Sunday, January 9, 2011

gold star activities

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Snow showers re-dusted the cars and trees and street last night, but it doesn't seem to require a shoveling agenda. It's clean and white and quiet, not at all like the email box, which I just finished shoveling out. It snowed there too -- a dusting of ... well Charles Fort once collected reports of frogs falling from the sky and that's a bit what the inbox feels like lately ... full of slippery, slimy, limping, hopping stuff. What ever happened to the exchanging of dirty jokes that my friend Bill McKechnie once assured me was the internet's sole contribution to human connection?

Well, this morning there is a fellow coming by to practice zazen and refresh the scenery a bit.

Yesterday, my neighbor, Joe, who had just finished shoveling his driveway and walks, walked across the street to chat. I asked him how his project in Kenya was going -- a volunteer program he had been on and came back from elated at the simplicity of simply being alive. He said he planned another trip in a couple of years but that in the meantime, the team he had worked with had raised the money for a roof on the school and now the kids didn't have to scurry into corners every time it rained. The water system they had installed had been extended. There was some success in getting chickens to each family. And someone had ponied up for 12 foot-operated sewing machines so that the women whose only recourse had been prostitution could sew various goods ... including uniforms for the school kids.

It's always nice to think that someone is doing something serious. The look of pleasure on Joe's face was the only gold star anyone might need.
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