Drive-through neighborhood

I wish I posted here more! I post every day at Just Add Light and Stir, but it's rarely personal.

For years I have talked about getting someone to help me make a video tour of my neighborhood, and the huge number of drive-throughs. I'm going to leave this here for a couple of reasons. Some of the places have closed, and I don't want to lose the idea of sharing it.

These comments were mine, on a post on my own facebook page, and I'll link that.

Sandra Dodd, February 2017

I live in and amongst more drive-throughs than I could have made up. There is a drive-through title-loan place (that used to be a one-hour photo booth). Drive-through drop-off-thrift-store donations. Drive-through dry-cleaners. And all the expected ATMs (though more than most neighborhoods) and fast-food. Within 1/4 mile.

Sandra Dodd

And former drive-through liquor, bricked-up drive through frozen yogurt (now Fed-Ex/Kinko's), gone-but-remembered drive-up video-return. Drive-through credit union. Our nearest Lota Burger (Chelwood and Menaul) is a drive-through, though when they were first building that, Keith said it was crazy to have a drive-through Lota Burger, because they weren't that fast. Sure enough, the first time we tried it, they told us to pull up and park and wait. 🙂

I had written I'm at a Blake's Lotaburger that does not have a drive-through. I did not know there was such a thing anymore, not counting the little picnic ones. (Click it if you have any idea what that's about. 🙂)

Just this week (August 2022) I saw that the Lotaburger I was writing about on facebook, five years ago, is boarded up. The Covid lock-downs were not kind to places without a drive-through option.

Process or product; practicality or art

When I was eighteen, I took a pottery class at the Student Union Building at the University of New Mexico. As such things go, for beginners, we did pinch pot, slab, coil pot and learned to use the potter's wheel. I was more interested in the glazes than in the clay. We were working in stoneware, and lesser glazes would burn right off.

For my coil pot, I made a regular flower pot, and played with how to make a hole in the middle of the slab/base. I liked the hole I settled on. I pulled little trenches down toward it with my finger, before I started putting the coils on.

Before that lesson, I had made a stamp, to put a design on it with. That was a pinch/slab combo. I carved a design and put a handle on it. The handle fit my hand. I thought I could make cookies with it, too.

So my stamp had been fired, my base had its hand-designed drainage set-up, and I put the coils on, stamped my design, and left it for its first firing.

When I came back, and was putting glaze on, the teacher came to talk to me. I was just glazing, clear glaze, even though I had asked all those questions. The pot wasn't creative or imaginative enough [for her to feel like an inspiring teacher]. She said the first part, and I figured out the second part.

We weren't being graded; it wasn't even for credit. She got paid, and maybe got art-department credit, for offering a night class people could freely sign up for. I felt successful because I did all her units, learned all her terminology, used all her tools, felt the clay in all its stages, watched several other people doing their pieces, and created a useable, functional, home-made flower pot.

I "failed" for not being creative (in the teacher's judgment).
I succeeded, though, because fifty years later, I still have that pot. It has had a dozen or more different plants in it over the years, has never sat empty, and has not cracked.

The title of the post is misleading; I know that. Maybe I'm more of a process person than product, but the product AND the process were, for me, were this:

Learning.

October 2015

In 2021, this pot was so full of reproducing succulent that I was afraid it might be broken before it could be 50 years old.

Now it only has the largest of those.

It was February 17, 1972 when I scratched my name into the bottom of the pot and tried out the stoneware stamp I had made.