the vg-r collective

While we were on the road for the Eat Well Food Tour, our contractors installed new windows and doors in our apartment in Three Rivers. They aren't quite finished yet (there's still a bit of exterior trim work left to be done), but this is a very exciting step in the renovation process. We have windows! And doors! And they all open!

Front:

Back and side:

Eventually, we plan to build a deck off the second floor and a stair down the side of the building--hence the doors on the back and side of the building. At the moment, though, we'll be installing cast iron bars so we can still open the doors for ventilation.

Back windows (interior):

All of the windows and doors were chosen primarily for their energy efficiency; they're all wood windows with vinyl exterior cladding. We intended to use Anderson 400 Series throughout, but they didn't have a window with an arched top sash that was tall and narrow enough for the front of the building. Instead, we used windows from Marvin with similar specifications.

We framed in a new ceiling over the living room and dining room. Unfortunately, the existing ceiling joists were in too poor a condition (and not level enough) to affix drywall, so new joists have been installed beneath the old.

We also exposed the existing beams in the kitchen, as they were in much better shape and quite beautiful. To do so, we installed plywood on top of the beams, insulating above the plywood (there's a bit of space between the ceiling joists and the roof joists. We plan to paint the plywood and leave the beams unfinished (after cleaning them up a little).

As per usual, you can see more photos on our Flickr site, including photos of the ceiling work.

On July 15, 2004, I blogged about having reached 100,000 on our beloved Volkswagen Jetta TDI (read: Diesel). Well, today we reached the next milestone in mileage achievement:

Two things to note:

1. Yes, we did take this photo while driving 60 miles per hour.


2. The check engine light is on, but it's for something different than the check engine issue indicated in the 100,000 mile photo.

The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is this month and it bears remembering. Led primarily by students and intellectuals, the protests centered around hope for democratic and economic reforms.

After weeks of protests and government crackdowns around the country, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to emphatically quash the protests and reassert government authority. On June 5, as the tanks were rolling into position, one anonymous man found himself face to face with authoritarianism and, for a brief moment, stood his ground. Several photographers captured the remarkable moment, which became an icon of popular resistance against totalitarian power.

Though it has never been confirmed, it is widely assumed that the Tank Man of Tiananmen was eventually executed. His legacy, though, has spread around the world, inspiring thousands to stand up in the face of oppressive regimes from positions of relative powerlessness--a remarkably Christ-like gesture.

Unfortunately, government censorship in China has prohibited public conversation about the Tiananmen events (and continues to do so). Indeed, most Chinese college students have never even seen the image above and don't know the significance of the next few days.

Kirstin and I watched The Singing Revolution last night, a film about Estonia's struggle to maintain identity through the long and brutal Soviet occupation from WWII to the early 90s. It is another inspiring story of nonviolent resistance, but unique given the centrality of song in the Estonian struggle. Through their tradition of singing festivals--during which 30,000 people are on stage singing Estonian folk songs together--the Estonians resisted Soviet indoctrination and eventually reasserted their independence. I'd highly recommend the film.

I don't like watching beautiful buildings fall into decay. Cities like Gary and Detroit, to name a few, are filled with amazing architecture from better days gone by, buildings that are now crumbling in the wake of suburbanization and economic downturn. I recently discovered Forgotten Detroit (via David Koyzis), a web site dedicated to documenting theaters, train stations, hotels and other formerly beautiful spaces that are disintegrating throughout the city.

For example, below is the exterior and the waiting room of Michigan Central Depot, a stunning and imposing train station that hasn't been used since the late 80s.

I recognize that these kinds of buildings are expensive to renovate and that it's most often cheaper to simply build a new structure entirely. And I know that a lot of people think that folks like me are too sentimental about old buildings.

But when we continually tear down historic buildings, we slowly erase tangible links to our past. We begin to forget our stories--and they become less real to us--when we can no longer see them. And it is in our stories that we find identity, so we are, in a sense, losing our identity.

In their place, we build other identity-forming structures that aren't nearly so beautiful and that tell a remarkably different story about what it means to be human.

In the long run, we save a bit of money initially by building new buildings (as these cheaply built buildings will probably cost us more), but we lose our history and identity as people along the way--which just doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

We haven't managed to write here since the end of March. Here's a cheat sheet (for cheating, I guess?) of what's gone down in our lives since then:

• In early April, we managed the Festival of Faith & Music at Calvin College. It was incredible and we really need to write about it soon. Check out the audio on the Festival web site ...


• Shortly thereafter, we took a two week vacation and attempted to do as little as possible--which just about worked.


• *culture is not optional put in an offer to purchase an old elementary school building in Three Rivers, Michigan. We have a lot of ideas for it and we need to raise $20,000 before the end of May if the deal is going to go through. Want to donate? :)


• We're finalizing plans for a speaking tour this summer, details of which will be forthcoming on the *culture is not optional web site. Essentially, the Christian Reformed Church Office of Social Justice is giving us a grant to make our way around to Midwestern congregations to speak about approaching food faithfully.


• We celebrated World Fair Trade Day at World Fare with events on the hour, from potting workshops to film showings to a fair trade cook-off. Sparsely attended, but great fun!


• We published a few issues of catapult magazine in there, too.

So lots of folks who are usually suspicious of big government conspiracy panics are perking up their ears lately and taking action regarding an impending bill that's currently in committee: H.R. 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. The bill threatens, in the name of "food safety," to subject small farms and even garden hobbyists to the same rules as large agribusinesses, making organic and heirloom methods extremely difficult, if not illegal. Farmer advocate Alex Tiller (yep, that's his real name) has a good explanation of why this bill is significant, with links to LeaveMyFoodAlone.org, a web site set up specifically to explain the bill's dangers and help mediate our response to government officials through a petition. You can also read the full text of the bill and vote "yea" or "nay" at OpenCongress.org. Whether you do or don't support the bill after doing some of your own research, this is an issue worth looking into as individuals and as communities.

I've been appreciating Thomas Lynch's essays in The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, working my way through slowly, usually one-essay-at-a-time before bed. His reflections resonate not just with recent news of deaths, but with my affection for Three Rivers, another Michigan small town not unlike Lynch's home of Milford.

This morning, a paragraph from "Mary and Wilbur" had so many synapses firing at once with recognition and connection, I had a hard time getting through it. It wasn't that I had a one-to-one correlation for Wilbur in mind, but that it captured such an aura of small town experience:

Wilbur Johnson knew everyone in town. It was his style. For seventy years he's worked in the produce section of the local market, proffering welcome to newcomers and old timers over heads of lettuce and ears of sweet corn. The market first owned by his father and then by his brother had changed hands a couple more times since Wilbur's youth. But Wilbur always went with the deal--an emblem of those times when people came away from the market with more than what they'd bought. Once known by Wilbur, you were known. Unafraid of growth and change, he thrived on the lives of those around him from children in shopping carts, their young mothers, husbands sent to market with a list, bag boys, and cashiers. His own life, perfectly settled--he never changed jobs or wives or churches or houses--gave him an appetite for changes in the lives of others. He kept an open ear for the names of newborns and newlyweds, news of setbacks and convalescences, the woeful monologues of the jilted, the divorced, the bereaved. He remembered the names of children, visiting in-laws, friends of friends. He had a good word for everyone and everyone knew him. Nowadays we call this "networking" and the store of information Wilbur kept on the lives of others, a "data base." But Wilbur called it "neighborly"--the attention we pay to each other and each other's lives.

I think of two young women who wandered in our shop just the other day who were surprised to find something of interest in such a small town, even though I would guess they were only from Kalamazoo--a small city of about 75,000. I asked them if they were just in Three Rivers just to hang out and they politely scoffed at the question: "There's not much to do here. We're just waiting for a friend to get off work." I wish I'd had a clever retort that would have opened their eyes to the unique wonder of rootedness in time and place, of readily accessible "wilderness," even of the endless possibility of empty storefronts. I wish I could have introduced them to one of our Wilburs, who might just have gone beyond simply charming them with his small town ways to giving them a sense of being known that perhaps they were missing in their pseudo-cosmopolitan lives.

Well. If we end up being rooted in a place, as I hope we will be, I have many more years ahead of me to cultivate such responses, such ways of being. Maybe I'll even become a kind of Wilbur myself. And in addition to personal application, Lynch also makes me reflect on how our work with *culture is not optional might not be so much "networking" as simple "neighborliness"--not so much a strategy for organizational success by some corporate definition, but day-to-day faithfulness in making connectios among the people with whose knowing we are entrusted.

It's kind of fun to hear that the Obamas will be planting a vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House.

One of the things Rob and I really like to do is make connections among people and organizations who are doing good work, so we were pleasantly surprised when having lunch last week to see a CRC coffee blend with Higher Grounds in our hosts' kitchen. The CRC's Office of Social Justice is doing some amazing work to connect congregations with information and action for all-of-life shalom. We're glad *cino and World Fare may have played a small part in connecting the folks over there to our favorite Michigan fair trade coffee roaster. Way to go everyone!