The twenty-fourth of May’s
          The Queen’s birthday.
          If you don’t give us a holiday
          We’ll all run away.

Around our house in the 1950s, my father sang this ditty from his childhood to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It referred not to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II but to Queen Victoria, who died eleven years before Dad was born. Victoria Day is still a Canadian federal holiday, observed the Monday before May 25 in many of the informal ways Americans observe Memorial Day a week later.

Why Victoria? Reigning from 1837 to 1901, she was the longest-ruling British monarch until Elizabeth (1952-2022). Those years saw tremendous societal, political, and industrial changes. Much work that had once been a family enterprise moved outside the home for a growing, urban middle class. Home was seen as a place of respite from the sordid outside world. Gender roles solidified. Talk of sex was taboo (though discrete prostitution thrived). Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, held up the ideal of the perfect family.

Last month the royal family marked the hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, April 21, 1926. I can’t help but wonder how future generations will look back on her era.

Image: Heinrich von Angeli, portrait of Queen Victoria, 1875, in Royal Collection Trust. Cropped.

I lack expertise in international relations, but my personal relationships have generally been positive and deep. Good luck, good choices, and good models all helped. I’m conflict-averse but not conflict-avoidant; that’s to say, I’ll raise issues but strive to resolve them without a fight. That means moving away from winners and losers, away from who’s right and who’s wrong, in favor of creative solutions everyone can live with.

As a young parent, when children blamed each other for causing a mess, I told them I only cared how we were going to fix it. I much prefer problem solving over punishment, revenge, or finger-pointing. Even in disagreement, two people who care about each other both want the same thing: We each want us both to be happy. Figuring out how to make that happen takes collaboration.

In Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981), Roger Fisher and William Ury describe a process focused on underlying interests, rather than the specific outcome each party demands. If you want to return to the lakeside cabin because you love beaches, and I want to go somewhere new because I crave variety, let’s brainstorm solutions like finding an unfamiliar vacation spot with a beach.

Whether between individuals, political parties, or nations, I doubt unconditional surrender often brings lasting peace. That may say more about my temperament than objective fact. I do believe that understanding another’s viewpoint and letting everyone save face accomplishes more than preening in one-sided victory. Too bad not everyone has the willingness or the skill.

Image: Baja California Sur, Mexico, 2018. Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash. 

I don’t think my mother either loved cooking or hated it. It was just a daily task like making beds or sweeping the floor. We dined on meat, potatoes, and vegetables from a can, unless fresh vegetables happened to be in season. Mashed or boiled potatoes were so predictable that I could start them after school without knowing the dinner plan for the day.

Schoolmates spoke of ethnic foods from their Irish or Italian traditions. My Anglo-Canadian heritage offered none, I thought. In time I realized that breakfasts of porridge (instead of “hot cereal”) and marmalade (instead of jelly) on toast were ethnic, too.

Mother rarely cooked from recipes during my childhood. Later, when I asked her to dictate instructions for making meatloaf—no one else’s tasted as good—she had me write “a handful of this” and “that, not so much.” Even a carefully written old recipe card can lose precision through the generations. I hoped exactly to replicate my mother-in-law’s mother’s favorite casserole dish until I read on the ingredients list, "One ten-cent bag of potato chips.”

My mother taught me basics of cookery, and so did the women with whom I shared an apartment and meals in my twenties. I treasure friends’ family recipes named for people I never met: Susie’s sweet potato pie, Aunt Dorothy’s hot chicken salad. A housemate’s mother’s delicious “up yonder rolls” got their name from the old gospel hymn, “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”

Half a century ago or longer, some women described struggling to find their voice. They’d been so socialized to be sweet and accommodating, they scarcely knew who they truly were, much less how to express it. I couldn’t relate. In my smart and vocal family of origin, at times my only choices were to agree or be wrong. But given the opportunity to write or say something of my own, wow, did I jump at the chance!

It took years and experience to realize more is not always better. Though I’ve always tried to be both honest and kind, other criteria came later. Is it necessary? Is it helpful? In my first job in the corporate sector, I made the mistake of challenging my boss publicly about a matter we’d already discussed, on which I’d been overruled. In my former academic setting, arguing a minor point forever was perfectly normal.

Interrupting is an unfortunate habit I’m still trying to tame. The childlike fear resurfaces that I’ll never get my turn unless I barge in. Another is taking the role of devil’s advocate. Multiple perspectives fascinate me. How could someone in another time or place or culture see things so differently from me and the people around me? I’m learning that a friend distraught with anger or fear may need a quiet listener more than a curious explorer. She may need my understanding more than my efforts to fix or guide her.

“To everything there is a season . . . A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” (Eccles. 3:1, 7) I don’t have to say everything I’m thinking.

Image: Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.

Marijuana was never a big part of my life. In the late sixties, I was married to a soldier with a top-secret security clearance. He had no interest in risking it with a drug violation. I tried pot twice in the seventies and felt no effect. I probably didn’t know how to inhale. While modest drinking made parties livelier, smoking weed made participants quiet and dull, so we left. With a child in tow, conversation could turn awkward.

Child: Was that marijuana?
Me: Yes.
Child: Isn’t that illegal?
Me: Yes.
Child: Are you going to call the police?
Me: No.
Child: Why not?

The code name “420” for marijuana dates from 1971, when five California teens met after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke pot. One of them later worked as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. Fliers distributed by Deadheads in 1990 encouraged people to smoke “420” on April 20 at 4:20 p.m., and High Times magazine promoted the idea. By then I was paying no attention at all.

​Image: Cannabis sativa.

The best children’s books speak to readers of all ages. One of my favorites is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.* From the moment he wakes up until nightfall, everything goes wrong for Alexander. One mishap builds on another. He just wants to get away. He wants to move to Australia. At bedtime his mother says gently, “Some days are like that, even in Australia.”

Alexander’s troubles—and most of mine—are minor in the greater scheme of things. Still, when the little stuff all fails at once, it’s like being nibbled to death by guppies. Even knowing full well that computer crashes and burnt-dry tea kettles aren’t in a class with major surgery or job loss, I can border on tears when the guppies overwhelm.

How does Alexander reassure me? Without comparisons, shame, or denial, it reaffirms that this too shall pass. Like traumas and calamities, mishaps are part of human experience. It’s not a character flaw to feel stressed by an onslaught of transitory troubles. Some days are like that, even in Australia.

​* There’s also a movie. I’ve only watched the trailer. This is about the book.

I’m finally watching the Netflix series The Crown. Thank you, public library, for lending the episodes on disk. Queen Elizabeth II’s story is filled with drama, romance, political intrigue, family dynamics, and of course history. Much of the history I never knew, some I remember from news reports, and some I’ve written about (see “Great Stink and Killer Fog”).

Monarchy was unremarkable to my Canadian-born parents. My feminist mother, sister to my Aunt Margaret and bearing the middle name Elizabeth, took pleasure in seeing a young woman on the English throne. My father sang to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell, "The twenty-fourth of May’s the Queen’s birthday. It you don’t give us a holiday, we’ll all run away!” The queen in the ditty was Victoria.

Americans are ambivalent about royalty. The Declaration of Independence is largely a detailed list of King George III’s “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The U.S. Constitution prohibits titles of nobility. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Americans’ fascination with the royal family seems to have no limits.
 
On this side of the Atlantic, “No Kings” rallies this past year hark back to the injuries and usurpations of a British king 250 years ago. The signs at supportive rallies in Europe read “No Tyrants!” instead. European nations with constitutional monarchs are now more democratic and less tyrannical than some without a king or queen. Watching The Crown suggests that modern British monarchs may be more deserving of sympathy than of protest.

​Image: Buckingham Palace gates, photo by Mark Stuckey on Unsplash.

My calendars and devices say I’m posting this on Monday, March 30. Maybe it’s really two days later, with the calendars and devices snickering “April Fool!” behind my back.

Gentle, unthreatening practical jokes can delight both prankster and target at any time of year. On April 1, we positively expect them. Jodi Wellman in Psychology Today describes the benign capers that lead to shared laughter as “pro-social mischief.”

Not all pranks are benign, especially in an unequal relationship. A trick played by the boss on a subordinate, or by a big child on a small or timid one, is bullying. In my camp counselor days, when the campers in my cabin short-sheeted my bed (folded the sheet so I couldn’t extend my legs), I laughed and praised their ingenuity. If campers and counselor were strangers, though, short-sheeting might seem insolent.

In a less happy learning experience one summer, several of us middle-class white college students sent inner-city high schoolers into a suburban woodland at night for a snipe hunt (prey we knew wasn’t there). We didn’t realize the dark forest would be as unfamiliar and scary to them as parts of the inner city were to us.

“In short, the ground rule for practical jokes is radical safety,” Wellman writes. No ridicule, no damage, no fear, no exclusion, no pushing personal buttons. Pranksters should reveal the joke quickly, clean up any mess, and honor their “victims” with some sort of celebration afterward. Then we can all laugh together.

Image: “A-maze-ing Laughter,” bronze sculpture by Yue Minjum in Morton Park, Vancouver, British Columbia.​

Do you ever wonder how hard to push yourself?

For several years, that was my favorite conversation starter with people I hoped to know better. It was personal but unintrusive. They could respond as deeply or as lightly as they chose. It was fine if they veered off in another direction: “Not really, but I sometimes . . .” I invariably learned something about the other person, and often something about myself. Every perspective helped with the issue I was struggling with.

It’s about more than work-life balance. My office job had somewhat regular hours; the quandary was on the “life” side of the equation. So many challenges and commitments looked appealing. Saying “yes” was almost irresistible. For self-preservation, at one point I started writing Empty in my pocket calendar for two evenings a week and two weekends a month.

That issue didn’t get resolved so much as it faded in urgency. Now older and retired, with ample free time but limited stamina and capacity, I'm not asking how hard to push but where. Priorities get clearer. The deer in the garden and the owl hooting in the woods feed my spirit for those priorities. Of all that needs doing in this world, I find my niche and let go of the rest.

Do you ever wonder how hard to push yourself?
​
Image: Photo by Sylas Boesten on Unsplash.

Two months ago, the nearby village of DeForest was filled with yard signs. As best I could tell, they were unanimous in opposing plans for a $12 billion data center at the edge of the village. As in other communities resisting data centers, residents questioned potential effects on water supply and energy costs. Once built, the data center would occupy a vast tract of land but provide few local jobs. By late January or early February, the proposal appeared dead.

Other communities are resisting ICE plans to convert privately owned warehouses into immigrant detention facilities. No matter how residents regard immigration policy, they care about their quality of life and the strain on local resources. Federal facilities won’t bring local tax revenue. Municipal governments can’t bar ICE from moving in, but public pressure can deter the private warehouse owners from selling. This process has quashed plans for warehouse conversions in Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, Ashland VA, and elsewhere.

I always used the term NIMBY with a degree of derision. “Not in my back yard” implied wanting the benefit without the nuisance, paved roads without any gravel pits. Now I’m starting to look at NIMBY differently. National and global changes can push us apart as though we have nothing in common. When those changes encroach on our home communities, though, local impact matters more than ideology. At least sometimes, backyard neighbors see shared interests without regard to party. This brings me hope.