Have you heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault?  I hadn’t until recently.  It’s a large storage facility on Spitzbergen Island just off Norway.  In fact, the island is part of Norway.  It has the capacity to safely protect and store up to three million seeds.

Svalbard was brought to my attention first via the radio show Splendid Table, when one of the guests talked about the importance of collecting and saving seeds.  I know there has been a resurgence in ‘heritage’ type vegetables and grains and a huge movement against the more current GMO eatables, but didn’t know there was a world wide effort to collect and save seeds.  This has been going on to some extent since the 1940s and of course, with farmers, has been going one since the beginning of agriculture.  The more recent focus on collecting takes on more interesting nuances.

My first impression of the seed vault was that it is a wonderful idea.  We need to save old strains of plants to be able to use them as a safeguard against new plant diseases or world crop blights.  Makes perfect sense.  One would think the ‘greenies’ of the world would be very happy with this.

On the other hand, it is worthwhile to notice who is involved with the seed vault and who controls it.  Norway is the home provider so they are involved.  Past that governmental involvement, the other major players are:  Monsanto, DuPont/Pioneer, the Syngenta Foundation, Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation.  The first three are the worlds largest holders of patented genetically modified plants.  The Rockefeller Foundation CGIR, has been involved in genetically modified plants since 1946. I haven’t quite figured out the interest of Bill Gates and why he would be investing some $30 million in the project. A sinister answer would be that he, like the other groups involved, has been known for monopoly and product/patent control. I would hope his involvement is altruistic. I just don’t know.

Anyway, what is interesting here is that sometimes when things seem very simple and seem like a great idea, more can be uncovered and the purpose is then not so clear.

Although I am comforted by the idea that our world’s seed resources are being saved, I am concerned about who holds the keys to the vault.

For heaven’s sakes!

Have you tried to decipher the Medicaid/SSI/VA Benefits laws recently?  If you have you will agree with me that someone needs to take a look at these laws and simplify them, if not for their own good, for the good of the rest of us.  And, we don’t need a new 27,000 page book of rules.  No, we need something that the average 75 or 80 year old can understand and use.

Does that sound too challenging?  I have been getting more and more concerned as I have seen the laws getting increasingly complex while the baby boomers age and many people are either childless or only have one child.  I just hope the children of the baby boomers are either lawyers or have enough money to hire lawyers to wade through the spaghetti tangle of regulations and exceptions to the existing laws.

For a time I was a trust administrator and I used to file insurance and medicare claims for my clients.  What a mess that was. And, that was back a few years when there were fewer hoops to jump through. As I age, I become concerned about my future ability to understand how all of the government health programs work and what I will do when I am confronted with personal health issues.

To put this simply I say, “Listen up government! Clean up the health care regulations. Make them understandable for average people. Make them usable and helpful.”

Or, maybe things have to get complex before they can become simple, as Alan Perlis observed.

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”

May 5th is the anniversary of the birth of Nellie Bly, American journalist and early feminist.  Well, she didn’t know she was a feminist, but she lived the life.

She was born in 1865 and lived a normal life until age 6 when her father died suddenly.  This wouldn’t have been so tragic except that he died without a Will and therefore his family had no claim to his estate.  Nellie was actually born, Elizabeth Cochran.  The Nellie Bly name was chosen much later. 

The family struggled along and eventually ‘Elizabeth’ went to a Normal school in Indiana with the intent of becoming a teacher.  When her mother’s financial circumstances deteriorated, Nellie quit school and jointed her mother running a boarding house in Pittsburgh.  As luck would have it, when Nellie was 18, she was aggravated by an editorial in the Pittsburgh Dispatch and wrote a response that caught the eye of the managing editor, George Madden, who offered her a job.

That was when Elizabeth took the name of Nellie Bly, chosen from the name of a Stephen Foster song title. She took on undercover assignments and did a 10 day stint in Bellevue hospital for the mentally ill. The resulting book was Ten Days In a Mad House. She also went undercover in the sweat shops of New York, exposing the terrible conditions of workers.

In 1889, The New York World hired Nellie to copy the adventures of Jules Vernes’ novel, Around the World in 80 Days. She broke a world record by finishing the trip in a mere 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds. That was with travel on ships, trains, rickshaws, horses, etc. Her record was only held for a few months though. George Frances Train beat the record by making the trip in 67 days. Oiled the wheels on the rickshaws perhaps.

When Nellie was 30 she retired from journalism for many years. She married Robert Seaman, age 70, who was a millionaire industrialist. In 1904, she was acting as President of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company when her husband passed away. The company was doing quite well but due to employee embezzlement, it went into bankruptcy. Her career turned back to journalism and she continued her work until her death in 1922.

Nellie Bly was an inspiration to many young women hoping to become investigative journalists. The adventures with her work, especially with her world tour, have been turned in to many books and movies and are still interesting to read/view today. She was a feminist without really focusing on that part of politics and never had the right to vote. Her work took guts and drive and she was consistently up to the challenge.

“Make new friends, but keep the old,

One is silver, and the other’s gold.”  1925 Girl Scout Song Book

I’ve recently been reconnecting with old friends.  Some from 30 years ago and some from 10 years ago.  It’s a fun thing to reminisce but even more fun to find out what people are doing now, who they are, their plans, their dreams. 

Friday I met with a former co-worker from the year 2000.  We were hired in with two other people and began our training in New York City at the same time, the first week of January.  It was a tremendous time of learning for each of us and maybe, especially, me.  I had never been to New York and I was like a typical gawking site seer in the big city.  It was fascinating and so perfect.  The weather was strangely mild for January, people were surprisingly very kind and helpful and interesting.  I understood the work I was to do and got to know the other new hires pretty well.  In fact, one of them shared the germs with me from her children that became the worst flu I have had in my life.  I barely made it back home on a late Friday evening flight and spent the next three days in bed.  Then I had to get back on a plane and fly to Dayton or someplace in Ohio and travel with a co-worker for the week.  During that time of my illness, I lost about 20 pounds.  Of course, they have been found since then.

Now, to get back on track. This former co-worker was a victim of a cut back at work, as I was, and about 25 of our co-workers. Some of us have stayed in touch but others have been ‘lost.’ I was happy to reconnect with this particular person and share some of what has happened over the past 12 years since we’ve seen each other. We talked about all kinds of things and I gave him the nickel tour of St Louis in a pretty much monsoonal rain. It was one of the nicest afternoons I have spent in years other than time spent with my husband. We will certainly stay in touch from now on and I think of the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel song Friends/Bookends:

“Time it was, and what a time it was, its . . . a time of innocence, A time of confidences”
“Can you imagine us years from today, Sharing a park bench quietly?”

And I have been meeting with old friends from college and high school too. Funny that as we grow older, we look back and like to remember people we used to know or would like to know again. Some of my old friends have surprised me with different lifestyles or more children than I thought they would have. Some never married. Some have married many times. Some have leaned far left and some, far right. Some have become deeply religious and some have become agnostics or atheists. I truly appreciate all of them and enjoy getting reacquainted.

To old friends and new, I offer this additional verse from the Silver and Gold song:

“You have one hand,
I have the other,
Put them together,
We have each other.”

I became interested in the work of Dorothea Lange many years ago and remain fascinated with her art, her photographs, to this day.

She had two major formative issues when she was quite young.  First, at age 7, she contracted polio and had a limp from a weak, shortened leg from that time on.  Her comment on how that impacted her life was,  “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”^[  The second major personal pain was that her father abandoned the family when she was 12.  At that point, she changed her last name to that of the maiden name of her mother.  She became a very strong, independent woman and studied photography at Columbia University in NYC.

After she moved to San Francisco, she met and married the Western artist, Maynard Dixon in 1920, continuing her work and having two children with him.  They eventually divorced in 1935 and Dorothea married Paul Taylor, a Professor of Economics at the University of California.  He educated Dorothea in social and political matters and they worked together to document the lives of migrant workers and sharecroppers.

During the Great Depression years, from 1935 to 1939, she worked for the RA and FSA and photographed the plight of the people fleeing the Dust Bowl and people suffering from the Depression. Her typical subjects were sharecroppers, displaced farm families and migrant workers. The pictures she took, along with other RA and FSA photographers, brought the story of the poor to magazine and newspaper readers across the country.

You may remember her most well know picture, “Migrant Mother.” In 1960 Dorothea was interviewed about that picture and said, “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

What struck me most about Dorothea’s photography was that the people seemed not to pose for her or even be aware of her presence. She said that because of her shyness, she always just tried to become an invisible person in the background and not intrude into the personal space of her subjects. I think she was incredibly successful and for that reason we still celebrate her photographs to this day.

I am very happy to say Dorothea Lange’s photography will be on display in St Louis’ Grand Center starting this August. It will be a joy to see her work in person, as I know she would have liked it to be viewed. She was yet another great artist that shared a view of American through a discriminating lens.

May Day is Lei Day in Hawai’i

Garlands of flowers everywhere
All of the colors in the rainbow
Maidens with blossoms in their hair
Flowers that mean we should be happy
Throwing aside a load of care
Oh, May Day is Lei Day in Hawai’i
May Day is happy day out there.

– Red Hawke, 1928

This is one of the very best times to visit our 50th state. In Hawaii, since 1928, May 1st has been celebrated as Lei Day. The idea of a day to celebrate leis was first suggested in a newspaper article written by poet and writer Don Blanding, then the following year, Grace Tower Warren created the saying, ‘May Day is Lei Day,’ and the local government recognized it officially.

Each island has their own festivities and on Oahu, the main activities are centered in Queen Kapi’olani Park in Waikiki. There are many entertainers and, of course, hula, as well as instruction for making leis and competitions for best leis. And, did I forget to mention the food? Typical luau food is on hand with enough variety to satisfy pretty much everyone.

I was fortunate enough to be there many years on May 1st and got to attend the sunset May Day concerts, given by the Brothers Cazimero. They used to be held outside at the ‘bowl’ in Queen Kapi’olani Park. Nothing like the sweet ocean breeze and the scent of thousands of flowers and the warm smiles of the Hawaiian people. The Brothers Caz sang their own great music and also brought in many of the other big name performers of the islands. That was when I got to see IZ, and Hapa, and Keialele Reichel. I was head over hills in love with Hawaiian music and still am. There’s something about the flow of the music and the vocal harmonies that take me back to the aloha of the islands.

Something else pretty spectacular to see on Oahu on May Day is the statue of King Kamahamaha in downtown Honolulu. His outstretched arms are covered with hundreds of leis, sending a very warm message of Aloha Nui Loa to all his people.