Musing with Skinner At the new library BY JERRY HARRIS I am a library freak. In fact, my deceased wife used to tell people that there were two places people could find me — the corner bar or the library. Green Eugene, the bronze sculpture of Eugene Skinner, the founder of this city, sits outside the new public library. I wonder why Whistler's Mother wasn't put beside him for companionship. If one is going to skip 100 years of modern sculpture, why not go all the way? The old pioneer seems to be coming off a bad night at the Horsehead bar, or maybe he is just sitting there musing over a girl with pink hair sitting on his lap. When I am at the new library I like to muse with old Skinner too, even though he can't talk, and if he could, he wouldn't speak to an African-American. Black people were severely segregated in Eugene well into the early '60s, but that is another western tale. Until recently, the Skinner sculpture attracted a crowd of homeless youth, petty criminals, destitute dogs, circus performers, and small-time thugs from Oakland, Calif. The dogs appeared to be more interested in going inside the library than the outsiders. An old-timer sitting with The Founder and me said that he didn't mind the show. "The Eugene monsoon rain washes them all back to California when the winter comes," he said while feeding a dog. I guess a man must laugh or scowl at something. The new library is not like the old. Some might say that it is sterile — a bit Orwellian with its computers, data (on you) banks, alarm systems, and IKEA interior. It's a bit eerie in the era of the PATRIOT Act, when Ashcroft and company have the right to know what you are reading. God help you if you are checking out The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller. The PATRIOT Actors might consider this a bomb-making book, and it is, considering that Miller likes dropping literary bombs on America. Librarians, known as "culture workers" in Sweden, have always intrigued me. They are a serious bunch, melancholic, efficient, smart, and a bit snobbish. Humor and laughter seem to escape them, at work anyway. One told me recently that he was not going to let me check out a CD. "There's a limit of five," he said. I explained to him that I had turned in my allotted five. It didn't matter. It wasn't on his computer. "Sorry pal." Dejected, I walked away like a wimp. Maybe their anxiety was the result of all those computers that didn't need them anymore. Perhaps those electronic demons were taking their jobs. I hope that these sui generis culture workers are not on their way out. I met a lot of homeless people when I worked at the library as a volunteer. It was a maddening experience. "We've replaced the ER mental ward at Sacred Heart," said one of the staff. It is certainly a luxurious place to bed down for the day. "At night I go back to my storage container — low rates — no deposit," said a rather jovial dude. He had recently lost his job and was evicted from his apartment. A smart guy, but down on his luck, he reminded me that it could happen to anyone in George Bush's America. Then there was the guy who cussed me out. "How the fuck did you get a job?" "Excuse me mate, but I am handicapped and I do this one hour a day so that I don't go crazy." Of course this didn't make a dent in his demented mind, but that was it for me, back to my electric rocking chair. I'm still a regular at the library. Mostly I search the aisles looking for books on pain, both mental and physical — no, I am not a sadist, nor am I a hypochondriac. It's just a state of mind and body. Still, life at the library runs relatively smoothly. Once in a while you meet an interesting person. The library is one of the two places where I can meet women. The other is Safeway — pretty low maintenance, as they say, when one is on the prowl. In high school, when I was kicked out of a class for some indiscretion, I was always sent to the library as punishment. It was a strange sentence, because it was there amongst books that I discovered life. Nothing has changed. Oh, sure, we try to take root in some cozy city or town — raise a family, get divorced — but it is the books at the library or the book store that get us going again. Just think, if Eugene Skinner had read books, he might have gone off to Africa instead of sitting here on a log in front of the library looking very bored. Jerry Harris is a sculptor and contributing writer to Eugene Weekly and has just finished his first novel, Mad Swedes and Black Men.     Pray from Peace Working toward common ground BY INGE TARANTOLA Spirituality, for me, is not the same as religion. Religion, as I think about it, draws lines of demarcation that point to the differences in the beliefs of the various religious traditions. Thus, it can create a sense of separation among us. Spirituality lets us see what we have in common such as prayer, a quest for peace, a need for worship and community and a belief in a power greater than ourselves, regardless of the name by which we call that power. It gives us a language that allows us to connect with one another respectfully. When we look at the Golden Rule, we find that most major faith traditions echo those words: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Three years ago the U.N. adopted a resolution designating Sept. 21 of each year as the International Day of Peace. The hope was that the entire world would observe a full day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. All peoples and organizations are invited to commemorate the day in an appropriate manner every year, and we did so in Roseburg, where I am involved with a spiritual community. The great statesman Moshe Dayan said, "If you want peace, don't talk to your friends; talk to your enemies." I believe we must find ways to open the channels of communication and to let the voice of every citizen of this planet be heard, not just of those who are in powerful positions. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is a state of mind and heart. By no means am I advocating passivity, but let all action arise from our peaceful center. Let us not pray for peace, but let us pray from peace. If I pray for peace, I have the sense that it is something outside myself that may be intangible or unattainable or in the future. No, peace is within me and within all of us now. So let us affirm peace and harmony, from that peaceful center within. The Eugene Interfaith community has offered a prayer service every month since 9/11. Their theme this past September on that eventful date's third anniversary was this: "There will be no peace until there is justice." By that I envision social, economic, gender, racial, age, and religious justice on a global scale. So we are called to the cause of justice around the world for all people. Let's put hands and feet to our prayers to guide us to appropriate action. Does global peace sound too good to be true? John Randolph Price said: "Nothing is too good to be true." Justice is elusive — but I recognize it when I see it. I believe we're all connected and called to look upon each other with compassion. Not once, but twice I read in the Bible, Jesus said to love. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39) and "Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (John. 13:34). There are no conditions in these statements – not if, not when, not just some and not others. Let's practice justice through love toward all. The Rev. Inge Tarantola is a Unity minister in Eugene and attends interfaith activities. This column is coordinated by Two Rivers Interfaith Ministries (TRIM) which sponsors the 11th of the month interfaith services at First Christian Church, and a special Thanksgiving service at 7 pm Tuesday, Nov. 23 at Central Presbyterian Church, including an all-community interfaith choir. For information or sheet music, call 344-5693.     Water Works Indisputable rationale for reproductive freedom BY SALLY SHEKLOW Every Thanksgiving I thank my poor parents, rest their souls. It's a wonder they lived as long as they did, considering the toll I took on them. The expressions on their faces after my various antics loom large in my memory and keep me thankful I never had kids of my own. As a child, I caused a lot of household damage, most of it involving water. Had my energies been channeled into more scientific pursuits, I might have become some kind of genius in the field of agricultural irrigation. But left to my own devices, my experiments veered toward home flooding. By the time I was 6, I'd completely saturated the entire square footage of our three-bedroom house — twice. In my first episode I tried to replicate a TV commercial. In it a bathing beauty in a tall glass tank smiled underwater and held up a successfully retrieved, still-ticking Timex watch. Having no glass tank, swimming pool, or other body of water, I improvised. I took my mother's Lady Bulova wristwatch from her jewelry box and brought it into the lab — my parents' bathroom. I closed myself inside the shower stall, plugged the drain with a rubber stopper, crammed my mom's entire collection of shower caps into the under-door crack, and turned on the water. I sat in there on the pink-tiled shower floor playing with Mom's watch while my tank filled. My experiment was interrupted by the screams of my mother coming home from work to a sheet of water flowing out from under the front door. My second flooding incident entailed even more water. My cousin Wendy had come over to play one hot summer day. Before Mom left for work she told us to be good, a weird instruction for a couple of 6-year-olds. Our idea of good had, just the week before, included giving all the stuffed animals full-body shaves with dad's electric razor. Wendy and I loved our dentist's fancy fish tank and wanted to make one of our own — big enough for us to be the fish. I was going to be a neon tetra. Wendy would be an angel fish. We stopped up the crack under my bedroom door and dumped some pennies onto the floor so we could dive for them once the water was deep enough. I climbed out the bedroom window onto the picnic table and into our front yard. I handed Wendy the garden hose through the window and turned on the spigot full blast. The hose sputtered a little, then started to flip around like a crazy snake. It sprayed all over my pink floral wallpaper before I could climb back in and help Wendy wrestle it into submission. We wedged it between my mattress and the dust-ruffled box spring where it made a beautiful fountain pouring out water onto my bedroom floor. Our squeals and giggles should have alerted my baby-sitting big brother, but he just sat in the family room glued to "Spin and Marty." Wendy and I were stomping around on the sploshy carpet when a car pulled up the driveway and tooted its horn. We climbed out onto the picnic table and waved hi. Wendy's mom leaned out the driver's window and asked did we want to go out for ice cream. Naturally we did. The 6-year-old brain being incapable of retaining awareness of running water at the same time ice cream is involved, we hopped into Auntie Phyll's wood-paneled station wagon and drove off. And now here comes Thanksgiving, the holiday that reminds us to be thankful. I thank my dearly departed parents for never mentioning the cost of replacing the carpet or the Bulova (which did not keep on ticking). Above all, I'm thankful that — for the time being, at least — reproduction is not mandatory. To take action against the right-wing assault on reproductive freedom, visit www.naral.org Writer Sally Sheklow performs with the improv comedy troupe WYMPROV! and welcomes comments at sally@wymprov.com
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