Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust and ‘Til Death Do You Part

Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem being cremated at facility that also cremated pets:

The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement.

The facility, located in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David A. Bose estimated last night. It uses separate crematories a few feet apart to cremate humans and animals, he added, insisting that there had “not been any people gone through the pet crematory.”

    — Some War Dead Were Cremated at Facility Handling Pets

Pets that are cremated are very much loved by their families. Some are probably more loved than certain human members of the same family. I understand how some people would feel that human and animal crematoria should be separate. But for me, pets are part of the family. I wouldn’t be taken aback if I or someone I loved was cremated in an oven next to an oven containing some family’s Spot or Fluffy.

In other news …
This caption was on the front page of the Washington Post over the weekend, under a photo of Jenna Bush and Henry Hager:

First daughter’s decision to privately wed Henry Hager disappoints a public fascinated by her coming of age.

WTF? Since when do presidents’ children owe the public anything? If she wanted a White House wedding, fine. But she didn’t, so end of story. She and her fiancé had the wedding they wanted, which is how it should be.

I once attended a friend’s wedding and reception. His fiancée’s father was s retired corporate big shot and the reception, at a local country club, was about 80-90% geezers and 10-20% younger people. It just seemed that the wedding was more for her parents and their social circle than for the wedding couple. I suppose if the parents are footing the bill for the wedding then they get some say in how it goes. But if you can’t afford to pay for the wedding, then maybe you shouldn’t (and save up until you can) or just have a simple one. Another couple of friends got married at the courthouse and had the reception at their apartment with a lot of home-cooked food. It was a great deal of fun.

Mother Knows Best

Added late Sunday:

The ad popped up in my e-mail the way it always has: “1-800-Flowers: Mother’s Day Madness — 30 Tulips + FREE vase for just $39.99!”

I almost clicked on it, forgetting for a moment that those services would not be needed this year. My mother, Margaret Friedman, died last month at the age of 89, and so this is my first Mother’s Day without a mom.

    — Call Your Mother

A great essay, which made me remember my mother. Again. I think of Mom a lot, even when I’m not being bombarded with Mother’s Day ads.

My mother died almost 16-and-a-half years ago. I don’t remember the first Mother’s Day without her, but I remember the first Christmas without her. She died in early December, a couple of weeks before I was to fly home. We knew she was sick, so in the back of my mind I thought it might be our last Christmas together. And I didn’t even get that. I felt kind of cheated that she didn’t live longer — through that Christmas and beyond. But my college roommate’s father died when she was in her 20’s; her Dad was only in his 50’s. No matter what, when a loved one dies it’s always too early.

I still call home on Mother’s Day. I’m not sure why, but I always called home on Mother’s Day and just never saw a reason to stop. I wonder if Dad thinks it’s weird. We had a nice chat; he went up to the cemetery to leave flowers for Mom, and he also visited the graves of his mother and mother-in-law. We talked about the NBA playoffs, gardening, the price of bananas, and a few other mundane things.

Mother’s Day is a good excuse to call home, even if Mom isn’t there.

No Country For Old Brooms

Or new brooms. Or new rakes for that matter.

nbh wrote in All Your Carbon are Belong to Everyone:

Hey, don’t go hating on the leaf blowers. What about the elctric ones?

I’m not sure if electric leaf blowers are more or less energy-efficient than gas-powered ones. But both certainly leave more of a carbon footprint than using a broom or rake.

I have nothing against labor-saving devices. But with all the labor-saving devices we have, this country sure is filled with a lot of out-of-shape people who don’t have a lot of free time. We take home work to do at night and on the weekends, rush from activitiy to activity, spend tons of money on health club memberships and diet aids, and yet have high rates of heart disease and diabetes.

I appreciate the neighbor next door who cleans up the sidewalk after mowing his yard; he uses a leaf-blower to blow the clippings back onto his lawn. Aesthetically, it’s nicer than the guy across the street who leaves mounds of clippings all over the place. The grass clippings in the street get washed down into the gutter, which I’m sure the city appreciates as there is a problem with flooding in the lower-lying streets in the neighborhood.

But what’s so hard about using a broom or a rake? I can understand wanting to make your life a little easier in the autumn when there are boatloads of leaves to deal with. But for a few cups’ worth of grass clippings? The guy next door also uses their snowblower after a fluffy 2-3″ of the white stuff comes down. I don’t think he has any physical problems; he is often out shooting hoops with his son.

A former co-worker and her husband have a lawn service, a snow removal service, and health club memberships, but she always complains about getting fat. True, mowing grass and shoveling snow don’t count as cardio workouts (not unless you do them for 20 minute-periods, three times a week). But every day activities can certainly help burn off calories.

Lawn services use a lot of motorized devices. You see guys marching around, blowers harnessed to their backs, cleaning up after mowing or gathering leaves. It’s a lot cheaper for the companies to have their workers use blowers than to use brooms and rakes; labor is the highest expense for businesses.

Once people spend money on something like a leaf blower or a snowblower they want to use it a lot in order to get their money’s worth out of it. It’s like people who “complain” about watching too much tv, but then rationalize that they spend some much on cable service that they might as well get their money’s worth out of it.

We have a lawnmower (gas-powered, a Craftsman machine that is going on 16 years now — fine made-in-America craftsmanship!), so it’s not like we’re motorized equipment innocents. We also have a weedwhacker (electric; I think it’s a Crafstman), but only because my father bought it for us; I hate using it — it scare the heck out of me. The washing machine and dryer (Kenmore, electric-powered; also going on 16 years) also make our lives easier, although most of the time we hang the laundry to dry and use the dryer for heavy things like blankets and towels. The other next door neighbors hang their laundry outside (props to them for that!), which is quite daring as there are a lot of birds flying about. They even have a birdfeeder; we have one, too, and so hang the laundry in the basement.

I don’t expect people to go Luddite, discard all modern contraptions, and live off the land. (Unless they want to.) Just aim for moderation or balance. Use a broom once in a while. Perhaps if they were marketed as “upper body workout tools” that would spur use.

Cast Your Fate to the Wind

you’re a fan of a team, nothing you do can change the outcome of the games, all of your agony is a waste of time

    — darkstar73 in MetsBlog

Dang, that’s haiku-like.

OK, so the Mets had a day game today (we won!) and instead of using my evening in some productive manner I am sitting here reading Mets blogs and message boards. I found darkstar73’s comment strangely liberating. Certainly the players and coaches and managment can act in a direct way to determine the outcome of the season. But as fans we are just along for the ride. We should basically sit back, enjoy the games, and not get so angst-y over every at-bat and every pitch.

I tend to be a worrier; I’m one of those people who worries about the weather. So this uplifting realization was a good whack upside the head. It made me think of a nice jazz piece, which someone had kindly posted to YouTube:

Cinco de Mayo +2: Ethnic Peeves

(I’m a couple days late with this post. It’s been busy here and with the Mets playing out on the west coast it screws up my schedule.)

Gilbert wrote in Ethnic Unawareness:

As someone who is of Hispanic decent, I feel the same way about Cinco de Mayo.
Way to celebrate our culture by getting drunk.

I’m Chinese and while I don’t think people go out and get blitzed on Chinese New Year it kind of bugs me when people get tattoos with Chinese (or Japanese) characters. It just strikes me as an superficial attempt to be hip and/or multicultural. If African Americans are the only ones who can use the word “nigger” and not get grief over it, then I think only Asians should be able to get tattoos with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters. Heck, and most of us second- and third-generation Americans can’t even read the characters.

(Of course I love it when non-Asians get hipster Asian tattoos, only to find out that the tatt doesn’t mean what they thought it was supposed to mean: Crazy Diarrhea.)

I noticed ads in the paper last week touting Cinco de Mayo. They were from grocery stores suggesting that consumers load up on things like refried beans, Doritos, Pace picante sauce, and margarita mix. I heard an announcer on the local classical station say something about “Aaron Copland and Cinco de Mayo,” which I found odd because — well — Copland wasn’t from Mexico. But later that day the station played Copland’s “El Salon Mexico” which I missed, but I found a recording of it on YouTube:

Just think if the California or Texas or any southwestern state had held a primary election near 5 May. The candidates would have contorted themselves to hit every Cinco de Mayo parade, sing along with mariachi bands, and eat a whole lot of tacos to “prove” that they respect Hispanic culture.

After reading Gilbert’s comment I realized I didn’t know much of anything about Cinco de Mayo (except for something a French friend once said; he was married to a Mexican woman), so I did what I always do at such times: click around the Internets to see what I could find. From Wikipedia:

… The holiday commemorates an initial victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín over French forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. … Although the Mexican army was victorious over the French at Puebla, the victory only delayed the French advance on Mexico City; a year later, the French occupied Mexico. The French occupying forces placed Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico on the throne of Mexico. The French were eventually defeated and expelled in 1867. Maximilian was executed by President Benito Juarez, five years after the Battle of Puebla. …

According to a paper published by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture about the origin of the observance of Cinco de Mayo in the United States, the modern American focus on that day first started in California in the 1860s in response to the resistance to French rule in Mexico. The 2007 paper notes that “The holiday, which has been celebrated in California continuously since 1863, is virtually ignored in Mexico.”

In Mexico the holiday is only celebrated in the state of Puebla, which is where the noted 5 May battle took place.

I guess it’s only because America is such a mixed bag of ethnicities that we have these ethnic awareness festivities. Most other countries are very homogeneous, and becoming multi-ethnic has presented a lot of problems for some of them. So I don’t want to sound crabby about Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, and St. Patrick’s Day. It’s just that I wish “ethnic awareness” meant more meaningful than getting drunk, selling groceries, or getting a tattoo.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming …

On There are places I remember …:

rrgirl wrote: May 4, 1970 was the first time I’d ever heard of Kent. with one brother volunteering to serve in Viet Nam, and another brother ready to leave for Canada if his draft number came up, the shootings were an expression of the differences of opinion within my own family, not to mention the generation gap. no place felt safe.
a few years later I was spending most of my days and a lot of nights overlooking the site where the riots and shootings took place. parked my car in the parking lot where kids died, walked past the steel sculpture with the bullet holes, past the bell, the precast pagoda, the oak tree on blanket hill. it wasn’t a good place to learn what had happened - too much shouting, too many personal agendas woven into the politics.

it seems its still that way. then and now, the only thing I’m sure of is the saddness of it all.

And Andy commented quite recently: I am currently a student at Kent State University. The whole May 4th ordeal is very significant to me. I walk through the May 4th Monument on a daily basis and not a day goes by without me thinking about what it was like to have lived through it. I have lacrosse practice on the commons. I see trees that have bullet holes in them. That hits hard and I realize the significance that that date in history truly has. It’s very sad.

I probably would have remembered the anniversary even if Andy’s comment hadn’t reminded me of the post I made on Kent State last year. Kent State is something that happened when I was growing up and it’s something that I will always remember.

I didn’t see anything in the news today on the Kent State shootings. 2008 marks the 38th anniversary. It’s not one of those “prominent” anniversaries, like the 10th or 25th or 50th. It will be interesting to see if the event is remembered in 2010, the 40th anniversary.

I was rather miffed last November at the lack of news or comment on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. And last month I didn’t see much of anything on the Oklahoma City bombing (19 April 1995), the shootings at Columbine High School (20 April 1999), or the Virginia Tech shootings (16 April 2007). How quick we forget. Or do we bother remembering at all?

Perhaps our recollection of history is clouded by a degree of Me-ism: If it didn’t happen to me, then it’s not that important. People are detached from things that happen outside their little worlds. Hence a sense of disconnect from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans who don’t have a loved one serving in the military.

Every day is a Remembrance Day in one way or another, if people would just remember to look beyond themselves.