I'm dreaming of a surfer Christmas

I'm glad the Obamas are spending a week or so in Hawaii. I hope the little girls are loving the island fashions. Maybe Michelle is checking out the Hawaiian quilting tradition.


When I was a child our very generous next door neighbor used to bring us Christmas gifts from Hawaii. We loved dressing up in shirts or muu-muus with bold floral patterns, leis and seed bracelets.

The guys behind the post office counter at 8:30 this morning looked like Maytag repairmen. This must be the slowest mail day of the year after a month of postal mania. When I told the man I couldn't stand any more Liberty Bells he was glad to show me some Hawaii statehood surfer stamps. I'm hearing that Hawaii Five-O theme song!

When the International Quilt Study Center opened in Lincoln, Nebraska, I saw my first Hawaiian quilt. It resembled a child's folded cut-out snowflake in red and white, but with island vegetation shapes. As a paper-cutter, I was intrigued. New England missionaries brought the idea of quilting to the Hawaiian natives in the early 1800s, along with new fabrics. There's something wonderful about the quilts that makes me feel a sweet aloha dream must be guaranteed for every user, Presidents included.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Frijole Anole Catches the Waves

I couldn't quite visualize the surfing dogs I heard about on NPR Saturday morning. The Frijole Anole must have heard the story, too. He's working on his surfing technique. He's spent the last hour wind-surfing on a canna leaf in a good breeze. He's ridden the leaf forwards, backwards, sideways, and even managed to hang ten.

When I popped my Dick Dale surfer music in the cd player and opened the patio sliding door, the lizard worked on his style points.

Have I mentioned how much I miss my camera?


© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Just what Age is this anyway???

Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and vocations. --Queen Victoria

Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.--Gloria Steinem

When I married in 1977, I did not understand the extent of my gamble. I deluded myself that one of my God-given vocations was to sand off the annoying rough edges on my spouse so he would quit chewing toothpicks and leaving his used dental floss on the red shag carpet back beneath the macrame plant hanger beside the waterbed.

I believed that the converse of Queen Victoria's proclamation was that men were intended to be helpmates for women, but with totally different duties and vocations. A man's God-given duties and vocations, in my mind, were to deal with taxes, cars, and insurance.

My spouse insisted my God-given duties included sitting beside him and giving him my undivided attention and worshipful adoration while he surfed through t.v. channels and viewed an unending string of lowest common denominator Blockbuster rentals consisting almost entirely of swearing, sex, car crashes, explosions, abusive and addictive relationships. And the lord said, "It is not right that Woman should sitteth and knitteth while Man is watching t.v. It is not right that Woman should addresseth envelopes for Christmas cards, or in any way diverteth her attention from Man while he pursueth his leisure viewing on the couch."

My spouse felt his God-given vocation was to badger me about exercising, and to allow me quiet, solitary (child-free) times only to work out, or to run. Not that I'm bitter or anything! I did derive benefits from exercise, and enjoyed it sometimes, but the emotional baggage was heavier than the Nautilus weights.

It's amazing the gamble lasted nearly nineteen years, and produced three fantastic sons. It's not surprising that I had to reshape my attitudes about exercise and fitness. I had to find my own motivations, minus the baggage.

Teeny Little Surfer Guys

Sesame Street debuted in 1969, when I was in my teen babysitting career mode. I made between thirty-five cents and a dollar per hour babysitting. My young charges were sometimes allowed to watch Sesame Street or Mister Roger's Neighborhood. My own kids watched Sesame Street sometimes, but they preferred Reading Rainbow. I did too, since it encouraged development of a longer attention span.

There are three songs* from Sesame Street that pop into my brain uninvited. One is the Teeny Little Super Guy. Had to confer with colleagues of similar age to come up with the visual memory of the Guy when my class started work on their teeny little surfer guys for our Surf City art project. Our Surf City is also inspired by last year's movie Riding Giants, which should have been on my list of cool movies this week, and by Gloria and Ted Rand's picture book, Aloha, Salty. That's why you'll see some surfing puppies if you look real close.



Female Singers: Teeny Little Super Guy
Pops right up before your eye
He's no bigger than your thumb
Teeny Little Super Guy: Snap your fingers, here I come
Now stop me if you've heard this one...



*The other two Sesame Street song flashbacks:

Takes a lot of little nuts
To make a jar of peanut butter
'Cause one peanut in a jar
Really doesn't go too far
Gotta crack and shell and mix 'em
There's no other way to fix 'em
Takes a lot of little nuts to do the job

and

I'm a dog
I'm a workin' dog
I'm a hard workin' dog
Hard workin' dog

Jan & Dean
Surf City
(Brian Wilson/Jan Berry)

I bought a pretty cool wagon and we call it a woody
(Surf City, here we come)
You know, it's not very cherry, it's an oldie but a goody
(Surf City, here we come)
Well, it ain't got a backseat or a rear window
But it still gets me where I wanna go
Chorus:
And we're goin' Surf City, 'cause it's two to one
You know we're goin' Surf City, gonna have some fun
Yeah we're goin' Surf City, 'cause it's two to one
You know we're goin' Surf City, gonna have some fun, now

A Three Hour Tour

When the Howell's finally got off the island, were they able to look back on their experiences and consider it a vacation success???? Don't millions of people go on expensive trips every year looking for a memorable experience far out of the realm of their normal day-to-day life?

What about Alice??? When she returned from her adventures in Wonderland did she feel oddly refreshed? Were her normal concerns and frets absent from her mind? Was she musing in pinafore moments about dancing the lobster quadrille with a handsome stranger who looked a bit like Emile de Becque? Like some enchanted evening you will meet a dormouse..

It's the first day of my mid-summer break. My son went to stay at his dad's for the weekend, so I slept in this morning. Got up mighty late by my standards, 7:20 or so, made coffee, and read the paper (Yes, the Dallas Morning News had one of those annoying yellow stickers on the front page today.) Spent over an hour organizing my internet "Favorites" bookmarks into more usable and alphabetical categories, a typical library junkie neverending activity.

Spent another hour plus reading about the Southern Baptist Convention president, Rev. Bobby Welch waving around a ziplock bag of roadkill frogs to encourage evangelism. I wanted to get beyond the two paragraph item in the DMN Saturday "Religion" section, and look for his recipes. Didn't get as deep in the GoldenPalace.com on-line casino purchase of a fence from the Grassy Knoll that didn't actually date from 1963. Next time I find a dead mouse or lizard out by my patio fence, I will either bag it for Rev. Welch or sell it to the casino as a religious icon. Book'em, Dano!

Decided it was time to get going, shower, and have breakfast about 10:30. Constructed a plan for errands:

1. Half Price Books in Richardson to seek a VHS "Pirates of the Caribbean", and a tacky world music calypso CD with the limbo song.
2. The nail salon to have my painful broken toenail and frightening cuticle helped and beautified. A student stepped on my toe yesterday, and four weeks of clay, paint, and dye have ravaged my hands.
3. A run by the library.
4. A massive grocery expedition at Kroger's.
5. Return home to spend the afternoon reading Elmore Leonard's latest, The Hot Kid, by the condo swimming pool.

Bet that was what The Professor had in mind for the rest of his day after the three hour tour on the Minnow. Sometimes a vacation day doesn't go as planned. Ask anyone who has ever locked the keys in the rental car at a July fourth fireworks display at Kirtland AFB, had to have the divers retrieve their son's molded plastic arm splint from the bottom of a water slide pool at Wet'n' Wild, spent time being questioned in the ER of some vacation town's hospital about their child's black eye and broken arm, knocked the oil pan off the bottom of their Chevy Nova driving on a gravel road in the San Juan National Forest, or had the transmission go out on their 1961 Pontiac Catalina on the drive down from Pike's Peak. Need I mention the jellyfish stings, impetigo, food allergy reactions, corrosive diaper rash due to overdosing on Gerber Baby Cherry Juice, claustrophobic toddlers who refuse to sleep in tents, and traumatic misplacings of "The Special Bunny"?

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip,
that started from this tropic port,
aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailin' man,
the Skipper brave and sure,
five passengers set sail that day,
for a three hour tour,
a three hour tour.

The weather started getting rough----It was nearing one hundred degrees in the Metroplex, and hotter than Hades on the strip mall asphalt parking lots. On my fourth stop in search of music and video I entered the twilight zone of the Barnes and Noble music department. The first clerk listened carefully to my three Sphinxy-Jinxy questions:

1. What is that cd being played overhead with the singer who has an even smaller vocal range than Robert Earl Keen's three note, and makes me feel like I've swallowed sandpaper and many cups of truckstop coffee from styrofoam cups then banged my head repeatedly against a concrete block wall outside a rundown cinemaplex with rotting cricket-infested concession garbage and flickering neon?*
2. Is there a soundtrack cd for "Riding Giants"?
3. Where would I find a cd sort of like this Putamayo World Music recording of traditional calypso music, but way more tacky and K-Tel-ish with the limbo song and that one about the lime in the coconut?

This young, spiky-haired, pierced fellow was gently entertained by my queries, and gave me some guidance. He even explained the wonders of the headphones and search systems, sensing that I might be a middle-aged woman who doesn't get out much. Unfortunately, he went off on break. I spent over an hour searching for surf music, luau party cds, Chubby Checker's "Limbo Rock" recordings, calypso, Jamaican steel drum bands, pirate and Errol Flynn movie soundtracks, all of which is actually pretty cheap entertainment. I think my dad needs to go to his Barnes and Noble, and listen to the Brubeck cds. Anything I can do, he can do better!

One of the goodies I found was the Ventures' Greatest Hits**. This cd includes the Hawaii Five-O theme, but I wish it had Wipe-Out. Doesn't matter. I'm one with the big waves. I went on to the nail salon feeling like Gidget.

* (Don't try this at home!)

** ***

...the tiny ship was tossed.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
the Minnow would be lost.
The Minnow would be lost.

Just as I was starting to think I could be Ginger if I just had a peel and stick beauty mark, fake eyelashes, and a Barbie gold lame dress, a crisis of Vesuvian magnitude struck. The gal doing eyebrow waxes tripped and spilled her pot of hot wax all over my new special [groovy black and lime green nearly perfect] purse, and over my sandals. All the nail salon ladies, and even their elderly male manager, collaborated and commiserated on efforts to remove the wax from my purse, but finally they had to concede the purse was a goner. My purse contents were placed in a plastic grocery bag, my salon services were on the house, and I was off to DSW to purchase a new purse while impersonating a bag lady. [This is a cautionary tale. Always zip your purse at the nail salon. That way a hot wax accident won't ruin your phone and everything else inside!]

No phone, no lights, no motor car,
not a single luxury
like Robinson Crusoe
it's primitive as can be.

Strange day in an alternate galaxy, but I am oddly unperturbed. I feel like Steve in Daniel Pinkwater's Wallpaper from Space***. I feel like a space explorer mountaineer tobaggan team mouse looking for gumballs and cornflakes, and I haven't gone five miles from my house. Time to write a Travel Guide to Disasters, Ointments, and Copays for Under $50 a Day.

USPS

Breezed into my favorite post office in Richardson, TX (Motto: We won't make you want to gnaw your leg off to get out of this trap!) when it opened at 8:30 this morning. Mailing a family portrait of three GQ guys and their old chrome-top mom to my parents. Lucked out and got my favorite civil servant, a chatty English-speaking guy who looks like a somewhat past-fifty former surfer who enjoys his Coronas. I noticed the Buckminster Fuller commemorative stamp on the poster of "new issues", and was stunned to see the stamp came out in July. Where was I? How did I miss this? Why do I feel like I am being sucked down into the rabbit hole of Memory Lane? I don't have time for Memory Lane! Why does the rabbit hole look like the hair dryer of an early Barbie? I've got to get to work!

Flashback to 1976, University of Nebraska... Mary and I decide during lunch at the student union to cut class and go hear Bucky Fuller speak to an association of Nebraska architects in the auditorium of Sheldon Gallery. The auditorium is full, but we slip in and sit on the steps in the aisle. It's winter. I sense our midi-length wool coats bunched around us on the steps, and suspect we had on knee-high leather boots. Bucky is a visionary Mr. Magoo, all bald head and black Coke bottle glasses and high-energy stubborn conviction about better living through geometry. He is much cuter and crazier than the image on the postage stamp... A just-hatched baby archaeopteryx, featherless. You kinda want to rub his head for luck.

Flashback further to 1957, Lincoln. Sometimes I wonder if it was real, but I remember my dad having a homemade model of a geodesic dome in the basement of our duplex when I was two years old. You know how sometimes you think it is an authentic memory, but it turns out to be a distortion from an actual family slideshow to ward off cabin fever during a blizzard forty years ago? You think you travelled to Bismarck, North Dakota in 1960, but it turns out you ate a bismarck with a carton of chocolate milk at a diner in Marysville, Kansas on a rainy day? You remember getting carsick in the backseat of the '54 Chevy when you went driving around the reservoir dam that was under construction in that plastic raincoat that didn't breathe? Still, for the next twenty-plus years you checked North Dakota off on the map of States I Have Visited... So, I maybe just think Howie had that model of a geodesic dome, but for thirty years I expected that when he retired he would build a real dome out in the backyard.

So, the civil surfer servant said, "You really want those stamps? No one has ever asked for those stamps. We can't get rid of them. Didn't that guy make geo-dweeezy domes or something?" The stamps are truly ugly. They look more like Dr. Strangelove-Does-Epcot than Bucky. I will be glad to use them to mail Mary and my parents. The civil servant is crossed off my Prince Charming list, though!

Riding Giants

You wouldn't expect that a summer surf movie would lead one into spiritual and religious musings, but that is one of the results of seeing Stacy Peralta's documentary, "Riding Giants" that opened here this weekend. There are a lot of reasons to go see this movie in August in Dallas. The star of the show is the ocean. Lots and lots of water. More water than it's possible to comprehend. Some of it warm, much of it cold, all of it powerful and seductive. These are images to remember when you get into your car after work and can't even touch the steering wheel.

My tried and trusty summer escape video is "The Hunt for Red October". An all-male cast led by Sean Connery with that cute beard, and the cold, deep waters off Newfoundland. It is not necessary to discuss the symbolism of submarines in this PG blog.

"Riding Giants" has an almost all-male cast, all muscular and bronzed, and all crazy in their obsession. The documentary is a history of surfing, but the first 1000 years of surfing are covered in two minutes in an imaginative children's' book pop-up style. The giants of the title are both the waves and the legendary surfers who ride them. Some of these "giants" have been surfing for over fifty years. Their comments are insightful and entertaining, and my friend was ready to invite them all to her house for dinner. These are fun guys of all ages, and much more intelligent and philosophical than the stereotypical surf bum.

The surfers sometimes refer to the wave as a woman who allows them to have their way as long as they respect her. They more often refer to the challenges of extreme surfing as "faith". It becomes clear through the movie that surfing is about both being one with the wave and being one with the moment. A blink of self-consciousness and loss of focus can easily result in death. Surfing is play, but in the sense of "flow", where challenge and ability are matched to lift one out of the mundane realm. Obviously, the surfers tackle the giant waves for the adrenalin and endorphin rush. They are devotees, fanatics, enthusiasts in the ancient meaning:

enthusiasm...n. ... 3. Archaic. a. Ecstasy arising from supposed possession by a god. b. A fanatic religious ardor.--See Synonyms at passion.... from Greek enthousiasmos, inspiration, from enthousiazein, to be inspired by a god, from enthous, entheos, possessed, inspired : en-, in + theos, god...

And if religious ecstasy were not enough, there's lots of vintage footage of automobiles from the 40's, 50's, and 60's, and Dick Dale's surfer guitar music! My Barbie used to listen to that music! My clueless Ken who could not bend was absolutely hopeless on the surfboard I cut for him out of a cardboard shoebox. Wipe out!

Cue up the Hawaii Five-O theme song!

This is the day I've been looking forward to all summer. This is the day we started our giant papier mache shark. I love doing group art projects in my classes. It is a trip!



This is the beginning form for the shark. For more information, click on the link to Itty Bitty Art Projects over there in the sidebar.

I love teaching figure drawing using photos of surfers. I am not a surfer. I'm not a traveler. I've only been to Galveston, Corpus Christi, and South Padre, and then not until I was in my late-thirties. I can teach kids to analyze and draw figures using my collection of photos torn from the wide array of surfing magazines available in Dallas, Texas, though. So I am looking forward to seeing the new surfing documentary, Riding Giants, this weekend.

Is it just a bad dream, or did Lucy and Ethel once sing a song about a surfboard that came back by itself????

Gnarly troll houses

gnarly adj 1. very good, excellent; COOL. ("That trick on your skateboard was gnarly!") 2. used to describe something that looks painful or dangerous. ("That was a gnarly car wreck.") 3. gross, disgusting. ("Check out that gnarly old homeless dude.")
Online Slang Dictionary

gnarly Original from 70's surfspeak - to describe waves that are violently breaking without the form that would render them more rideable. Can also describe less than ideal females.

"I'm bailing on this session-waves are too gnarly"
"I had to ditch her friend, she was lookin' gnarly"

UrbanDictionary.com

gnarl - "contort, twist," 1814, a back-formation from gnarled, which appears only in Shakespeare ("Measure for Measure," 1603) but was picked up 19c. by romantic poets and brought into currency. It is probably a variant of M.E. knar "knot in wood" (1382), originally "a rock, a stone," of uncertain origin. Gnarly first attested 1829; picked up 1970s as surfer slang to describe a dangerous wave; it had spread in teen slang by 1980s, where it meant both "excellent" and "disgusting."
Online Etymology Dictionary

My favorite dictionary is the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language that my Uncle Milt and Aunt Margie gave me for high school graduation in 1973. Its red binding is really showing the wear, and sometimes it is a bit out-dated, but the thumbnail illustrations are still intriguing, and the page lay-out has enough white space to keep it visually restful. The entries invite browsing, and send me off on see also references to other words for perusing. To a word-lover, it is a ten-minute vacation, the equivalent of a power nap or hot shower.

I have a friend who reads phonebooks, and finds the same intrigue, edification, and relaxation. Other friends browse cookbooks. To each her own reference book.

American Heritage indicates that gnarl can mean to snarl or growl, as well as a protruding knot on a tree. Gnarled can mean misshapen, "crabbed in temperment", or "rugged in appearance".

How are you doing, darling? You seem somewhat crabbed in temperment....

It's so nice of you to ask, honey. I'm having difficulty refraining from browsing gnash, gneiss, and gnu, and thence to wildebeest or schist. I am worried that I might be gnathic, and maybe related to a jaw.

We are making quite delightful troll houses. They resemble tree stumps. I will get some photogs on the Itty Bitty Art Projects blog soon. We did papier mache with Ross Art Paste and covered our houses in crumpled and torn brown paper bags for a tree bark texture. [This is going better than the year we made the rock'n'roll trolls on stage at the Fairyland Bandstand complete with teeny tiny disco balls.]



Papier mache always brings out both the "excellent; cool" and "disgusting" comments. This time the soggy, sagging forms will also fit the contorted, twisted, misshapen connotations of "gnarly".



One of these summers we will finally create chia trolls. The time frame limitations have yet to be surmounted. I want to make clay trolls, dry them, fire them, and still have time to sprout the grass seed hair...It just doesn't work in two weeks.

Going to climb the rope ladder into my treehouse now for some reading time. I will lower a bucket for provisions and bug repellent.