Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

Our Pets Can Teach Us

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Jack is a day late and a dollar short with his guest post this week – – –

In contemplating how everyday life has changed for us and most other folks, I’ve been observing how it goes on pretty much normally for our pets.

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Our rescue dog Bruce has always been happy to get his exercise running around our big backyard and spend the rest of his time sleeping in his favorite bed. Every now and again he gets walked up and down the alley beside our house where he can enjoy different smells and that continues normally too.

Our cats are used to going in and out at will and know to stick to the yard or close by. So no real change for them either. It’s true that our most recent cat recruit, Buddy, has some health issues and that has meant a couple of vet visits. The arrangements for attending the clinic are a bit different, but I don’t suppose Buddy notices!

Our neighborhood dogs are all being walked as usual, although their humans are observing social distancing rules, but again I don’t suppose the pets notice much difference.

Our previous canine and feline friends probably knew the contrast between work days and weekends when we had the bookstore in Big Stone Gap, but when we moved here to Wytheville our routines changed. I finally really retired and Wendy worked much more from home. So our new ‘brood’ only recognized this new regime for us which likely won’t seem to change much from day to day for them.

Oh that it was as simple for us –

We are usually pretty social and sociable types, but now there are no weekends away, no shared meals with friends, no unannounced droppings in. Days tend to be much the same regardless whether it’s a weekday or a weekend. We do pay more attention to our neighbors than before but always while observing social distancing and our careful quarantine rules. I suspect that our pets see little difference for now, while we are beginning to get a bit ‘stir crazy’. It’s beginning to dawn on me that we won’t be going back to ‘normal’ for a long time, if ever.

Perhaps we can learn something from our animal friends?

Time to Select Reverse

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Jack finally gets a Wednesday blog post up on time – – –

Back in the 1990s I was working as a middle manager in a local Scottish community college. I was head of construction crafts, and that department was fairly low in the pecking order. So I decided to find a focus for us that would boost our profile.

I had been interested in environmental topics for a while and did some research. That resulted in a series of projects funded by the EU and with partners all over Europe. The college senior management supported me and I traveled regularly from Belgium to Denmark and Germany and Italy and even eventually to Romania and Vietnam.

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But I worried continually that I wasn’t always producing the educational outcomes that I had promised. It was many years later that I discovered that these were never the expected outcomes in the first place. It was always just about getting people from different countries and cultures to interact and talk to each other!

This brings me to the real point –

I discovered a few weeks ago that my hard-won US Citizenship can be arbitrarily taken from me at the drop of a hat and the whim of a faceless bureaucrat. This seems to mirror what’s going on in Britain right now as well. Not just there but all over the world there seems to be a resurgence of the fear of ‘the other’.

Of course I don’t expect to be deported any time soon. I’m not black or Hispanic. Not Mexican or Muslim. Not Catholic or Italian. Not Irish or Chinese. I’m a white guy from Scotland – – –

So come on folks. It’s time to put all this nonsense behind us. We inhabit a tiny dot in the universe and we need to look after each other – and that tiny dot too!

“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.” – Douglas Adams