Standing at the Kitchen Sink Washing Vases for the Rehearsal Dinner.

Tags

Gratefulness, photo essay, Thanks, Vases, Wedding

This month, I’ll write about things for which I am grateful.  My first post relates to the recent celebration of my son’s wedding.

Our first purchase- black and turquoise tumblers

September 29, 2015

It’s a good day to wash vases. My kitchen sink faces the back yard.  From this vantage point, I can see the Hawaiian Ginger plant that took off after my mother-in-law snuck it home in a paper towel on the plane from Hawaii.  Hummingbirds flit back and forth between the tree and the feeder on the back porch. I line the vases up on the kitchen counter, and one by one, I baptize them in the hot soapy water, gently scrubbing off the price tags.

The whole clan has been collecting vases for the last year and ten months.  That’s how long our son has been engaged.  The most expensive vase was twenty-five dollars, and the least was two dollars. We found them in antique stores and Goodwill’s and thrift stores all over south Texas. We needed twenty-two of them because the rehearsal dinner will be large.  We wanted it that way—people are more important than money.

I start with the five black and turquoise tumblers that inspired the rehearsal dinner design. I know they’re not vases, but they’ll hold water, and that’s all that counts.  Hot soapy water removes most of the purple price tags.  I turn one over.  It says, “Dryden, Hot Springs Arkansas.”  I’m surprised, because I hadn’t looked at the bottom.  As I wash each of the unique vases in turn, I find other surprises.  This one’s from Colorado, this one’s from Mississippi, this one’s from Germany.

I think about my son, how he’ll be a married man in just a few more days.  I think about what they’ll collect along the way; joyful times, yes, but also real grown-up situations. Sick children when you both need to go to work, feeling grumpy just because, and taking it out on the person you love the most.  Mortgages, taxes, insurance.  Along the way, he’ll have tumblers that need to be vases. He’ll need to baptize his life regularly in the cleansing water of trust and faith in his new wife, in his own ability to be a husband, a father, a son.  When something is unnecessary and it sticks, it will need gentle scrubbing. He’ll need to notice the surprises at the bottom of his circumstances, because that’s where the joy comes from, the places you didn’t expect.

I’m grateful for all the help that rallied round when I had fifteen vases and the wedding only two weeks away.  Vases came from all over the place, from the loving hands of those who scoured their local thrift stores for their finds.  After the wedding, they will take their favorites I suppose.  But we all know where they are.  The collection can be righted again in a short time.

I know, too, that my son has this same force to rally round if his vases sprout holes.  And for that I am most grateful.  He and his brand new wife will be actively loved, not just by me, not just by my husband, but by a wide circle of family and friends who will be there if the need arises. Together, we’ll see them righted in time.

Noticing the bottom

The day is mild and sunny.  It’s a good day to wash vases.

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Weekend Walk: Big Boats

Tags

Boats, Corpus Christi, Hazardous Waste, photo essay, Shipping Channel, travel, travel essay

I liked the patina on this hook

At Whataburger Stadium

Battle Ship Guards The Baseball Players

Pirates!

Bridge near the stadium

We saw many boats on our recent trip to the Corpus Christi area.  I was really impressed with the size of the ships that stood in the shipping channel outside of Whataburger Stadium.  Plans are currently underway to make the bridge in the background of this last photo forty feet taller.  Right now, the larger ships have to download materials onto ships the size of the big white one in order to clear the bridge into port.  It is hard to imagine boats bigger than this behemoth.

I played with my editing software to make the reds stand out on both of the two big ship pictures.  I need to take a photography course and invest in some different editing software. Someday, when my ship comes in.

Barge blocks the waterway and carries hazardous materials

When we were on our dolphin watch, long flat barges stretched all the way across the waterway.  The captain remarked that the barges were sometimes a nuisance, but they were a safe and cost efficient way to transport hazardous waste.  It was scary to think we were sitting that close to at least ten of these floating garbage dumps.

Weekend Walk: Turtles!

Tags

Kemps Ridley hatchlings, Padre Island National Seashore, photo essay, photography, travel essay

Sunrise over Padre Island National Seashore

We arrived early last Sunday morning to witness some Kemp’s Ridley turtle hatchlings waddle to the ocean to begin their amazing five day journey to the gulf stream.  While the turtles were fun, it was the people who caught my eye.

They turtle watched- I people watched.

Rangers were not sure of the odds for survival- they estimated between one in a hundred and one in a thousand. However, volunteers were on hand to insure that none of the hatchlings fell prey to a group of ever watchful birds who clustered around the release site in hopes of snagging what one ranger referred to as, “the Oreo of the sea.”

Dedicated Volunteer

Vigilance in action- This volunteer uses her hawk-like vision to warn of bird threat.

The park rangers worked hard to ensure that the spectators had a good experience as well. They carried individual turtles around the audience so we could see them close up.

Taking pictures for the spectators

The rangers were also kind enough to take pictures of the turtles up close, carrying around handfuls of cell phones to accomplish the task.

Finally- the sea

The hatchlings must cross a long stretch of beach to meet the sea.  This is because they need to imprint on the beach. When females imprint, they return some fifteen to sixteen years later to lay their eggs.

When these baby turtles return to Padre Island National Seashore in the summer of 2030, I hope they will be greeted by a group of dedicated volunteers and Park Rangers who will take care of their hatchlings and see them on their journey to the sea.

I am so grateful to the Park Rangers and volunteers for their work on this endeavor. The imprint that they leave on our world is much greater than the sum of turtles they protect. You can follow the Padre Island National Seashore or the Padre Island NS Division of Sea Turtle Science and Discovery on Facebook.  Let’s do all we can to support their efforts.

Weekend Walk: The Merritts of the Stark

Tags

California, Lake Merritt, Oakland, photo essay, photography, travel essay

Cedar?

Lake Merritt is close to the Bonsai Garden I almost visited in last week’s Weekend Walk post.  The area around the lake teems with life, both wild and domesticated, both human and animal.  In the picture above, I was trying to capture the twist and movement of this tree.

A new landscape- natural and urban

The light on this day gave all of my photos a stark quality.  Maybe the fog off the East Bay diffused the light just enough for the camera to pick up what the naked eye could not sense.

View of the northern end of Lake Merritt

I am still trying to suss out how to depict depth when taking a photo.  It will take many years to perfect this, I’m sure.  I’m still learning not to accidentally take a picture or turn the camera off/on.

The roost

No examination of the Lake would be complete without mentioning the birds.  Lake Merritt is home to a bird sanctuary.  Although the sanctuary itself looks in need of an infusion of funds, the birds don’t mind a bit of benign neglect if they have places to roost and search for food.

Cedar tree with spider webs

The cedar bushes are covered in spider webs at this time of year.  I like the contrast between the white web and the deep green of the bush.

Bougainvillea and Building

Here, I was playing with depth again.  This photo is a bit like the place itself.  The mist that can sometimes make the San Francisco/Oakland area seem gloomy is the same mist from which these colorful flowers draw sustenance.  And the colors are unlike those in any other place I’ve ever seen.

Here’s hoping you all have a great burst of color in your lives this week to even out the gloomy bits.

j

Weekend Walk: Bonsai! (Almost)

Tags

Bonsai, California, Community Garden, Oakland, photo essay, travel, travel essay

Never saw a purple rose before…

On our recent visit to California, I spent a couple of hours at the Oakland Bonsai Garden taking pictures.  Since photography is a new pursuit, I find it easier to take pictures of objects because they stay put.  The enclosed Bonsai Garden closed minutes before I arrived, but there were some lovely flowers in the adjacent community garden facility. I used the photo editing program that came on my computer to create the blurred background in the photo below.  My semantics are probably all wrong, but I don’t know photospeak.

I’d never seen one of these before, either…

I have been playing with foreground and background focus.  I took a bunch of photos with different aperture settings, and I couldn’t tell any difference between them, but I had luck just taking the camera and putting it very close to the foreground objects to create some parts that were out of focus, some that were in.

Yellow flowers, white bucket.

I wandered across some ducks in a pond, so I played with shutter speed to capture motion.  These ducks were fun to shoot, although I didn’t capture motion the way I envisioned.  Gotta start somewhere.

This shy fellow swam away from me, fast.

His gregarious older siblings.

Taking photos has made me notice much more than I have in the past.  I might need to learn to balance viewing life through the lens with actually being in the scene. I say this because I took approximately five million pictures on the California trip. That’s a topic for another blog.  For now, I hope you are having a happy Saturday.

Something else I’d never seen.

Weekend Walk: Writing Marathon

Tags

Mission Branch Library, Mission San Jose, photo essay, photography, San Antonio Missions, San Antonio Writing Project

Tom Castanos, Park Education Specialist

On May 2, I participated in a writing marathon to benefit the San Antonio Writing Project’s Summer Missions Writing Camp. We walked to several locations near the San Antonio Missions National Park site, stopping to write after each leg of the walk. On our second stop, education director,Tom Castanos, schooled us on the history of the Missions. His historical perspective is broad and includes many voices that have not been heard in the past.

Mission San Jose, 1950

While we stood in the shade of a giant oak tree near Mission San Jose, a man approached our group and showed us this photograph.  He took this photograph when he visited the park as a child in the summer of 1950.  This was his second trip to San Antonio.  I thought it was cool that he remembered to bring the old picture with him, and that he was willing to share it with us.

In the shadow of San Jose Mission

Many people were at the Mission in their Sunday clothes to take pictures.  I like the image in the background, as those flowers fell over at least fifteen times while we were there.  Each time an arrangement fell, someone walked over and picked it up.

Door to living quarters, Mission San Jose

Arches in the rear or Mission San Jose

After our session at the Missions park, we walked to the Mission Branch Library and had a most interesting art lesson from Marianist brother and artist, Brian Zampier.  Check his blog out here. Brother Brian was so inspiring.  He has 97 journal/sketchbooks and brought them to share with us.  His mottos during our lesson were to: Play!, Have Fun! Do not be afraid! Date your pages!  Suspend Judgment!  He taught us to do mark making, blind contour drawings, cartooning, and collages.  We did a little of all four, but I’ll share the collage I created during our session with him.  Walk a little, take a few pictures, do some writing, make some art… what a perfect way to spend the day.

On Failure: A Guest Post by Maya Kuehn

Tags

Commencement Address, Doctorate, guest blog, photo essay, Psychology, travel essay, UC Berkeley

I have been out of pocket for the last week because my son-in-law graduated from UC Berkeley on Thursday, and is now a Doctor of Psychology. Our friend, the beautiful Dr. Maya Kuehn, spoke on behalf of her fellow PhD graduates, and I was so impressed with her speech, I decided to make it my first guest blog.  I believe what Maya has to say about failure applies not only to graduate school, but also to life.  I am immeasurably proud of my son-in-law, my daughter, and the bright, socially responsible, nice people they have incorporated into their extended family.

Dr. Catterson and Dr. Kuehn

Maya Kuehn-Psychology Commencement Address -May 2015

On Failure

Hello everyone. You guys, we did it! We made it. I’m so proud of all of us. I have the immense honor of making a few remarks today to represent the doctoral graduates of 2015. My name is Maya Kuehn, I’ve been a grad student here in social and personality psych since 2008, and in many ways on many days, I thought today would never come. But here we are. And I get to speak! I’ll keep it short and sweet, I promise.

I just wanted to take a few moments to reflect on grad school. If you’ve ever spoken to me about graduate school you probably know my feelings on this topic are… mixed. On one hand, it’s been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life: I’ve worked with truly brilliant people, made amazing friends, done original research, lived in a beautiful place, taught over a thousand students, and thrown probably a few too many social events. But on the other hand, it’s been
incredibly difficult, both personally and professionally. Grad school is hard, and I think that’s because, at its core, grad school is about learning how to fail.

I’m sure some of you just shivered at the thought of failure. Seven years ago, I would have done the same. Ten years ago, if you’d asked me, I would have said failure was my worst fear. So I totally feel your discomfort; failure can be terrifying. But I’m asking you to give me a couple minutes to change your mind.

Because guess what? Grad school has helped me conquer the fear of failure, via a twisted, brutal form of exposure treatment. In grad school, failure comes as naturally as breathing. Research fails most of the time, papers get rejected, grants get denied, lectures fall flat, symposium proposals don’t get into conferences, and job applications don’t even get you close to an interview. Unlike high school and college, where we learned that hard work would usually earn
success, in grad school, there’s no longer any reliable correspondence between effort and payoff. Life feels unpredictable, work feels pointless, and everything seems really unfair. And it sucks. A lot.

For we lifelong overachievers who managed to get ourselves into Berkeley, you’d better believe this is a departure from the norm. Never before had I faced this much failure, this often, at this scale, and on this personal of a level. What’s worse is I had to sit with this failure and fully face it. We overachievers especially hate this phase. When you’re growing up and are fairly smart and capable, you can skip gleefully away from a failure in one domain to focus instead on your budding successes elsewhere.But in grad school, there is no escape from failure. We are highly specialized, success has some fairly objective markers, and it’s a small field where everyone knows everyone’s business. Failure is inevitable, and it’s in your face, and it haunts your dreams at night.

But in grad school, even as you learn that failure is very real and extremely likely, you also learn that it’s not the end of the world. They always have beer at Triple Rock, the sun sets and rises again, the fog rolls in and burns off, and life goes on.

Here’s the surprising thing about failure: Once you start fearing it less, you learn that failure can be incredibly liberating. Failure gives you license to start fresh, it gives you room to grow, it makes you get creative, it makes you less defensive, it makes you more empathetic, it makes you challenge your assumptions, it makes you think about your goals, it makes you re-examine the system you live in, it makes it totally acceptable to treat yo- self to a little indulgence, and it makes you seek other forms of fulfillment in your life.

It also makes you draw closer to the ones you love, whom you absolutely need, in good times and bad. Without my family and my friends, there’s no way I would have learned and grown as much as I have from this seven-year waltz with failure – thank you to everyone who has supported each of us over the years, and thank you especially to my mom, dad, grandma, and brother in the audience today.

Proud Mom and Graduate

I think that a quote by Tom Robbins from the awesome novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues beautifully captures my feelings about failure here and now, at the end of grad school:

“So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve got any sense at all you’ve learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

So here’s my indelible nugget of wisdom for all you graduates: be brave enough to go forth and fail. Fail with wit, fail with grace, and fail with style.

But you don’t have to start this instant –for today, savor your success, and celebrate this amazing accomplishment.

Congratulations, class of 2015. Thank you.

A day for proud Moms.