preserves

May 29 , 2021

Have we learned nothing from the pandemic? Important decisions will be made at town meeting next week by only those people who can be present at 9 am on a Saturday morning. There is no remote access and no absentee voting. When we get past that meeting where library funding will be voted on, we need to get to work on changing voter access to the town meeting warrant. In the meantime, email reminders and phone calls are going out to get our Library Voters to the meeting. My nerves will be glad to get past that date. Looking around to see if other towns have changed their voting ways during the pandemic, I came across this article in a local newspaper: Is Secret Ballot the Way to Go?. Several towns have already changed to referendum voting (secret ballot). My suggestion is that the annual town meeting in March should stay in-person, preserving the tradition, and anything other than that should be public hearing followed by a week of secret ballot voting. Let the next campaign begin!

These are some of the slabs of granite that were the foundation of the old building at 38 School Street. They will become broad steps into the new building as soon as our guy gets to it. Another preservation of something old while moving to the new.

I got my first grant rejection letter. I am going to wait until the other two grants get decided before I judge myself. We are looking at a rainy memorial day weekend, so Melissa and I will be working on a grant to fund the children's room shelving and furniture.We will do it the Sara Trunzo way and turn it in at the last minute on Monday.

waiting on it

May 6 , 2021

Things I'm waiting on: funding from multiple sources for the library; Brian G to install the granite pieces that were the support of the old building as steps up to the porch of the new building because it is so cool to use pieces of the old as steps into the new; an electrician, any electrician. (pause here to actually call around about an electrician); a shelving plan; the surface-of-the-moon camp road to be graded.

In the restroom of the fancy new restaurant, I'm playing with the cloth hand towels and a deeply familiar song plays. I shazam it; it's Kenny Rankin, very back in the day as is the occasion we are celebrating with dinner. Back home I find Haven't We Met and add it to the April mix, and then I find a Caetano Veloso cover of Jonie Mitchell's Dreamland and add that. The mix has a lot of New Orleans funk on it cause the only thing better than funk is protest funk, some Cha Wa, some Dumpstafunk, my new funk guys Smoke n Bones, my new jazz guitarist Erick Turnbull. I need to find an hour's ride somewhere so I can listen loud in the car.

The sisters are reading River of Fire by our famous cousin Sister Helen Prejean. I am behind on the reading because it gives me nun dreams, but to my credit, in those dreams I don't lose my nerve, I know I am playing a role and I know Reverend Mother is playing a role and I keep it civil. The writing is ordinary; her family says the rosary every ten minutes; she is five years older than me so her novitiate experience is slightly different from mine. We are reading it for the references to familiar things, but revisiting that difficult era is not pleasant for me. It is impossible to figure out how you made decisions when you were 17 or 19 years old. It is not possible to reconstruct the immature mind in the hapless milieu of the only world you know. From Sister Helen's reputation, I would have thought that she would be the driving force bringing her community out into the real world of racism and suffering, but it was the other way around. Her community was out there in the projects while she was still playing comfortably and blindly in her religion as a spirituality club middle class environment. Her community sent her to the St. Thomas Project to wake her up. She tells the story on herself.