Be Not Idle

“(I)n 1973, the Michigan legislature passed a law intended to regulate unlicensed day care providers, not good neighbors, to ensure the health and safety of children.” – Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Services

Recently the plight of a West Michigan woman made national headlines when she received a letter from the Department of Human Services warning her against running an unlicensed daycare. Except that she wasn’t doing that: She was helping her neighbors. Between the time they left for work and the time the school bus arrived, the woman looked after their children.

In these parts, that sort of caring gesture is called “neighborliness”.

But another neighbor – anonymous, of course – called the DHS to report an unlicensed daycare center. The DHS sent a letter to the helpful lady, complete with a list of consequences like fines and jail time.

News shows and bloggers leaped on the story. A few (very few) right-leaning commenters equated the law with a Michigan full of “union toughs” and power-hungry “libs”. Evidentally they missed when Governor Granholm*- a notoriously left-leaning politician – talked to Mr. Ahmed and Michigan legislators about working together to change the law.

I also tired of comments (both online and in real-life) that stated that the helpful neighbor should go ahead and get a daycare license. I suppose some of them responded out of igorance, having no idea that a license entails background checks, home inspections, etc.

But what bothered me most were others implied that private citizens (Jane Q. Neighbor, if you will) shouldn’t be doing public service.
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I noticed a couple weeks ago that rental signs appeared on the unused post office boxes. Now more signs of the times at the USPS.

From today until September, our post office is cutting back its hours. They now close at 3 pm. In a letter, the postmaster explained:

We are experiencing an ongoing decline in mail volume and we are seeing fewer customers in our lobby. As a responsible business, we have to preserve our operational efficiency and reduce operating costs to remain viable for the long-term.

On one hand, I’m glad they aren’t raising the cost of stamps again. And I can still get my mail before I go to work, if I get there when the lobby opens (now at 6:30 instead of 5 am).

It’s relatively warm still. I was in St. Clair just a couple hours ago and the temperature fell to -2 degrees Fahrenheit already. Yet it’s not THAT cold.

How cold?

As cold as my hometown in the ’70s, a decade that seemed rife with icestorms and blizzards that knocked the power out. At one point, we lost power so long that Mom cooked over the woodstove and Dad cut a hole in the ice to bring in lakewater for flushing the toilet.

Here are some impressions of the cold back then:  

We took showers at night. The kids who showered in the morning had frozen hair when they got on the bus.  There’s nothing like seeing a teenaged boy brush a fringe of hair away from his eyes – and the entire swath of hair moves like a toupee.

Our nostrils would stick shut when we inhaled because the moisture would freeze our nosehairs together.

We wore scarfs over our faces, but the inside of the scarves STILL stiffened with frost. You didn’t dare lower the scarf to wipe a snotty nose. That would make all the moisture freeze in an instant – the ultimate in chapped skin.

At least once during the winter, one of us would smile and bust a lip. Owie…

My elder brother scared me because he said the booming I heard outside at night was a monster. It was really the sound of ice forming and expanding on the nearby lake.

Several trees near our house exploded from within because sap or perhaps rainwater trapped in hollow spots froze and cracked the surrounding wood.  

The biggest trees in our neighborhood were the poplars, those giants with knobby twigs like arthritic knuckles. An icestorm took most of them down in one fell swoop, but our house wasn’t hit.

When it got cold enough, the snow sounded like stryrofoam underfoot and made the perfect sliding surface for racing. But it wasn’t nearly as slick as the amazing runs that Dad built out of snow. The first ones ran  from the wall near the driveway to the lake. Dad made them faster by pouring hot water on them – a do-it-yourself Zamboni. Later the neighbor’s hill became the launching pad that carried us over the ice rink and into the opposite snowbank. 

They weren’t sled runs – they were were for SAUCERS, those round dangerous things. The saucers were heavy plastic, but the straps were cheaper plastic that inevitably broke. Dad replaced them with leather straps held on with bolts.  They were perfect for aspiring juggernauts.

Ah, winter! Good times!

Recently I made five predictions for 2009. Sadly, one of them is on its way to coming true.  The Detroit News reported:

Metro Detroit’s hard-pressed arts organizations are reeling from a new blow. The GM Foundation has asked high-profile presenters like the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Michigan Opera Theatre to exclude the foundation from budget planning effective immediately.

(…)

The cancellations are part of the GM Foundation’s global suspension of major gift disbursements that amounted to $31.4 million in 2007, the last year for which the foundation has a complete accounting.

The Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts lost out on $350,000. The president of the Music Hall was “stunned”, according to the story, because they’d recently lost funding from DTE (the electrical utility company). 

But so far, the other four predictions haven’t materialized. Only two black squirrel sightings…

The Anchoress has a 2008 round-up of end-of-year reviews. Plus she calls for predictions from the readers. Here are mine: 

1. Local newspapers will survive while the big dailies continue their decline. Today Tim Dowd, publisher of the Port Huron Times Herald, explained how the local economy has led to changes in the paper. It’s a good paper, attentive to its readers and willing to go the long haul in investigative reporting (a rarity nowadays).  I hope it survives.

2.  There will be increased calls (perhaps even successful) to regulate Internet news sources.

3. Trusted newsbloggers will have egg on their faces when they’re taken in by a hot Internet story that turns out to be a hoax – or sophisticated propaganda by a political group.

4. Across the nation, liberals who revel in the decline of big businesses will be shocked and dismayed to discover how much their area’s arts, education, and recreation programs were underwritten by big businesses.

5. The black squirrel population will make a comeback across the Thumb of Michigan. 

This is the first year I’ve put a political sign in my yard. It’s not for any candidate, but to ask my neighbors to vote down Proposal 2. It would amend the Michigan Constitution to allow research on human embryos. That’s right: amend the state constitution. The goal of the proposal is to enfold it in the fabric of our state, thus making it difficult to repeal. Even proponents of embryonic research point out that Proposal 2 allows for NO review NOR oversight of the research.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Gov. Granholm supported the proposal. She’s been irking me since she blew off a debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters in her first run at the gubernatorial office. Recently she shirked her responsibility by blaming our one-state recession on President Bush.

However, she shocked even me in her words about Proposal 2. She said, “As a Catholic, I can say to be pro-cure is to be pro-life.”

But the Most Reverend Earl Boyea, Bishop of Lansing, gave everyone a spirituality check .

Saint Paul reminds us that we must preach the Truth in season and out of season. The Truth will never go unspoken. To be in favor of Proposal 2 is not to be pro-life. A well-formed Catholic conscience would never lead a person to support Proposal 2 “as a Catholic.”

Bishop Boyea was installed as the 5th bishop of Lansing in April. He’s a young fellow, just 56, and he seems like just the fellow to oppose Gov. Granholm’s consistantly pro-abortion stance.

Whispers in the Loggia has more about the bishop’s statement.

Presidential hopeful Sen. Obama took a shot at Republicans by mentioning the huge numbers of lay-offs in Michigan. (The Labor Department just announced that 39,000 auto-related jobs were lost in August.)   According to the Detroit News:

“These numbers are unacceptable and are just one more reminder of what is at stake in this election,” Obama said in a statement issued just before McCain and Palin arrived in the state. He reiterated his support of $50 billion in loan guarantees for domestic automakers to help them “retool their factories to make the next generation in fuel efficient vehicles.”

“Re-tooling” isn’t the same thing as “re-engineering.” Nor is publically acknowledging that automotive workers continue to bear the brunt of industry changes the same thing as acknowledging that political policies, including those of Gov. Granholm (D), have contributed a great deal to our one-state recession. 

I don’t recall ANY politician addressing the question of changing our nation’s infrastructure to support the transportation of the future – although they legislate lower carbon emissions even if they occasionally back down when reality strikes. The truth is that there’s a disconnect between political catch phrases and reality.

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When I mow the lawn or weed the garden behind the house, I always watch for Mr. Toad, the amphibian that suns himself near the garden. It’s not unusual for him to leap suddenly from the grass or scurry into the flowerbed.

So today when I was coming around the side of the deck, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see movement in the grass head of me. But it was too fast and furry to be a toad and too slow to be a chipmunk. It was followed by a small explosion of other bodies running away from the horrible Mower of Earsplitting Doom.

Bunnies! Two itsy bitsy rabbits went hopping through the grass and into the garden along the privacy fence. One remained in the grassy nook between the trunks of the maple cluster until it, too, lost its nerve and made a run for the greenery. Since I like the lawn is little longer and my yard is relatively dog-free,  the backyard must have looked like a little sanctuary (until I began mowing).

I figured that their mother had left them in what she thought was a safe place, so I kept mowing.  Then she burst from the garden and ran away, leaving the three little ones behind. I got a nice look at them, since they weren’t sure at first if I were evil, too.  They are very young, so that their ears are more round than long, and I could hold them in one hand (which I wouldn’t). Then they voted that although I didn’t make a lot of racket, I was clearly a Hateful Beast. They hid in the mums.

Mother took several hours return.  She was none too subtle, either.  I looked up and there she was in front of the deck, scratching her ear. I moved and she hopped over to the corner of the deck, “hidden” by a statue of Our Lady. I could see one exquisite black pool of an eye staring at me. Once in a while the long fuzzy frond of an ear would twitch into view. 

While she waited, the three youngsters came out from the garden. I left the deck and moved to the bedroom to get a better view from that window and saw something unusual: a wild rabbit grooming her brood while they nursed.

I took some nice photos before she spooked and hid in the sedum. Then I realized there were FIVE babies. Cute ones, too. 

The Clamster (aka Kasia) and her readers were talking about the consequences of consecutive rainy days in the urban landscape, and I was filled with nostalgia. A kind of “Thank God that’s past!” sort of nostalgia, to be sure, but it’s nostalgia nonetheless.

 I used to live in Warren, first by myself and then with the Baby Brother (and older brother, and friend M’e, and BB’s buddy Rob, and any other pal who needed to crash on the davenport for a few weeks or months**).  Days of heavy rain meant the storm sewers would overflow onto the road. If it didn’t happen on the commute to Troy, it happened before the commute home.

 On two non-consecutive years, I drove my car through an enormous puddle and stalled it until the engine compartment dried out. When it rained heavily for a few days, ants would come up from cracks in the slab, trying to escape the water. Once I woke up to a sound like irregular dripping from the bathroom. It wasn’t water but hundreds of winged ants flying and then falling back into the bathtub.   Come to think of it, that was just before the mouse moved in and the Baby Brother moved out, like a mini-Pestilence drama.

Now I live in a floodplain, but only because FEMA decided to extend it after I bought my house. My neighbours and I won’t buy the insurance because FEMA doesn’t pay unless over 50% of the house is underwater. The only way for that to naturally happen would mean the St. Clair River had flooded miles (or km) of inland Ontario and Michigan and overwhelmed the islands.

UNnaturally it would mean that when the Channel 4 chopper came over the area, they’d find me and my neighbors pumping water INSIDE our towering walls of sandbags to make the FEMA percentage requirements.

Seriously, the wetlands are intact here, so there are seldom standing puddles. The only downside is the high humidity near the marsh and the state park, as opposed to surrounding areas.  But that’s okay. I haven’t had to water my lawn yet and, so far, the mushrooms are minimal.

 **crash on the davenport = sleep on a fold-bed in a full-size sofa or couch) Sometimes my colloquialisms are indecipherable without footnotes!

Like many other Midwesterners, I lost electricity when weekend storms rumbled with trees and powerlines.  The power went out Sunday afternoon. It was restored briefly on Tuesday – long enough to do a load of laundry - then went out until early Wednesday morning. 

A power-outage is a great reminder that most material goods aren’t that important. My TV and PC became to large paperweights. The furniture formed an obstacle course.  Everything else impeded the hunt for bare basics: an emergency radio, the crank-powered lantern, and a can-opener to break into dinner.  

The things I missed the most were the fridge, the washer, and the dryer.  Going to bed early was no heartache. I read and wrote while there was natural light, then I fell asleep. The weather’s been unusually warm, so I was comfortable. 

I’ve had problems lately with appliances, so I’ve come to appreciate basic devices.  I had a cordless phone/answering machine combination. It hadn’t been holding a charge, so I bought a new battery.  No use. Sometimes it charged; sometimes it went dead.  I went to a resale shop and bought a phone for $5. Its a plastic relic with huge buttons, including two mysteriously labeled “FLASH” and “AUTO”.  I suspect it was an office phone, since it has a speakerphone option and a hold button. The latter plays a deafening electronic rendition of Fur Elise. But it works, even when the power’s out. (More on that below.) I also dragged out the cheap answering machine that I couldn’t GIVE away two years ago. When I got home this evening, I had a message from a high school pal – in other words, it works perfectly.

Thank God for Mr. Bell and his amazing invention.

When my washer died a clicking death, I ended up washing one load of clothes in the bathtub. I used a washboard and a small paddle. Afterwards, I felt tremendous admiration for my grandmothers. It took a lot of upperbody strength to wash and wring a single load of schoolteacher clothes. Those ladies washed work clothes for farmers and miners! 

I told my friend Karen that I needed a new washer, and we discussed local retailers. Within a few hours of our conversation, she called me back. Her family friends had recently moved and were selling a dryer (circa ‘89) for $50. Daniel and Tim were kind enough to handle the delivery and installation (including finagling space for it in dinky utility closet).

 Why doesn’t anyone offer a Nobel Peace Prize to Whirlpool factory workers?