Memorial Day
May 28, 2010
On Google Earth the pool in the parish is open. I wish it were, it was in the 90’s today. Another few weeks. I keep on checking to see if I can see the cross I made of reclaimed bricks. When the aerial shot is next updated you will see the cross from above in our new garden the way the kids in our school see it going up the back staircase. I have been collecting their scraps of bread, uneaten vegetables, chips, apple cores and filling old trash cans with holes bored around the bottom. I want to turn their leftovers into food and teach gardening. In the meantime the children asked if they could have a bake sale to raise money for the garden, which they held this past Monday and Tuesday. They raised $355.00. I was wondering if they thought I was too poor to afford to buy soil.
I have been growing heritage seeds from Bakers in Missouri: Sweet Annie, New Zealand vine spinach, telephone pole beans planted on St. Patrick’s Day, edible chrysanthemums, barley, sugar snaps, zucchini, tomatoes and Mars grapes and more. We moved a telephone pole, AC units, broke through asphalt and concrete down to the old coal dust and built up a raised garden. My parents donated an old Victorian fountain of some children leaning over a shell and Sal and I fed a tube to pump water through it. One big advantage of living between the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Bruckner, major highways, is that there are no deer or gophers, rabbits or moles. Squirrels and feral cats are my worry.
The bake sale is one of many tangible ways in which the parish and the surrounding community is embracing Goods of Conscience as a way of life.
We are happy to have Melissa Wasserman of Iowa State University with us for the summer as an intern. Melissa is a talented young designer and is helping me create the Bloomsday Collection. Melissa’s grandmother, it turns out, saved Astrid Bachich’s life. Astrid is the Dutch-Guatemalan sister-in-law of Mike Bachich, a young man dying of cancer on 82nd Street in 2004 that I visited in his last days when I first returned from a retreat in Guatemala. Astrid and Joe flew me and my niece Claire down to Guatemala that August and her family organized the workshop that developed social fabric.™
Astrid asked Melissa’s Guatemalan family name: Gonzalez Goyri, a noted painter and sculptor. Astrid brought her daughter Nina along to meet us over lunch and we six-eyed her weeping and telling us how at 11 or 12 years old she was lost in Zona 3 in Guatemala after taking the wrong bus stop and how Melissa’s grandmother spied her and gathered her up and restored the little blonde girl to her parents. Melissa and will see her grandfather’s painting at MoMa. In the meantime we have a lot of work to do. The world of Joyce’s Ulysses is our theme, lost and wandering children in search of their true father, father’s seeking lost children, a cuckold reordering his marriage bed and Molly’s fifty pages of “yes.” We will print them inside linings and tuft in tweed and home-spun cloth Dublin on that day in June 1904 when 22 year-old James Joyce met Nora Barnacle. I hope you can come by for the reading and rendering in cloth of that prophetic novel.
Mission Guatemala: Last February my brother Christopher and I brought down fifty US-made uniforms of native cloth for Guatemalan children. CNN filmed the event that will have a second installment this coming August when Goods of Conscience sponsors a tour of Guatemala. Our project plants the seed of pride in a local tradition that is alive and able to develop along with the times. We include a satchel full of aid with our uniforms: school supplies, allocation for food, and a contribution for medical aid to the elderly who are often primary care-givers for the children.
Mission Green: The first phase of the building of a teaching garden has been accomplished. We are breaking ground on a blueberry and lavender field on Blackrock as well as installing a beehive on the roof of the convent. Robert Deschak, a budding beekeeper from West 81st street is gathering the bees. Hans Roegele, a local architect, has been researching building a greenhouse on top of the school to grow blueberries. I would like to market them as “Castle Hill Blues.”
Mission Bronx: Catholic Charities has an outreach here in the parish for the homeless that includes counseling and aid for the marginalized with young children. We would like to build up a counseling service for couples to augment their work. We have been working with children in the sixth grade to design their own logos on a silkscreen.
