17. Bob & Bobbie; York; the Procession of Flowers

May 11 (cont.)    6:40 p.m.  Mom and dad arrived 30th of April, Thursday.  Dad left Saturday, 2d, Heathrow to Amsterdam, then Sunday to Ghana.  He called Sunday night (same time zone as here), while we watched S. Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" on television.  They left Saturday, rendezvoused at Gatwick, arrived and departed in the rain.  In between were a number of sunny, lovely days.

The King Riots.  When they arrived on the 30th, the big news story was the riots in Los Angeles which left so many people dead.  I shall add my peace (that is, piece, Freudian slip) to those voices which have written so much about the riot.

Where does one start?  The obvious: the Rodney King brutality verdict, acquitting all of the cops but one, who had a hung jury, flies in the face of common sense, common decency, fair play, justice, etc.  The verdict is simply a disgrace and one can think of all the explanations one likes, but no explanation truly makes sense.

The next thing that struck me were the comparisons of the LA riots to other events, e.g., almost as many people died in the English soccer riots (1986?); there are as many murders a day in the U.S.  One also thinks of natural disasters, preventable diseases, road accidents, wars, etc.

The thing about LA was that it was all there to see in the film capital of the world, like a bad movie script: the shoddy court verdict, the ineffective police chief out on the campaign trail, the angry poor, the gangs, the party atmosphere, looting, Korean shopkeepers guarding their grocery stores with machine guns.  Who would have believed it?

And afterwards, if the papers are to be believed, President Bush at first one way, then the other; quickly taking to heart the formerly banished Secretary of Housing, Jack Kemp.

The question rightfully posed is, what has gone wrong?

After the 60's all sorts of money flowed into the cities, into riot torn areas, but I suspect things got worse.  Why?  There was the continuing underlying racism.  I suppose Reagan and Bush more so than the Democrats, but it was rich vs. poor as well.  NIMBY attitudes, pulling up the ladder behind.  The 20th Century, which replaces concerned individuals with a bureaucracy and rules and regulations and money to spend.  Why can't people be people to people again?

The Korean shop owner shot the girl because he thought she would rob.  Why?  He was afraid, just like the cops who beat up Rodney King.  Perhaps we need to say:  So what, fear is no excuse! But how can we justify living in fear?  Somehow, the poor need to be integrated into the non poor world. We need to behave more humanely to each other.  FIGHT FEAR!

What is it that makes us fear?  Fear of harm, fear of injury, fear of death, of losing things.  The real Christian is not afraid to lose any of those things.

 Sunday May 3 was a lovely day.  We went to 8 am mass the drove an hour to Peterborough where we took the 10:33 train to York, arriving at 12:30 after a very long stop.  We had lunch near the station then tokk the AA self guided walking tour to Minster, Shambles, Guilhouse, Viking Center, before boarding the tour bus.  York is walled like Canterbury and very busy, with a good sized river.  Everyone enjoyed the day.  We left on the 6 pm train and were home by 8:30 in time to watch the Stephen Hawking TV show.

 

Nice visits here with John Ryder, Friday May 8th and then again Saturday.  Friday here, Saturday at Greenleas, the other half of Greenfields, the manor house we lived in in 1958 - 59.  Cup of coffee, tour the house, look out to the copper beech in the backyard.  JR says probably two acres in the backyard at Greenfields.  He moved to Horley in 1951 or so.

Three new poems:

The last days of winter unleashed

A procession of color, which will
Not stop till fall,
Beginning with the lowly crocus and
Ending only with the bright red
Ivy leaves that cover brick buildings
with tenacious wooden roots
Growing sideways up the stone.


(For Robert, sitting on the roof, upset at life:)
Sitting on the roof
Thinking at the edge
If you jump
It will only hurt
it will not make
your sorrows disappear.

I used to think I was crazy
And my father said, "Good,
A sign of mental health!"
As I grow older I think more and more
That all the world has gone crazy
With guns and money,
Banking its way to insanity,
little by little, but
with outbreaks of sheer dementia
growing more prevalent.
Was I ever really healthy,
Or was I mad all along,
And it's only my recent
Shock treatments that
Bring me back to sanity?

Monday 12 May.  10 a.m.   It is a very windy day, I can hear it howling through the windows; yet the predictions are for the weather to be hot and humid by tomorrow, in the high 70's.

Many stories yesterday about the drought, which is still page 1 news in The Times, despite one of the wettest springs in quite some time.  The weatherman says it must rain in the winter for rain to be any good.  Rain after April evaporates too quickly to replenish the underground water supplies which are so low.

Our hedge has two parts, the front half or bottom of the "U" next to the lane, and the back half closest to the house, being the tops of the two legs.  The bottom half was bare when we left for Italy and green when we returned (27th March to 18th April).  The top half remained bare until last week when the clusters of leaves, which were swirled up, wrapped ever so tightly, began to unfurl, almost like a butterfly unfurling its wings.  Now, a week later, the back half is almost brown, the leaves are brown, in contrast to the green up front, though, as I recall, it all turns brown in the end, with the leaves remaining until they are bumped off by the next year's growth.

The procession of flowers as I recall them:

Crocus and white flowering trees and shrubs (February to early March).  Also some small yellow bulbs in our garden.

Daffodils in early to late March.
Hyacinths. 
Pink and white flowering trees continuing.
Yellow flowering shrubs.  We saw many of these in late March, on our way to France.
Tulips in early to late April.
Fruit trees in mid to late April.  (Apple trees in late April, cherry blossoms (?) in late April.
Oil seed rape yellow!  Late April to mid May.  (Still now continuing.)
Bluebells, lilacs, horse chestnuts in early to mid May.
Hawthorn in early to mid May.

Present flowers: stock, snaps, primroses and pansies still look good (though ours never did).  Honeysuckles getting ready.  Roses still preparing.  Lilacs are white, light purple and dark purple.

4 p.m.  Thinking about the seasons here.  Winter has slipped almost imperceptibly into spring.  The fog is gone, the frost gone, and we go through different flowerings.  Finally, but quickly in the last two weeks, the leaves have almost filled out just about all of the trees but the oaks.

I welcome spring, and I welcome it most heartily, but it is not at all like the passage of summer into fall in Las Vegas.  In September/October we, oh so anxiously, await the coming of fall, and the cool nights we know lie ahead.  When they come at last, it is hard to believe that it all really happened.  Did we really live through days that hot!  It's unbelievable!

Now I look back on winter and autumn and see the days one by one, most of them individual, though some go on for days, up to a couple of weeks, when the low clouds hung around.  Still, it's easy to see how the days came upon us, how they gradually left, the worst days of winter, the coldest and the shortest, darkest were but a day, not a season, to be appreciated or unappreciated as only a day.

In Las Vegas it is definitely a season.  The succession of days with an impact so great they strip all memory of past and futures.