Around 4 or 5 in the morning, I’m, usually, awake and jotting notes about things I want to keep in mind.
Maybe, ‘jotting’ isn’t the word for it. Jotting notes on paper, in this high-tech age, seems passé. Nowadays, I’m mostly tapping notes on a smart phone. On a tiny keyboard. I could talk into the phone. Dictating notes would be easier, but talking out loud might wake the rest of our household, so I tap, slowly and inefficiently, on that incredibly small keyboard, quietly grumbling.
Here’s some of the stuff I tapped out, the other day. You’ll see that sentences, in the notes, are incomplete, the grammar isn’t so good, and some words are in high-tech shorthand. That’s something I’m learning to do, I’m abbreviating words, so I won’t go nuts, laboriously attempting to type big words. I’m writing ‘gov,’ for example, rather than ‘government,’ and ‘ur’ for ‘your’ or ‘you’re.’
So, bear with me, here’s Note #1: “He’s pulling stuff out of his…” (I’ll leave the last word, in the incomplete sentence, to your imagination.) I was recalling several things the nation’s current president has been saying recently. And recalling something else, as well, about White House staff, evidently, attempting to keep the president out of the decision-making process.
“Where does that put things? Us? In the crapper?” I was wondering about that, as I was typing Note #2 on the phone.
And then, this, in Note #3: “The ‘Primary role of gov is to protect people’. Gotta keep that in mind.”
Here’s Note #4: “Anthony Baxter… about Turnberry… the elderly lady’s farm is blighted?”
I had to go online for more, with regard to that brief note, and the first thing I read was: “You’ve Been Trumped is a 2011 documentary by British filmmaker Anthony Baxter. The film documents the construction of a luxury golf course on a beach in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, by developer Donald Trump and the subsequent struggles between the locals, Donald Trump, and Scottish legal and governmental authorities.”
I recalled something in the news on TV, about a lady in her 90s, and her son, who reside on a parcel of land near a Trump Organization golf course, out there in Scotland. I thought I’d heard the word “blighted” mentioned in the story, with regard to that small parcel of land. But it was other words the Trump Organization had used that were quoted in The Independent, a UK online site: “Pig sty,” those were the words.
Then, I realized why that word — ‘blighted’ — had come to mind. ‘Blighted’ was the word used as a rationale for developing the “27-acre parcel on Hot Springs Boulevard,” as mentioned in Bill Hudson’s editorials about “the corrupt streets of Pagosa Springs.”
Funnily enough, as they say in the UK, there was something else at the back of my mind, as I was reading online about the Trump golf course. Something about an estimated 6,000 jobs that would be created at the golf resort. But at the time that one of several articles, were published in The Independent, there were only “150 people directly employed” at the golf resort. In relatively low-wage jobs, perhaps? Where the cost of living would seem to be quite high?
Was that another reason why those 27 acres in Pagosa Springs had resurfaced in my mind?
I made another note, in the phone, about a series of programs my family and I discovered on TV. About street food cooking, and an elderly lady, also in her 90s, who has been cooking street food in Indonesia, as I recall. In the program, you see this wonderful lady meticulously doing what she loves to do, hunched over hot, steaming pots and pans. She looks so fragile, but she has grit. She jokes that most of her teeth are missing, but her smile is captivating. She loves cooking a particular, sweet-tasting food that people stand in line, for three hours or more, to purchase. She does much of the cooking, herself, with some family helping out. But she loves what she’s been doing for many decades and says she’s going to continue cooking, and keeping her special recipe to herself, until she’s much older.
Later that night, with the street cooking show in mind, I typed this note on the phone: “Cultures… u close urself off to cultures… to people… u become empty… empty… that’s something!” There’s much to learn – and to gain – from people, everywhere!
And in one more note to myself, I had typed the words – ‘plantation capitalism.’ I think I heard those words during the memorial service, in Atlanta, for John Lewis. It would be interesting to learn more about ‘plantation capitalism,’ and maybe write about it… sometime, soon.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.