Merry May!

A Tree Song

Rudyard Kipling

Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn,

Greater are none beneath the Sun,

Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

(All of a Midsummer morn!)

Surely we sing no little thing,

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,

Or ever AEneas began.

Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,

When Brut was an outlaw man.

Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town

(From which was London born);

Witness hereby the ancientry

Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard-mould,

He breedeth a mighty bow.

Alder for shoes do wise men choose,

And beech for cups also.

But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,

And your shoes are clean outworn,

Back ye must speed for all that ye need,

To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth

Till every gust be laid,

To drop a limb on the head of him

That anyway trusts her shade:

But whether a lad be sober or sad,

Or mellow with ale from the horn,

He will take no wrong when he lieth along

'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,

Or he would call it a sin;

But - we have been out in the woods all night,

A-conjuring Summer in!

And we bring you news by word of mouth-

Good news for cattle and corn-

Now is the Sun come up from the South,

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs

(All of a Midsummer morn):

England shall bide till Judgment Tide,

By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

Facebook Fishbowl

I'm taking courses in how to teach online. This is part of my retirement plan, such as it is. (Teachers don't all get big fat pensions, by the way. Republicans lie a lot. But that's the topic for another post.)

Part of the current course has us exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. Apparently this is a great ploy for motivating middle school kids who are more easily seduced into education if it seems like something else. For my community college students, and myself, I worry about conducting class in public to such a degree. You can hide the posts from random googlers, I realize, but not the names of your "friends." Maintaining privacy on Facebook can be done, sort of, with the use of an alias that they don't want you to use and have software to spot. (Sybil Drinkwalter got past their radar, but Grammar as a first name did not.)

But you have to be savvy to stay in control of your privacy on Facebook, more savvy than most of my students, among them people being stalked by vengeful exes, young people with double identities (gay with conservative immigrant parents is one example of the complex scenarios that develop. Or a woman from a strictly traditional Muslim immigrant family whose friends and activities have become a bit more Americanized than others in her family realize). There are people with political and legal histories that provide any number of reasons for preferring privacy. And not one of them will want a prospective employer who googles them five years from now to see what their English is like now.

And I get nervous, too, viewing the spread of photographs on my new Facebook page in my legal name ... "people you might know" ... you betcha. There they all are, lined up in random order, Witches, occultists, community college students, community college administrators, my sister in Tacoma, my born again cousins in Texas, people from my high school class whom I haven't been in touch with for nearly half a century, and if it's been that long there obviously have been reasons why not. Of course, I don't have to friend them all, but if they want to friend me, it seems rude to ignore them. And it's disconcerting to know that there is software out there that can so instantly determine that I "might" know them all.

Why Easter Is So Late

"Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox."

And what is an ecclesiastical full moon, I hear you ask?

The web page I got this definition from, (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.php), does not explain except to say that an ecclesiastical full moon is not quite the same thing as an astronomical full moon, but that they are pretty close. I am sufficiently annoyed by the presumption of Christian ecclesiastics in setting up their own full moon, different from everybody else's, that I have not pursued the matter further.

Anyway, this year the moon was full only a few days before the Equinox, and will not be full again until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, which is a Monday, putting off Easter until April 24th.


Easter is actually a perfectly good word for either holiday--ask your Christian ecclesiastics where the word comes from. Don't ask our fuzzier-brained Pagans, actually, many of whom are pretty sure it has to do with Ishtar. That similarity in sound is apparently pure accident, English and ancient Semitic languages not being very closely related. "Easter" does derive from a Germanic Goddess of the dawn.

The Christian scheduling strategy was to give their God the last word in the days when people were still talking to more than one. However, I think it was a miscalculation on their part to allow for quite so much lag time. This way the Pagans get the last word with May Eve, one of our real blockbusters, less than a week after.
And it is an inconvenience for us when the Spring Equinox and Easter are so widely separated in time, because Safeway doesn't have Easter candy for Pagan children.

My schoolteacher problem is that the spring break is always the week before Easter, even though probably no more than ten percent of my students celebrate it (most of them being Buddhists and Muslims). I am accustomed to a spring semester rhythm in which we do midterm exams just before spring break, take a week off to reflect on the implications, then come back and really get down to business. This year it looks as though we will be getting down to business far too late.

Kathy Mar has a wonderful song called "Everybody's Moon." For just $.99, download and listen to the whole thing.

Cookies

So, a bank CEO, a Tea Party activist and a public employees' union member are sitting together at this table. In front of them is a plate with twelve cookies.

The CEO grabs eleven cookies and shoves them into his briefcase, then turns to the Tea Party member and says, "Look out for that union guy, he's gonna try to get some of your cookie."

The Reluctant Immigrant

Every once in awhile one of my students' immigration stories starts to haunt me. Prakesh's maybe has the makings of a novel.

(Prakesh is not his real name--I Googled a list of common Nepali names.)

He stayed after class to explain why he had come in late and didn't have the assignment done, and little by little the story unfolded.

He is from a working-class family in Kathmandu, and never seriously thought about leaving. One time, as a passing lark, he and a bunch of his friends all put in applications for the U.S. immigration lottery. By one of those random twists of fate, Prakesh won.

After that, he didn't have much choice. The family pressure to go to America and make money was overwhelming. He had no contacts in the U.S., but picked San Francisco as a place that sounded good, got a job driving a cab all night and signed up for school during the day. I had him in another class a few years ago, and remember that his work was pretty good, but often late. Apparently he then got overwhelmed with loneliness and homesickness, and decided to give it up and go home. But after he got back to Kathmandu, his father became sick and money was needed for his medical care, so Prakesh had to return to America make more.

So here he is, living out a lonely and exhausting adventure that sprang unexpectedly from a long-ago joke.

Eating the Seeds

Work is depressing these days, watching and even being expected to participate in the dismantling of the California public education system. In traditional agrarian societies, everyone knew that in times of famine you should not succumb to the temptation to eat next year's seed corn. By doing that, you delay starvation for only one more year, and then your death will be inevitable. If we jettison public education to save money, we only delay for one more generation the collapse of our civilization.

Political Uncorrectness Alert--Cultural Stereotypes Ahead

Every semester we read Jack London's "Love of Life" or rather, this being quite a low-level ESL class, an ESL adaptation of it.

In this story, a gold prospector in the Klondike becomes injured, separated from his sidekick, and lost. He comes very near death--in his exhaustion and confusion, losing all his possessions, his gold, and his tools. He and an old, sick wolf stalk each other for days, each hoping the other will die first. Finally, summoning his last strength, he kills the wolf with his bare hands and sucks the blood to stay alive. Eventually he is rescued by a scientific expedition and cared for on their ship, where he is a bit of a nut case, hoards food and cannot believe he is safe.

For a writing assignment, I always ask the students to imagine this man a year later--where will he be, what will happen to him ("what will have happened to him" being too advanced a verb structure for this class.)

Well, most of the Asian immigrants like to see him safe at home with his family, his health regained and his trauma left behind. But the Mexicans and Central Americans, the male students anyway, say he goes right back to the Klondike to find his lost gold, or to prospect for more.

Maybe gives you a clue what the U.S. Border Patrol is up against ...