Meanderings, 12 August 2023
We’ve got three chrysalises dangling from the top of our little net cages. We’re thinking one will burst forth into the world of a Monarch Butterfly by the end of this weekend. Cheer our little chrysalis on for this one. Thanks.
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash
As schools resume, in certain regions food insecurity remains a challenge for many districts. Students arrive hungry and districts accumulate debt while providing free meals.
Millions of children face this issue nationwide, but a Missouri teen is drawing from his personal experience of uncertainty about lunch and actively working to aid children in his local community.
“I’m only one person, but if everyone starts doing something like this, it will start to make change,” said DeJuan Strickland.
At 14 years old, Strickland demonstrates age is no barrier to impact. With determination, he successfully addressed his community’s child hunger issue.
Through a GoFundMe campaign, he cleared lunchroom debt for students at his former elementary school, McCurdy Elementary. Strickland’s initial goal of $200 was surpassed, raising $400 instead.
“The reason why I wanted to do that was because I’ve experienced not having enough money to pay for school lunches,” Strickland said.
During Strickland’s fourth-grade year, there was a day when his lunch balance was $0. Although his mother managed to add funds, it was a struggle for her.
“One time I was on disability so my income was fixed and so we had times when food was rough,” Sharron Prather, Strickland’s mother, said, reflecting on challenging times.
The mother and son duo continued raising funds, ultimately eliminating school debt across the Hazelwood School District, a suburb near St. Louis, Missouri.
“Maybe one day in the future, lunch will be free for everybody,” Strickland said.
Across the nation, nine million children face food insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The yearly national public school meal debt amounts to $262 million, with more than 30 million students unable to afford school meals.
MEXICO CITY -- Gently holding a baby hummingbird between her hands, Catia Lattouf says, “Hello, cute little guy. Are you very hungry?” It’s the newest patient at her apartment in a toney section of Mexico City where she has nursed hundreds of the tiny birds back to health over the past decade.
Under Lattouf’s caress, the bird relaxes little by little, allowing her to evaluate it. A young man who rescued it after it fell from a nest onto his patio watched attentively.
“It is a broad-billed hummingbird,” the 73-year-old Lattouf said, as she moved an eyedropper to its beak. “Oh, mama, you want to eat!”
This is often how Lattouf’s days have gone since she turned her apartment in Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood into a clinic for sick, injured or infant hummingbirds, about 60 of which currently flit around.
Lattouf, who studied French literature, has become a reference source for bird lovers, amateur and professional alike, across Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
Her improvised clinic also supports more formal institutions like the Iztacala campus of Mexico’s National Autonomous University, which sometimes refers cases to her due to a lack of resources, time and space, said one of its researchers, the ornithologist María del Coro Arizmendi.
Arizmendi said there are 22 species of hummingbird in Mexico’s sprawling capital, of which the broad-billed and the berylline hummingbird are the most common. In Mexico, there are some 57 species and around 350 across the Americas.
In the wake of WWI, a brilliant woman in search of an income found herself in a quandary. Here she was, a woman in a man’s world, and therefore unable to become a professor—a path she would have likely pursued, had she been born half a century later. She was, nevertheless, someone prone to live inside her head, dwelling less comfortably with people than with her intense and deep ideas about so many topics, from the Greco-Roman Classics to Dante’s poetry to French literature and, most of all, theology and God’s claims on her life.
Sure, the myth persists today that degrees in English or other literatures are worthless; apt to leave one broke, unemployed, and unemployable. This is a lie as much in our own age as it was in Sayers’. You see, every advertising agency or company selling any kind of goods needs a copywriter.
The copywriter’s job is far from glamorous, but just think of all these words with which we are besieged on every side today—on roadside billboards, on websites for every product imaginable, on ads that troll us on social media. Someone has to write all these words, painstakingly making sure that they read smoothly, are free of error, and hopefully portray the product enticingly enough to get readers to buy it. This someone is a career writer, most often a proud owner of a degree in English or literature with dreams and aspirations of becoming the next J. K. Rowling or Dante or Keats. Instead, here they are, writing eloquent ads for meatless breakfast sausages, absolutely leak-proof diapers, and toilet paper so soft even the bears love it.
It is mind-blowing to imagine in retrospect, as we think of Dorothy Sayers as who she became by the end of her life—a best-selling crime writer, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a public intellectual par excellence—that for a decade (from 1922 to 1931), she was primarily a copywriter for an advertising agency.
Sayers was never content to be peddling mustard and beer—as characteristically elaborate and witty as her jingles for such products were. But this time in her life was not wasted. Rather, she used this period to solve her own crisis of the evangelical mind and in the process, perhaps not even quite realizing it at the time, she determined the track that the rest of her life took.
The key question that she faced during this rather low time in her life was: what should an intellectual woman do to make ends meet if she feels called to a life of the mind, yet the traditional careers that most readily offer such a life are closed to her?
William Henry Brown, good on you, too:
GREENVILLE, Mich. (WOOD) — A barber in Greenville, Michigan is celebrating his 96th birthday on Aug. 13, and he is still up on his feet, cutting hair.
William Henry Brown, or Bill to many people, has been cutting hair for more than 50 years.
Before he became a barber, Brown wanted to go into the military. But when he tried to join the Navy at 17, he was seen as physically unfit due to a heart condition that he received after being ill as a child.
The next year, he tried again, and it was the same result: physically unfit.
“I felt bad, being a draft dodger, and all my buddies and everyone were in. (My) cousins, nephews … So, no, it didn’t feel right,” Brown said.
On his third attempt, he finally was drafted into the Army and sent to Germany during the Korean War.
I put two years over there. Then in December of 1952, they sent me home,” Brown said.
After coming home, he worked in Detroit at a factory. Then he took a trip to West Michigan and applied for a job at a barbershop in Greenville, which he got.
“I drove from Caledonia, 50 miles one way here, for two years,” Brown said.
Then one day, he came to work and was asked if he wanted to buy the barbershop. After talking it over with his wife, he said yes.
“It’s been an experience and everybody, as the clientele comes in, everybody’s personalities are different,” Brown told Nexstar’s WOOD.
It became Bill’s Barbershop, a one-chair barbershop where you don’t need to schedule an appointment, you just drop in.
“If they’ve never been here, give me a shout. And don’t be afraid to talk to me because I don’t bite,” Brown said.
He credits his faith and his late wife, Clara, for helping him navigate tough times in his life.
“I survived and I’m still surviving today. God has different plans. God does different than what government and men do,” Brown said.
While he loves being a barber, Brown called it something he needs to do to survive.
“Thank God I can work because I don’t have the pension. I have social security and haircuts. So I budget and I live on what I make.”
The 95-year-old works six days a week at his barbershop.
Before long we’ll hear about “rizz” preachers:
“Rizz” is a relatively young word — it’s been circulating online since 2021 — but one that’s cemented its place in the cultural lexicon. It can describe one’s self-assurance, wooing prowess or general coolness. It’s hard to define but immediately noticeable in practice.
And unless you have a TikTok-fluent person in your life, it probably sounds like gibberish. Here’s what you need to know about the slang word-turned-catchall descriptor for someone with undeniable swag.
“Rizz” is, basically, a truncated version of “charisma” that refers to one’s unique swagger and overall success in endeavors both platonic and romantic. It can be used to describe a stereotypical “ladies’ man,” like Ryan Gosling’s character in the rom-com “Crazy Stupid Love,” or the general swagger one brings to everyday life, like Ryan Gosling on the press tour for “Barbie.” “Rizz” is that “je ne sais quoi” quality that describes someone self-possessed and assured of their own awesomeness who inspires others to develop their own confidence.
Just what I needed to read today. Thank you so much.
Always thankful for your Saturday meanderings .