Complaint Department

On January 15 I placed an order with Farmer Seeds as I have done often before and in due time the seeds arrived and were planted. An important part of my order was Lincoln peas, a long time favorite of my family. The weather grew warm and the seeds sprouted, the vines grew, and the blossoms appeared. But in the six rows of peas I planted, the first two rows of blossoms were purple! Lincoln peas had always before had white blossoms. However, I watched and waited and eventually saw pods that were knobby looking, unlike the smooth pods of Lincoln peas. Eventually they matured and we ate some. They were not Lincoln peas.

At this point I wrote a friendly letter to the Customer Care Department at Farmer Seeds saying something seemed to be wrong. I thought they might find the situation oddly amusing as I did. But the reply, while it apologized “if there was an error” in my order, requested that I send “the original shipping label, along with a brief note detailing your request” and “a sampling, or picture of the item in question.”

Well, I had already detailed my request and was happy in the interests of science to send a sample of the non-Lincoln peas, but the original shipping label was long gone. Who keeps the original packing of a seed order for six months? I did send them their confirmation of my order which came by e-mail and said, “We suggest you save this email for any future inquiries.”

That didn't satisfy the folks at Farmer. “We are willing,” they said, “to make a single EXCEPTION and send a replacement order if you will send us a COPY OF YOUR CANCELLED CHECK or CHARGE CARD STATEMENT as proof of purchase.” (Emphasis theirs.)

Why should I, I wondered, have to prove that I made a purchase from them? Don’t they keep records of what they sell and to whom? Yes, they said, they do keep records, but it is company policy to insist on evidence from me.

So I sent them a copy of the credit card statement. By now the cost of the correspondence (sending them sample pods and blossoms, sending them a copy of the credit card statement, etc.) was beginning to outweigh any possible refund.

And what have I received in return? An electronic transfer of funds that appeared in our account without other notice for one-third of the $6.95 I spent originally. They did not refund any part of the shipping cost, though the peas would have been the largest part of the cost. They have never even acknowledged the arrival of the samples I sent them, let alone report on what may have gone wrong or what the misfits were – though I asked more than once.

Result? The “Customer Care Department” has lost far more than $2.32. They have lost a long-standing customer and reaped some very unfavorable publicity.

I also discovered by typing “Farmer Seed” in my internet search engine that at Dave’s Garden they have a feature called Garden Watchdog that allows gardeners to report their experience with various companies. Over the past year, Farmer Seed has chalked up two positive reviews, four neutral reviews, and 24 negative reviews. So I am not alone in thinking that this is a company with problems.

Now you know.

Quotation of the Week

“In the twenty-first century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

John McCain
Candidate for President of some place which is not a nation.




Columbus discovering America

Cousins

In the mystery of human relationships, cousins are a strange middle ground between people who are close family (parents, grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren) and those who are strangers (having no known relationship).

This week I spent two days in a “cousins reunion,” a carefully planned event bringing together the second generation descendants of Eugene and Caro Fowler Basquin, an immigrant from France whose name indicated Basque ancestry a couple of centuries back and a member of an old New England family . They had five children who grew up, four daughters and a son. These five (one never married) produced ten children. With two of these (and their spouses) we have had fairly close relationships. Two others I never met. One has died. The others have crossed our paths on occasion. Six of these ten and five significant others were assembled in Mystic, Connecticut, for a low key event that featured a couple of block-buster meals, lots of nibbles with alcohol, an afternoon ride up and down the Connecticut River by steam train and ship, and ambles through a couple of museums and specialty stores. We included in our number, among other things, a couple of Episcopal priests, two lawyers, two registered nurses, business people, a concert pianist, a teacher, an author, and others, all in some degree of retirement.

It was an enjoyment. I had conversations in depth about everything from translating Horace to presidential politics and conversations in no depth about the weather and the foibles of Global Positioning Systems.

What brings us together? A certain degree of physical resemblance, a good deal of commonality of upbringing, similarities in the expectations we were raised with. I remember my mother telling how she brought home an excellent report card to show her father and was told, “What do you expect? You’re a Basquin!” We spent time telling what we knew about our grandparents. None of us had any memory of Eugene Basquin, who died when I, the oldest cousin, was three, and our memories of our common grandmother were limited. We didn’t talk much about our parents since all of us knew all of them. A plan to talk briefly about what each of us was up to never happened. It was more about being: being together, being who we are, discovering commonalities, cousinalities.

“Know thyself,” is an ancient piece of wisdom because, as Wikipedia wisely observes, knowing oneself is an important step toward knowing others. We are told that Vice President Cheney and Senator Obama are eighth cousins. It is said that all Western Europeans are within thirty degrees of cousinhood with a common ancestor scarcely a thousand years back. A few more cousin reunions might be a very good thing.

Time Frames

I was walking in the orchard last week when I noticed some apples. They were on a tree that had never borne before and they were pale green shading to yellow as they ripened.

Nursery catalogs are surprisingly coy about the time it takes a tree to produce fruit. Semi-dwarf trees will produce fruit sooner than a full size tree and dwarf trees will produce fruit even sooner - but how soon? Not soon enough to enable me to remember what tree it was I had planted. The nursery companies always attach a plastic label that has the nursery name stamped in bold and indelible letters on one side and the name of the variety written with a marking pen on the other. The marking pens are not indelible; the variety names wear off in a year or two. Recently they’ve begun stamping the variety on in indelible ink and I’m grateful, but that’s no help with my older trees.

I went to look at my file of orders placed. The first two trees in the orchard were ordered 30 years ago and one of those trees has been my best producer for a long time. The other died last year. The yellow apples seem to be Lodi, an apple that ripens in late July or early August, way ahead of most others. I planted that tree – semi-dwarf – eleven years ago. No wonder I’d forgotten about it. I have other trees, even older, that still haven’t produced anything. I hope I can still identify them when they do.


I remember also a conversation I had recently with our neighbor, a professional forester. I asked him what he thought might be the problem with my oldest chestnut tree. It had produced a few more chestnuts every year for five or six years now. Last year was a banner year with maybe two or three dozen nuts. But I found literally hundreds of tiny nuts that never matured. What did he think might be the problem. “Maybe the tree just isn’t mature enough to ripen them all,” he suggested. After thirty years? Yes; we’re talking trees, not people. (Actually there are people not very mature after thirty years also.) I have three walnut trees planted thirty years ago that have yet to produce a single nut.

I planted a copper beech when we first bought this property. Somewhere I read that they live for five or six centuries so I thought I should get it started. On line, I learn that they live “only” 100 to 150 years and start flowering after 30 to 80 years. Mine might start flowering next year – or not.

We’re talking time frame. If I don’t get a good crop of green peas this year, there’s always next year. If it seems that I’ve put a nut tree in the wrong place or that I’d rather have a different kind, it’s not that simple. Some things take more time than others.

I wonder whether we lose certain perspective when everyone grows up in a city and makes dinner in the microwave. I grew up in a day when oatmeal was made in a double boiler and cooked overnight on the stove.

I’m thinking about the way we attempt to solve the energy crisis by opening up more areas to drilling, solve mid-eastern tensions by imposing democracy on Iraq, fight the war on terror by overthrowing constitutional traditions two centuries old.

I hope I live long enough to harvest walnuts from my trees. I pray for leadership that understands the human time frame.

Prime Time in the Garden

It’s too soon to hang up the “Mission Accomplished” banner or take any victory laps, but this year’s garden is looking good. Already our super-size freezer is beginning to look full – and the season is far from over. What happened? Maybe three things:

1) I’ve learned about some crops that I hadn’t tried before or had forgotten to include in my planning. Pole beans are something I never bothered with until two years ago. It took a couple of years to figure out how to create a trellis for them to grow on and how to keep the voles away. Pole beans are like a vertical garden, producing beans all up and down a five foot high trellis. It’s good exercise hunting for them too. I also learned recently about Swiss chard – another crop that keeps on giving. Like spinach, Swiss chard boils down drastically when cooked, but a short row has produced about 8 pints in the freezer so far, and we’ve already eaten some along the way. I hadn’t grown beets in several years or purple cauliflower or enough broccoli plants. All these add content and color to this year’s crop.

2) I think (fingers still crossed) I’ve learned to deal with voles. For several years I didn’t know what my problem was when whole rows of crops disappeared before producing. Then I learned about voles. They are like short-tailed mice but twice the size. They love vegetables. Last year I found organic ways to deal with voles (traps, for one) and this year I haven’t seen much evidence of their presence. Maybe they figured out that I don’t want them around. It makes a difference when the crops you plant grow up without being chewed off. Several years ago the raccoons learned how to climb over the eight-foot chain link fence. Since then we haven’t had much corn to eat. This year I got the Hav-a-Heart trap out early and two raccoons that came early to check the crop are no longer in the neighborhood. Maybe that’s why the corn is still thriving this year.

3) Weather? Luck? Going to France for ten days and leaving the garden to its own devices? Maybe all of the above. A good garden seems to require a certain amount of serendipity. One example is the winter squash that are spreading across the center of the garden. I didn’t plant them. They are growing where the semi-composted compost got tilled in: the seeds came from last year’s squash but the fruit are totally different. Last year’s squash were small; these are enormous and very differently shaped. I guess they don’t breed true. I don’t know what we’ll do with a half dozen squash the size of a basketball, but maybe the family can have squash for Christmas dinner this year.

August is prime time in a garden. Beans, beets, broccoli, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes (large or small), Swiss chard, zucchini. It's very satisfying to plant a crop and harvest the results a few months later -- even more satisfying come January to have our own fruit and vegetables available.

I've never had a guest columnist before, but when I found this discussion of a new book by Caroline Grant (nee Webber) and Elrena Evans, I thought this might be a time to try it. It comes from "The Debutante Ball," a web site for first time women writers, and begins with a paragraph by the editor of that site, Gail Konop Baker.

I first “met” Caroline Grant when I was columnist at Literary Mama and clicked with her immediately. She was smart and funny and deep and a terrific writer. When I went out to San Francisco for Tillie Olsen’s memorial the year before last, I met her in person. We had brunch at this amazing breakfast place in East Berkeley. During that brunch she talked about the Mama PhD book and I thought it sounded like a GREAT idea and here it is.. One of the miracles of publishing, an idea transforming into something you can hold in your hands. Astounds me every time. Please join me in welcoming Caroline and Elrena and then click on Amazon and buy the book!

Today, Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans write about editing their new anthology, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, which has been called “easily the most important piece of work to date on academics and family issues, full-stop.” The anthology voices stories of academic women choosing to have, not have, or delay children, and its essays speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family.

Read more about the book at mamaphd, view the trailer at you tube, and join the conversation about work and family at the book’s blog on Inside Higher Ed.


3,000 Miles, Two Writers, One Book

Meet over email. Of course; you live, after all, 3,000 miles apart, but it helps our relationship get into writing right away. We are literally words on a page (screen) to each other for the first year of our collaboration (we don’t even talk on the phone!) It doesn’t hurt that we meet via Elrena’s submission to the section of Literary Mama that Caroline is editing at the time.

Meet when one of you is pregnant. This helps get the conversation personal, pronto, as Caroline cautions Elrena that she might not get back to her very promptly with edits.

Don’t always stick to the point. We know we are both writers, and mothers, and if we’d stayed on topic it might have stayed at that. Instead, we digress into breastfeeding and parenting and graduate school and ivory tower life — and friendship. And then, ultimately, a book.

Write about what matters to you. This is old advice, but it’s still good. Elrena was on medical leave from graduate work and thinking she might want to write about mothering and dissertating. Caroline had left the ivory tower behind when her first son was born, but was still frequently looking back and second-guessing her decision. Writing about our choices seems like a good way to figure out if they are the right choices for us. (Caroline can now say yes with assurance; Elrena’s still up in the air but has decided that’s okay for now; up in the air is still a place, after all).

Invite others to join the conversation. At a certain point, it’s always good to share your thoughts with others. We figure if we have so much to say about our lives in and out of academia, other women might, too. They might even have advice or ideas on how to make it better. We write up a call for submissions and spread the word. To our amazement and delight, essays came pouring in.

Punt! Write until you’ve lost your way, or stop making sense, and then email your draft to your collaborator. If you’re lucky (we always were) she will make what you wrote sound better, add some more, and then send it back to you for refining. You will smile when you read what she’s added: ah, yes — that is what I meant to say.

Are you deep in the book project now? Time to have another baby! We pause for the arrival of Elrena’s son.

Agree on everything. When we were in graduate school, we sat through innumerable training sessions with our peers, learning how to mark essays and score exams until we all worked from the same rubric and our responses all agreed. It was a useful process, but one we don’t happen to think of this time around. We read all of the submissions independently (3,000 miles apart and four kids, remember?), marking them Yes, No, and Maybe. When we are done, we exchange our lists and see that we only disagree on one essay. We send it back and forth for a while, and soon both feel right about our decision.

Meet! A year into the project, Caroline realizes her Christmas travels will bring her within a couple hours drive of Elrena’s home. “In my ideal world,” she emails, “there’d be an aquarium or something equidistant from your house and where I’m staying, and we could all gather and you and I could start 5 or 10 different conversations and maybe finish three sentences while we run around after the kids!” Elrena emails back the URL of the New Jersey State Aquarium, exactly one hour’s drive for each of us. Ask, and you shall receive. So now we can attach voices and faces—of ourselves and our husbands and kids—to our writing.

Return to work with fresh energy after the meeting. Keep it light. Pepper your emails with exclamation points and smiley faces, just in case. Always put your families first. Sympathize about everything, big and little: the rejection letter, the sleepless night, the husband’s work hours, the emergency room visit. Celebrate milestones: publications, toilet training, landing an agent, birthdays, editorial promotions, weaning.

Send the book proposal out to nearly a dozen publishers. Receive many rejections and two good offers. And it only takes one. Effortlessly agree on the publisher, talking on the phone while one set of kids splashes in the baby pool and the other set makes and serves an elaborate play-doh dinner. Sign a contract. Marvel at how different your signatures are.

Knock yourselves out to fine-tune essays, trying to draw out the best in each writer, then fact check and copyedit. Negotiate the contracts of 40 contributors, many of whom become friends, also. Learn how to use Google docs to keep things organized. Work during naptimes, typing with one hand while nursing, at 5 AM before the family awakes, and on weekend afternoons while your husband and kids go to the zoo. Always feel like the other one is doing more work, and wonder how she does it. Feel grateful, because you know she feels the same way.

Just when you think you’re done, receive one last, significant editorial suggestion. Start to lose the plot. “But it’s perfect!” one of you cries. “It is perfect,” the other agrees; “but we’ll make it even better.” And you do.

Wait for publication day. Be surprised by a package on the doorstep a month earlier than you are expecting. Page through the book, pausing over well-remembered passages that still read so well, but look a lot better in their new home. Show the kids where you dedicated the book to them. Grab a tissue as your newest readers carefully spell out their names.

Anniversary Cruise

If you paste the link below into your search window, it should take you to an article I wrote about the history of the Lambeth Conference for the Times of London's on-line publication.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4317892.ece


Barack Obama went to Iraq, the Anglican bishops went to Lambeth, and the Mets went on a ten game winning streak – but I was on a barge in southern France and knew nothing of all that. For the better part of ten days, I was in another world, often as narrow as the two sides of a small canal or the dimensions of a canal barge. But a small world can sometimes bring far more rewards than the larger one. The Christian faith is that the meaning of life is found in relationships and it all begins with family. Over a span of fifty years, Peg and I have acquired a small but remarkably varied family – who like each other! There’s no better place than a canal barge to find that out.

We were a total of thirteen, ranging in age from 70-something to 3 – four children, three spouses, four grandchildren – and that was the exact number the barge held. We are often together for a day or two at Christmas or Thanksgiving but never before for a whole week. Of course, we weren’t entirely on our own. There was a crew of five – captain, first mate, chef, and two stewardesses – all of them significantly younger than any of our children, and they made sure we had every creature comfort imaginable. There were two wines and two cheeses at every meal, introduced with a short description. There was a help yourself liquor cabinet and chocolates on the pillow every night. (The second night, Ben, age 6, came running back to where the rest of us were lingering over dinner to tell us, “The chocolate fairy came again!”) The last night there was a premium champagne and an anniversary cake with five candles sending up streams of sparks.

In between time, when we could drag ourselves away from the table, there was swimming in the Mediterranean (twice), bike rides off into the country, a medieval village one day and a castle another, bull games, Bastille Day-eve fireworks, and a visit to the Châteauneuf-du-Pape winery for the most carefully guided wine tasting I’ve ever attended. We also visited Arles and saw much evidence that Van Gogh had been there first. And finally we came to Avignon where we toured the papal palace (bare and boring), watched Ben and Eli ride the carousel, and enjoyed two meals, dinner one day and lunch the next, at sidewalk cafes where it wasn’t the food that mattered but the ambience. It was festival time in Avignon and actors and performers were constantly coming by to entertain us a bit and encourage us to go see their show.

We had gathered as a family first in a hotel in Montpellier where we spent the night. The next morning, Sunday, we gathered in one of the hotel rooms for a simple Eucharist. I remember discovering many years ago that when you come to the Eucharist to give thanks for God’s gifts, you are given another and greater gift. During a week such as we have had, one can almost forget that. If fifty years had led “only” to such a family as we have, it would have been enough, but there are always greater gifts ahead. Satisfied and over-satisfied as I am, I try to remember that. If heaven is better than last week, it will be well worth waiting for.