Post by millring on Oct 15, 2023 7:02:44 GMT -5
Finding truth and life in the ordinary. What beautiful observations.
I miss Lisa and the old Owen's. It was my mile-from-home, go-to place for two decades before it closed under the pressure of the big box store.
Lisa understood who shopped at Owen's and made sure everything we needed was there. Always. Or nearly so.
Attempts at more upscale groceries made their way into our small town to compete. They came in to cater to our big-city tastes. In very short order those boutique stores and sections found that those tastes didn't exist in big enough numbers to sustain good business. Within a year or two the variety was gone and they were selling what Lisa stocked all along.
Lisa would smile and say: "If I don't have it, you don't need it."
But I don't read this extremely well-written article as being about Groceries so much as a much appreciated suggestion that there is great value in what most of our celebrity/fame obsessed society would deem as "menial" ... or even "mundane".
For forty years my work as a potter was at least in part an attempt to elevate the unavoidable mundanities of life. The simple, universal act of morning coffee became something better with a favorite mug. Sharing a favorite casserole dressed up in handmade stoneware was suddenly a "presentation".
I loved that part of my job. It was my way of swimming against the current of our culture.
The bend in my road that I didn't see coming -- I'm now a common laborer and no more an artist -- has immersed me in the mundane. My life is now the nail that will not stay pounded down -- just like almost everybody else's lives. And it's thinking and writing like this article that makes me see the value in this new old life.
So I'll go to work yet again today and I'll take another wack at the nail. And maybe I'll try to do a better job because someone like Steve Yarbrough wrote about the value in it.
Of maybe, like usual, I overthink things.
theamericanscholar.org/a-clean-well-ordered-place/?fbclid=IwAR2TZBeKCtILMFt0SGjmo8ThfB_zaJ76IyMohLSWMKpF8OM_Pwm8-2UAGaQ
I miss Lisa and the old Owen's. It was my mile-from-home, go-to place for two decades before it closed under the pressure of the big box store.
Lisa understood who shopped at Owen's and made sure everything we needed was there. Always. Or nearly so.
Attempts at more upscale groceries made their way into our small town to compete. They came in to cater to our big-city tastes. In very short order those boutique stores and sections found that those tastes didn't exist in big enough numbers to sustain good business. Within a year or two the variety was gone and they were selling what Lisa stocked all along.
Lisa would smile and say: "If I don't have it, you don't need it."
But I don't read this extremely well-written article as being about Groceries so much as a much appreciated suggestion that there is great value in what most of our celebrity/fame obsessed society would deem as "menial" ... or even "mundane".
For forty years my work as a potter was at least in part an attempt to elevate the unavoidable mundanities of life. The simple, universal act of morning coffee became something better with a favorite mug. Sharing a favorite casserole dressed up in handmade stoneware was suddenly a "presentation".
I loved that part of my job. It was my way of swimming against the current of our culture.
The bend in my road that I didn't see coming -- I'm now a common laborer and no more an artist -- has immersed me in the mundane. My life is now the nail that will not stay pounded down -- just like almost everybody else's lives. And it's thinking and writing like this article that makes me see the value in this new old life.
So I'll go to work yet again today and I'll take another wack at the nail. And maybe I'll try to do a better job because someone like Steve Yarbrough wrote about the value in it.
Of maybe, like usual, I overthink things.
theamericanscholar.org/a-clean-well-ordered-place/?fbclid=IwAR2TZBeKCtILMFt0SGjmo8ThfB_zaJ76IyMohLSWMKpF8OM_Pwm8-2UAGaQ