St. Louis: History Museum: #1 in Civil Rights Exhibit

#1 in Civil Rights Exhibit, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. March 2018.

I learned about the #1 in Civil Rights Exhibit at the Missouri History Museum through the Readings on Race Book Club at the Ferguson Municipal Library.

Although I'm not much of a museum person, the exhibit captured my attention for about an hour.

I plucked the bits that I ingested on the spot or that I will investigate more deeply in the future.

#1 in Civil Rights Exhibit, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. March 2018.

Harriet Scott?! Why had I only heard about Dred Scott all these decades of my life? Here is one story of Harriet Robinson Scott's adult life. In this account, we learn that Harriet Robinson was only 16 when she married Dred Scott. This suggests another story, untold. Further, because the legal status of children of enslaved persons followed the maternal line (i.e. if the mother was enslaved, then her children were also enslaved), one could argue that Harriet Scott's name should have been the more prominent one on the Supreme Court case, as the futures of their two children depended on the outcome of the case.

#1 in Civil Rights Exhibit, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. March 2018.

It was only a few weeks before I visited the History Museum that I learned about the East St. Louis Massacre. The confounding range of estimated killed between 40 and 200 reminds me of the similar obliqueness about the Opelousas Massacre.

#1 in Civil Rights Exhibit, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. March 2018.

 The above quote by William Wells Brown countered the mealymouthed exhibit on slavery in the state capitol's history exhibit.

St. Louis: A Korean Lunch

Korean lunch, St. Louis, Missouri. March 2018.

March 2018


I have enjoyed the pleasure of working with several Korean students.

St. Louis is home to many Korean-Americans. I don't know how many people make their home here, but there are at least seven churches that serve the Korean-American community.

And  "St. Louis is home to a 'shockingly high number of [Korean] restaurants,'" according to the managing editor of the magazine Sauce, according to this piece on St. Louis Public Radio in 2017.

I went to one of these restaurants.

My eyes lit up like Oliver Twist's at the sight of all the dainty plates of banchan, or side dishes, that accompany an entree.

I ate every single bit of every single plate.

Oh, and the sizzle of the spicy pork dolsot bibimbap:

Creative Life: On Cold and Flame

Runge Nature Center, Jefferson City, Missouri. December 2006.

Wintry in Missouri.

My hands are cold, but another's vengeance drip, drip, drips a molten sludge of thick poison into my gullet, seeking to liquidate my spirit.

My hands are cold, but my gut twists from a dull, yellow ember of acid fear that seeks to burn.

My hands are cold, but my heart constricts from a subterranean rage that seeks to consume it.


Come soon, spring.

Icy serviceberry, Jefferson City, Missouri. December 2006.

St. Louis: Come to Me, My Pretties

Jícama on the Nazca figure vessel, "The Harvester," ca 100-300 CE, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. February 2018.

I finally found a source of fresh and juicy, affordable jícama. It's at the China Town Market on Olive Street in University City. The produce truck comes every Thursday.

Come to me, my little pretties. I will gobble you up.

The Tajín I get at Aldi's.

Learning to Dance: Swing, Part 1: Remember the Curve

Swing, Toronto, Canada. Summer 2016.

One of my goals when I moved to Louisiana was to learn to dance. I wrote a series about my Louisiana dance-learning experience:

Learning to Dance, Part 1: Solving for X
Learning to Dance, Part 2: The Tao of Following
Learning to Dance, Part 3: The Pause
Learning to Dance, Part 4: Signals
Learning to Dance, Part 5: Anticipation

Swing, Toronto, Canada. Summer 2016.

When I moved to El Paso, I intended to learn salsa, and I made some attempts at getting into the dance scene, but it didn't happen.

One of my St. Louis goals was to learn swing dancing. This post inaugurates the story of my progress.

Via a meetup group I joined, I began weekly swing dance lessons at the Moolah Shrine in one of St. Louis' bajillion cities that cluster around actual St. Louis: Creve Coeur. Or maybe Maryland Heights. Or Bridgeton. It's a toss-up.

West County Swing Dance Club hosts the Tuesday-night dance, which includes an hour-long lesson before the dance begins. There are different lesson groups, which range from beginner to advanced.

I began at Level 1: Beginner. In fact, I did three weeks at the beginner level before moving on to Level 2, which is where I am as I write this post.

Swing, Toronto, Canada. Summer 2016.

On learning swing, I am re-learning lessons I thought I knew, both in dance and life:

Learning a new dance means making mistakes, looking stupid, feeling lost, feeling impatient with myself. I must remind myself that this is normal. I'm supposed to make mistakes, look stupid, and feel lost. I don't need to feel impatient with myself. Instead, I must remember the cardinal rule of dance: Have fun!

My tendency to move too quickly, to forget the importance of the pause - the importance of letting a process unfold rather than push toward the destination, to relax into the moment, to savor the act - remains.

Word of the Year: Courage 2: A Poet Familiar With Fear

Audre Lorde. Art credit: Harriet Faith.

An author friend recently introduced me to the works of the poet, Audre Lorde.

Ms. Lorde had a few things to say about fear:

“I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change. I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me. Jettison cargo." 


“Your silence will not protect you.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches



“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” From The Cancer Journals


“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems


"Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches


All Word of the Year: Courage posts here.

St. Louis: Art Museum: Half Moon Serene

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

A January Sunday. The end of winter soooooo far away. Days still short; nights still long. A good day to float through an art museum, enter rooms of others' imaginations.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

I hied to the St. Louis Art Museum.


My eyes fell on Ben Nicholson's Half Moon and they rested there.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Half Moon by Ben Nicholson, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri. January 2018.

Missouri: Springfield: WOW Aquarium and Wildlife Museum, Part 2

WOW Wildlife Museum, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017


I covered the WOW Aquarium in Part 1 here.

Today it's about the Wildlife Museum.

It reminds me a bit of the Chicago Field Museum, which my mother and I visited some years ago during a burning-cold winter weekend, which you can read about here. The similarity of the two institutions is the catalog-like collection of living creatures, now dead, stuffed, and preserved for our observation. Not a bad thing, just a little disconcerting at times. Like being on a massive space ship, aimed for a new planetary home, taking with us a unique library of what was on Earth.

The WOW Wildlife Museum, like the Chicago Field Museum, also has exhibits depicting the clothing and arts of native peoples of North America. And paintings of historic America.

Chicago Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois. December 2009.

There are moments of awe in some of the WOW rooms, in which the awe is a consequence of an astonishing quantity of one thing. Like the room of mounted deer heads and the arch of antlers. Or the room of mountain sheep. 

There's a gasp-inducing exhibit of a world-record sized polar bear.

WOW Wildlife Museum, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

When I walked through the Wildlife Museum, I'd already spent so much of my mental and sensory energy on the Aquarium that I couldn't give the Wildlife Museum its due.

That was a shame.  

Word of the Year: Courage 1

Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, Albuquerque, New Mexico. April 2013.

From the movie, He Named Me Malala:

There is a moment when you have to choose whether to remain silent or to stand up. 

If my rights are violated and I keep silent, I should better die than live. 

Islam is our religion. They tarnished the beautiful face of Islam. Today, in a very peaceful manner, we record our protest. People used to respect each other's beliefs. Whoever ruins Islam's holy name, for the sake of politics, it is required to stand in their way, and not let them go. 

If I keep silent, then you lose the right to exist. 

The above quotes are from either Malala or her father.


I'm not one to do words of the year, annual vision boards, or the like. Nothing wrong with these things, they just aren't generally my bag.


However, this year is different. I need a word for this year, and that word is courage. A couple of definitions from Monsieur Google:

• Strength in the face of pain or grief.
• The ability to do something even when frightened. 

I don't know how this is going to roll out on my blog, but for now I'm looking at doing something on this word on the first day of each month.

The inspiration of Malala came to me first, because I figure if a 15 year-old can show the courage she has, then maybe I can, too.

Missouri: Springfield: WOW Aquarium and Wildlife Museum, Part 1

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017

My two sisters, one of their friends, and I visited the new Wonders of Wildlife (WOW) Museums, the aquarium and the Wildlife National Museum.

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

The visit ain't cheap. And, really, visiting both exhibits in one day is a challenge, especially for minors and for the most senior among us. Not just because it might be tiring, but because of the sensory overload, exacerbated by the hum and movement of the other visitors.

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

If I lived close by, then I'd just buy the ticket for one of the two exhibits and return another day for the second exhibit. If I'm staying overnight, then I'd forego the savings of buying both tickets together and buy the tickets separately so I can go to one exhibit the first day and the second exhibit the next day.

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

In this article, I'll focus on the Aquarium, and tomorrow, the Wildlife Museum. 

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

At first, I was pretty underwhelmed by the Aquarium. In the beginning, the traffic path isn't clear and I thought perhaps there were only two floors of the museum, one of which was consumed by award-winning fisherfolk. Which I didn't care about one whit. But one of my sisters noted there was a third floor, which I went to and that's when I began the long journey through the quite large Aquarium.

Three standouts for me:

• Two jellyfish tanks
• The darling, charming, personable sea snakes (who knew?!)
• The flirting or fighting Caribbean spiny lobsters

I had fun putting music to the jellyfish videos I took here and here (with one embedded below).

And here's a slide show of my jellyfish photos:

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

The sea snakes reminded me of the gladness of watching prairie dogs and meerkats.

WOW Aquarium, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

And below is a video. Enjoy:

.

And here's a video of two Caribbean spiny lobsters conducting a dance or a battle.


If you'd like some gentle moments of serenity, I invite you to sink softly into a cloud of Pachelbel in blue below:

A deep breath.

Ferguson: Our Lady of Guadalupe and One of Her Stolen Sons

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017

Beauty, sadness, membership, anger, quiet, fear, song, powerlessness, power.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

All of these wavelets lapped around me at the Spanish Mass I attended at Ferguson's Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

Forefront in my mind was the St. Louis Public Radio story I'd read the day before about a parishioner, Jose Garcia. In November, the United States of America deported him to Mexico, yanking him from the arms of his wife, Ana, and his three little girls - Amanda, Julissa, and Dana.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

Who benefited from this action?

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

No one, other than a pyramid scheme of ICE operatives to whom a man is a commodity for meeting quotas and adding ticks to a quarterly report.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

A tiny little stat thrown into a virtual mass grave of thousands of other data blips, all denuded of their names, ties to families and communities - their very humanity.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

Marks on a report that will be covered by a fresh sediment layer when government operatives dump new nameless, faceless expendables into the ditch.


'tis the season.

St. Louis: Art Museum: Cell

Cell, by Louise Bourgeois, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017


I met an acquaintance for coffee at the St. Louis Art Museum. 

Cell, by Louise Bourgeois, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. December 2017.

It's probably a sin, but I didn't look at much except for this exhibit, practically at the entrance.

Cell, by Louise Bourgeois, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. December 2017.

  I figure I'll make up for it later.

Cell, by Louise Bourgeois, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. December 2017.

 And the gods will forgive me.

Ferguson: The Christmas Home Tour

A house on Ferguson's Christmas Home Tour, Ferguson, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017

Ferguson's annual Christmas Home Tour is a fundraiser for the Caring League.

I've never been much excited about home tours.

"Home tour" at Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, Turkey. June 2012.

But my mother likes them, and I martyred myself for her by buying tickets to the Ferguson event.

But what was this?! At the very first house, I saw what I may have been missing all of my adult years: Vodka, wine, schnapps, and many sweets. And a repeat at the second house.

If this is the norm, no wonder such tours are so popular!

Disclosure: My mom is 88 years old, and schlepping into two houses maxed her limit, so we spent the next hour just driving around Ferguson neighborhoods and admiring the town's charming architecture and the yellow, green, and gold beauty of its mature trees.

In one of the neighborhoods, we stopped the car to watch a dancing blanket of sparrows swirling up and over and around a house and tree.

Flashback: Bottomless Lakes State Park, NM

As was so often the case, New Mexico surprised me when I visited Bottomless Lakes State Park in April 2013.

Below is my post from back then:

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Bottomless Lakes State Park: Another New Mexican Surprise

Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico 

I didn't have high expectations for Bottomless Lakes State Park. The photos on the New Mexico state parks page are a bit shoulder-shrugging, but since visiting all of New Mexico's state parks is one of my goals, I made my plans and went.

(A note to the state of New Mexico: I like your "find a state park page," but once you click through, the information for each of the state parks is inadequate in presentation and content. There aren't even directions to get to the parks. And wouldn't a link on each park page to your parks events calendar be nice? And because New Mexico is so rich in federal public lands, perhaps a link in that direction, as well?)

One of the coolest things about New Mexico's geography is that in one spot, you can look out over the horizon and see an uninterrupted plain of scrabbly flora and sandy soil. But take a few steps forward and a new world opens at your feet.

Thus Exhibit A at Bottomless Lakes State Park:

Exhibit A, Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

 And Exhibit B, just a few steps into the frame, so to speak:

Exhibit B, Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

Thanks to the very pleasant volunteer at the park's visitor center, I learned how deep are the sinkholes - or cenotes - that dot the park, and how salty the water.

Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

   

Visitors can swim in one of the sinkholes. At that lake are a couple of pretty stone buildings and shade structures with picnic tables.

Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

On the day I visited, there was lots of activity at the swimming hole.

Just across the street from this large sinkhole was a quiet boardwalk trail (the Wetlands Trail) with intermittent stick-built structures, I'm guessing birdwatching blinds, but also the perfect cool, shady places to lug your folding chair to and have a cool lunch, with only the sounds of birds, bubbling water, and sweet breezes to keep you company. I had this pleasant boardwalk trail entirely to myself.

On the surface, the wetlands soil is a mass of white or off-white crystalline crusts, some flat against the surface; others clustered around twigs, plants, or objects. If you push your finger into the surface just a little bit, you'll bring up water.

Do you see the perfect little paw print below?

Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

I placed an earring close by for a size perspective.

Bottomless Lakes State Park, New Mexico

It's funny how there's a thin, red layer of silt over the white gypsum at the park.

The tamarisk, aka the Water-Sucking Soldiers, were in bloom the weekend I visited. 

A slide show:

And a video below, which wasn't in the original post: