved time, but didn't show me how authors structure novels.

For a few years now, I’ve written bits of a murder mystery.  After reading so many mysteries writing one should be easy - Pfaugh!  While writing the people and settings is interesting, getting characters to move out of their chairs and do anything is a different matter.  What on earth is going to happen next in this story?

The person I was when I started isn’t the person I am now.  The story too, is changing as I go along.  Sometimes I get lost in the story.  When I come up for air the story feels like congealing lava.  Part of the problem is that I don’t want to kill anyone off.  Another problem is that the story has changed from a straightforward poisoning story to the story of the insidious growth of jealousy.

A long time ago I dealt with the destructive and consuming feeling of jealousy.  I worried that reexamining this feeling would revive it; It hasn’t.  I can examine the insanity that lasted for a while with me.

I don’t plan easily. I write and write and don’t really know where on earth the story is going. The fix for this problem might be to pay attention to the plot.  How?  Plan one?  Me?  I bought three how to plot books.  Steal This Plot, No Plot? No Problem! and Just Write, here’s how!  All have excellent advice.  I made the lists from Steal – story spicers and motivators.  But I can’t decide what plot to steal.  I filled the six boxes from Just Write.  I keep telling myself that I must write, then edit and remind myself that it’s not all crap, just a work in progress, advice from No Plot? No Problem!  My brilliant younger sister advised that I outline the story from the end working toward the beginning.  I'll end up doing that too;  it seems the best way to get where I'm going.

Until I get hopelessly bogged down again I'm going for the reductive sculptural approach - just write at least twelve hours a week (No P? No P!) and trust that form will happen or can be imposed on the story later.  In any case the project seems worth doing to me.  Maybe after 100,000 words I can cut out enough solidified lava and rearrange events to make a coherent story that moves.

Betsy's Big Birthday

Fifty years ago Betsy slid into the world at the Air Force hospital in South Ruislip, England.  Labor, with the help of the Lamaze method, was long and easy.  Ox read us Chapter 5 of The Wind in the Willows during Betsy’s journey into the world.  Her obstetrician, a Texan, sang “Home, Home on the Range” to welcome her at entry.

Betsy weighed 8 lbs 1 oz.  Despite that, I marveled at her tiny hands and feet and worried about her survival.

Last Wednesday we celebrated the birthday.  Tom, Betsy’s husband, threw a party at Shelter two at our local park.  Good friends and good family came to the party.  Shelter two suited us well; my niece Sarah’s children, aged two and four, both run to get everywhere; from shelter two you can see a long distance.  The playground is only a little way downhill.  Betsy’s son Jackson, nine, loves being Tommy and Abby’s wise older cousin.

My sister Polly came with Mike, our brother Jack came with Rauna.  Tammy and Sadie, friends from Orange came.  This was especially fun for Jackson, who built robots after school with Sadie last year.   Sadie went off to college this year.  Julie and Jeff, who we seldom get to see, came from Charlottesville.  Betsy’s sister Cat brought the ice cream later.

Sarah and Mike took the children swimming.  The children returned to the shelter.

In the evening a fearless fawn browsed down by the playground to Jackson’s and Tommy’s delight.   She let the boys get close to her.  While the boys quietly watched the fawn, we saw a large, pale, owl fly over the playground.  I often hear “hoo h’hoo, hoo, hoo” on our walks in the late evening; it may have been a great horned owl.  The geese, who have recently returned to the park from their summer vacation at Beaver Hill Trailer Park pond, stayed away Wednesday.  This was a wonderful birthday party, even though no bears or geese came.

                                       

Nancy Elizabeth Surr Hoffsdyk Loy Cameron

All three of my sister Nancy’s husbands survived her.  The final husband, the Scot, said she was a juicy woman.  Her first husband told mother that Nancy never nagged; she just bubbled him to death.  Nancy’s two ex-husbands remained friends with her. She lived with each for seven years.   The third husband, John Cameron, stuck.  Nancy’s 76 years of life were too few, but were fully packed. 

 Our parents thought ”Nancy Surr” sufficient; they couldn’t agree on a middle name.  Nancy wanted the middle name ‘Elizabeth’ so she took it. Her other names came by marriage.

She wore thick glasses that eventually, along with exercises, corrected her wandering eye.  Mother fixed her long brown hair in tight braids.  Her energy, intelligence, warmth, and force of personality comprised her charm as a girl. 

Nancy, the firstborn, organized everything.  She organized circuses (admission a penny), directed plays and family pageants, supervised fort digging, planned active games like red rover, charades, and races, and quieter games like hell, Monopoly, and Lexicon (a Scrabble-like card game).  Nancy made life a lot of fun for her family. 

Toward adolescence Nancy adopted the short curly hair popular in the fifties.  She grew a fine pair of breasts, also popular in the fifties.  In the seventh grade, Nancy got a diary with a lock.  My brother Jack and I were intrigued.  Jack tried his hand.  The lock yielded at the first pass of a paperclip.  We read the wildly funny phrase, “Oh heavenly day, Harvey kissed me today!!”  When Nancy came home Jack and I pranced around the house chanting “Oh Heavenly day, Harvey kissed me today!!”  After dinner Daddy pointed out the churlishness of reading other people’s private papers.  We heard him. 

In 1950 we moved into the house our parents built eight miles away.  Nancy was the beautiful new girl in Redlands High School.  During winter frosts, high school boys trudged to school with pale, blackened faces and eye circles; they’d lit smudge pots all night to save orange groves from freezing.  They earned the cash, thus, to buy junkyard cars, fix them, and feed them.  Nancy became expert on smudging, the internal combustion engine, and the cosmetic fixes one could make to a car – chopping, bobbing, and channeling. 

Nancy attended Smith her first college year.  At the end of that year, the man Nancy would marry graduated from Yale.  The army drafted him; he drove to Fort Ord, California for training.  Nancy followed him to California for her second, last, year of college at Berkeley.  They married; she had just turned 20.  The two moved to Indianapolis where John, a Private, taught officers at the army’s finance school.  Their first child, Annie, was born in the army hospital there. 

When Nancy was great with Annie, and late for an OB appointment at the hospital, she parked in a slot marked “Reserved for General Officers”.  In her cubicle, in her angel gown, she heard a male voice calling out “Private Hoffs-dik, Private Hoffs-dik”.  Unsure who was wanted, she remained quiet.  The next Monday, John's irate Colonel dressed him down for parking in the General Officer’s slot.  The General’s wife, late for her appointment, parked in a space marked “No Parking – Fire Lane”.  A small, easily contained fire broke out, the fire engine blocked the parking lot, and John's license number was noted.  John passed his Colonel’s ire on to Nancy that night. 

When he left the army, John took Nancy and Annie to Boston to earn his MBA.  Nancy sold furniture to support them.  Susie, a Down syndrome baby, was born in Boston.  Nancy attributed the Down syndrome to free, student-administered X-rays of her teeth with old machines around the time she conceived.  Nancy took classes to learn about genetics. 

Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California, hired John as an executive.  He joined the Young Republicans and the Junior Chamber of Commerce.  Nancy bore their son Johnny, in California.  Nancy threw herself into the good wife role for as long as she could, then found work at an employment agency.  She specialized in finding jobs for bright young geeks, aerospace engineers and physicists.  She hired me to babysit and housekeep.   She made friends with executives in Palo Alto.  Weekends she hung out, and wrote, at a coffee house, where she got to know Ira Sandpearl and other wildly pacific men.  Friday nights she’d go out to L’Omelette where the bright young executives celebrated happy hour.  She made good friends and asked good questions. 

Nancy divorced John, and moved to Southern California.  She found work as a secretary at an aerospace engineering firm. 

Nancy met and later married Dick Loy, a funny, original, engineer.  The family moved to a houseboat.  Time magazine featured them in an article about the Loys' time-sharing computer terminal on the houseboat.  The article pictured Nancy in the round bed Dick had made.  Annie and Johnny did their homework on the terminal, which spewed arrows of paper onto the rug.  Nancy set up and edited Time Sharing News.  She wrote a book, Computer Management.  Dick fell for another woman and Nancy divorced him. 

Our father gave Nancy a fine briefcase for Christmas and advised, “An expert is a person from out of town with a briefcase.”  Nancy moved her children to London; she had always wanted to live there.  She worked editing Dataweek, a journal about computers.  Johnny and Annie attended minor public schools.  After she left Dataweek, she founded Druid Management, a consultancy.  She wrote The IBM World (The Sun Never Sets on IBM in England), the Yin and Yang of Organizations, and ghostwrote People at Work. 

Nancy never earned a college degree.  She didn’t need one.  She was perceptive, curious, and knew what made people tick, singly and in organizations.  Oxford University’s Center for Management Studies gave her a research fellowship for three years and she taught there. 

She met John Cameron, then Director General of the Chartered Institute of Transport.  He was a quick, wiry man, and kind.  They married and lived in London.  John held a lifetime pass to ride Great Britain’s trains anywhere, anytime. 

Her own genealogy fascinated Nancy; Nancy’s enthusiasm infected John.  He knew of a great-grandfather, John Cameron of Pitlochry, Scotland.  Nancy suggested a trip there to investigate.  They took the overnight train from London to Pitlochry, a tourist site in the Highlands.  They found the tombstone with Cameron’s name and the right dates - “John Cameron of Clunemore Farm” - in the Scottish Episcopal churchyard in nearby Blair Atholl town.  People at a local pub told them Clunemore Farm had stood vacant for ten years.  The house had no doors; sheep from the farm below wandered through it.   When Nancy and John saw the small stone house at the top of a hill they loved it.

Clunemore had a majestic view of Killiecrankie pass where Scots soldiers had leapt, naked and shrieking, down a cliff to rout the English.  Nancy and John arranged the lifetime rental of Clunemore with the Duke of Atholl’s farm manager. 

The Camerons rode the sleeper from London to Pitlochry most weekends.  John put Clunemore to rights.  He installed doors, built a ha-ha (retaining wall to keep sheep out), installed a Rayburn (wood-burning cooker), a kitchen sink and drain-board, gutters and a garden.  He restored the stone barn in the back (later the home of his bookbinding and rare-book business, and his model train.) 

Nancy kept her successful management consultancy going while becoming the perfect Scots housewife.  She made friends and curtains, and learned to dye and spin wool.  Costumed as a Scots crofter she spun wool to entertain tourists.  She wrote a pamphlet about dying with woad.  She arranged flowers at the Episcopal Church and met with friends to sew needlepoint kneelers for pews.  Theirs were gros point; hers depicted Blair Castle, the Duke’s seat, in petit point.  Nancy gleefully recounted that the Duke, seeing the boy next to him with Nancy’s kneeler, switched kneelers saying “Mine, I think.” 

One spring Nancy fostered an abandoned lamb.  It followed her around the house, bleating when she was out of sight.  Nancy never ate lamb again. 

Nancy entertained family and friends royally.  She cooked well, and whipped up delicious dinners when friends dropped in.  She served Stilton soup and Famous Grouse to varied and interesting people every Christmas.  Everyone loved visiting Nancy and John. 

Soon Nancy needed an interest beyond consulting.  She rented an abandoned gas station next the train station, filled it with used books, and sold them to locals and tourists.  Often she’d sweep in, greet her clerk, sweep out the till, and sweep out the door without accounting for the cash.  The Atholl Browse was successful anyway. 

For her final enthusiasm, Nancy pieced fabric into works of art.  These were bright, colorful, beautiful, and treasured. 

John developed angina.  They rented a small house near town for the winter; Clunemore’s hill was impassable in snow and John needed easier access to medical care.  Nancy, diabetic, swam daily at the Hydro.  Despite exercise, she eventually suffered heart failure and was hospitalized for a few weeks.  The Duke gave the Camerons lifetime use of Blair Castle’s gate house in exchange for their interest in Clunemore.  Nancy and John had collected too much stuff; the move daunted.  After they finished pruning Nancy’s fabric collection, they drove to Edinburgh to sell John’s British Rail memorabilia.  Nancy had a massive heart attack on the drive and died in the car. 

Typically, Nancy had organized her own memorial service.  She “stipulated a healthy supply of guacamole (and whisky) be provided for mourners after the ceremony.”*

* The Herald Scotland - 28 July, 2010