JUN-C-10
THE FIRST OF THE WEATHER BREAKS
FOLLOWS THE VERNAL SOLSTICE
AND I GET THE LAWNS MOWED—
BUT AN AIRLINE INDUSTRY GLITCH
EXASPERATES THE OTHER PLANS
FOR THE DERWOOD INTERIOR LAUNCH
June 23, 2003
Noah’s dove must have found a branch, since it is finally coming out to the first day of summer, as we pass the vernal equinox and it has just gone the first day without raining. The streams are swollen, the grass is so thick and green—both because of the lush rainfall fueling its growth and the fact that no one can get out in the rain to mow it (I have failed three tries just this week after return from Haiti.) So, I finally got a chance to get out without a washout, and worked on not just my lawn, but also Joe’s.
After the Tom Griffioen clan packed up for their late start on Saturday night as the thunder announced a fresh freshet, I ran around the house cleaning and doing laundry, and packing out the trash—possibly the last time before all that is done into a dumpster. I went to DCCRC on Sunday morning and her Pastor Norm Steen berate himself for taking off on his two week West Michigan vacation, just as Vacation Bible School was starting and he was delegating that to the summer seminary intern we now have. He spoke to me after the service, not so curious about what I had seen in Haiti nor what I would b e doing next in India, but to ask me what I was doing at Derwood. “Oh, you are selling the place?” No, I am remodeling it. “You mean after you have sold off all the property around it, you are fixing up the house a little?” (I wonder who is coaching this line of questioning?) No, I am keeping all the woods in trust, and will be totally overhauling the house in what the builders call a “Gut and Remodel” and as a consequence, with no bathrooms, bedrooms or kitchen, I will have to be moving out to a place as yet unknown, to which I will have to return when I come back from the next three months abroad.
He told me that they had completed the building of a small retirement house in Douglas Michigan near Saugatuck a few blocks from Lake Michigan, and will be vacationing there this next two weeks, and then his kids will largely have use of it, since retirement is at least fifteen years off. All of the building had been done by phone and email, and he now had the first mortgage payments of his life. I congratulated him on the joys of home ownership and long distance construction.
When I got back to Derwood, I went to the shed to get out the lawn mower. I had previously cleared out the living room before the Griffioens arrived by staking all the cardboard boxes with all the medical supplies in the shed up on shelves. It was soon apparent that I had two tasks to do before the yard work. The record-setting heavy rains (30+ inches in the recent past) had come through some parts of the shed, and the cardboard boxes had given way and all the medical supplies had come cascading down into the shed covering the lawn mower so that I could not even see it. After I had unburied it, I got the lawn mower out and fought with it as I always must, to coax it to start. In just over an hour I got all the grass mowed and the heavy branches which rain down on the yard in the wind and rain picked up. I had promised Joe I would pick him up at four o’clock instead of the usual dawn run which we most often try to do. He could not do it early today since his kids had a surprise for him. They had taken him out to a McD’s breakfast—on top of the Father’s Day “breakfast in bed” they had fixed and served him. Lucky Joe. But, of course, his kids are only two, six and ten years old, so they still think of such things and have not outgrown them.
We had a good run, which we started down at the Rock Creek Meadowbrook stables, where we could pat the horses before taking off down the Rock Creek Parkway closed to traffic on weekends and holidays. It was a glorious cool yet sunny run in the shaded path along Rock Creek, and we had a good run together for just over an hour. When I had come back to the house, Betty was fixing dinner of a chicken casserole and had invited me to join them in lieu of the Fathers' Day celebration to which they had invited me as I was still enroute back from Haiti.
Since dinner was not quite ready, Joe had pulled out a video on baseball he was going to show and asked if I wanted to coach him through what I saw. Since there were probably two hours of daylight left on this second longest day of the year, I asked instead: Let me see your lawn mower. I started it up after several tugs and got started. The grass was so thick lush and long, that the mower could hardly stay alive while mowing it, so I had to lift it up several notches on its leveling device, and then mowed twice in a “polarized lawn. I also had to reclaim the lawn from about five feet of overgrowth from the creeper from the edges. It was hard work. But, when I had finished, the Aukward yard appeared to be the pride of the neighborhood, unlike the unkempt hayfield of the recluse who lives next door, has never worked, and, of course, mowing the grass would be too much of an effort. He seems a harmless hermit. So, when I finally came in, I needed a shower more from the mowing than the run, before I could join the Aukwards en famille in dinner. WE will try to get together at least one more time before I leave for India, since the kids like the picnic in the woods and also the fourth of July holiday as we have celebrated them each year of the last several.
AND, NOW, THE SAD AND EXASPERATING STORY
PLANS FOLIED AND HOUSING PROKJECTS DERAILED BY
A NORHTWEST DISHOORED AIRLINE TICKET
Virginia had carefully planned for heir first Monday off to be coming up on the morning of the day off, and meeting here at Derwood with Megan at noon, then picking out the appliances and the granite for the counters and the fixtures for the bathrooms. On Tuesday, the same process would be held with Sandy Sheilor who would be helping us with all the furniture orders and putting on order the upholstering of the tailor made custom pieces and the fabrics she had recommended.
There has been a lot of turmoil in Virginia’s week, however, not the least of which is doing nine major performances in five days, and commuting back and forth to Dayton from Cincinnati to be in the theatre. On Friday Saturday and Sunday there are two consecutive performances, and she would usually call between the sets. This time she was harried more than usual, since five of her company, including her best friend with whom she was going to room in San Francisco when the company moves on there in a few weeks, were summarily fired with the advice that “there needed to be changes made.” Despite the fact that one man is the sole support of an invalid mother, and the friend of Virginia’s is the only bread winner with an unemployed husband, they each got their “contracts bought out.” That is, they were given fifteen weeks pay, $20,000, and told they were no longer needed effective immediately. My first response would have been “How can we get that same severance?” This would mean she would b e paid for not singing and we could still go to Lingshed! But, she is on a short –term contract and will have to fulfill it. The money that is made must be looked at against the cost of living on the road in hotels and flying from one punt to another. Virginia had found a low cost Northwest Airline fare from Dayton through Detroit to BWI, leaving at 6:30 AM. For that she would have to get an airport hotel in Dayton since she would only get pout of there last performance after midnight, and turn in for only four hours and setting her alarms for four o’clock AM, get ready for the back and forth trip of less than 24 hours to conclude the final decorating plans of Derwood’s remodeling, all initiated in my absence.
She called at 7:30 to say she had missed her flight. She had been so exhausted that she apparently did not hear the alarm. There was a later flight on Delta, but Northwest would not sign it over, and they advised that all their subsequent flights were overbooked so there was no point in standing by. They pointed out that on the face of the ticket it says that if you are not here early, there is no fault of theirs, and the ticket becomes worthless. You paid your money, now it is ours, and you can just go buy another ticket (like a short term purchase of over a thousand dollars) So, the money for the tickets, the hotel, and the plans for the meetings are all wasted, and we would have to scramble to call off the visits by the designers. She was very distraught and turned around to go back to Cincinnati, where her parents had left, figuring she had already gone, and they were visiting their son in North Carolina. Bummer!
So, I put al the stuff away that had been marshaled for the anticipation of her visit, and went to work. There, every machine I have crashed immediately, with the desk top system down and frozen as soon as I completed the reply to an urgent request for dates and time for a planning meeting on the next trip to Haiti. I picked up my audiocassette player, with which I listen to books on tape (although it is very unreliable and always jams on the run) and it failed absolutely to play, after using all the tricks to get it started. I had brought in my MP-3 player the Yepp unit I got from the George Award ceremony, but the guru has the memory card I had hoped to have installed, and needed the software, which I brought in, but he is never around to do so. I need the MP-3 system since I can no longer have anything with moving parts that can snarl and tangle tapes and shut down on the run—but not today.
So, I went out to the Wellness Center—the first time in months—and suited up and ran to the mall where I had seen them setting up for the folk life festival the Smithsonian puts on every summer. There I saw “communities” on the Mall—like the Tribe of Simon, squeezing apples in a cider press—I got a long sample. There were herbal teas, and handmade shoe cobblers and a lot of musicians, all of them belonging to religious communities.
I also saw the startling sight of Mali Tare tribesmen wearing their conical African hats for the Sahara sun, bending over on top of an archway made of very aromatic cow dung mortar. I am glad I had brought the little camera. The folk life festival is always full of some interesting findings from around the world, almost invariably from someplace I have just returned from.
`So, I am here with a number of postponed projects which are all getting pushed back into the time I should be packing up and getting ready for essentially two months in India, followed by two weeks in Alaska, during which time I will not have home to return to .
At least the Griffioen kids got a good whirl around, and I am getting a few of the plans together to arrange the Haiti trips. I will be meeting Paul Farmer and others interested in “Haiti and Health” in a presentation on Thursday afternoon in the Capital Hill Rooms (see Jun-C-8). I will try to meet with Kim Green and representatives of the Green Foundation on July 10-11m and then I am packed up and on my way out to the High Himalaya!