Scout Moves

It's been an interesting week—started with a band concert...Eustacia came home...I started knitting with stainless steel yarn...I had long talks with good friends...I bought shoes...I went to band rehearsal...I may go to a movie tonight...I may help a bride-to-be make wedding earrings tomorrow. And so the week ends, and I give you a video from Sunday's concert. The soloist is Ron Barkett, a local baritone—you won't see much of me in this video because I'm directly behind him..

Part One Eustacia arrived home safely from Romania last night. Yay! We're so happy to have her back. Her re-entry adjustment is going to be difficult, although she's got her junior year in college to plan for with just two and a half weeks to go before that begins. She brought home lots of pictures, and I borrowed a few. Here: This is the road sign at the turn off for Pro Vita, which sits just at the edge of Valea Screzii. Here, Lea (another volunteer) and I are setting up the art show featuring the kids' craft work. This is what happened when we tried to drive up to the sheepfold after too much rain. The Landrover got stuck, and the jeep had to come to the rescue and then take us up to meet the shepherds. The men doing all the work are Mihail and Gabriel, sons of Father Tanase who founded Pro Vita. And here we are in the shepherds' hut sampling the cheese and pollenta—dirt floor, canvas walls, great cheese. Part Two I post my weekly columns at Open Salon just to give t...

I had two band concerts over the weekend, one in the sweltering heat with sweat dripping down my back so that by the end of the evening, I could wring out my sporty black trousers into a puddle. Sorry, but those were the circumstances. There was a bald clarinet player directly across from me actually wearing a sweat band on his head like he was in a tennis match, it was that bad. Despite the weather, we played well—the band played well, and I played well with my second horn part. Didn't miss a pitch or an entrance, and I enjoyed the music. A winner. And then there was the concert on Sunday. For the first time, the band played at an outdoor amphitheater here, one that was built for performances of Trumpet in the Land , a play about the Delaware Indians who lived in Ohio in the 1700s. They were converted to Christianity by David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, but in 1782, 96 members of the tribe were massacred by the British. The play runs throughout the summer, and on off weeken...

(left, Mary Badham as Scout/right, me in the third grad) I've called myself "Scout" on this blog for some time now because someone said that it's my blog. I can be whoever I want on it. I chose Scout Finch as my moniker because I always thought I looked like the actress who portrayed her in the film "To Kill A Mockingbird." The connection runs deeper, though, and I used the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the novel to explain. Here is today's column in Small Town Newspaper: ••• Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” was published 50 years ago this July, and 30 million copies later, it continues to receive a remarkable amount of attention. On its anniversary, the book is being celebrated around the country with film screenings, special events and panel discussions; but I would have held my own private celebration even if the rest of the country didn’t bat an eye. “To Kill A Mockingbird” remains my favorite work of fiction because of who I was and where...

This past spring while Husband and I were visiting No. 1 in Berkeley for a few days, we took a drive to Napa to tour a winery or two. We toured the Hess Collection winery and spent some time at the tasting counter where we had some fine wine. As is common in lots of wineries, there is a gift shop there just off of the wine tasting room, and it has Chardonnay scented candles, special glasses, bottles of wine, funky wine stoppers and cookbooks. I bought one. I chose John Ash's From the Earth to the Table because at first glance it looked wonderful. Turns out, it's wonderful all the way through with creative but approachable recipes paired with wine suggestions, and I have been cooking from it this week. We've had corn salsa, grilled steak with a no-cook, versatile sauce, oven-fried chicken, sweet potato ravioli and blue cheese and caramelized onion pizza. Everything has been just great and not too difficult or so fancy-schmancy you can't find the ingredients in a typical ...

I don't have much going on this week, but one thing I'm busy doing is band. AND how. There is a great concert band in Canton, about 30 miles from Small Town, that is short of horn players this week. Everyone is either sick or on vacation, so the manager scrambled to find replacements, and I got a call. Yay . The woman suggested I might play fourth horn, and I was fine with that. You can sit at the end of the row, play your part, mind your own business and go home at the end without a care in the world, at least with the relatively simple music the bands plays. They only have one rehearsal per concert, so they typical choose easier pieces they can play well without much effort. Nothing ever works out the way you expect, as we all know, so when I arrived at rehearsal Tuesday evening, I shouldn't have been surprised when the manager handed me the folder for the first part. Well, OK then. I sat down and introduced myself to the other horn players and immediately exchanged the t...

So, I write this weekly column for Small Town Newspaper, as you know because I post the columns here every Monday. I'm hardly a celebrity around here, but my name gets out there, and sometimes good things happen because of it. A cashier at the grocery store will ask, "Hey, aren't you that lady who writes in the paper? I like what you say." The butcher in the same store has asked for my autograph because he thinks someday I'll write for TIME, and he wants to be able to say he knew me when. And sometimes I get nice mail or phone calls from strangers telling me how much they appreciate my columns. Well, a couple of months ago, the new librarian of Small Town's library asked if I'd conduct a little creative writing event for teenagers as part of his new program for teens. He's a fan of my columns and thought I could offer some inspiration. I could find no reason to say no to that invitation, so we met yesterday afternoon in the Community Room and talked wr...

Finally off the Romania thing—not really, just not writing about it—here is my opinion column for today's edition of Small Town Newspaper. I love that Mott was so unashamed of her boldness that she called herself "obnoxious" and wasn't self deprecating. Go, Lucretia! The Seneca Falls Convention held in New York on this day in 1848 was the first women’s rights gathering of its time—attended by both men and women—and it marked the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the groundbreaking event; and while Stanton’s name is well known still today, Mott’s story is told less often. Lucretia Mott’s narrative is no dusty, old biography. Hers is a story of courage and determination based on her guiding rule: “If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?” Fearless, Mott spent her life working to correct the wrongs she witnessed, despite harassment and danger, persecution and criticism. Mott was...

OK, I know I said I'd quit talking about Romania, but I've been trying to post this little video for days and haven't been able to get it to work until just now. This is one of those magic moments I described the other day with Nicoletta singing and playing guitar. The video is a 360˚ view from where I was standing at the moment, with the tiny chapel on the hill and some of the houses across the road.

You know how you experience something completely in the moment, and you say to yourself, "this is just magic, and I'll never forget it as long as I live." Well, I experienced some of those magic moments during my two weeks in Romania, and I'd like to describe them here. And then I swear I'll stop talking about it. 1) There was a group of Italian volunteers living in the house with us, older gentlemen who were there to install bathrooms in one of the houses. They would work hard all day and then usually disappear for dinner, but on their last night there, they stayed in and cooked their own meal. We all shared a kitchen, but we didn't do our own cooking—we ate from the communal pot, so to speak. So, when we smelled the wonderful aromas of pasta with fresh herbs and salami, we were jealous but stayed out of their way. When they were finished eating, they sat around the table with Nicoletta, a Romanian teacher who was living with us, too, and who worked at the or...

It was a sunny Saturday at Pro Vita, a relief after days of rain, when we chose to have a carnival—a day later than originally planned because the priest didn't want kids to be given candy on a fasting day when they couldn't eat it. We had planned the carnival for over a week and kept it a secret from the kids as we built our games, made our booth signs and gathered prizes. We marched up to the playground, arms loaded with the goods, set it up, and presto—a carnival. It was great to see what we had been working on actually happen and happen well; and I enjoyed the kids at my booth, the Hook A Duck booth where they had to fish for little rubber ducks floating in a wash tub. A note about those ducks—you don't just go out and buy stuff because you have no money, so you use what you have. And if the little ducks you do have don't float, you create little boats for them out of the bottoms of disposable plastic cups. And when the hardware store doesn't have screw eyes for...

I was tidying up the kitchen one day—I swear to you, United Planet needs to thoroughly coach their volunteers to assure they all pick up after themselves. Wiping off the jelly they've smeared on the plastic table cover, putting the milk back in the refrigerator or just washing their tea cups once in a while would help. Anyway, I was tidying up when I found a volunteer handbook I hadn't seen before, and in it I read about the Pro Vita sheepfold. The paragraph said we might have an opportunity to go visit the shepherds and taste the cheese they make, and it all seemed so appealing. I asked Mihail about it—he's the big chief in charge—and he said he'd arrange for a quick trip for anyone interested. So, me, Emily, Maggie, Lea and Ram decided to go. Mihail and Don (one of Pro Vita's employees) divided us up between a Land Rover and a rugged pickup truck, and we headed down the main road until we came to a turn off, a dirt patch in the grass, mostly, and we headed off int...

Here is today's opinion column as it appears in Small Town Newspaper: I burned my breakfast bacon the other morning, and for a brief moment I considered shoving it down the disposal and cooking another batch. But then I remembered one of the lessons I learned while spending two weeks at an orphanage in rural Romania. Waste nothing because everything is a valuable gift, and it may not be available tomorrow. I learned this while at Pro Vita, which is not an orphanage as much as it is a refuge for anyone in need. It is a commune providing food, clothing, medical care and shelter for any and all: for mothers with children who have left abusive husbands, for the homeless who are eager to work, for the elderly and disabled adults who have been neglected, for children whose parents cannot support them and for adults who are permanently scarred from having been raised in state-run orphanages during communist rule. No one is turned away, and with more than 100 souls to care for, plus aid gi...

So, I went to Romania. Weird, huh? I think so. I was sitting in the airport in Bucharest waiting for my flight out of the country, and I was sipping coffee with Maggie, one of the other volunteers who happened to be leaving at the same time. I took a quick scan of the events of the previous two weeks and said, "this was a weird thing we just did." It was also amazing and eye opening and occasionally unsettling and wonderful. Here's how it went, and hang on because this could take a while. It could actually take a few blog posts to get the story out. Eustacia and I left Cleveland on June 20 and flew to Newark. Then we flew to Zurich and then on to Bucharest where we landed on June 21. After we got through customs, we went out to the arrivals area and looked for a driver waving a United Planet sign. It took a few minutes, but we finally found Ionut (pronounced E-O-NOOTS) who was our driver. We waited for two other volunteers arriving that same afternoon, and when we were al...