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Johnny Jump Up

My mother loved Johnny Jump Ups. Her birthday was toward the end of March. As her birthday approached, she went out into the woods, looking for Johnny Jump Ups. They were among the first spring flowers to appear on the woods floor. Johnny Jump Ups are wild pansies. I don’t have any pictures of Johnny Jump Ups from our woods.

Generic yellow pansies. Grant [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Grandma Waschke cultivated pansies that she grew from seeds, mostly purchased from Tilllinghast’s seeds down in LaConner.

My mother had nothing against my grandmother’s cultivated pansies, but she had no passion for them either. My mother went to business college and learned to be a bookkeeper. Before she married my father, she was a bookkeeper at various businesses in Lynden and Bellingham. My grandmother grew roses and pansies. Mom tended the vegetable garden and searched for Johnny Jump Ups and Easter Lilies (Trilliums) in the woods and tried to transplant them to grow in the yard.

She succeeded with the trilliums. They grow well on the north side of the house. They are most likely up now, uncurling their leaves. They will bloom in a week or so, the white blooms turning purple as Easter arrives and the season wears on. There are blue, pink, and white violets in the lawn. Violets and pansies are the same thing, but the violets in the lawn are not Johnny Jump Ups.

In our woods, Johnny Jump Ups are small bright yellow flowers with a black accents that look as if they were drawn with a sharp crow foot nib and black India ink from the finest and blackest charcoal. The black in the generic photo above looks smeared compared to my mother’s Johnny Jump Ups. They grow in bright yellow and green beds on the bleached gray leaves of the woods floor. My mother succeeded in digging Johnny Jump Ups from the woods, generally under spreading big-leaf maples, and transplanting them to little clay pots she lined up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. The blossoms lasted a week or so and lived on as nice little green plants, but they never bloomed a second season. Pansies are perennials, but gardeners usually replant them each year, as my grandmother did.

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A Retired Software Architect

Mornings, I have walked Waschke Road and its fields covered in the fog, and wandered through the foggy woods. Bitterly cold winter ice fog, gentle late summer ground fog, sodden brooding November fogs. Wisps of vapor drift three steps away. Waiting for sun, watching daytime moons, searching for hounds, bay horses, and turtle doves.

Photo by Christopher Waschke

Fog on Waschke Road comes from the west, the Salish Sea, the Straits of Georgia, the Straits of Juan De Fuca, the Islands of Japan. China. The fog floats up the Nooksack, Silver Creek, Deer Creek, slides on greased skid roads, rolls on gravel, asphalt, and concrete. It comes up from the red loam and down from the gray sky. From the water to the land, settling in among the firs and cedars.

Owls glide in the morning fog with muffled wing flaps, field mice scream as red talons pierce their downy pelts and lift them from their damp tunnels, carrying them beyond the fog and into the treetops and the gables of the barn.

Flying owl. C9 Photography

Software architects build castles of fog. Wood, steel, and concrete castles break your toes, collar bones, and skull when forces are unbalanced, but software castles are drifting electrical signals. Software architects dispel them with “cd /; rm -Rf *”. And, trust me, they never forget how.

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My Failed Background Check

A couple months ago, I noticed an online request for volunteer mentors at my old high school. Since I am retired and recently moved to within a few blocks of the school, I followed a whim and volunteered.

Me at FHS 1966

Although I didn’t appreciate FHS at the time, Ferndale’s teachers in the late 1960s were good: I think of Miss Wynne in mathematics, Don Buzzard, chemistry and physics, and Roy Bentley, English. All taught well, even challenged an obnoxious know-it-all like me. When we graduated, both my cousin Dave and I received scholarships from the University of Chicago, an institution that is regularly ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world. I was given an “Honors At Entrance” certificate and placed into honors math and chemistry classes with students from high caliber places like the Bronx High School of Science, went on to graduate with honors, and received a fellowship for graduate study.

This reflects well on FHS, but not that well on me. Unlike most of my peers on the South Side of Chicago, no stellar career followed my distinguished UChicago education. In fact, I had to completely reboot my life after stumbling through graduate school. But fifty years later, I thought it was time to repay an old debt by listening to a kid or two at FHS.

Volunteering at the high school is not what it used to be. When Ferndale had a three-digit population, a few calls, a few people to vouch for you, and the school had a clear idea of who you were and if you could be trusted with kids. Now, you have to go through a background check with the state patrol. That’s sensible. People move around now. Communities work differently. People are not the easily measured quantities they once were.

To get a background check, you have to be finger printed. As best I can remember, the only time my prints were taken prior to volunteering, was at the 1959 Scout-O-Rama at Battersby Field in Bellingham. I brought home a card with a thumb print and an inky thumb. With that history, I expected to pass with flying colors.

I failed. My finger prints were unacceptable.

On the first try, my finger print quality scores were low and I googled not having finger prints. Between one and two percent of people fingerprinted fail to produce readable prints. Apparently, thirty years of pounding computer keyboards wore the ridges on my fingers into illegible smears. The decade I spent as a carpenter dipping my hands into caustic wet cement must not have helped. The experts advise lots of hand lotion for weeks prior to printing to “plump the ridges.” I bought a bottle of the cheapest hand lotion I could find at Winco and spread it on when I thought of it, afterwards peering at my finger prints under a strong light and magnifying glass, hoping to see ridges rise like tectonic fault lines. Hah.

My finger prints were taken at the Ferndale Police Station. When I went back for a second try, two experts worked me over. They don’t use ink pads any more, now it’s a computerized scanner. They ordered me to rub on Corn Huskers Lotion, then clean my finger tips with some special wipes, and the polished the screen on the scanner. Then they went to work, taking turns rolling my fingers and thumbs. The computer gave my prints low grades, even on the second try.

I went home feeling pessimistic. I might still be able to purchase an assault rifle at a gun show, but I couldn’t volunteer at the high school. If a tin can had been lying on the sidewalk, I would have kicked it home.

I passed. My finger prints were clear enough and the speeding ticket on a winter morning in 1991 passing through Mount Vernon when I was afraid I would be late for work in my office in Bellevue did not disqualify me from volunteering.