For Better or Worse
It’s very smokey here, though the city of Santa Rosa itself is not threatened, yet. Many areas of the county, however, have been evacuated. Our family is affected in that the farm is near an evacuation warning area, as is my son’s spec house in Lake County and my daughter’s house in Quincy. It gets more and more difficult to be optimistic. Reflecting on this. Mrs. side pocket recalled a line from a poem;
The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick…….We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
This is from a poem by Jack Gilbert. I’ll link here to a long interview with him. Parts of this poem are tough reading for a kitchen table, but if there were ever a time, it might be now. But wait. As hard as one might work to remain positive in the face of so much negativity, with coronavirus, fires, hurricanes, fascism, pollution, climate change (did I forget anything?), there are experts to attenuate any optimism:
Time to ditch ‘toxic positivity,’ experts say: ‘It’s okay not to be okay’
Folks here know how much I love restaurants. We have been supporting some of our favorites using takeout, but it’s not the same as being there. Since outdoor dining is allowed, our city blocked some streets to give restaurants that option. And other restaurants were fortunate enough to have existing outdoor venues. But the time and place don’t always cooperate. As Press-Democrat columnist Pete Golis said this morning: “During the noon hour on Thursday, I drove by one of my favorite restaurants and saw that no one was sitting outside in the smoky air. Here was a snapshot of this moment in time, a moment in which we can’t be inside and we can’t be outside.”
Twenty years ago a new restaurant appeared in Sebastopol, K & L Bistro. Almost immediately it won a Michelin Star and it has been our favorite place since then. We still stop in frequently when we’re back in Sebastopol. Their French Onion soup and their french fries have no equal anywhere. I was alarmed that in today’s paper the owner, Lucas, said that if the takeout doesn’t work out soon, they may not make it. This would be tragic. They have no possibility for an outdoor venue.
One humorous aspect of wearing masks for us. We mostly stay home but do have errands and even protests. Several times we’ve recognized people or even couples and gone up to them to say hello. Oops, they have been strangers. We certainly miss face to face connections, more than we ever knew.
Catitude
