It’s mushroom season on the Oregon coast. My yard and the woods around us are full of them. This week, I’m sharing photos of mushrooms Annie and I found on our walk. The whole series of photos took place in less than a week. These are Coprinus comatus, also known as Ink Cap mushrooms. They’re edible, but you have to catch them quickly because they blossom and die in only a few days.
![IMG_20151012_150924430[1]](https://unleashedinoregon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_20151012_1509244301.jpg)
![IMG_20151016_143217329[1]](https://unleashedinoregon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_20151016_1432173291.jpg)
“All right, Miss Sue,” said the doctor’s receptionist as she set up my appointment. I flinched. I’m being called “Miss Sue” too often lately. The woman in charge of putting my car back together after my accident a couple months ago called me “Miss Sue” constantly. I’ve heard it before, and I’ll hear it again, but I don’t like it. I’m not a “Miss,” haven’t been for 41 years, and I’m old enough to be that receptionist’s grandmother. I’d like to toss out the whole Miss, Ms., Mrs. thing along with the white-girl afro I wore in the ’80s. It’s so last century.
Google offers dozens of websites where people dither over whether to call a woman Miss, Ms. or Mrs., especially if they don’t know whether or not she’s married. Who cares? Men have always been Mr., married, single or shacking up.
When I was growing up, every girl’s goal was to advance from Miss to Mrs. A popular joke was that women went to college to get an MRS degree, meaning it was more important to find a husband than an education. Then the women’s liberation movement started and we adopted Ms., a neutral abbreviation that did not delineate our marital status. Fine. I’ve used it, but it can sound a little like slave and mistress talk, as in, “Okay, Miz Sue, I’ll draw your bath as soon as I finish mopping this-here floor.” Ugh. Just call me Sue. Or Mrs. Lick.
The arrival of “Ms.” didn’t stop most people from still using “miss.” On too many jobs in my college years, bosses used “Miss” almost as a pejorative. And how many waitresses over the years have been called “Miss” just before a customer complained about something? It’s like “Miss” means you don’t deserve the respect of a “Mrs.” Etiquette guru Emily Post says “Miss” is for females under age 18. That works for me.
I’m sure most people don’t mean anything by it, but these little things raise my hackles. So don’t “miss” me. Even though my husband died, I still claim the “Mrs.” title, preferably with my last name. Just like my mother taught me oh so many years ago when she was Mrs. Fagalde. Mrs. Clarence Fagalde. She was taught married women didn’t use their own first names in formal address. Hogwash, I say. I have never called myself Mrs. Husband’s Name.
It’s the 21st century. Let’s just use our first, middle and last names and forget the rest. Okay?
Just call me Sue Lick.
What do you think about this?
“I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart,” I sang, standing at the mic watching kids from kindergarten through fifth grade waving their arms and singing along. The setting sun was shining through the windows, and we were rocking the church. It doesn’t get better than this, I thought.
Every Wednesday, as part of my music minister duties at Sacred Heart Church in Newport, Oregon, I lead music for the children, singing and playing guitar. It’s usually only four songs, fifteen minutes before they adjourn to the classrooms for their religious education lessons. It takes me longer to set up before and put away my music afterward, but there’s a wild freedom to it that I love. I’m an aging woman with a Joan Baez voice, but to the little ones looking up at me, I’m a rock star. To Sandy Cramer, the religious education director, I’m the one who saves her from having to lead the singing herself. And I get to share my favorite religious songs with a new generation.
Grownups in Catholic churches are notoriously reluctant to sing. They sit in their pews staring at the missalettes, their lips firmly sealed. But the kids are young enough to let it out, even if they’re off-key. Some have big voices while other kids have little butterfly-wing voices, so soft you have to get within inches to hear them.
They don’t just sing. Sandy has paired gestures from American Sign Language with the songs. I’m often grateful that my hands are busy with my guitar because it can be like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. Joy: raise your arms high and wiggle your hands. Love: cross your hands over your chest. God: Point your index finger skyward. Work: Make like you’re hammering. Bird: make like you’re flying. If you’re five and can’t read the words projected on the screen, you can still wave your arms.
If only grownups put this much energy into the music. Sitting at the piano on a Sunday morning, I often hear only a few singers, with maybe one or two who sing extra loud, not necessarily on the beat. The best times are when I hear a wave of singing behind me and suddenly feel like we’re all together in this music, in this love of God, in this service. But usually when I look around, I see most people not singing. Somewhere between the “Joy, Joy, Joy” of fifth grade and now, the adults have decided they can’t sing, shouldn’t sing, have bad voices, or would be too embarrassed, so they sit silent no matter how much we urge them to let God hear the voices He gave them or tell them “he who sings prays twice.” Nope, not singing. Which is why our “choir” sometimes consists of two people with the courage to give it a shot.
Last week, I looked out and saw a pretty blonde third-grader singing her heart out. Behind her, a husky Mexican boy belted out the words. Right in front of me, a kindergarten girl didn’t know what she was singing, but she was making noises and waving her hands, smiling like crazy.
As was I. When I was a kid–back when we called it Catechism and our teachers were nuns in black habits–the music was my favorite part of our Saturday lessons. We’d file into the church to sing songs like “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” and “Immaculate Mary.” No gestures. No wiggling allowed. But that music filled me up. I took those songs home and figured out how to play them on the piano and sing them to myself. Today’s songs are more rowdy. We have no nuns at Sacred Heart, just Sandy and I in our jeans, projecting the words from a PowerPoint file onto the screen and singing that “Joy, Joy, Joy,” hoping these kids will never stop singing.
Post-Vatican II, the choirs in Catholic churches are not supposed to do all the singing. This is not a performance. We are leading the congregation, who should be singing with us. But that message has not trickled down to everyone yet, especially to those who grew up in the days when the priest spoke Latin and faced away from the people. I worry that as music programs get cut from the schools, church may be the only place the kids are exposed to music. But maybe, God willing, someday everybody will sing.
Meanwhile, I’m having a ball helping the kids rock out with Jesus.
Marijuana, grass, weed, ganja, pot*. The dried leaves and female flowers of the hemp plant. Smoke it, make brownies, cook up a medicinal omelet. Get caught with it and go to jail. Test positive for it, and you lose your job. Start with grass, and pretty soon you’re taking heroine and cocaine. Mellow stoners walking around in a daze, scarfing down junk food because the weed gave them the munchies? Sneaking a joint out back?
That’s how it used to be, but now it’s legal in Oregon. We voted for it, and it passed. Last summer, stores here started selling medicinal marijuana to those with prescriptions. On Oct. 1, they started selling pot for recreational use. Anyone over 21 can walk into a store and buy a quarter ounce of leaves to use as they wish. The headline on the front of Friday’s News-Times proclaims: At Long Last, Retail Pot. The photo shows a line of middle-aged people walking into Pipe Dreams Dispensary in Lincoln City to buy pot in broad daylight. We have four marijuana stores in Newport, eleven in Lincoln County. No more dealers sneaking baggies to customers in the dark.
Saturday, driving home from Portland, I saw one of those tall skinny balloon guys wiggling in the breeze next to a building all lit up with Christmas lights. It had a lighted green cross. At first I thought it was some kind of church. But then I read the letters on the side of the rubber guy: marijuana.
It is so strange. All our lives it was illegal to use it or have it. A felony. Now it’s being advertised like cars and computers.
While I was at a meeting in Portland, all of us working on our computers, one of the guys, long-haired, about my age, shared his expertise on the subject. He and his wife went to one of the marijuana shops on the first day, sniffed the various types of leaves and each purchased their limit. They planned to bake it into cookies. While you get a rush from smoking, you get a longer, more mellow experience when you eat it in a brownie or a blondie, he said. Whatever was bothering you before does not bother you once the marijuana kicks in, he added with a smile.
Strange. Talking pot recipes.
I think back to parties and picnics where I got a whiff of that sweet smell and felt the thrill of violating the law. I remember an outdoor Willie Nelson concert to which my brother and I took our mom in 1980. She sniffed the air. “Is that marijuana?” Mike and I looked at each other and laughed. “Yeah, I think so,” I said, breathing it in, hoping for a tiny high.
Then there was the whole Stan situation. Back when I was in college in the ‘70s, I was living at home and dating this guy named Stan because I really liked his friend Jack. Wherever Stan was, Jack was. Stan was very weird, possibly stoned all the time. He wore paisley shirts and striped pants, had this odd high laugh and green stuff growing on his teeth, but I had almost convinced myself I was in love with him. One night while Mom and I were watching TV, she turned to me during a commercial and asked if any of my friends smoked pot. I said yes, sometimes, but I never did. Well! The TV went off, my father was called in, and I was ordered to stay away from Stan and all his friends.
Stan came over to plead his love for me and his status as an upstanding citizen. I remember him sitting in the big chair by the window, talking in his spaced-out high-low voice while I sat on the edge of the sofa wringing my hands. Soon he and Dad were both shouting and then Stan was out the door, driving away forever. I hollered something at my father, probably my usual, “You just don’t understand!” and ran to my room sobbing.
All because of marijuana. And now it’s legal. I have no idea what happened to Stan or Jack, can’t understand now why I wasted a minute on either one of those guys. But I was 19 going on 12.
Yesterday I passed three marijuana stores on my way home from church. So strange.
Recreational marijuana is now legal in Oregon, Washington and Colorado. There are still restrictions. See marijuana.oregon.gov. You can only buy a quarter ounce of dried leaves and flowers per person per day, but you can possess up to eight ounces. You can’t smoke it in public. If caught, you get a citation, like a traffic ticket. An article in Sunday’s Oregonian reported that you still can’t have or use pot on any of the state’s college campuses because the colleges get federal funding and it’s still illegal nationally. But if you get caught, you probably won’t go to jail.
A guy at our Friday jam session said he’d never tried pot, but maybe now he will. I’m thinking the same thing. It sounds nice. And if you can combine it with brownies, hallelujah!
If my mother were alive, she would be amazed. At this point, my father just shakes his head.
Ah, Oregon.
* The word “pot” came into use in America in the late 1930s. It is a shortening of the Spanish potiguaya or potaguaya that came from potación de guaya, a wine or brandy in which marijuana buds have been steeped. It literally means “the drink of grief.” –-blog.dictionary.com/pot-marijuana
Unleashed in Oregon 