I had an amazingly productive day yesterday. We finished the taxes! That’s the biggie: this is the first year we are doing them ourselves after having accountants for many years. I followed along closely last year and am using TurboTax and feel fairly confident about the whole thing. We’re getting an extension so at some point, I’ll print the whole packet and review it against last year’s to see what different. Here’s an interesting thing: we only got the standard deduction even though in the past we’ve itemized. Just not enough medical stuff or mortgage interest on this old house to get us over the hump. We could do more charities, although I think we give a lot for our income.
I made chicken legs General Tsao style and a potato herb frittata for dinner. As a post-tax treat, I made baked tortilla chips in the convection oven. They were very good and since I used spray, I think they were very low in calories.
I also got a lot of little things off my to do list in preparation for travel. I decided to drive west tonight for a few hours so tomorrow morning is a bit more leisurely. I was not looking forward to being on the road at 6 AM and 8 hours in the car. I’ve got something else to do so I’ll stay over until Wednesday as well. My bags are packed; I’m ready to go.
The main point of this post is to record a quote from Annie Dillard’s The Living, which I finished last week. It has been raining here for three or four days and I feel like I’m in the Pacific Northwest without the views of Mount Rainier and Mount Baker hovering always on the horizon. The novel focuses on the history of the Bellingham, Washington, area and follows the pioneer families through several generations. It was superb, really, with startling metaphors woven into its sometimes spare historical narrative.
But, I’m giving it up. Taking it to the Book Exchange with several others including the Carl Hiassen (Double Whammy) I finished this morning. And there’s one quote I didn’t want to lose as it deals with change:
The women, low on the logs, had started up “long Ago, Sweet Long Ago,” and the men’s deep voices met their earnest sopranos boldly; they all love this song. They sang in the dark, and looked at the fire. They had seen younger faces, around other fires; they had sung beneath other skies, in other times, far away. The tide was starting out, and the wet mud reflected the fire darkly, in only the yellows.
Each man and woman had seen the old ways lost in half a life time, and knew there never was a generation so pushed, spun, and accelerated by change as their own, and so nostalgic for a more innocent past, however fanciful. It was their childhoods they mourned for, and the vanished times and places and people (pp. 357-358).
I was struck by the notion that these people, living in the late 19th century felt as we do today: spun out of control by the force of change around them. In their lifetimes, they saw massive expansion of travel, from the wagons they drove across the frontier to get to Washington to the railroads, whose choices of towns for depots could make or break a community. And, with that travel, came more accelerated communication. Certainly nothing like what we have today, I know, but for them, taking several weeks off the delivery of a letter or being able to send a telegram must have seemed like quite a feat.
Yet, these people are mourning more than technologies, but the culture that developed around such technologies. Wagon trains built community; railroads encouraged individualism. “A more innocent past, however fanciful” captures that notion of looking back on something that never really existed, a memory that sustains you.
