Digging through my “treasure chest” of old things from Mom tonight, have no idea why….and found this hand written on a scrap of paper. Seems appropriate….

“I am not afraid to die- I believe in reincarnation. I think that a very few would be sorrowful but I, only too well, know that time buries sorrow. My conscious world would miss my “things”, books, music, collectibles etc. but I wont be “Susan Conscious”- Ill be me in soul only. Maybe next time Ill learn to play the piano, (please God, longer fingers next time), read faster and be able to have my ears pierced so I can wear really large gypsy sized hoops. I wonder if Ill miss my few dear ones. I suppose not as I wont be aware of their actual existence. But there will be a familiarity, an essence of them since love resides in the soul.”

SWS (date unknown)

I cant believe its taken this long. A world map out of potato chips. This comforts me some how. Knowing there is a person out there under the same stars as I am…. quietly making geographic records out of snack foods.

I will surely sleep better tonight.

Cheers Oh Potato Chip King.. who ever you are.

“…until the sun is long since gone. Until time loses all meaning, and the moment comes that he knows only the positions of the stars, and sees them whether his eyes are closed or open, until he forgets his name, and the place where he’d once come from. He lives, and he lives, until all of the lights go out.” – Don Hertzfeldt’s animated short film trilogy.

It was the summer of heat and fireflies and of course, the virus. It was the summer of anger and divides and anonymous faces behind paper masks.

Maybe it had happened before but I dont remember it. Tonight I sat in my garden and watched the heat lightning in the distance and wondered if there would be thunder later.

I read a book recently about an ancient tribe who marked their years with whatever the major happening was and this was how they recorded history.  “The year of the flood.” “The year of the births..” etc.

And so I thought it made sense to me to do so.

It has been heat and  fear …and yes fireflies.

The news showed videos of people screaming in each others faces and pepper spray and bullhorns. Glass breaking and gunshots. Are we really that far apart now?

Are some people just BORN irritating? Pulling in to the grocery store. A woman slowly moseying right down the MIDDLE of the parking lot so no cars can get through.

In the grocery store, I turn my cart down an aisle and there is a woman with a basket parked SIDEWAYS across the aisle so no one can get through.

At the cheese counter.. a woman wanted a sample of all 6 million kinds of cheeses and olives before she buys.

At the checkout- a woman wants to pay for half her groceries with cash and half with a check and then decides she needs to separate all the items into two piles to make sure she has them in the right group.

Then she questions the price on every other item.Fascinating thing? It was the SAME WOMAN.

Gahhhh.

I dont have any particular fondness for statues in general though I do appreciate their beauty as art and their reminders of our history, both good and bad.

I was told that the recent tearing down or defacing of statues was first about police violence towards black communities. That didnt make a lot of sense since none of these people memorialized were police and Im not trying to over-simply this issue but what does that have to do with the police? Then we heard the focus would be on Confederate statues.

Now that makes a little more sense as the Confederates fought to keep slavery in place, but wouldn’t we want them to remind us of our past as well as how far we have come? And with all our flaws, no one can argue that we haven’t come a very long way from our early history. Next we saw the destruction of Union soldier memorials but those people fought and died to end slavery so again, thats confusing. We read that the mayor of Baltimore agreed to take all their statues down but even that wasn’t good enough.

Later this week it was announced that the statues must also be completely destroyed. Now, almost nightly, we are seeing random statues toppled, destroyed, vandalized or demand that they come down including The Jefferson Memorial, Teddy Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus, the Confederate Soldier frieze at Stone Mountain in GA and even the Emancipation Memorial with Lincoln that was introduced by Frederick Douglass.It seems to me this statue removal has no longer become about police violence or even Black Lives Matter but about any statue the mob turns their eyes upon.

This is the problem with mob rule. Where does it end? Where do WE end it? Do we destroy all our monuments? Shall we erase our history, both good and bad? Surely we all recognize that if the lessons of our history are “vanished down the memory hole” we are most certainly destined to eventually repeat them. If some statues in states need to come down, let it be by a vote of the people of that state. If they dont want it there, remove the statues.

But our federal statues should be preserved and people who damage or destroy them should be prosecuted. A better solution than trying to erase history would be to call for new statues put up alongside the old ones. Statues of people of color and indigenous people who have positively contributed toward our progress- and there are plenty.

Promote books that celebrate them… Put them on our currency… Continue naming more streets, buildings etc. after them, make more holidays to recognize them. This combination of old and new, side by side would provide both a cautionary tale as well as hope for our future. If we destroy our history in marble, when do we start burning the paper books? When do we abolish the names of states, flags or raze named buildings and schools?

What about our money?If ever there was a “slippery slope” we have certainly started on that downward slide and frankly, I find it appalling.