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CREATIVE CREMATION

/ The Coastal Crone / 2 Comments

 Maybe it was the heat of August, but as I was out running one morning  last week I thought of cremation.  And when I think of cremation I am reminded of the San Francisco Columbarium that I visited several years ago.  As part of a post-graduate technical writing class I had taken, I had written a piece about cremation versus burial and had mentioned the San Francisco Columbarium in it.  I managed to shock my younger fellow students with the clever title of “The Tomb or The Torch?” 

San Francisco Columbarium

The San Francisco Landmarks website describes it this way:

“Columbaria, first built by the classical Romans, are buildings which contain cremated remains. The word is derived from the Latin columbawhich means dovecote.

The San Francisco Columbarium, containing over five thousand niches, was designed by British architect Bernard J. Cahill and opened in 1898 in what was then the 167-acre Odd Fellows Cemetery. In 1910, San Francisco passed a law prohibiting cremations, and the crematory was demolished. Later all bodies in the cemetery were relocated outside the city. The Columbarium survived but from 1934 to 1979 it was abandoned to raccoons and birds, mushrooms and fungus.  The Neptune Society acquired the building in 1979 and over the years has performed a dazzling restoration.”

Inside the San Francisco Columbarium

It is an incredible place full of beauty and surprises around every curve.  The dome,  stained glass and marble floors presents a cross between a cathedral and a museum with a quiet sense of  reverence, mystery and art.  The rounded walls blend with the dome which is capped with stained glass.  The rotunda gives it a feeling of infinity, but  the small alcoves gives one a sense of intimacy.  The settings seem so much more personal than a mausoleum or a cemetery.  Each niche is like a compact memorial.  In some niches the urn is sealed inside with only the name and life dates on a plaque.  Others have a glass front with the urn and a few personal mementos visible –  passport,  picture,  locket,  teddy bear,  rosary,  lock of hair,  good luck charm – to reflect the life departed life of the ashes that now reside there forever. 

Check out the San Francisco Landmarks website and click on the photos there for a closer view of the ones I posted here. 

Cremation makes sense to me, but I just don’t know what I want done with my ashes.  The San Francisco Columbarium is too far away.  Composting would be practical but quite undignified.  I see no reason to have them kept around the house like some odd vase that nobody can find the right spot for but will feel obligated to keep.   To bury them seems to defeat the purpose of cremation.  So scattering seem the best solution.  But where?  I’ll have to be creative.

Crude Oil vs. Olive Oil

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Texas Olive Ranch

Texas is better known for its crude oil than for its olive oil, but a small olive industry is growing in South Texas.   Recently on the local PBS station, KEDT-TV, a documentary was aired as part of its annual fund-raiser.  It was called “Texas Olive Trails.”  Check out this website to view a trailer.

Here is a quote from the site:

“Sun, stone, drought, silence and solitude: these are the five ingredients that, according to Italian folk traditions, create the ideal habitat for the Olive Tree.”

The area is also on the same geographical parallel as the Mediterranean.  A large aquifer is found beneath the area stretching for many miles.  OK…maybe it doesn’t look quite like Tuscany.

The olives will be harvested in September.  I have not tried any before, but I intend to check out the 2011 Texas Olive Ranch products when they are available in my local grocery store – perhaps the Rattlesnake Pepper & Chipotle,  Mesquite or Sweet Basil.  For now check them out on their website .  http://texasoliveranch.com/index.html  They all appear to be extra virgin – always better.

In January I bought oil from a friend who has an olive farm in Tuscany and will post something about that later.  Hint:  it was excellent!

DRINKING ART FOR THE FRENCH QUARTER

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Lumus Redux

Lumus Redux

 
After walking down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter at night with a drink in your hand, the buildings could start to look like this.  I love New Orleans – the old building are works of art themselves with a colorful mixture of French and Spanish architecture.  History beckons and whispers from every corner –  Old Absinthe House, LaFitte’s Blacksmith Shop,  St. Louis Cathedral , Preservation Hall, Louis Armstrong  and voodoo queens.  
 
James Michalopoulos captures much of the city’s soul with his slightly abstract works of art.  He lives in New Orleans part of the year and maintains a gallery at 617 Bienville.   Kevin Allman writes of his architecture, “They slope, soar and sway. Some of them rear back on their foundations, or lurch drunkenly over cracked sidewalks; others dip their balconies over the street curiously.   His representations seem to have a life of their own.” 
 
I visited his gallery and purchased this poster,  Lumus Redux, several years ago. 
 
I haven’t been back to New Orleans since I spent Christmas there in 2003, but I plan to go back in November.  A visit to his gallery will be essential…I need some  art.

Tropical Storm Don

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It looks as if Tropical Storm Don may be heading to our coast by Friday night.  Rain would be welcome as the drought has deepened.  The timing is good also because most of the cotton and sorgrum have been harvested. 

A tropical storm is preferable to a hurricane every time!  It would be nice to sit on the veranda and watch the rain come down.  I’ll be checking the rain gauge.

WHAT WOULD MOLLY IVINS SAY IF SHE COULD?

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“What you need is sustained outrage…there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority.” – Molly Ivins

While I don’t want to take political sides in this blog, I can’t help but wonder what Molly Ivins would have to say about state and national politics today.  If she had lived, she would have been sixty-seven next month on August 30.

What would she think of the possibility that Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry might seek the Republican nomination  for president in 2012?  Would she regret her support of  Barak Obama instead of Hillery Clinton in 2008?  Would she be outraged that our troops are still in Iraq?  Would she be disappointed that President Obama’s health plan did not  include a single payer?  What would she have to say about this summer heat in Austin?  How would she react as a senior citizen?

For those of you not from Texas or perhaps too young to remember, Molly Ivins was a newspaper columnist, political commentator, humorist and author.  Her books included, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say that, Can She?,” “You have to Dance with Them What Brung You”,  and “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.”   She grew up in the affluent River Oaks section of Houston, but she wrote with a down home gutsy style that overshadowed her eastern education at Smith College and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

 Austin, Texas was her home for many years where she wrote colorfully about  Texas and national politics.  She loved Texas but delighted in poking fun of its government – “The Lege” as she referred to the Texas legislature.  Yes, she was liberal, but she had no trouble criticizing Democrats, Republicans and anyone else in between that she felt needed taken down a notch.  She spoke out for the underdog and was passionate about any cause that she supported.  She was wickedly funny and always a rebel to the end.

She died in Austin in January of 2007 of breast cancer.

Other Ivins quotes:

“Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.”

“It’s hard to argue against cynics — they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side

“The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion. “

from her last column, January 11, 2007:  “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there.”

I miss  Molly Ivins!

I ONCE RODE UP WITH JOHN GLENN

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John Glenn, 1998

It must have been about 1966 when John Glenn and I rode up together – just the two of us.  We never exchanged a word.  He just gave me that gentlemanly smile as we  boarded  and the doors closed for the ascent.

Ok…I rode up in an elevator with John Glenn.  His wife, Annie, was a patient in the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas for  surgery and my mother was there for surgery also.  I thought I recognized him, but I was too shy to ask, “Are you John Glenn?”  I don’t remember who got off first, but the next day I read in the paper that his wife was in the Methodist Hospital and knew that indeed I had ridden up with John Glenn.

My memories of him go  back to February 20, 1962 when as  high school students we were all called to the gym to hear over the loud-speaker via the radio (yes, I am a crone, remember) of his three orbits around the earth in  the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft and splashdown in the vicinity of  Grand Turk Island.

Commerative Stamp, Feb. 20, 1962

John Glenn will be 90 years old on July 18, 2011 and was recently interviewed on the CBS News commenting on the space program.  He has had a long and varied career –  combat pilot in World War II and the Korean conflict, one on the first seven astronauts, U.S. senator from Ohio and candidate for president of the U.S. in the 1984 Democratic primaries.  Then in 1998 at the age of 77  he ventured into space again as a member of the Space Shuttle Discover crew to study the effects of space on aging and became the oldest human to go into space. 

He and Annie have been married for 68 years and have established “The John and Annie Glen Historic Site”  at his boyhood home in New Concord, Ohio.  There will be a birthday celebration there for him on July 18.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN!  You still inspire us!

Water for Elephants

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 “A piercing  look at Depression-era circus life, where violence, laughter managed to coexist…Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants captures the sounds, smells and sights of the circus…Delicious.” – The Charlotte Observer

“You’ll get lost in the tatty glamour of Gruen’s meticulously researched world, from spangled equestrian pageantry and the sleazy side-show to an ill-fated night at a Chicago speak-easy.” – The Washington Post

Chapter One of Water for Elephants begins, “I am ninety.  Or ninety-three.  One or the other.”

I haven’t seen the movie, but I read the book last year.  If the movie (released April 2011) follows the book, it will be a great movie.  Many chapters begin with an authentic black and white photograph from the period.  It is a love story woven around a murder.

Jacob Jankowski is a young man with his career goal within reach when a tragedy sets him on a completely different road (or rather railroad ) and takes him all over the country traveling with a circus.  He encounters all sorts of bums, freakish characters, circus animals and a dangerous love.  And as the Minneapolis Star Tribune put it, “Gruen performs a double trick in her novel: She gives an engrossing picture of circus life as well as a taste of what it’s like to grow old.”

The movie came out this year and stars Robert Pattison as Jacob and Reese Witherspoon as the beautiful Marlena.  Hal Holbrook is cast perfectly as Old Jacob.  A trailer can be viewed at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).  There is an authentic dark richness in the sense of the colors as if the shadows were hovering just outside the big top.  The glamour is mirrored seductively in the glitter and lights of the center ring, then fades into dirty reality as the show is over and the crowds are gone.  The smells are sweaty and sensual.  The menagerie provides a dual background of innocent entertainment and animal cruelty.

I really must see the movie soon.  As Dr. Seuss wrote in Horton Hatches an Egg, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant…An elephant’s faithful – one hundred per cent!”

This book proves it.

WISDOM OF THE CRONE

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North Beach, 1978

Yes, that’s me  – the one in the middle with the sensible hat and Hollywood sunglasses – with my daughter and son enjoying a beautiful day at the beach over thirty years ago.   I’m sure  there was two-piece bathing suit underneath my shirt. 

My journey to becoming a crone has been a slow one day to day.  It has been a bit like T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”    Then at the end Prufrock confesses, “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled./…I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”

 DEFINITIONS OF A CRONE:

1.  an offensive term that deliberately insults a woman’s age, appearance and temperament (insult)

2. a woman aged over 40 (approving; used by one woman to another)

3.  [14th century.<Old N French carogne “withered old woman,” literally “carrion” <Latin caro “flesh”]

4.  hag

5.  a withered, witchlike old woman

The Wikipedia gives a more detailed description of a crone throughout history.

There seem to be good crones and bad crones based, rather like witches, on how one chooses to use her knowledge and experience.  I prefer to think of myself as a modern crone who has survived women’s liberation, menopause and the realization that some  dreams may never come true.  But I can’t complain as there is life still to be lived!  There are relatives and friends who died young and will never have the sweet pleasure of growing old with someone, and  I will never know what they would have been like at my age.

So I will use this format to write about tales, trails and connections  to almost anything that washes up on my coast and hope that perhaps some will find it worth checking out!

The Coastal Crone