I have a couple more twenties hanging around and I will be buying more peas to shell.

Also cleaned Telecublandia, which means I took everything off the adjacent windowsills, vacuumed up the spider webs and dead bugs and then WASHED all of the sills with soap and water. Window panes themselves are okay for now because Mr. Clean washed them a while back. And changed the sheets on the bed in the “guest” bedroom. I haven’t been changing those between guests because the only guest we’ve had in the last two years is Lizard Breath. Why bother?

Other than that I was focused on re-reading The Grapes of Wrath. I read it in high school or thereabouts but at this point, I knew that I only had a handle on the general arc of the story. I greatly enjoyed my revisit and probably understood a lot of details and references more clearly than I did back then. It was and is a hard book to read.

We humans can treat each other so horribly. The “Okies”, many of them destitute, are forced to leave land they’ve lived on for a few generations and are generally treated like crap when they get to the “promised land”. I cannot be eloquent (or even accurate) about the era because I am not all that well informed about historical details. But when the book started to refer to supposed union organizers as “reds”, I couldn’t help but compare that to all of the references to “communists” in contemporary times. Yes there are probably some “commies” out there. I am not one of them although I have been called one. Why? Because I care enough about “others” to want them to be able to feed themselves and their children and be treated fairly in our society and I am willing to help pay for that via my taxes. I know this book was sort of a muckraking novel but the people in that era *were* treated badly and children were allowed to starve because why? Because they were other? We can do better than that.

People form unions because they are not being treated fairly by the entities they work for. The Commander, a well-educated white woman married to a bank president, joined a union. It was the teachers’ union. Teachers are vitally important to our society. They are professionals entrusted with our children and are still paid like crap. And that wasn’t even an era when she had to be trained to shield children from nutso mass murderers or learn how to use a gun and keep one in her classroom. I’ve said this before AND I’LL SAY IT AGAIN but my parents voted for Republicans back in the day. That changed as the Republican party moved so far to the right it was unrecognizable to them.

I’ll put an end to the incoherent rambling but two things struck me. 1) I didn’t remember how competent the Joad boys were at keeping an old, decrepit truck running for a cross-country trip. Seems like that talent *should* have landed them decent jobs as mechanics? Maybe in a different telling of this story they would have. 2) I mis-remembered that a toddler fell off a truck and got left at a service station or somewhere. Maybe that was a different book? 🤣

I dunno what book is next for me just yet…

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