Every Purpose Under Heaven in Everyday Ramblings

To everything, turn turn turn, there is a season…

Even though it is the height of summer here the chestnuts on the big trees a few blocks down are getting ready to fall. I have tried to get some pictures to share but the light just hasn’t been right. Today it is warming up again and we are expected to have blistering heat the next few days, which is unusual for us.

I am waiting for the handyman with some trepidation.

I’ll keep this relatively short. I just wanted to share my excitement over yet another history connection I made yesterday afternoon. Trying to find out more about Miss Anna Belle Crocker the artist that at one time lived in the cottage I posted a picture of yesterday (that is across the street from the church/temple that is across the street from me that I can see while typing this) I had this inspiration that for some reason she might have been Unitarian.

When I mentioned this before class last night in a building owned by the Unitarians and in which a number of my students are Unitarians, one of my other students, not Unitarian, (he was raised in Alabama very much a Christian) asked how I would know a Unitarian in general. There was much laughter at that. I said, well first off, Unitarians are really really smart.

It is hard to describe. We tend to be kind of nerdy in a dry but passionate sort of way. Practical (in this I don’t quite fit the profile) but artistic and very well educated (some might say… over educated) and well heeled as well.

It was a gestalt thing, an impression based on what I am learning about the movers and shakers in Portland at the time. As director of the Portland Art Museum Miss Crocker brought the scandalous Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp to town and shook things up. But she also had a sense of proprietary about the art museum and was not in favor of the garden club exhibiting there.

Anyway just before I left for class I looked in the index of our newly minted church history “Toward the Beloved Community” and there she was! A very active member.

For our historic Eliot Chapel Miss Crocker designed the huge simple Tree of Life tapestry that hangs above the organ. I have spent a great deal of time looking at that tapestry. It is one of the first things I saw in Portland when I was deciding to move here. What we have now is a remake of the original as the first one burned in a fire.

One of my poetry friends told me a long time ago that her aunt made that tapestry so now I am most curious if she was related to Miss Crocker and will need to investigate.

Class was good. The person who is the director of adult programming at the church is very busy and lovely and has been coming the last few weeks and last night said without prompting she needs to get me on the fall schedule somehow. With that kind of exposure to our broader community I will actually be able to not only enjoy teaching more but will finally be able to consistently make money doing it! Sweet.

Paying my dues over the last three years will finally begin to pay off. Yippee!

Last updated July 28, 2015