A line is thin. A line is narrow --
curved like a worm, straight as an arrow.
        .   .   .
Yes, a line is fine, but when a line swerves,
when a line bends, watch what can happen . . .
a shape begins!
from: When a Line Bends . . . A Shape Begins
written by Rhonda Gowler Greene
illustrated by James Kaczman
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997


    A movement is underway in Ohio. 
    This past weekend I joined three other women to collect signatures for the Citizens Not Politicians petition to ban gerrymandering in Ohio. These petition-signing events are happening all over the state. You can check their website to find a location. (Check the hours of your county Board of Elections, too. Call to find out if they have petitions available to sign.)
    The League of Women Voters, Common Cause Ohio, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio have joined with others around the state to ensure that voters have fair maps that represent the different geographic areas and demographics Ohio. A petition is circulating that, if accepted by the Secretary of State will 

• create a 15-member Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission to represent the different geographic areas and demographics of Ohio
• ban current or former politicians, political party officials, and lobbyists from sitting on the commission
• require fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician.
• require the commission to operate under an open and independent process.

(from the petition tab of Citizens Not Politicians website.)


    Before the 2012 election, and after the 2010 US Census was tallied, the states were tasked with drawing new boundaries for their Federal and State Congressional Districts. Of course the boundaries were drawn to favor the party in power, in Ohio’s case the Republicans. But the maps were so far out of whack that the Supreme Court of Ohio declared them unconstitutional. They were invalid. The group of appointed politicians went back the the drawing board and came up with new maps and more new maps. The Ohio Supreme Court struck them down as being unconstitutional, time after time, until a compromise was reached.
    In November, 2023, the Ohio Ballot Board allowed the current petition’s circulation. If the petition campaign is successful, the unconstitutional maps would ONLY be used one more time, in 2024! 
    I like to think my vote counts. After all, that’s what a representative democracy is supposed to provide for its citizens, meaningful elections. While I understand that a majority is necessary, I vote for a representative who, in turn, will vote in my interest. But what happens when our representatives don’t voice the majority’s opinions? How can that happen anyway?
    In 1812, Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area. He drew a line around neighborhoods that included more of “his” people. Because its shape was compared to a mythological salamander, we get Gerry-mander…gerrymander. Here's a map of MA including a map of his gerrymandered area around Boston. 
    This re-districting technique caught on quickly. Districts in any particular state can be drawn to create politically advantageous voting blocs.
    The U.S. Constitution requires a census every 10 years for the express purpose of redistributing Congressional districts. Because populations do not grow evenly. In the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court decided that similar numbers of people should reside in each district. Sometimes an area needs to be re-drawn so a more consistent number of people can be represented. 
    Each state decides who draws its lines.                
    If the district lines are seen to be gerrymandered, that is, giving advantage to one group over another, especially if the targeted group is in the minority, the Courts can be called in. 
    This is the current condition in Ohio.
    As late as November 2015, after the last map was declared unconstitutional but accepted anyway, “even Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose, and Gov. Mike DeWine, all Republican commission members, expressed frustration with this year’s mapmaking process, citing concerns about a “partisan process.” (ACLU.org) 
    Even if the Ohio Supreme Court and the current commission members are okay with gerrymandering, I am not. I understand that a direct democracy in a country of 341,327,772 people is impracticably cumbersome. Even with Ohio’s population of 11,807,067, an overhaul to a direct democracy is not feasible. 
    But when I cast a vote for the candidate who I expect will represent the majority of people in my district, I also expect that he or she has a fair shot of receiving the majority of votes cast. 
    I hope I have not presented an over-simplified summary in my search for understanding this complicated issue. I’m glad gerrymandering is finally getting some of the attention it deserves. We cannot be a true democracy if our elections suppress our collective voice. If we are not heard at the ballot boxes of this country because our individual voices have been divided and conquered, we can contact our Representatives. Find your Ohio Legislators here. And here’s a handy way find your US Representative. 
    To help Ohioans make our voting system more fair, look for a Citizens Not Politicians petition to sign and sign it. Let’s all work together for free and fair elections to choose representatives who really speak for the majority of us. 
    
Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2008), is the story of three kids who meet serendipitously at the fictional Moon Shadow Campgrounds to view the upcoming solar eclipse. They forge friendships, explore space science, and learn to trust themselves and each other as they prepare for and experience totality. Just in time for our own 4/8/24 totality. More on the eclipse next week.
                                      -—Be curious! (and speak up)

    “Turkey vultures aren’t really dangerous,” Dr. Tibbits said. “They’re just scavengers.”
                                     from Gone to the Buzzards
                                            written by C. B. Jones
                                         Illustrated by Chris Green
                               Stone Arch Books/Capstone, 2017
                                             read on Libby 3/16/24

    Usually, in Ohio at least, robins are the harbinger of Spring. My husband and I are always sure to tell each other of the first one we see. “Ours” have been back for about a week or so.
    I had a robin stuffie that lived in my Storytime Bag. When I presented a story time about spring, I’d reach in pretending to pull out a springtime story. I’d squeeze my little bird to make it chirp and looked surprised when it did. I’d ask the children what they thought was making that sound. “A  robin!” they’d (predictably) answer. And we’d go on from there.
    But robins are not spring’s only herald.
    Swallows return to Mission San Juan Capistrano in Southern California each spring. The song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” written by Leon René, made it to the top of Your Hit Parade when it was released in 1939. It’s been recorded by Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, and Pat Boone among others. There’s a whole room at the Mission dedicated to René where you can see the piano he composed it on.
    The return of the swallows was unintentionally promoted in the early 1900s by St. John O’Sullivan. The Mission had fallen into rack and ruin due to its abandonment in 1886. O’Sullivan, a Catholic priest, was looking for a dry climate to help him cope with his recent diagnosis of tuberculosis. He began working, on his own, to restore the Mission. As he continued his work, support for the Mission grew. Today, the site functions as a museum and serves as headquarters of the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society and the repository of all its archives.
    But wait! There’s more! Swallows and robins are not all we watch for at the beginning of spring, either.
    Like clockwork, according to the Hinkley Chamber of Commerce, buzzards return to Hinkley, Ohio, on March 15 every year. 
    On February 15, 1957, The Cleveland Press ran a story describing the 29-year-old legend, originally told by a member of the Hinckley Reservation police force. He predicted their return in exactly one month. Tension, suspense, and controversy ran at a fever pitch. Believers were sure the buzzards would come back. And at 2 p.m. on March 15th, the first buzzard was spotted by a Metropolitan Parks Police and Park Naturalists’ skywatch camera.
    Harold E. Wallin and John Kason, citizen bird-watchers, were the sharp-eyed spotters. Wallin worked together with park officials as quickly as they could to organize the expected bevy of onlookers, sightseers, and revelers. But the crowd exceeded all expectations. In all, over 9,000 Ohioans overran the park. By mid-morning, cafes, restaurants, and all local food establishments had run dry. 
    Photographers, reporters, even movie, radio, and TV folks caught the whole event for posterity. It was called the most spectacular “bird walk” in history.
    Not to be caught unawares again, the Chamber of Commerce organized the Annual Buzzard Sunday Festival for the first Sunday after March 15 every year. This year, 2024, the 67th Annual Buzzard Day in Hinkley, Ohio, is planned for Sunday, March 24, from 7:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m. I know, that’s the 2nd Sunday after the 15th, but that’s the plan for this year. Click here for the link to the Chamber’s FaceBook page where you can see the schedule of events, peruse pictures, and watch a video (from 2018).
    Go to the Hinckley Chamber of Commerce  to buy tickets for the pancake breakfast and avoid the sure-to-be long line.
    A few buzzard facts I found along the way:

•     Buzzards are known as turkey vultures in most of the world.
•     They have an average wingspan of 5-6 feet and can weigh up to 3 pounds.
•     They have bright, red, feather-less heads.
•     The claw-like tip of their beak is perfect for dining on carrion of every type.
•     They don’t have vocal cords. They hiss and grunt.
•     They’re related to storks, but not to any birds of prey.
•     Their Latin name, Cathartes aura, means cleansing breeze.
•     They have the largest olfactory system in the bird world and can smell carrion up to a mile away.
•     Orville and Wilber Wright, Ohioans both, observed buzzards to help them understand the principles of flight. 

    Our northeastern turkey vultures, buzzards by any other name, migrate to North Carolina through Louisiana for the winter. If you see them swarm in spring or fall during the early morning hours, they are getting ready to take off. If you catch them in a swarm later in the day, they’re probably getting ready to roost.
    Buzzards are not attractive. They do not sing. They’re scavengers. But they help keep our streets clean. They’re predictable. And like robins and daffodils, they really are a sure sign of spring.
    While it remains to be seen whether the birds will make an appearance in Hinckley on March 24, Buzzard Sunday, Accuweather Forecast predicts temperatures in the mid forties and a partly sunny sky. Sounds like good flying weather to me! 


I had to re-reserve Mockingbird Summer, so no update yet. Meanwhile, I started reading Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath (Doubleday, 2024). Our choices, the author tells us on the very first page, are influenced and sometimes completely determined by memory. An intriguing premise I hope is followed by an equally interesting narrative.
                                         --Be curious! (and look up)    

    “Play dead, Sparky!” I said, and he did.
    “Roll over,” I said, and he didn’t.
    “Speak!” I commanded.
    We all waited.
    And waited.
    “Speak? I said.
    Sparky looked at me. The only thing you could hear was the wind in the trees.
                                                                 from  Sparky!
                                                        written by Jenny Offill
                                                 illustrated by Chris Applehans
                                               Schwartz & Wade Books, 2014
                                                  accessed on YouTube 3/11/24

    We all have unique combinations of character traits. Some we are born with and some we can acquire along the way. The helpful ones are our strengths. They are the values our society holds in common: faithfulness, kindness, honesty, generosity, empathy, cheerfulness… Others are those we fight against: laziness, impatience, sloppiness, tardiness, fearfulness, arrogance…
    Most people have a default. My best friend defaults to optimism. 
    My default is laziness. When I admit that to people I know, they disagree. But it’s true. I fight against it continuously. 
    I wondered, “What’s the difference between slothfulness and laziness?” and discovered that slothful comes from the Greek and Latin for acedia, a word that means spiritual apathy. First recorded in English between 1350-1400, it identified one of the Seven Deadly Sins (which are opposite to the Seven Capital Virtues) and came to mean indolent. 
    I’m still stuck with the difference between lazy (indolent) and slothful. Here’s one idea. Laziness is when we are unwilling to do a chore, fulfill a responsibility, or exercise 30 minutes a day. Slothfulness is doing nothing, staying on the couch without making a conscious decision to get up and do something, anything.  
    With that definition, I need to revise my own. I’m not lazy on purpose. Time just gets away from me, so I guess my default is slothfulness! That sounds worse, but the result is the same so I’ll lean in and own it. And still fight against it, continuously!
    Here’s something interesting about sloths. When scientists studied them, they came to the conclusion that sloths are not really lazy. As they evolved they became more efficient. Their respiration is slow, their movement is slow, and it can take up to a month to digest a meal. 
    Roadrunners, on the other hand, are the opposite of lazy. They are fast, fast, fast. They move fast, up to 26 miles per hour. They catch fast-moving food like scorpions, bats, and even hummingbirds.
    While seemingly opposite, sloths and roadrunners depend mostly on their instincts. While it is true that we humans are creatures of habit and we rely on subconscious instincts, we depend on motivation to live, not merely survive.
    According to VeryWellMind, motivation is the driving force behind human actions. Motivation is what causes us to act in ways that move us closer to our goals, keep us happy, and involved in our lives. 
    Psychologists recognize two distinct types of motivation. 
    Extrinsic motivation is completing a chore, task, or activity for a reward such as a trophy, some money, verbal praise from friends or family members or our boss. To encourage us to reach our goals, my Weight Watcher teacher suggests we reward ourselves when we reach a small milestone. The reward needs to reinforce the goal. (It does not work to reward myself with chocolate after completing my 30 minute pre-planned walk.)
    Intrinsic motivation springs from our inner selves. We do what we do for the sheer joy it brings us. Jogging, belting out karaoke, or reading an engrossing novel, are examples. While I think about my readers, I write this blog to satisfy my own curiosity. I hope you are also a little curious about my thoughts and “tune in,” but I’ll keep writing as long as I stay curious.
    Motivation depends on three components: activation; persistence; and intensity. We need all three to not only get motivated, but to stay motivated.
        Activation is the action we take to begin a behavior. My example
                 is joining Weight Watchers. 
        Persistence is staying with it even when the going gets tough. I
                 can say “no” to the bowl of M&Ms and reach for the
                 popcorn instead. Maybe not great, but not de-railing!                 
        Intensity is the amount of concentration and focus we devote
                 to our goals. I can “watch what I eat” and “exercise” or I
                 can plan, keep track, and stay determined.
    The degree of those three components impacts how quickly I can reach my goal.
    It’s hard to stay motivated, especially externally, without crossing the bridge from mindfulness to obsession. Willpower depends especially on the last two components. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister gave a group of students dishes of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies and crisp radishes. One group was asked to resist the cookies and go for the radishes. Then he gave all of them an impossible puzzle to solve. The cookie eaters spent twice as much time working on the puzzle as the cookie resisters, 18 minutes vs. 9 minutes.
    Baumeister suggests that those who used willpower to resist temptation did not have enough mental energy to fully engage in another challenge of their willpower, solving a puzzle.
    But scientists tell us there are ways to help ourselves revive motivation when it sags, droops, flags.
        Figure out why we chose this course of behavior (our new
             goal)
        Break the goal into its smaller parts
        Imagine ourselves as successful (“fake it till you make it” really
             works)
        Make a list (it can be a mental recounting) of our successes so
             far
        Reframe our goal. (Instead of counting up how many pounds I
             have lost, I can count down the pounds I have left to reach
             my goal.) 
    So motivation is not really the difference between a sloth and a roadrunner. It’s a positive step we can take to help us enjoy a life full of interesting challenges.

I just finished reading The Many Masks of Andy Zhou by Jack Cheng (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2023). It’s a coming-of-age story about 12-year-old Andy who learns to navigate friendships, bullies, and straddle two cultures. The characters are well-drawn and complicated. Andy never loses sight of his goal, once he figures out what it is. Recommended for all of you (like me) who enjoy Middle Grade stories.
                               -—stay curious (and stick with it, whatever IT is!)   

If I had your vote,
oh, the things I could do!
Oh, the things could do
with a YES vote from you!

​If I had your vote,
and if I were in charge,
I would make a few changes.
Some small and some large.
                                           from If I had Your Vote
     written by Dr. Seuss (with a little help fromAlastair Heim) 
                                        illustrated by Tom Brannon
Random House Children's Books/Penguin Random House, 2020

    Last month my grandson turned 18. He’s eager to vote. He saw his mom and grandma vote. He has heard stories of my great-grandma (his great, great, great grandma), a suffragist who marched for Women’s Rights in the 1920s. 
    Who can vote has been a question debated in government and on the streets and at kitchen tables and salons since the heydays of Ancient Greece and Rome. In those days, women were not allowed to vote. Not to say that women in those times (and ours) were (and are) uneducated, uninterested, or even unable (intellectually or otherwise), the times were full of misogyny. Women in those ancient days (and our own not so long ago days) were smart, capable, and determined. But they were denied a voice. They were not even citizens.
    We have come a long way, but still have a long way to go.
    On February 18, 1965, Reverend C.T. Vivian led a march to the courthouse in Marion, Alabama, to draw attention to the Civil Rights Movement. The peaceful march protested the arrest of leading Civil Rights activist, James Orange. It turned deadly when Alabama state troopers attacked the marchers and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson. He died of his wounds eight days later. 
    John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams led marchers to talk to Governor George Wallace about Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death. Alabama law enforcement officials violently stopped them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That first march, from Selma to Montgomery, on March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Over 60 marchers were injured including John Lewis who suffered a fractured skull and Amelia Boynton who was beaten unconscious. 
    Two days later, on “Turnaround Tuesday” Martin Luther King led 2,500 people to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. After finding troopers and police there, MLK turned the people around without entering the unincorporated area of the county. Nevertheless, the Ku Klux Klan attacked Reverend James Reeb who died later from his injuries.
    Then, on March 25, over 8,000 people led by MLK and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschl, finally crossed the bridge and arrived in Montgomery, the state capitol. They stood below the governor’s window where MLK delivered an inspirational speech. He told the people to have heart. He told them “truth crushed into the ground will rise again.” 
    He told them “[t]he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
    MLK spoke with President Lyndon Johnson. So did George Wallace, Alabama’s governor.
    It took until August 6, 1965, for Congress to pass the Voting Rights Bill. President Johnson signed it into law the next day. Ninety-five years after the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified, this law, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawed literacy tests (poll taxes had been outlawed the year before) and provided federal examiners to make sure all citizens in all states could exercise their right to vote safely. By the end of 1965, over 250,000 new Black voters had registered to vote.
    The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was re-adopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975, and 1982.
    In Mississippi and Alabama, especially, registered voter rolls increased dramatically, from less than 10% to over 60%. 
    But since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, with their decision on Shelby County v. Holder, those states with a history of race-based voter suppression were no longer required to submit changes they made to their election laws to the US Department of Justice for “preclearance.” Now there is no governmental oversight of state’s voting laws. 
    A report from the US Census Bureau shows significantly wider disparities in voter registration and turnout since the Shelby decision.
    Ruth Bader Ginsberg said in her dissent, “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
    How unfortunately true are her words. 
    Today is Super Tuesday.  Today, voters in 16 states and one territory will vote. Even though a significant number of ballots will have been cast by the end of the day, it’s not even close to the end of the road. Primaries continue in the states until June 4, when New Hampshirites, New Mexicans, and South Dakotans will vote.
    This Primary Season let’s fight fear and anger with action.
        Inform ourselves about the candidates and issues: local; state; and federal. 
        Use what we discover to fuel our voices.
        Speak our truth.
        Encourage friends, family, and everyone else to vote.
   My grandson will vote in his first election on November 5. Let’s let him be our role model!

    I will start reading Mockingbird Summer by Lynda Rutledge (Lake Union Publishing/Amazon, 2024) this morning. It’s based on the friendship of two young girls, one Black and one white, and draws on themes in Harper Lee’s classic. Stay tuned for a review.
                                       -—Be curious! (and informed)