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2012-01-31T17:50:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the birds who visit the feeder outside my kitchen window, the juncos and chickadees and finches, the bushtits who hover a dozen at a time at the suet block. Thinking about how watching them settles my brain, eases the accumulated tension. And then there's my ten-month-old kitten, frantic with excitement on the sill, chittering and eck-eck-ecking at them, desperate for a mouthful of feather.

R. called me yesterday to tell me that the old cat had a seizure. Maybe he has a few months left in him; hard to tell. He's such a good old cat, the best, really. Crankier these past few years, but nonetheless with pretty much a good perspective on it all, if you'll allow me to assign perspective to a cat. My son is tender and so very engaged in the feline universe. Sometimes I think he's more cat than human. (He too limits his daily word output.)

---

Slow at the gift show today, a trickling of buyers and a stuffy, sleep-inducing atmosphere. The only place for a lie-down was in the 18-inch space between curtains, between booths. I decided that it probably wasn't a good idea.

Headache.

Where is my remedy of finches?

Cuisine

2012-01-30T18:37:00.000-08:00

A crappy dinner at a Spanish restaurant in Midtown, its only saving grace the fact that it was within walking distance of the hotel. We were tired of paying $$$ for a single martini and a midget bite of food, so we tried something else and, although the price tag was lower, the quality was equally low. We've been twice to Union Square Cafe, which is superb and in the realm of what one would want to shell out for great food on an artist's budget, but it's a subway ride away which equals added effort.

Alas.

I like to cook, and I won't be shy in saying I'm a damn fine cook. It does get to be a curse, though, when eating out. I do get tired of deconstructing every bite of food I eat in a restaurant but the obsessive part of me insists on doing it every single time. It can't be helped. On the other hand, I abhor food snobs. Food needn't be complicated, or pretentious. It just should be mindfully prepared, and prepared with respect for not only the ingredients but respect for whomever shall consume it.

I can make a feast from whatever happens to be in my larder at any given time (often slim pickins), and when a restaurant, with its (hopefully) well-planned-out menu can't deliver even a basic decent meal, then all is wrong with the world.

Well, with my world, at least.

Does it show that I'm ready to be back in my own kitchen?!

(I should mention that I had an absolutely perfect bagel with scallion cream cheese and Irish smoked salmon today for lunch. Ate every bite sitting on a bench in the cold winter noontime. Wanted more.)

The City (The Big One)

2012-01-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

I've been caught up in the zip-pace of NYC since last Wednesday, at the New York International Gift Fair, as well as spending some time hoofing it in the city. I wandered all over the Lower East Village today, as well as Soho, in a kind of meditation, taking it all in.

Yesterday in Chinatown, I stood two hours to keep my place at the curb to watch the Chinese New Year parade, and by the time it finally started, my fingertips (lost my gloves) were numb. After a few dragons (and one drag queen) --

I elbowed my way back out to the sidewalk and found a warm bakery where for $2, I wrapped my hands around a black tea with milk and ate a cream bun. Took about ten minutes for the feeling to come back in my fingers. A bit scary, but I survived my flirt with hypothermia in a city of 18.9 million people and no lack of heat.

Taking off my coat back at the hotel, I rained down glitter and confetti -- shot from long confetti popper tubes -- which kept the hoards entertained during the cold and lengthy wait.

Boot, to the end....

2012-01-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

She pulled down the lid, not bothering with the latch, and repositioned The Civil War Narrative – Fort Sumter to Perryville, Vol.1 and The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli, and began hatching a plan of confrontation. (She could’ve sworn she heard a whisper of constricted panting coming from the now practically throbbing trunk.)

When the confrontation finally occured, several days later, and she flamed at him her accusations of his secret sex life, he claimed obedience to the holy vows of monogamy. Conveniently, at some point in the past few days he’d also availed himself of the opportunity to dispose of the “equipment”, as it were. If there had been one time she'd regretted not documenting the evidence, this was it. He'd been caught with his pants down, and yet he'd managed to cover himself.

When the season shifted and every legal document of undoing had been filed, signed, stamped final, and every last buckle between them had been forever unfastened, she found herself in possession of only the left black boot. And when he admitted (when they finally spoke, after long silence) to shunning the bed they had once shared, to sleeping on the sofa night after night in his own personal cocoon, twisted and swaddled in the thread-worn quilt his mother had sewn him decades ago -- her first thought was bingo! He's got that bit of leather nestled in beside him, probably rubs himself with it before he nods off to sleep.

And while she yearned to be reunited --
with her boot --
part of her was secretly enjoying the thought of man and boot entwined in a pill-balled blanket of poly/cotton calico with rickrack trim.

So when the missing bit of mid-calf footwear suddenly turned up in her basement, she was just a tiny bit wistful. Did this mean that he didn't, each night, secretly nuzzle a piece of black leather that had once embraced her leg? That his couch-cocoon was not a repository of regrets, of souvenirs from a middle-aged marriage gone awry?

Was there something else ferreted away, perhaps, snugged down between his thighs in the cozy glow of Mommy's blankie? Maybe her notion of his secret stash was her particular kink. Less colorful than the one she imagined he maintained, but in the end, it sufficed to entertain her for months after the reappearance of the boot-mate.

And wasn't there a black sock, decidedly not her size and very limp (very him), that she kept in a corner of her lingerie drawer beside the now rarely-worn cleavage-plumping, lace-spiked brassieres? Well then.

But the boots, again the happy couple, fit like the fawn calfskin gloves (irresistibly tiny suede bows up the backside of each) that he'd once gifted her, with the request that she "use them". And which, suddenly -- and with great delight -- she realized were missing. She emitted a private snort of a laugh.

Would the fun never end?

More Boot....

2012-01-23T18:59:00.000-08:00

These were not merely about clandestine expeditions into the world of solitary ecstasy – the many athletic possibilities they represented, the opportunities for enchainment, for cinching and collaring -- all clearly required a partner. She seethed at his deception, at the outright lie he’d attempted to parade before her like a pair of brand-new whitey-tighties. (And furthermore, when had she ceased to be the #1 attraction in his daily get-up-and-go?)

Continued

2012-01-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

-- how should she phrase this? -- intimate accessories, or, uh, toys. Good god almighty: had these all been sitting here beside their bed ALL THIS TIME?

And/Or

2012-01-20T18:17:00.000-08:00

These days have been all about light and the lack thereof. Mornings I open the curtains to what should, IMHO, be well before dawn and in fact it's getting on 8am. Where last week I laid in my bed and watched brilliant winter sunrises above Lake Washington and Mt. Rainier, this week has been all drab dim January haze, snow underfoot and no intimation of sun.

It's more dark when living a solitary life, when there's no hubbub of another human to fill in the gaps between the sparks, or another human to provide the sparks. Cats are a meager substitute, try as they might, and try as I might to believe that they are enough. Their limited vocabularies of squeaks and rumbles, though entertainment in themselves, just don't quite expand the edges of human imagination.

Sigh.

I recall a winter, eight years ago, newly widowed, where I didn't want the darkness to end. Each night was a descent into swaddled-down, drugged comfort, and silence. When the light began to re-emerge as spring strode forth, I mourned the solace of my 8pm bedtimes and the many hours devoted to the perfection of dreamless sleep. This year, though, rings decidedly different. I've developed a sensitivity to light of all kinds, have become terrifically opinionated about sources of light and intensities of light. Last night I again walked the circuit around the block, late, in the illumination of street lights on snow, and the contrast seemed perfect, and warming. Odd, I know, when this small corner of the world was frozen into place, when all meteorological predictions of a thaw continually held false promise. Yet the balance of light and dark, the highlights and the shadows teetered not on the edge of a descent into the depths but offered a glimpse of some other light, some other universe where darkness opened a door into something yet undiscovered and overflowing with possibilities.

Tomorrow the snow will be gone, and night will resume its seasonal gloom. I'll light candles, shift the curtains, adjust the lamps and plug in my red-pepper lights. There will be no late-night glasses of wine under the kiwi vines, no squares of bittersweet chocolate shared on the balcony as the sun sits itself down on the western horizon. No midnight constellations, unless I desire to stand outside -- barring a cloudcover -- and shiver while searching out Orion.

Can't it just be summer already?

And yet the speeding-up of time, of the seasons, brings with it the general speeding-up of life. Yin/yang, yes/no, here/there.

It's a persistent quandary, to which no answer if sufficient.

Cake (and Boot [embedded])

2012-01-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

The world outside has been reduced to dark and light -- snow and not-snow -- punctuated by the rare Seattlite who braves wearing anything other than a neutral color, mostly likely someone either pre-adolescent or post-menopausal. We are a neutral Gore-Tex culture.

I'm readying myself for the mile-trek to work in what has now become an ice-pelted landscape. Perilous footing ahead, and being so drizzle-centric here on this corner of the continental United States, in our very comfortable Temperate Rain Forest, we are never quite prepared for this maybe-once-a-winter Arctic deluge.

Late last night I took a tromp around the block, and an icy crust had formed on everything, which not so much sparkled in the streetlights but glowed in smooth swaths where the snow was untrammeled. Quite satisfying to step down onto that crunch into the five inches of pillowy snow beneath. What came to mind immediately was meringue -- an entire landscape of meringue and the earth one giant cake. A version of heaven for which I'd stay upright on the planet for as long as possible!

Extending this baker's metaphor, I recalled a birthday cake I'd made, at age 18, for two of my sisters whose BD's are on consecutive days in May. The cake recipe itself was from my mother's much-used 3-ring binder Betty Crocker: Black Midnight Cake. (The devil was in the food.) The icing was White Mountain (aka Seven Minute), and by some meteorological anomaly, some odd bit of moisture in the mid-spring air, formed a crisp crust atop the billows of sugar-whipped egg-whites. I have not, in the ensuing decades, been able to reproduce this same effect. Seven Minute Icing is one of my faves, and has turned-out recipe-perfect for 30+ years, but not once has that same delectable edge again made itself known.

But by god, I was walking through it last night in the frozen sugared landscape.

[When she easily picked the lock on a Sunday afternoon while he was out -- after his explanation of a lost key and his lie it doesn't matter there's nothing in it -- she discovered his stash of -- ]

I am in awe at the power of weather, how it not only physically alters our basic movements on the planet, but also in its power to affect a significant shift in the psyche. Where, two days ago I was enswamped in a winter mopiness, slug-footed and lacking inspiration, last night I walked out to a Black Midnight Cake universe, and White Mountain Icing in which to contentedly travel miles, if I so chose.

2012-01-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Snow Event at dawn:

Snow Event at noon:

Intermission-Event

2012-01-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

Alas, but necessary.

The local media has created a monster out of possible blizzard scenarios, with the current monikers running the gamut from "slushmageddon" to "snowmageddon" and everything in between, my favorite being "Snow Event", for which I possess season tickets. In internet minute-by-minute updates today (as we prepped for the big shipment to NYC) the forecast became more and more absurd. When I checked my iPhone weather app at 11:59, there was 100% chance of snow at noon -- in sixty seconds. Outside a scattering of clouds gave no indication of giving up even a single iota of moisture. WTF? Are we once again being forced to gauge precipitation by actually looking up at the sky? How very twentieth century.

Granted, it was sloshy underfoot. I walked to work today in waterproof hiking boots and multiple socks, determined to keep a constant toe temperature. And between 10AM and noon, the residual snow on the steps did indeed slough off in runny rivulets, enabling an ice-free path from production-line to pallet, down on the sidewalk, in advance of the shippers which -- barring actual blizzard conditions -- are scheduled to arrive tomorrow afternoon.

We were not only on-time but early in completing the line for the show. All last week I was in denial of the viral microbes streaming through my sinuses (cough, sneeze, cough cough cough) and spent all of Saturday -- my one day off -- at a funeral and immediately afterwards, dinner with friends. There is no time for wallowing in the throes of wretchedness.

And now, close to 8pm Tuesday, no sign of the apocalyptic storm in the star-strewn sky. My poetry group was cancelled (or should I say my "Poetry Event?). I fear a Rain Event is beckoning. In my kitchen, a Pork Event is nearing completion. And earlier, Melinda and I celebrated the shipping-off-to-the-show with a Martini Event at Lottie's Lounge. (Afterwards, we struggled with a Walking-Uphill-Event.) Before long I'll engage in a Sleep Event, and with any luck, a Dream Event will present itself during my REM-Event.

Eventually, I'll post the remainder of Boot.

(Which will be an event unto itself.)
(Ahem.)

2012-01-16T20:18:00.001-08:00

....possessed enough kinks to last them both several lifetimes. That trunk, for example; and what she -- before knowing the actuality of what it concealed -- considered nothing more than a block of black metal upon which he piled his benign biographies and yawning histories.

Continued

2012-01-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

Bordering on one, possibly, but not a full-blown, parade-around-the-bedroom-in-boots-and-only-boots fetish.

But he, on the other hand,

Boot, Continued.

2012-01-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

Not quite a fetish.

Sentence 3

2012-01-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

Admittedly, she had a thing for boots, preferably black, the more buckles and straps the better, the longer-the cord-to-tie-around-her-ankle-the-better.

The second sentence (of which there are 36)....

2012-01-13T09:02:00.001-08:00

(Her entreaties to the ex- to search the closet for its black-buckle evidence resulted in neither heel nor zipper.)

Boot: A Short Fiction. Sentence One.

2012-01-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

She was, actually, a bit disappointed when the missing boot turned up, after disappearing, it seemed, upon her sudden exit from marriage.

2012-01-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

All of you lovely people with all of your useful suggestions on curing this condition of winter: I am most grateful.

In the meantime, I've written something rather risque -- a fiction (it's all fiction, isn't it?) -- and I'm of two minds about publishing it here.

Hmmm.

I'll admit that it was deliciously fun to compose.

Will the fun never end?!

Impossible Blossoms

2012-01-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

One week into the darkest of months, and while out digging in the garden this morning I came across these most unlikely of unseasonal flowers. It's not unheard-of to snip a few hard rosebuds for a Christmas vase, but I've not ever witnessed such color in the winter landscape. I'm certain that a hard freeze will, anytime soon, snap each of these to death.

And while these anomalies of the natural world -- small and understated -- continue to sing their warm-season song, my own voice has gone into its cave wearing a coat of dense fur, desiring one long nap until spring.

But.

We don't get to indulge ourselves, no chance of going all-bear.

So instead there's a daily grumping, a slumping through each hour.

Remedies include:

1. English breakfast tea with milk.
2. Marathon video sessions (Showtime's Shameless is highly recommended).
3. A stack of novels.
4. A martini, three olives, very cold.
5. Popcorn (which I stuttered out as "cop-porn" yesterday. [Um, no.])
6. Homemade soup.
7. Sleep, when it graces me with its increasingly rare presence.

And seeing that the likelihood of my going geographic in my quest to find a cure for winter is highly unlikely, I welcome any/all suggestions: tisanes, tinctures, infusions.

My new, um, "entertainment".

2012-01-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

Now, one could say that he's of Scottish descent with a name like that. Easy to come to that conclusion. And boy-oh-boy -- so easy to turn on, this one! (TMI, I know, I know.)

The one before, every time I brought out my photos he'd freeze up -- bam -- and stay like that for hours. No fun! I got SO tired of that. I mean, that just doesn't work for me AT ALL. (And his memory was crap.)

But this one -- a memory unlike anything I've ever seen!

The best part, though, is how he lights up the moment I touch him.

I am one lucky girl.

2012-01-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

“But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.” --Marcel Proust

2012-01-04T21:15:00.000-08:00

Sgraffito

2012-01-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

It's all squares filled with scritchings & scratchings,
piled one upon the other. And not just black
and blue, but new-leaf green beginning to show
in the shadows.

Back to the art factory tomorrow after
two and a half weeks off. Thought I'd be frantic
trying to fill up the space but I've found
that I'm craving more free time.
Alas, free time comes with its price tag.
(And I mean literally.)

We ship our glass line to the New York Gift Show
two weeks from tomorrow -- current lines
as well as the quickly-emerging new line....
Lots of #'s of freight, and then soon after
Melinda and I will catch a plane for NYC
ourselves. Lots to do in the meantime.

It's a new year, a new life, a new perspective.
Whew!

Glad you're all here -- even you lurkers!!

My favorite book, front to back....

2012-01-02T20:47:00.001-08:00

Woody Guthrie, 1942

2012-01-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

Discount

2011-12-30T21:44:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I was in a Ross store buying some tights, and the clerk, who was -- maybe -- 12, looked at me and said in a monotone: "Are-you-55-or-older." No question mark. Just a statement. Something she said to all the old people, I guessed. But why was she saying that to me??!!

I stuttered, "Well, I'm 55, but not older!"

She replied, "Okay. You get the Tuesday Senior discount."

There's a first for everything, and this was the first time I saved 46 cents for being "55-and-older".

Obviously, this is not my path to riches.

---

On a brighter note, my friend Robin and I walked the trails of Cougar Mountain this afternoon, awash in pale winter sun: a universe of ferns and alders, big-leaf maples and cedars. The stream was high from last night's rain, and spilled over a cliffside onto rocks draped in lush moss, slipped under a lashing of windfall saplings, vanished beyond our vision into second-growth forest.

It's been too long since we've shared this pleasure of walking these trails, but thank god we figured out the world in that hour and a half. There are few secrets left between us, I'm guessing.

And weren't we just in our twenties, when we were certain the world was a knowable entity? I admit a certain sense of thanks for reaching 55 (and not 555, which I just typed but corrected) and realizing that the world needs figuring-out on a regular basis. A daily basis. An hourly basis. Minute to minute. Right now!

I don't know about Robin, but I certainly didn't feel 55 or, for that matter, any age. But then, just what does 55 feel like? I think it feels like this (which was in my head this morning upon waking):

Rain City

2011-12-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

I possess an unwavering affection for Seattle, especially in the rain....

Reality Check

2011-12-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

After the fuzzy la-la-la-chorus-of-angels-humming scenario I posted yesterday (stars a'twinkle) the oven overheated and the parchment nearly caught fire, the bread burned, the Kabocha squashed charred (but what was scraped free was incredibly sweet) and the baked garlic-mashed-spuds formed a crisp blackened carapace, which, though nearly impenetrable, did reveal edible potato within.

The smoke alarm BLARED AND BLARED AND BLARED and we opened all the windows and a door and it didn't stop so we got out the Giant Fan and cranked it up to hurricane force. My son and I engaged in a shouting match on the subject of the pizza stone in the oven and the general lack of oven space because he'd decided to make candied blood orange slices (which he should've done the day before, not an hour before dinner), and we were forced to yell REALLY LOUD to hear each other because of the gale force winds blasting through the kitchen.

He retreated in a pissy huff to his room (are we two years old again??!!), abandoning his remaining dinner prep.

I poured myself a tumbler full of punch, with extra vodka.

My guests were mercifully late.

12.25.11

2011-12-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

I managed to slip away just now for an hour or so, to the silence of my upstairs room-amidst-the-trees, with bread set to rise on the stovetop and pork shoulder slow-cooking in the flame beneath. Riles is attendant in the kitchen, setting his white-chocolate ice cream to spin in the electric ice core. Friends arriving in a few hours.

Yesterday evening, before heading down the street for Christmas Eve with neighbors (aka My Chosen Family), both boys were in the house: R. was shaping strips of red & white dough for candy-cane cookies, N. was wrapping. I was funneling my homemade vanilla bean liqueur into small bottles, and then corking them. R.'s holiday music sampler included some Jimi Hendrix:

I admit I didn't know who was playing, and I don't think R. takes greater delight in anything more than when I have to ask him who we're listening to, especially when it's someone from my generation. (I was too busy, as a teenager, working out on the piano the most mournful of Chopin pieces.) I'm discovering the music of my youth three+ decades late, but that's okay. For some reason, it makes more sense to me now.

Anyway, as I was exclaiming how f---ing fantastic this electric guitar was, I couldn't help notice that the flavor of this Christmas -- from the week-to-week buildup (which contained, astonishingly, almost zero baking) to this moment with the three members of my family unit in the family house at the same time -- was decidedly different from any other Christmas. Few, if any, of the old rules remain. The prime directive is to eat well & laugh often. Other than that, it's open to anything.

And I thought: this is it -- a moment of absolute contentment, where, for that tick of the clock, the house quietly humming with filial activity, all is as it should be in this planet we claim as home. In this house that's seen more than its share of heartache and yet is still the best place I can be, and the place where I can just be best.

You know what I'm saying?

I didn't expect this, long given-over to worry and a pervading sense of perpetual sinking doom. And yet there it was, wave upon wave of well-being -- and I was afloat, head above water, not gasping for a damn thing.

I may need reminders of this fleeting, flashing moment on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, when January grabs hold and threatens to pull me under the icy surface of winter.

But for now, there's dough to punch down and a cranberry punch to spike up.

And a Happy & Merry Etcetera to every last one of you!

Agenda

2011-12-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

There exist days where the schedule is lickety-split sewn-up, everything happens according to its location on the list. And then there are days like yesterday, when my car wouldn't start, then almost started, then went dead dead dead. Called AAA, called the mechanic, and then the car started with all kinds of Warning! Lights! Lit! Egads.

I managed to get it to the shop, then headed back home afoot, 28 degrees and a hint of sun easing through fog. Plugged in my earbuds, cranked up Handel's Messiah and set out on a route I've only ever driven, down the long decline from the top of Beacon Hill, across the light rail tracks, back up another hill, through a neighborhood that some would think of an unsavory but I look at for the diversity. My zip code is the most ethnically diverse in the nation, and I passed elderly Asian men on their morning constitutionals, African-American teenage boys in their oversized coats and butt-saggy pants, Muslim women with little skin unswathed. A storefront church with JESUS SAVES painted on the plate glass. My Vietnamese dentist with his red neon tooth in the window. Lots of empty storefronts: "For Lease". A corner store with a large HALAL MEAT sign painted on plywood.

As I neared the small business district of Columbia City, everything suddenly became tidy, swept, minus the peeling paint and tired disuse visible just two blocks prior. Gentrification seems to have strict boundaries sometimes, edging out from a few core businesses. Signage goes from hand-painted to factory produced. There's a not-so-interesting Starbucks, and an even less-interesting Subway, and about ten independent restaurants, all relatively new. A co-op gallery, a used bookstore, a florist, a butcher. People were out, but not in any great number.

It was the first day of winter, and despite the below-freezing temps, with Handel piping into my ears I was content in my wandering back home. And flowers -- what a surprise! I counted eight
different varieties in bloom in front yards or parking strips -- nothing I'd ever notice while driving:
calendula
lavender
rosemary
oxalis
valerian
geranium
campanula
nigella

It continued, one surprise agenda following another, about which I will not bore you, except that while waiting for a prescription at Costco (where I had to park [in my son's car] in The Outback: Costco was very tiny in the distance), a woman sat down beside me and commenced to talk about back fat. WTF?!

The car was repaired for less than a thousand dollars, which is a Big Deal.

I was treated to a martini and a bowl of French onion soup at Cafe´Presse. Heavenly comfort.

I participated in a lengthy debate about the women's movement, which in the end, turned into a semantic argument more than anything. Words!

And Christmas! I nearly forgot about it.

Food

2011-12-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

My computer is achingly slow. I come here to respond to comments and the whole damn thing goes Rainbow Wheel. So that's my excuse.

Edging closer to Christmas, the solstice. Can it just be spring already?

I'm theorizing that if I can just keep cooking I can get through this year. Three more months to come full circle, to begin what will be my new year. This grieving sometimes gets its teeth into my neck, the bones of the vertebrae, and shakes me until I'm ready to fall down. And damn it if I just don't crawl back up. One millimeter at a time. Slowly slowly slowly.

Yesterday I hung old glass ornaments on the skeletal pink dogwood arching above the sidewalk. Some are handblown and not old, and if they're stolen, may they find a good home.

Riles has cassoulet on the stove, and I just pulled two loaves of sourdough baguette from the oven. Old friends -- from the beginning of time I do believe -- are coming to share in the feast.

I don't really know how to be divorced.

My weekend of funk....

2011-12-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Not one, but two live performances (unquestionably better than dead performances) by Seattle groups, two nights in a row.

Hard to choose which I liked better, so I'll say I loved them both.

First up: The Balls Out Booze Band --

The curly-topped, hip-spectacled guitar player on the left is Gus, aka P.J.Williker, who spent a good chunk of his early years at my house. He lived down the street, and was the best buddy of my boys. (I claimed him as one of my own.) So how in heck did he go from his Ninja-Turtle-cowboy phase to this ultra cool guy on stage with idiosyncratic style and uber-confidence? All I can say is dayam. I knew him when.

And to add frosting to this already marvelously sweet evening, BABB performed at a new music venue a mile from my house: The Royal Room. I am SO lucky to live here!!

Funk event #2, plus a family Christmas party --

My late-husband Mark's family hosts an annual event at the local community club, and this year included a performance by the reformed (minus several band members claimed early by hard living) Acapulco Gold, a seventies-era Seattle funk band. This is the best part: before I knew this family, when I was in high school in the suburbs, this band was the one to get for school dances. (And also the most difficult to get, they were so scheduled-up.) I remember listening and dancing to them at a club when I was in college.

When Mark and I were first living together at the eponymous "109" (former neighborhood grocery store building), his brother and an ever-transient assemblage of musicians lived downstairs. Those were some sweet days, albeit with all the glassware tinkling in our apartment because the volume emanating from below was, well, at times deafening. My favorite music memory from then is of entire afternoons of Mark's brother Paul doing riffs on his electric guitar: a mightily talented man.

Several times Paul borrowed Mark's car, and while we were at work, Paul and his friends -- perpetually cash-poor artists -- came up to our apartment and helped themselves to breakfast, leaving a mess of dishes that made it appear as if an entire touring roadshow, groupies included, had converged in our tiny kitchen for a feast. It wasn't long before Mark caught on to the trick, and lent the car minus our apartment key. I don't think either of us would have minded so much if that had just cleaned up after themselves, damn it!

Bittersweet moment last night, sitting with my two sons listening to their uncle perform. Life has completed a circle, despite fewer of us sitting in the warmth of the extended family beside the Christmas tree. There was delight and elation in the listening, as well as a wrenching of the heart that Mark wasn't with us.

And even more bittersweet in that, had I still been married to NoGoode, I most likely wouldn't have been sitting there, wouldn't have made the Sunday evening trek alone across the lake to Southeast Seattle. (His interest in anything Seattle was/is marginal, at best, even as colorful a piece of history as Acapulco Gold.)

Big sigh.

Here they are in a cheesy iPhone video, but trust me, these guys (even with a noticeable decrease in hair) are HOT!

And finally, cousins....

HiJinx

2011-12-17T16:20:00.000-08:00

I was shopping at the Seward Park Clay Studio Sale yesterday afternoon when a woman came in the door and announced: there's a head in the lake. Of course, all five of us inside immediately turned our attention to this messenger and voiced a unified what? Right away I pictured the grisly remnants of decapitation: the sawn neck, bulging eyes, the skin bloated and discolored. I thought -- this is Seattle's latest incarnation of Ted Bundy (who once used Seward Park as a dumping ground for one of his victims, and indeed decapitated 12 of his victims), or of Gary Ridgeway -- the newest murder-and-dismember modus operandi.

I was soooo relieved to be wrong. This instead turned out to be a case of "guerrilla art repositioning": someone had taken a clay head that was on display outside the studio and placed it ever-so-carefully in 5 inches of water. Eerie, but benign. Phew! And good for a damn big chuckle. I LOVE stuff like this.

Surrender

2011-12-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

3:30pm, and every street locked up tight with stopped cars, so I did a u-turn in the apartment building parking lot where my former step-son once lived and where his father bought him out of his lease because he heard gunshots at night. Welcome to the city. Ho hum.

But to the point: I was enroute to yet another meeting with the Big Bank re: $$$, and, finally freed from gridlock, made a quick escape down Yesler Street, a hill which careens almost vertically into downtown Seattle, and which gives one the impression of being dumped into Elliot Bay aka The Salish Sea. Luckily I managed to hedge dunking, and zipped up 3rd Avenue, only to be greeted by a Do Not Enter 3-6pm sign: buses only. Feck!! And late, to boot.

Downtown Seattle is made up of one way streets, crazy steep streets, a freeway which slices through everything, and water. One would think that I'd have it all under my belt, having lived here since the previous millenium, but I try to avoid driving down here and WHY IN HELL DIDN'T I TAKE THE LIGHT RAIL? (Because The Bank was offering validated parking and I thought piece of cake lickety-split. Wrong.)

And then this story came onto NPR about the 1500 grebes who crashed into a snow-covered Wal-Mart parking lot at night, mistaking it for open water. I thought: I can't listen to this. It's too sad, I'm too anxious about this f---ing meeting. No stories about dead grebes. I wanted to cry.

The entrance to the free parking lot was down a one-way street on Mars, as it turned out; and after driving around first one block, then another, and driving under the freeway, encountering yet another Do Not Enter, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, I parked on the street, grabbed the leather briefcase that my deceased mother-in-law gave me 14 years ago that I've never used, and high-tailed it down the sidewalk to the highrise (floor 17) (did I get the correct bank of elevators for god's sake?!).

Jesus Mary and Joseph: life shouldn't be this hard.

And all in vain.

(Did I mean: Life shouldn't be this hard and life shouldn't be all in vain? Maybe.)

Getting back to the car, my parking expired, I switched on the radio, and there it was again: the dead birds, trying to find safety, only to crash-dive onto Wal-Mart blacktop.

This is our world, folks.

No matter how hard you try to follow the migratory patterns proscribed by your specie, you are doomed to end up beak-down in a parking lot with a Price! Rollback! special on a Disney Cars Lightning Mcqueen Twin Bed just footsteps (or wingbeats) away.

I felt the doom of every last grebe, heading for a safe port in a storm, only to be smacked to death by corporate America, by greed.

(Now put your glasses on [this is not victory, but compromise, and so must be whispered]:

Upon returning home, I called yet another functionary of the above-mentioned Big Bank, who, months back, had offered me a see-no-evil-speak-no-evil refi, and who I'd kept on the back burner if all else failed.

Within about ten minutes I was approved: Merry X-Mas to me. Ho.
It's not as good as I wished, but for us poor slobs making less than $200k per annum, it's almost acceptable.)

George Whitman and Shakespeare & Co.

2011-12-14T21:16:00.000-08:00

From the NYTimes:

PARIS — George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98. Read more here.

I had the good fortune, in the summer of 1979, to sub-let a Paris apartment with a college friend. When we weren't idling away long afternoons-into-evenings lingering over a single glass of Côtes du Rhône (very limited budget!) we could often be found at Shakespeare & Co., amid the musty books shelved, stacked and piled floor to rafters. It was a maze and all quite amazing, and we felt like a part of some secret society, like characters from a page of French history. Once George Whitman, who I remember as somewhat cantankerous, gave me a vintage Parisian address book, circa 1900, with marbled end-papers and written in elaborate fountain-pen script. (I still have it -- when I dig it up I'll post a photo.)

What I've seen of this film is marvelous (I admit I've jumped around in it) -- but I'd venture to say that it's worth all 52 minutes if you are even remotely interested in Paris, literature, or quirky characters.

2011-12-13T23:47:00.001-08:00

At four o'clock this afternoon I was outside (wearing a dress and an apron), Sawz-All in hand, tree propped ready for lopping when my phone rang, and I stood out there in the cold and talked to my friend Jeff until my fingers began to lose feeling and I thought why am I standing outside? It's f---ing cold out here!

Because the phone rang while I was out on the deck, I felt like I had to carry on the conversation in the same location where I answered the phone. Still rooted in those old habits: as if tied to a cord. Uh, walk inside, dolt! Go towards the heat!

Nonetheless, the tree got its trunk trimmed and I shimmed and propped the damn tree in the stand BY MYSELF and tightened the screws and untightened the screws and repositioned the tree and stood back and looked at it and said damn. It's crooked.

And it's still crooked: crooked with white twinkle lights and about twenty ornaments.

My poetry group came over and I made crème brûlée and seviche and yam chips and a chili lime dip and cocktails. Lots of candles. Five minutes before people were scheduled to arrive I went out to the yard in the dark and cut strands of ivy and snipped the tips of the lowest branches of the Douglas fir. Inside I prised open a pomegranate and took the last of the satsumas and twirled the ivy and the fir snips around the candles and nestled the oranges in with the ripped-open pom. Lit the candles.

I took three old apples, leveled the bottoms of each, took a melon baller and scooped flesh from the stem-end, making enough space for a votive candle in each. Onto the windowsill with these.

Cava, cranberry-pomegranate juice, triple sec: swirled ensemble in a pitcher, poured into wine glasses, slung an orange twist over the lip of each glass.

Damn it was FESTIVE.

And what a great group of people: poets and poets and poets.

My element.

My people.

In my home.

On my turf.

(Happy.)

Lap of Cats....

2011-12-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

....living the Life of Reilly.

Conifer

2011-12-11T18:56:00.000-08:00

I could not have imagined, before today, the ease with which one picks out a Christmas tree by oneself. No yackity-yack, no dithering, no opinions. Just look at a few trees, walk around for a few minutes, look at the trees again and then bam! Done.

No more tree lots on every other corner, no Boyscout troops raising funds. I succumbed to Lowes (Home! Improvement!) -- a couple of miles from my house, a minimum of carbon fuel burned in the process. Everything bondaged-up in a plastic mesh and crammed into my trunk.

The romance of it -- I used to love tree-shopping -- is just plum gone.

I forgot to have them lop off the trunk end so I have to lug up the Sawz-All and get all butch with my boy-tool.

There were two or three charmed years when we picked the kids up from school, stopped for some hot chocolate, and headed east to Hobart, in the Cascade foothills, to a tree farm. I recall the boys running slap-happy down a rut-pocked hillside, choosing first this tree, then that, every last one of them too tall and frightfully broad at the hips (the trees, not the boys). We found one, of course. Draped with lichen, mossy. An honest-to-god tree. Alive.

So fleeting, those years; and also at times interminable. It all ends: the shape-shifting of time.

Which brings me to here.

Blogging about it.

The tree, as yet un-Sawzed, lies in the front yard.

(And admittedly, solitary pseudotsuga menziesii shopping is dreary.)

2011-12-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

Surrounded by hydrangeas still, in various stages of losing their blue. Two stems have taken root in their glass vase, sprouting bright leaves as if spring were upon us. One small sprig I've let dry completely on a shelf in my bathroom.

Ice fog this morning.

The kitten is back from the vet, snipped clean of all her internal girl parts. Sad incision up her belly. Subdued. All her minx seems to have eked from her. Nothing but sleep, a limp purr.

I intend to succumb to a Christmas tree this weekend.

Found

2011-12-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

My red binder, repository of years of research, has thankfully resurfaced. It's been missing since August, when I lent it to a friend. (Stupid thing to do.) And why would I do such a thing? Because she wanted to make a load of cookies, and my red binder has all the secrets: every last instruction of all my best formulas for personal happiness, perfected during my tenure as The Baker at Two Tartes Bakery.

I paged through it tonight, and relief and joy bubbled up. Old friend! Everything was as it should be.

Some of the pages are so stained and tattered, I'd surmise that entire microscopic plant/animal kingdoms exist on the paper. I could do tissue samples! (Eww.) (How utterly unappetizing!)

The day I made my final exit from TTB -- the day I discovered that there was something fishy going on, and confronted my business partner -- I had the presence of mind to grab the binder. I found out later that she wanted to sue me for what she considered to be her intellectual property (figure that one out), but her attorney told her not to bother. The recipes were mine, and she possessed no rights to them.

(She turned out to be a criminal; I had managed to expose only the tip of the iceberg, it turned out. And although I was summoned to testify on behalf of her husband at their divorce trial, she's managed to evade prosecution.)

I haven't written much here about Two Tartes, and stories are simmering on my back burner. Those few years there -- beginning with the building of the business until the demise of the partnership and long-friendship -- are best summed up by Dickens:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us....

Ah. Yes.

Sigh.

(But the red binder: all mine.)

2011-12-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

Post has been deleted by blog administrator.
(That would be me.)

Tuesday Poem: Seamus Heaney

2011-12-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

From Clearances

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

The Other Woman

2011-12-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

It never fails to stun me when a woman betrays another woman. I don't care what the story is, the bottom line is: we are sisters. We are sacred. We honor each other, and we honor the relationships that each of us nurture, and that sustain us. Period.

Recently I rendez-vous-ed with a high school friend who I hadn't seen for many years. She told me that her ex-husband left her for her best friend. WHAT???!!!! I was dumbfounded. What woman would do this? Is any man worth this?

The answer is a resounding "NO!" I don't care how "in love" you profess to be with someone else's husband, you just don't do this. End of story.

No matter what he tells you about how bad his relationship is, remember that you are hearing it through his filter. There is no way of knowing just what kind of damage your hijinx may prove to cause. And another thing -- if he can cheat on his current wife to dilly-dally with you, you can be certain, and I mean certain, that he'll do the same to you. It's just a matter of time.

So women, if you're entertaining this idea, let it go. Not. Worth. It.
Consider your own sense of self-respect.
Consider the potential for long-term harm down the line, and on and on. The fall-out from your actions most likely will go farther and hurt deeper than what/who you can, at this time, imagine.

If you are reading this, and feel perhaps just a little uncomfortable, well then perhaps you should feel a lot more uncomfortable. Yes, I'm talking to you.

Shame.
And shame again.

Sale

2011-12-02T18:57:00.001-08:00

As the afternoon glowered down on me, my paint colors got brighter and brighter. Payne's grey gave way to cadmium yellow and alizarin crimson.... The darker it gets outside, the more challenging painting becomes, everything shifting with the light, losing intensity, going dormant.

Our annual studio sale is this Sunday and the next, and Melinda and I have been cranking out the work at a manic pace. Post-Thanksgiving reorders are trickling in -- yay! Job security. But the big push is getting all our seconds in sell-able shape -- it's the big draw for this sale. So it's been out to the sheds in the cold, digging back into the webbed corners and lowest shelves to extract boxes and boxes stashed all this past year.

It's a little like reliving the past twelve months -- an evolution becomes visible in the painting style, the color choices. As Melinda comes out with a new line each year, there's always a handful of the early versions of whatever it is that's currently in demand. I have just a moment to feel wistful, then it's on to the next thing.

I'm rather bleary and just a bit dizzy from this pace. There's not a lot of breathing space in a small business like this, especially in these unpredictable times. If all goes well at the studio sale, there's a chance that M. will take her work to the NY Gift Show in January -- a new venue, potentially new clients. Keeping fingers crossed. We're ready to grow into the next phase.

2011-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

This is ridiculous but I want it:

Voice

2011-11-30T19:49:00.000-08:00

I've been taking lessons, free of charge, from a young man who's doing graduate studies in Arts Administration, and who is also a musician and dancer. As part of his thesis work, he is pulling together a 200-person choir to create "a river of song" in the park behind Columbia Library, where 100 years ago a river did flow but has been long filled and forgotten.

He's a tall, understated, erudite man, healthy and square-shouldered, handsome, with blue eyes. He speaks in the voice of a poet and sings as if he's the (undiscovered) lead in an opera. I used to sing -- all the time -- until the morning I woke up (twenty years ago) and discovered that the middle register of my voice had vanished. The cause: a drip on a small section of my vocal cords, allergy-related. Antihistamines help only marginally. I can still sing a decent first tenor, and an okay limited-range second soprano, but my alto -- where the heart & soul of my voice resides -- is nowhere to be found.

Campbell -- my teacher -- is absolutely certain that his instruction will bring it back, or release it from its constraints. Singing with him this afternoon in the studio at work, my voice cracking and cutting out, it felt as if all good sounds were trapped somewhere in the back of my head, lodged in a part of my skull: impenetrable bone.

I am less confident of the potential for success.

We're working on relaxing the throat muscles. My homework is a lot like the breathing exercises that one encounters in yoga, and that which I find most difficult in yoga: being still, listening, breathing. Isn't breathing something we do automatically?

Campbell spoke of the necessity & importance of silence -- as necessary as the presence of voice. Then he said:

"Think of your voice as a flame which melts away that which is bad in all people."

Well.

At the rate I am not progressing, I fear that evil may well exist on this planet for a long time.

Nonetheless, I have my assignment for the next month while he jets off to NYC to assemble a choir similar to his Columbia Park choir, but on a slightly smaller scale.

Tra la!!

2011-11-28T20:44:00.000-08:00

Melinda and I are doing a holiday show at the Rainier Club in downtown Seattle tomorrow afternoon. Check it out here.

We've been advised to wear "business casual", but since neither of us had any inclination to go out and purchase a "business casual" ensemble for a three-hour gig, we both decided, instead, to go, um, "artistic". Which means, to us, "normal".

My own composed attire will include the "recycled" skirt that I bought yesterday at Value Village for $4.99.

The Rainier Club is very Olde Seattle. Exclusive. Moneyed. I figure that we artists are going to be their little December sideshow. Exotic! Quirky!

But as long as they wield their wallets generously, I won't be complaining. Their money is green.

And we're allowed one complementary cocktail each. Woot! Party!

Melodies

2011-11-26T23:16:00.000-08:00

It's late, Saturday night, and I've been playing music for hours and my hands aren't aching, despite painting at work all afternoon. Did someone shoot some cortisone in my knuckles when I wasn't looking?

It's really weird.
I like it.

There's a piano piece that my sister taught me in the 1970's that I like to play, but for years I haven't been able to summon up the bridge. I don't even know the name of it. But tonight it suddenly came back -- go figure. I started playing and there it was, unlodged from some previously-dormant part of the brain. I remembered it, played it through, was astonished. Who can account for lost melodies, suddenly called forth?

I played three of six Bach Variations. I played Moonlight Sonata, if even in the absence of moonlight on a rainy November night. I played and sang "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles.

Stacks of music heaved from the big wicker basket: Chopin, Mozart, Fats Waller, Strauss, Carole King. Single sheets of notes, out of order, rag-eared & ripped. Ghosts of pianos past. Notations written in pencil, some from the 1960's.

Buried in the basket was my melodica, unused for years because of a wonky key. I said fuck it and got my handy-dandy multi-tip screwdriver and took the damn thing apart, poked out the loose pieces, repositioned them, put the screws back in, et voilà: music. And of my own doing.

I worked out Cal Scott's The Lighthouse Keeper's Waltz, key of G.

Heaven.

Post T.G....

2011-11-25T18:59:00.002-08:00

....and the pecan pie is gone.

Woe.

Nonetheless, it was a grand feast for the six of us, my dining room aglow with new paint, the furniture in a yet new configuration, candles lit for the comfort they offer. The kitchen hummed with cooking.

Earlier I clipped the last of the cosmos from the garden, a sprig of borage and two sprigs of pink valerian. Meager, but still in bloom.

My massive harvest of five sugar pumpkins yielded squash for pie. Fresh sage for stuffing, parsley from my neighbor Candy's garden.

For the first time ever I love my house.

I am grateful for it.

Grateful for my convivial, big-laughing, handsome sons.
For the friends who came bearing vodka and vino: grateful for their reliably generous and loving hearts.

I would not have guessed -- a year ago -- that T.G. would be hosted this year in this reconfigured house, this life-under-construction. But here we are, here I am, and (dare I say) it's a good thing.

Underfoot

2011-11-22T18:44:00.000-08:00

My mother would wax her kitchen floor late, the night before thanksgiving, all of us in bed. It was the only time she could be certain of no one making tracks across her gleaming floor. But me? I'll be lucky if I get the floor swept, much less mopped.

And do people really still wax floors? Mine is old-fashioned (but not old) vinyl composition tile, and could definitely take a wax coating, but lord, who could be bothered?! Yet I still judge a holiday by the cleanliness, or lack-thereof, of my kitchen floor.

It will be swept.

Will make an honest attempt at mopping.

But mop or no mop, our dinner Thursday is going to be damn good.

And that's enough by me.

Tuesday Poem: Nesting

2011-11-21T17:50:00.001-08:00

(collage by Michael Bristow)

(I've posted this before, but it seemed so appropriate for today, for right now -- )

Nesting

--for Mark Benchley Anderson
September 28, 1956 - November 21, 2003

July

You called me out for a sparrow
fallen from the Douglas fir,
the nest invisible in the endless web
of branch upon branch reeling above us.
And what comfort was I,
your earth-bound wife, nine months
pregnant, barely moving?

You lifted it into the warm cradle of your hands
and for a long moment we didn’t speak.
The child inside me shifted and turned —
a certain impatience, I suppose, to get on with things.
And then so gently you balanced the bird
on a low bough, out of reach of cats.
We knew it would not survive the night.

January

The City Light crew
has trimmed the upper branches,
sheared off most of one side
to keep us safe, they say, from a collision
of evergreen and wire. Now it stands
lop-sided, north-heavy.

In wind I fret over gusting limbs,
a shattering of glass and timber —
I keep watch over our sleeping children,
yet they wake and cry
to the rhododendron’s rasping
against storm windows.
My bones shiver
under cover, safe
from careening branches, from small birds
dropping into darkness.

©T.Clear

Stormy

2011-11-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

Minus Poundage + Youth

2011-11-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

I've shed more than a few #'s in the past seven months, and suddenly realized (or, rather, it was pointed out to me by MMW), that most of my clothing is literally falling off me.

And then this week when I tossed the last of the summer things to the back of the closet, there remained but a handful of things actually in my size. I know, I know -- I should be rejoicing in the New & Improved Me. It's just that the journey (which I've been advised to trust) has been a chapter straight out of hell. (The Ninth Circle, to be exact.)

Okay. This is really boring.

This is not boring -- came home tonight to this framed photo, a birthday present from my son Nelson:

In September he did something called "Warrior Dash" -- an "extreme 5k dash from hell". And although the photo is obviously photo-shopped, he really did leap over fire, muddy legs and all, carrying a beer the entire way.

Yes. That's my boy.

Damn -- to be 23 again!

2011-11-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

These are not girly hands. More likely to be smudged with paint. More nails jagged than smooth.

They can heft a Sawz-All as easily as a pie crust. Rub a cat's belly and come away with torn skin. Never polished. Often softened. One ring, two. Or none.

Can quickly raise a middle finger in an emergency, but has raised a thumb just once. Left thumb smashed at age six in a car door before Mass, the bone crushed and a dearth of ice. The writer's lump still evident despite years now of a keyboard. Will push concertina buttons, but not for cash; plunk plastic chipped piano keys.

They toss garden gloves quickly: in love with cool dirt. Deadhead cosmos with a snap, pinch dahlias. Caress the unfurling of a frond. Check a grape for sugar.

They uncork like a sommelier: quick & snappy. Pour, twirl the glass. Sponge lip-prints from rims. Wipe spots with a linen cloth.

They rub eyes, a furrowed forehead. Conceal a yawn. Rest atop the body as if in prayer, but only in sleep. And only in dreams do they pause -- poised as if gloved in kid, tender as a peach, blushing.

2011-11-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda nails this one:

Ode to the Present

This
present moment,
smooth
as a wooden slab,
this
immaculate hour,
this day
pure
as a new cup
from the past--
no spider web
exists--
with our fingers,
we caress
the present;

we cut it
according to our magnitude
we guide
the unfolding of its blossoms.
It is living,
alive--
it contains
nothing
from the unrepairable past,
from the lost past,
it is our
infant,
growing at
this very moment, adorned with
sand, eating from
our hands.
Grab it.
Don't let it slip away.
Don't lose it in dreams
or words.
Clutch it.
Tie it,
and order it
to obey you.
Make it a road,
a bell,
a machine,
a kiss, a book,
a caress.
Take a saw to its delicious
wooden
perfume.
And make a chair;
braid its
back;
test it.
Or then, build
a staircase!

Yes, a
staircase.
Climb
into
the present,
step
by step,
press your feet
onto the resinous wood
of this moment,
going up,
going up,
not very high,
just so
you repair
the leaky roof.
Don't go all the way to heaven.
Reach
for apples,
not the clouds.
Let them
fluff through the sky,
skimming passage,
into the past.

You
are
your present,
your own apple.
Pick it from
your tree.
Raise it
in your hand.
It's gleaming,
rich with stars.
Claim it.
Take a luxurious bite
out of the present,
and whistle along the road
of your destiny.

2011-11-15T21:48:00.000-08:00

Well, damn.

Promised not to blog about this.

Tuesday Poem: What the Living Do

2011-11-14T23:32:00.000-08:00

by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

--Marie Howe

2011-11-13T16:34:00.000-08:00

Been back in this house since the first of May and other than a few potlucks this summer on the back deck, there hasn't been a whole lot of entertaining going on. Just haven't had the heart for it. But yesterday I inhaled deeply and hosted my first full-on dinner party of this new life in the B-Street house.

I just had the living room painted, and haven't yet hung a single thing on the walls, so it felt a little austere. I sent my son to the hardware store in the afternoon to pick up a picture-hanging kit and he came back with something completely other than what I expected. (Growl.) Sigh. Bare walls.

Nonethless, low lighting and the warmth of candles amped up the ambiance considerably. And then there were the numerous bottles of wine, all of them, incidentally, French, save for the 1957 -- yes, 1957! -- bottle of Tawny Port and an 18-year-old Jameson's. Ah. Lovely stuff, every drop.

I've still not unpacked everything that was frantically stuffed into boxes last April, and when it came time to serve the meal, I hadn't a platter anywhere. No baskets for bread -- wait! My sister had just minutes before given me a beautiful red basket for my birthday, so it was put to quick use. Espresso cups? Teacups? A sprint down the basement stairs solved that, a hurried rummage through a box labeled, amazingly "teacups". Okay -- that wasn't so hard.

Last week my trusty Joy of Cooking reappeared (minus the first 167 pages!), but my red binder with all my own recipes is still oddly nowhere to be found. I've done this gotta-move-immediately twice now in this lifetime and if I have to do it again, may it be in another lifetime. It fucks everything up, washes away every last remnant of carefully constructed foundation. (I'm a girl who needs the underpinnings to be not only solid but thoughtfully reinforced.)

Rebuilding, one cookbook at a time, one teacup at a time.

The big hit of the meal was the stuffed pork loin -- the scent of onions and red apples sauteeing and caramelizing yesterday afternoon was the stuff of inspired dreams -- made even better with a handful of chopped fresh sage, panko crumbs, nutmeg. Tied it, rubbed in a generous portion of S & P plus some spices (my son pulled the rub together), layed two slices of bacon along the length, roasted it for an hour. (It just occurred to me that we no longer "bake" anything: we "roast". Ha. Even the language of cooking has its ins-and-outs.)

Dessert was an ice cream pie:

-crust of crumbled ginger snaps and melted butter
-softened vanilla ice cream for the bottom layer
-pumpkin mousse for the top layer

Um, yeah. Divine.

My toast: "To loyal friends and family -- may you endure."

I did it.
And I think maybe I can do it again.

God it's good to be alive -- really alive, this right-now alive, this moment.

Meanwhile....

2011-11-10T18:28:00.000-08:00

I want to be here, under this sky, in this mist, on this beach....

No Words.

2011-11-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

Poets

2011-11-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

I often leave my monthly writing group in a kind of spell, charmed by the company of poets. Tonight was no exception.

Eve appeared, and also Lucifer, and a Danish audiologist named Old Bentzen who died from laughing in 1989 while watching A Fish Called Wanda. There was a hummingbird and the beating heart of a bird, a grieving carpenter, the semi-colon, blond spiders and live music (guitar & voice). There was a reading from the New England Journal of Medicine about the changing language of medicine. There was a saw.

The spell begins to diminish the moment I walk out the door, and lingers always not long enough. I hear their voices, though, for weeks afterwards, as I pluck and prune the flaws from a poem-in-progress.

It's all good stuff.

Hallelujah

2011-11-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

I've not done this:
played music with friends.
I've sung, played piano, sung harmony, but not an instrument with other instruments. Do I have permission to do this? Do I need permission?

Guitar, mandolin, concertina.

I'm new to it all and play badly, and every time J. picked up the beat I'd lose it and my fingers would begin to stumble, tumble, and T. would give me a look like I don't think that's part of the melody and then of course I could barely stop myself from dissolving into laughter. GAWD it was hard to concentrate and not forget fuck-all. To makes things worse, really bad, they decided that I was the one to follow because the concertina is dominant and I HADN'T A CLUE.

O.

We were in luck.
The music police weren't patrolling that street; no one banged on the door demanding cessation; the two other musicians were patient; our audience of ONE was very mellow.

But when it worked, when I hit the right buttons and J. and T. hit the right chords, it was a hallelujah moment, an I-can-barely-sit-still-for-this-joy moment.

The question, of course, is Why Did I Wait So Long To Do This?

(I'm not sure why All The Upper Case Letters but sometimes they just leap to the fingertips and demand to make their presence known.)

Anyway, I survived.
And here is John Boutte in NOLA singing his version of Hallelujah (a song which has been covered at least 200 times):

X

2011-11-06T20:25:00.000-08:00

Hello early darkness.

2011-11-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Fall Back

It’s returned, that hour lost last April,
slipped in at 2am while a half-moon
gleamed in the pine. Hovered
while I slept, unclaimed
angel, tick-tock.
But

I don’t desire to use it yet: I want to be
selfish, to hoard, tear it into ten
minute bits. Fold one into
my wallet for the late
appointment,
one

in the vegetable bin to forestall wilt.
Under my pillow to prolong
the dream, into the oven to
extend the fragrance of
Quick Yellow Cake
rising.

I’ll give one to my son to get out of jail
free. One I’ll bury in the garden
in eternal plastic, mark an X
with apples. Maybe I’ll
forget it’s there.
And

maybe, in the next century,
someone will unearth this
ten-minute treasure,
and it will be that one
extra moment they’ll
need to save their life.

© T. Clear 2011

How It Is.

2011-11-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

Out of focus and off-kilter.

The Dimming of the Day

2011-11-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

Richard Thompson closed his show last night with this:

His voice drops me to my knees, makes me weep.

Today at work I said:

"No more inspiring words. I just want to feel better."

Damn.

It's been one of those weeks.

Yoga Strange & Wonderful

2011-11-01T21:20:00.001-07:00

It was a little like walking into a prayer -- an unremarkable bungalow, circa 1900 -- going to "Quiet Yoga." My friend C. and I were the only people there other than our facilitator, a beautiful young woman named Lin, whose hair was pulled back in a long black braid and moved with the ease and grace of the young and fit. All very hushed, no music. Silky light. We unrolled our mats and Lin told us we could do our own practice or follow her.

At first the silence was disconcerting -- we were all-breath, and without a melody or chanting the breath-sounds grew magnified and took on greater importance. My usual (bad practice) breath-holding was more evident than ever, and finally I settled into a rhythm, air in, air out. Who knew breathing was so important?! (Duh.)

Stiff. Out of yoga-shape.

At one point I was facing Lin's calendar, and saw that she volunteers at the Crisis Clinic. It struck me as very odd that here I was in someone's home, knowing nearly nothing about this person. (C. had seen an advert. for "Quiet Yoga" on a local reader-board.) Lin had opened her door to us, complete strangers. And we took off our shoes and went to work, bending and contorting our limbs in this stranger's house.

Lavish blue blossoms and some East Indian characters were painted on a wall; paper shades concealed the sliver moon, city lights. The energy was that of peace, at a slow simmer .

When an hour was up, and we regained speech, she asked if we'd stay for meditation. Alas, it was time to go.

C. and I walked the half-mile back to our houses through dark November streets, a day past Halloween. No pumpkins lit, the noise of the world turned way down.

Life continues to offer up the new and the unexpected.
I bow my head in gratitude.

Intermission, Carmen

2011-10-31T19:18:00.000-07:00

I headed for the nearest refreshment stand in search of anything to assuage my hunger. The choices, unfortunately were cookie, cookie or cookie. I opted for a Big Cookie , paid my $4(!) for a single cookie(!), slung my vintage evening bag -- seventy years old and a hand-me-down from my mother -- across my arm and began to make my way through the wine-sipping crowd. The cookie was ridiculously big, and cake-like, and I decided to break off a piece instead of taking a bite from the whole thing. When I did that, a big chunk crumbled off and fell -- ah! Dinner on the floor! Did it again, and another chunk fell to crumbs at my feet. Damn. At least it wasn't very good. Tasted like whoever the baker was substituted oil for butter to cut costs, and didn't add any salt to compensate. Bland damn thing, even with the chocolate chips.

The cookie was crumbly, I was grumbly and still hungry. Then someone pointed to me, pointed to the carpet and said, "I think you lost something."

About four steps back was my iPhone. As I stooped to pick it up, one person, and another, and then another stepped in front of me -- as if choreographed -- hands extended with currency. What the? For me??!! I couldn't figure out what was happening, but as long as people were stepping out to hand me cash, I was going to grab it.

Then I figured it out: after I paid for the Big Cookie, the ancient clasp (shaped like a rose, gold-toned) had failed, and my vintage silk evening bag, slung near my elbow, was swinging wide and free. And I, (as Gretel), while attempting to negotiate my Big! Cookie! was leaving a trail of not only crumbs and cookie chunks but five-dollar bills as well.

After a good long laugh, I headed back to my seat. As the curtain rose for Act II, I had a short-lived moment of panic, thinking "Keys!" In the darkened performance hall, I reached my hands into the shallows of the purse: credit card, driver's license, lip gloss, phone and, yes, keys. Whew.

The whole story would've been much better, of course, if I'd ended up with more cash than I started with, and even better yet if each handing-over of cash was accompanied by an aria excerpt. Come on people! Be dramatic!

But I don't wish to appear ungrateful.
So thank-you to the good people of Seattle, thank-you taffeta-skirted opera-goers!
Bravo!!

Burning

2011-10-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

Getting into the trenches, the deep deep archival depths, on the borderlands of gravity. Reaching up to top shelves and pulling down the reams of legal paperwork from seven, eight years ago, nearly puking at the language, the presumptions of people that I paid $$$ to drive away demons. (And who were not really all that successful.)

So out I went with my box of baggage, to the fire pit which hasn't been lit yet since I've returned to B-Street. I sat in the nearly-dark and lit the whole of it, sent flaring paper-fluff & embered bits high into the air until it all vanished. The rain held back save for a drop or three. Warm enough to go coatless. No cats.

What pleasure to be done with it -- that box of saved damages, the evidence of a life prior to the most recent undoing: the layers and layers upon which a life is stacked. I must say it's teetery here at these heights, but I'm feeling an approaching balance, albeit faint as yet, and tinged with smoke, fogged at the edges.

Consider this:

The words solitary and solace both contain the word sol.
Sun.
(And precariously close to the word soul!)
(The sun each of us holds within.)

---

I'll be 55 in a week, and would not have guessed that I'd be rebuilding a life at this age. But then, the surprise of sorrow may as easily be the surprise of joy: equally possible.

I say Bring It On.

2011-10-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Lucky me -- I have a friend who does reviews for a Seattle arts organization and gets free tickets to various events, and last night she invited me to Carmen at Seattle Opera: fabulous.

I'm generally about a 50% opera fan -- I can listen to about half of any opera before my ears start to go wonky with the tremendous vibrato pounding my eardrums. But Carmen was an over-the-top spectacle of non-stop color, dance, costume and song.

AND there's the added bonus of seeing ordinary people in their not-s0-ordinary going-to-the-opera costumes. Seattle, with its recent roots embedded in grunge, tends to dress-d0wn for most everything, and neutral tones are de rigeur in this city. Clothing and fabrics tend to reflect the sky (grey) and the soil (brown). Not so at the opera. I saw women in full-length taffeta strapless gowns with -- get this -- color! Woot! Not so many man in tuxedos, but there were a few. And as expected, the birkenstock/feed-sack crowd was appropriately represented.

Our seats were Orchestra Center -- about ten rows from the front. Hard to beat.

Sitting there in the first act, the stage aswirl with skirts, dance and song, I couldn't help thinking of the color-names of the oil paints that just a few hours before I'd been rubbing onto sand-blasted glass: Prussian blue, luminous violet, brown-pink. I couldn't help thinking that everything one experiences in life is linked to something else. Earlier in the day, these colors were at hand, just inches from my eyes. And then there they were on stage, in glorious lighting, a spectacle that seemed to crawl into my every cell and take up residence for those few hours, and that lingers still, the next morning, in the muted rainy greens and slate greys of an off-stage Saturday.

Off now -- it's grape pressing time!

The Enigma of the Keys

2011-10-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

Is this staring me in the face?
If it is, I'm lost.

As are several more keys.

The day following my lost-and-then-found-in-the-apron key adventure, Melinda (for whom I work) suffered a key disappearance after opening the trunk of her car. Between the car and the kitchen, her keys did their magic act. And no white bunny of fortune to point us in the right direction. We looked:

1) in the car
2) in the street
3) in the garden
4) on the porch
5) under the porch
6) in the kitchen
7) under the kitchen

No luck.
A mystery.
A *poof* of disappearance.

And today, the secret hidden spare also went missing, with the last remaining set of keys inside the house and both Melinda and I outside the house.

No, it wasn't in my apron.
It wasn't in my jacket pocket.
It wasn't anywhere.

It isn't anywhere. And although that's technically impossible, it's what I believe. It is GONE. Whoosh.

The locksmith arrived while we both shivered in the October chill, and told us that he recently went to a job on Norman Street. His first name is Norman. The next street over was the same name as his last name. What are the odds of this? He said he was able to take a photo with both street signs visible. Cool.

Then he waxed philosophical on the value of locksmiths, and said that a previous governor, Gary Locke, enacted a Locksmith Appreciation Day. I asked Norman if that had anything to do with the fact that the governor's last name was, well, Locke.

"Well!" He said. "I hadn't considered that!"

Well indeed.

He also said that, in light of the fact that Melinda's assistant called the locksmith and not Melinda-the-homeowner-herself, he (Norman) could be charged with a felony if this wasn't indeed Melinda's home. A quick show of ID remedied that worry. I mean, what if we were two middle-aged woman burglars sitting out in the cold trying to gain access to someone else's house? Cherish the thought.

But the thought I'm cherishing -- or not -- at the moment, is this ongoing theme of lost keys.

Lost keys.
Entry denied.
The opening of doors.
The opening of new doors.
The reaching for the unreachable.
Entry gained.

It's a cliche, and threatens to smack me in the head, this symbolism. But sometimes synchronicity isn't just synchronicity.

Equal Temperament

2011-10-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

More about this later.
My head is too filled up at the moment with the science, the mechanics
and the mathematics of sound.
Got it?
Me neither.

(98.9545922303676 CENT)

(99.9066043792227 CENT)

(100.0000094845790 CENT)

(100.0000006728490 CENT)

2011-10-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

The first inspiration of today comes from Elizabeth at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. She's a baker extraordinaire, and when she writes about food, I always want to drop everything and head to the kitchen. Elizabeth is taking a class called Food Crafting 101 -- a kind of home-economics redux, where she'll make cheese, jam, bread, and mustard, etc.

I suggested to my son that we make our own mustard, and he said, "I've done it."

Well.

It's hard to find something he hasn't made.

Last week it was ice-cream, again, and -- the brat -- he failed to let me know that there was HOMEMADE DARK CHOCOLATE PEANUT-BUTTER CHUNK ICE CREAM in the freezer. This is grounds for expulsion, I think, but then, who else would come into my kitchen and cook up a storm of everything marvelous?!

This is my small benefit of the recession and an unemployed son. One can always find blessings, often right under one's nose (and apparently in one's freezer).

But back to the ice cream: the first spoonful, and the second, and the third, ad infinitum, was an OMG moment. An OMGOL moment. (O! My! God! [Out Loud!]) So chocolately (gawd, I sound like Keebler elf) it was almost black, with spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter. Sublime.

Earlier this summer, there was fresh coconut ice cream, served with sugared blackberries just moments off the stem, and then there was fresh blackberry ice cream with a color so deeply and so perfectly purple I wanted to sit down and weep. Wanted to roll in it. Wanted to wear it, which I would've done had I given in to the urge to roll.

I do believe my son has found his niche.

Anyone looking for an ice-cream maker? That is, a human one?

2011-10-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Spirits ran fairly high all summer, despite the barrage of seemingly never-ending Major Life Events. Walks to-and-from work buzzed with activity: people gardening, people playing music with all the doors and windows open, people walking to the store. Children riding bikes, children in the middle of the street with balls, children on the sidewalk, bright chalk at hand.

Fresh-cut grass, smoke from a grill, the sweet vanilla breeze from my neighbor's hedge in bloom. From every house and from every life: evidence of the here & now.

A child's cry from down the alley. From an open kitchen window, the clink of dishes being washed. From the synagogue: chanting, or prayer, low and rhythmical.

Life hummed along at a pleasant pitch. Bees hummed in lavender, and if someone told me that tomatoes hummed in their ripening in parking-strip gardens, I would have listened, and I would have heard.

Then every evening: dinner in the garden, a glass of wine beneath the kiwi and grape vines, an abundance of birds in the apple trees. I existed outdoors: a walk around the block at dusk, a midnight accounting of stars from my upstairs balcony.

And now with autumn in full leaf-fall, everything appears shut down, closed out, turned inwards. My one-mile on-foot commute is minus the soundtrack of people living their urban lives. Curtains are drawn, windows latched. And only a few bees persist on the last few flowers: cosmos, calendula, here and there a dwindling rose. A sudden damping-down in the volume of life, a volume that, in summer, was easy to keep wound-up.

Descending into melancholy.
Feeding it, one song at a time.

Take my advice and take shelter from "Take Shelter"....

2011-10-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

In his October 17th review of the movie "Take Shelter" in The New Yorker, David Denby states that our protagonist, the apparently paranoid-schizophrenic young husband/father Curtis (played by Michael Shannon) is "definitely paranoid" but "not totally crazy."

On the screen we watch Curtis conjure -- in his mind only -- terrifying and ominous lightning storms, tornadoes, and clouds of menacing crows. He loses his job while rebuilding a tornado (aka bomb) shelter in his back yard, loses his closest friend, and nearly loses his marriage. It's a movie about mental illness with all the cliches about mental illness: the delusional "crazy" man doing delusional "crazy" things.

David Denby, on the other hand, sees a greater metaphor, that, for me, was sorely lacking and, if it exists at all, is beat to death by the ponderous and repetitive takes of Curtis' twitching eye or his wife Samantha's (Jessica Chastain) full-lipped, red-haired stares of incredulity. Denby states that "Take Shelter" could become as iconic an image of this moment of American unease as Edvard Munch’s 'The Scream' has become for all the anxieties of modern life.

Did I miss something? This movie drowns itself in the tired fantastical notion of what too many people consider mental illness to be. In real life, mental illness often drags along those suffering from it day after day. Drags along, drags down. Drags. Sure, there may be drama, but it's often a more quiet, insidious drama, or any number of small dramas piling up one atop the other. There is no ridiculously dramatic soundtrack in real life, and, if there's a denouement, it exists, as in all of life, in death.

Admittedly, this is my soapbox rant -- I've dealt with mental health issues, and have been an advocate for mental health education, all my life. It is something I know intimately. It's an illness, not an "attitude problem". You can't fix it by "pulling up your bootstraps" or "looking on the bright side", just as you can't cure emphysema or diabetes or cancer by "bucking up". And furthermore, if someone close to you came to you with a diagnosis of any life-threatening illness other than mental illness, would you tell them that they just need to be more positive?

It's a condition for which, often, you need the meds so that you have the where-with-all to ask for the meds. That's where, for me, the "crazy" part comes in. It's insidious. Confounding. Enraging. Life-destroying.

When I say I know this intimately, I don't say it lightly. My first husband's death was caused by untreated -- or, actually, self-medicated -- mental illness. Two days prior to his car accident, he agreed, finally, to seek help. Too late.

Mental illness played a major role in the disintegration of my second marriage. I've intervened in attempted suicides (yes, plural) and have initiated and participated in less life-threatening interventions, some of which have been successful, some not. There's no "fix". There's no cure. Brain science is primitive at best, but when something works, when a medication allows life to happen, with a degree of happiness and success that would otherwise flat-out not be impossible, then by god, bring on the meds.

If I hadn't been sitting smack in the middle of the theater last night, I would've walked out -- and I had the notion to do that several times.

Towards the end of "Take Shelter", we see Curtis and his wife speaking to a psychiatrist who suggests in-patient treatment. I thought -- okay, this is a redeeming moment on the part of the film-maker. He might have slammed us with cliches, but at least at the end, he's taking a responsible role. (Although I thoroughly expected to hear the words "insane asylum" at any moment.) But my relief was short-lived: he throws it all away in the closing scene, and I left the theater spitting nails. (With apologies to my movie companion.)

Denby goes on to say that "the movie makes you uncomfortable, but in a good way." Oh please. Let's ditch the horror-movie romanticizing of mental illness. I know -- no one made me go to this movie. It was my choice, but based on a review by a critic whose writing I respect. And who let me down.

Lament for a Rainy Friday

2011-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Getting ready to walk to work in the rain....a piece of music
I'd like to learn.

Perfect Tree

2011-10-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

It's officially Autumn and here's the Official Tree:

It belongs to someone named John, or Johnny, with a last name I've heard pronounced a half-dozen ways. What I remember is Johnny Eubanks, which has evolved, in my head, to Bob Eubanks, who hosted the original Newleywed game, which debuted in 1966.

This tree is not owned by Bob Eubanks, though. I'm sure of that. Bob lives somewhere in California, I'm guessing, and doesn't own a little pickup truck and is most likely not a carpenter. Johnny Eubanks, aka something else, does own a little pickup truck and is a carpenter. And is the owner of this fabulousness....

Encounters, by Chance

2011-10-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

Leaving work today on foot, I headed downhill to Columbia City to meet a friend for a drink. Halfway to my destination, I encountered a tall, thin young man wearing tiny wire-framed glasses and a close-fitting green jacket & jeans, with a complexion so pale you'd miss him if you blinked.

"Excuse me," he said, holding out a green seedpod for my perusal, "but do you know the name of this tree?" He pointed to a tree in the parking strip about thirty feet away.

I peered down at the odd-looking fruit in his hand. I peered at him. He resembled the tree for which he was seeking identification, and his jacket was the same color as the seed pod.

"No, but I have this cool iPhone app called Leafsnap and I can look it up. All I have to do is take a photo of the leaf, and it'll give me a list of possible trees."

"Really? I mean...I....an iPhone app? Huh? You can?"

"Sure."

Yikes. What was I doing?! I was already late for my drink.

"And," I said, "failing that, I know who lives in this house. She'll know the name of the tree for sure."

Again from the young man, "REALLY?!"

I plucked a leaf from a branch, laid it down on the sidewalk to photograph. (Leafsnap instructions: lay leaf on white surface. Uh, no.) At the same time, I was ambushed by an excited wiggle-and-twist of blond fur: Leishka -- my friend Connie's dog -- unleashed and jumping on me and licking and nipping at me, way too happy. The leaf flew up and away, disappeared. The thin young man stood aside, a kind of half-smile overtaking his face. Leishka was loose! Where was Connie?

Abandoning my tree-name-seeker, I went in search of Connie, found her embedded in foliage at the side of her house, hard at the work of fall-cleanup. Leishka levitated and yipped at me, desperate for my attention. What the heck? This dog was literally jumping straight up, as if on a trampoline. Circus dog. Tricks.

Connie pushed a gentling hand down on the dog's side, shushed her, calmed her.

"Hey Connie. This guy wants to know the name of that tree."

"Styrex Japonica."

Count on Connie to whip out the Latin, lickety split. Connie: a quiet, steady intelligence. A reliable intellect.

Our Thin Man nodded, satisfied, then asked a most unexpected question:

"Do you know the location of any artesian wells? I've heard there are a few, but can't find them."

And even more amazing, was Connie's immediate response. I mean, she didn't even take a breath, she was so certain:

"Yes," she said, matter-of-fact. "In Lynnwood. Take I-405, exit to Lynnwood, follow the exit ramp west until you see a bunch of people lined up. That's the well."

"Oh." Mr. Thin Man. "I've heard of that one, but do you know the address?"

Aha! iPhone!

Me: "It's on 164th Street, just off I-5."

"Wait -- you just looked it up on your phone?"

I thought: this is all so strange. I'm late meeting a friend. A stranger asks me to identify a tree. I'm set-upon by a small dog named Leishka, followed by a discussion about local artesian wells. I don't think I've ever even said the two words artesian wells out loud. Ever.

I made my exit, abandoning trees & water-talk, exuberant dogs.

Did I leaf them (and the barking) in peace? (Well, yes.)

(Note: sometimes a conversation about a tree is just a conversation about a tree. No social/psychological/cryptic/symbolic/metaphorical significance.)

The End.

Lost & Stuff

2011-10-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently there is an iPhone app for finding lost keys -- here -- go figure -- but on Sunday I couldn't brag that I was in possession of any such device when my keys vanished -- whoosh, gone.

Riles and I were up to our elbows in pie crust and apples when our neighbor Roy knocked on the door to help us move The Behemoth (an ugly white vinyl massaging recliner acquired by my younger son and then conveniently abandoned when he moved out -- presto! Out of sight, out of mind.) It weighs slightly less than this:

And moving it Out Of The House required tripping it down ten steps. Not something I was going to attempt without sufficient manpower. Moved my car from the driveway so we could park The Behemoth beneath a tarp in the shadow of the quince.

And then finally: done.

I stood outside in the chilly October afternoon, no coat, and chatted with Roy about learning to play the concertina by watching YouTube videos; and Roy, an old-time fiddle player and, at age 65 (or so) approaching the state of a grizzled, lean H. Brandonium, demonstrated clog-dancing that he learned from -- yes, watching YouTube videos. Roy does nothing without wit and a wryly-humorous narrative, and within seconds I was overtaken with delighted laughter at his fancy footwork and tale of feeling oddly embarrassed practicing clogging alone in front of the computer screen.

Back inside, Riles and I resumed our apple-turnover adventure. Once they were in the oven, we continued the seemingly never-ending task of Cleaning Out Stuff. I've been back in this house nearly six months now, and it feels like I'll never fully liberate it from its fraternity-house atmosphere. New paint helps, as does the reinvented bathroom.

But: STUFF. I believe that once you are successful in removing any amount of STUFF from a house, the remaining STUFF not only inflates itself to fill the newly vacated space, it undergoes a kind of mitosis. Replication of STUFF is a bad thing. And there's a sneaking suspicion that it happens in my house the minute I leave a room. Emptied and then: BAM! Filled. Repeat.

We had to prepare a third and final room for painting, and I'd been amazingly successful at avoiding this room all summer. Because it was already filled with STUFF, it became the receptacle for all STUFF that couldn't find a home, including:

1. a single black hiking boot
2. a popover tin
3. strewn baseball cards
4. a mattress
5. a survival-print coverall
6. a box of transformers
7. retired baseball caps
8. a pile of mismatched gloves
9. pennies
10. other

My biggest achievement of the day, other than the banishment of The Behemoth, was in discovering that surface of my dining room table, piled-high with STUFF for months -- apparently it's a lovely butcher-block oak table, circa 1980. Go figure.

The kitchen now fragrant with cinnamon and golden pie crust, I hung up my apron and prepared to go out for the evening.

And no keys.

A cursory search yielded nothing, and even fewer clues. And because we'd moved and cleaned so much in the prior hour, nothing was where it used to be. I took the search to the second level, seeking out keys behind and under sofas, in and under sofa cushions, under tables and under chair cushions, in boxes where the tiny bits of accumulated and random STUFF had, by default, congregated.

Nothing.

Level Three: garbage can, food waste bin, recycling bin.

Again: nothing.

Sigh.

Level Four: up and down the front steps, with a flashlight in the garden on either side of the steps, to-and-from the car (tidily locked up, no keys within), in-and-around the tarped Behemoth.

Nothing nothing nothing.

Screamingly: nothing.

My friend Tom came over and helped -- or should I say, "god help me, there's someone digging in the darkest corners of my house aka my subconscious." I felt flayed open, unmasked, denuded. Tried to keep my mind from wondering what Tom would find other than keys. Yikes.

But still no keys. They didn't seem to be hidden, wedged, under, between, or even in plain sight anywhere.

I gave up for the night -- and resumed my futile quest in the morning.

Now for the math:

no keys + no spares = no car

no keys + no car title yet (complication of dee-vorce) = communication with ex, re: spares?

text message to ex + voice mail from ex = more complicated title info and still no spare key

voice mail from ex [after months of < zero communication] ≈ anxiety multiplied by $π$

=

I have to

wait ten days until new copy of title arrives.

(Grrrrrr.)

$($

Hrrrrmmmphhh.)

Remember all those kids in high school math questioning the point of taking any math at all, and the question, "When will I ever use this?"

Well, apparently they never anticipated losing their car keys while making

$π.$

$THE HAPPY ENDING$

(No, the keys were not embedded in an apple turnover.)

Having hithered and dithered for an entire workday

about the absence of keys, I came home and got out the ingredients for a nice sausage-kale-potato soup.

I donned the necessary apron, which fell off the hook into my hands with an uncommon weight and a jingle: AHA!

But nothing is without its lesson and delights: in searching, I was inclined to think that the reason for the keys' invisibility was my overabundance of STUFF -- that they'd become lost in the swirl of getting-rid-of, had become victim to my desire to purge and purge again. And then the sound of my ex on the voice mail, like a ghost, as dee-vorce is so much a death in its own right, sent a disturbing chill up my back and into my skull, wrapped its wriath-like fingers around the lobes of my brain. There was the actual physical sensation of a punch to my gut. And yet there he was, with his verbal explanation, in nearly live-time, recorded for all perpetuity on my iPhone. And for all intents and purposes (for all intentional purposes?) dead to me.

The perspective gained, from yesterday to today, is significant. Yesterday I was myself lost to any freedom to move forward, albeit if only by car, and the world seemed locked out to me, inhabited by voice-mail ghosts. Felt as if, once I closed a door behind me, I'd never again go back through it.

But it wasn't the presence of STUFF. I wasn't locked out to anything except my ability to consider that this was merely a single day, with its minimal significance.

I can appropriately blame the misplacement of keys with my apron-wearing obsession and my own rapidly-leaping thought process. My brain had already moved on to pie when I unconsciously slipped the key-ring into the apron pocket.

And now, a day later, I can say that I've repossessed the key(s) to a happiness, of sorts -- a happiness that was always here. (Kind of a Dorothy-returning-to-Kansas experience.) And that doors everywhere are opening to my command.

Who wants pie?

Recent Archaeological Discoveries

2011-10-14T22:24:00.000-07:00

Recent excavations, in preparation for painting my bathroom, have unearthed a number of curiosities that are worth making note of:

1. Cisorium Dullbladia
   origin: small drawer, upper left corner
   content: metals of unknown composition, rust, lint fibers
     use: primarily for trimming the fur of the upper lip of male members of H. Brandonium

2. Pinnium Diaperium
     origin: beneath clawfoot bathtub
     content: mid twentieth-century plastic, steel
   use: for joining together two pieces of woven cotton fabric, generally worn by bantlings of the tribe of H. Brandonium; considered a rare find

3. Pinkus Rockus
   origin: somewhere on earth, in the vicinity of my bathroom pipes
   content: a rock-like substance (unrelated-to and pre-dating cheeselike substances)
   age: 2.7 to 3.19 million years
   use: decorative but generally thought to be without practical applications

4. Buttonium Propogandia
   origin: under Ace bandage, middle shelf of cupboard
   use: worn as bodily ornamentation; often employed as a means of socio-political communication

5. Lancet
   origin: inside corner of small drawer; required use of fingernail to extract from wedged-in position
   content: carbon steel
     use: small surgeries, ie., splinter extraction

6. Broachium Aviarium
   origin: lower drawer stratum, possibly originating in the Far East
   content: painted tin
   use: generally considered a common trinket in its day; of little monetary value, although may be extinct

7. "Temple of Heaven" Unguent
     origin: middle bathroom
   content: camphor, mineral wax
   use: commonly employed by early H. Brandonium to relieve various itches

8. Corkus Runtus
     origin: bottom-most layer of cabinet debris
   use: known to function as a stopper for a salt shaker, although findings are as yet unverified

The Hoh Rain Forest

2011-10-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

Could've spent weeks here.
Alas, it was only a few hours.
BUT, at least the rain forest lived up to its name: RAIN Forest.
Soaking, soaking & soaking.

Beside the Hoh River --

Taken from the car window --

In the Hall of Mosses --

The floor of the canopy --

Along the trail --

Second & Third Beaches, Olympic National Park

2011-10-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

We traversed an enchanted forest, where, ninety years ago,170mph winds ripped through the landscape and laid bare most everything. It’ssecond growth now, but with odd bearded sprites of branch & moss-drapedtwigs & mushrooms sprouting from bark and humus.

Ancient nurse-stumps give a root-bed to multiple trees:spruce, hemlock, fir.

Where the path twisted, an outcropping of white fungi huggedthe Douglas fir trunks, appearing as crab nebula, or deskulled brains, orsomething placental, dripping essential fluid. I’d inadvertently left on mycamera’s flash, and a serendipitous surprise came into sight on theinstant-replay: the burst of light had illuminated the raindrops, otherwise notso intensely visible. O happy accident of technology!

Sea stacks, drifts of wave-tossed logs, the churning sea.Stood well back up on an embankment and watched the surf play pick-up-stix withbroad-based trees. A young woman walked unconcerned through the powerful waves,in and amongst the erratic floating logs. Part selkie? She disappeared beyond a headland. Wasshe ever even there?

Rain and more rain, slick logs and slipping mud. I felt wetunderneath my skin: the waterproof-jacket-self-contained-sauna syndrome,incurred while exercising vigorously in wet weather. Part of me wondered,what’s the point? Did it matter that I was soaked with sweat rather thanrainwater?

Back at the cabin, the bathroom was designated as “Italy”with the heat cranked up and a forest of wet clothing became its interiorlandscape.

First Beach. La Push. Quileute Indian Reservation

2011-10-10T17:26:00.000-07:00

Escaped.

And had forgotten just how much I love this part of theworld, my part of the world, going on fifteen years since I’ve been to thisnorthwest corner of the continental United States.. Not that I’ve minded cavortingon other parts of the planet, but this is one of my holy places, and it’salmost in my back yard. Well, a ferry ride and a three-hour drive away, butstill. Through Douglas fir and spruce forest-farms and mist-shrouded valleys,in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains which never came into view Sunday forall the clouds, in a temperate rain forest where annually 300 inches of raindescend from the sky.

Twentyminutes into walking on First Beach, there came into view

two seals, asea lion, a pair of eagles and a fly-by of pelicans,

one afteranother and another.

And somesun, if only just barely.

The beachedrippage of upended trees, the roots flounced up,

exposing ahollowed-out trunk big enough to set up camp in.

A gradationof flat stones, from palm-sized

to diminishingin size until they became sand.

Unassailableheadlands.

I stood atthe foot of cliffsides and ran my hands over

salty-wetmoss and barnacles, leaned my shoulders

into therock faces and then high-stepped away

fromincoming waves, quickly quickly.

A roil ofsea at my back.

So much theneed to be here, to choose one flat black stone

and name it Absence of All Things Good.

To fling ithard and cutting into the surf.

To let itgo.

To turn myback and walk away.

Dearth

2011-10-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

The muse has been largely absent, although she's made his/herself known for a few fleeting moments in cognito, saying things like:

There's a pound of frozen venison in my freezer, and I don't know where it came from.

And:

I hate gangrene in the morning.

And then:

I could use some help with this weed problem.

And of course:

He had a cupboard full of Bazooka bubble gum.
He was always a soldier.
He died in the Beirut bombing.

What to do?

I'm stumped.

The Conversation, Part Two

2011-10-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

Tradesmen, and women.

This seems to be my life these days, and it's a good life.

My nephew switched out a weight of old galvanized plumbing for plastic, lucky that it's all still exposed in the nether-regions of the house, the down-under.

I went to the basement tonight to change the wash and I swear -- there was the scent of centuries and centuries of stone, that damp heaviness that comes with October rain. The words ancient and medieval came to mind. Silly! A hundred+ years -- my house was built in 1908 -- isn't a long time by some standards, but I love the notion of this century-old dwelling upon which I've set my life. It's my old workhorse of a house, practical, never fancy. It just is.

I'm just lucky, I think.

My nephew, who I see maybe twice a year, sat down, after his piping-about, to have a beer. He's 35, loquacious, energetic, outgoing -- and couldn't be more different from me. He leans towards the right, whereas my lean is decidedly left. He's an avowed Christian, and I'm anything but. He carries a gun, I'm a pacifist. For the first time, we acknowledged this philosophical chasm between us -- territory that, up to this point, we've dared not approach. We tip-toed out to the edge of the cliff, testing the wide-open air of lives lived in vastly different worlds. We debated and knocked heads together but under it all was the ease that, if one is lucky, comes with being family. Maybe one of us just needed to grow up -- me, perhaps? Perhaps.

Old plumbing, old house: this is how I've come to know my nephew. Being from a large family, he's one of many nephews, but the only one I ever seem to see. He knows his stuff when it comes to pipes, and he's a sweetheart to do work for me. The boy -- and I'll never think of him as anything but a boy, despite his age -- has a generous soul borne out of equally generous parents. He tries to insist, often, on just charging me for parts, and I insist on paying him for labor. He give me a deal. I get to know him, he gets to know me.

After an hour+ of spirited kitchen-table talk, I herded him towards the door. Wasn't he as tired as I was, after a full day of work? Probably not. We'd covered politics, religion, The Constitution, the American banking system, gun-control, the value of family, revolution and, of course, plumbing: toilet models, pedestal vs. vanity sinks, clawfoot tubs and then-some. I'd illustrated my POV with a black sharpie on the back of an envelope: arrows and charts and numbers, including some odd squiggles and underlinings (although, the next morning, I couldn't for the life of me tell you what any of those black marks meant).

Upon leaving, he was loaded down with tools, and I got the door for him. Now, I am 99.999% certain that he doesn't read my blog, and so would have no idea that this week I'd already written of the delight I take in chatting with the various repair/handy-people that seem to be making my house a destination. And yet, as he was going down my front steps, he turned and looked back up and me, smiled, and said, "I liked the conversation."

No need to say that I did too.

New

2011-10-03T19:37:00.000-07:00

There's a man in my bathroom, with a saw, cursing at old pipes which will not ease their rusted grip on the century these eleven years past. (I quickly learn that it's not necessary for me to come running when he expounds on the state of This Old House.)

O ye useless pipes.

A new floor, a new sink, new toilet, new trim. The old clawfoot tub, about a million pounds and an ornery bastard to negotiate. The carpenter and I moved it on Saturday, careful to not crush toes or arches, bones. Devised a way to drag it, on a second-hand rug and a length of cardboard box found in the garage, and flattened. Now the tub sits in the kitchen and looks embarassed, like a woman caught bathing on a riverbank. Surrounded by the chaos of Home Improvement. Paint. Drop cloths. Etc.

It's always an adventure having someone work on the house. There's the conversation -- or sometimes not. I prefer the conversation, the digging beneath the hired skills to discover the fallibility of the human on the other side of the tools. The half-spoken clues to a life lived elsewhere. Every soul with his/her story.

This particular soul exclaims loudly and often. The same man that I heard cursing and conversing with a 40-year-old Toyota engine in the process of repair, parked on the street outside where I work, a year or two ago. How contained and finite our world seems, at times. Now he's making his commotion chez-moi, amidst a new floor which resembles cork but is actually vinyl, and was a beast to install. But it's my new floor and last night I was tempted to lie face-down on it and extend a warm embrace. Good-bye old life. Hello new faux cork.

Hallelujah.

My days once again are spent often in the presence of carpenters/contractors/builders with a cultural and intellectual intelligence that challenges stereotypes. It's something I missed sorely in my recent life afield. Glad to be back among the literati carpenteria. The woman who, last spring, installed my new shower, just began law school on a full-ride scholarship. Goddamn.

Easier, with this backdrop, to process the curt note from NoGoode which arrived in the mail. His explanation for Things Neglected. I would prefer not even a microscopic specimen of his DNA in my home, but perhaps in this tying-up of last details I can look forward to a fall-winter-and-onto-spring with a horizon clear of turbulence.

In The Moment: Gratitude

2011-10-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

I listened to Melinda, yesterday, speak of a transcending moment -- one of those moments of clarity that arise, seemingly, out of the ethosphere: god and physics and the collision of science and faith and the notion of we-are-a-single-organism and we only exist right at this moment, right now. No past, no future, everything flowing and rippling simultaneously. I recall the word hallelujah being spoken, and we discussed religion and the existence of god or a god, and trying to define a notion of "god".

The bookkeeper arrived and dove right in, told about having belonged to a theosophical society at one time. This stuff fascinates me.

We often converse like this -- in the midst of a certain level of chaos -- a million tasks all screaming for attention simultaneously. I don't quite remember how many orders I packed and prepped for the UPS pick-up, but there seemed to be a constant going in-and-out, up-and-down stairs from house/factory to garage/studio, the locking and unlocking of doors, the hefting of unwieldy boxes. The careful wrapping of delicate glass pieces so that they won't break in shipping while attempting to keep shipping costs down -- a constant challenge, and something which I puzzle over daily, because glass inevitably breaks, in spite of the utmost care. And then there's the re-imagining of recycled gin/whiskey/tequila boxes into suitable shipping containers. (One must conceal any reference to alcohol on the exterior of the box.)

At one point in the day a heavy binder slipped onto the computer keyboard and activated "voice-over" (what the?) and suddenly a male voice was narrating every key stroke that Melinda made:

"You are pressing the shift key. You are now in a window. You are scrolling down...."

On and on. And oddly, the voice speeded up, and Melinda couldn't figure out how to turn it off. I began to laugh, of course, and suggested she google "turn off voice-over" and she did, all the while with this narration blaring at her. I descended into one of my laughing fits with tears streaming down my cheeks. So absurd! I half expected the voice to scold me for laughing and (according to reports) drooling on the keyboard. (I contend it was a hilarity-tear.)

Out. Of. Control.

She finally was successful, and Mr. Voice-Over was silenced. Phew!

(Thank you, Mr. Anonymous-Voice-Over, for that moment of wild abandoned fun!)

But to focus back on the subject I intended to write about here, I received an email from my friend Candy this morning with a link to this TED video. I so love when the theme continues, from unconnected sources! (But then again, we're all connected....)

Week of Nonsense

2011-09-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

B of A, that behemoth American money-grubber, is once again figuring prominently chez-moi. To date, they have rejected my loan-modification application for the following reasons:

1. I don't make enough money.
2. I make too much money.
3. I don't have enough assets.
4. I have too many assets.
5. I don't (according to them) live in my house.
6. I pay my mortgage on time.

I've been laughed at, yelled at and lied-to.

And I'm not giving up.
The giving-up is what they're banking on -- while they're pocketing their share of the bailout.

---

In other news, at work yesterday, in the interest of caloric-awareness, we decided to measure just how much "liquid" would comfortably fill one of our martini glasses. The astonishing and most unwelcome revelation sent both Melinda and I into a gloom-state: a whopping 584 calories, not counting the de riguer three olives.

The gloom-state persisted into today.

I've decided it's time to invent the Meal-in-a-Martini: lay a slice of bacon and a single skinny grissini across the top of the glass for another 150 calories. But the problem here is that now I'm up to 734 calories, and it's only one martini. Defeat around every corner! Ha!

Time to switch to plain water. With a twist. Hold the bacon.

Other

2011-09-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Bear with me while I fan the fires, or tune me out if you so desire . (Just no lectures, please. I gotta run this stuff through its paces.)

Awaiting my arrival home from work yesterday was a big sloppy, falling-apart box, opened at the bottom, the slim strips of tape performing only what their paucity allowed: next to nothing. Affixed to the box was a nearly illegible customs declaration form, as well as this stamp:

Let's see....70 euros is equal, at today's exchange rate, to $95.06. Or 35.78 dinars. Or 606.69 yuan. And what does that get me, the Ex-W. (W. stands for wife)?

Well, in this case it got me:

1. Four books of poetry (Sean Lysaght, Ger Reidy, Lorna Shaughnessy, Knute Skinner), a book of stories by John F. Deane, as well as a hardback book of stories and illustrations by Tess Gallagher and Josie Gray. Fair enough -- all books I'd purchased in Ireland and had kept at the house there to peruse on future trips. (But, alas, not all the books I'd left there.)

2. Three very worn out (and several sizes too big) pairs of pants.

3. An equally unwanted shirt.

4. Assorted art supplies, including three vials of dried-up glue.

5. A bag of white ribbons.

6. Five Q-Tips.

7. A plastic cutting board.

8. Two packages of tampons.

9. Scraps of paper.

10. A package of pastels and a package of colored pens.

11. A cardboard box which originally held six wine glasses.

12. A tube of antibiotic cream.

13. Three vintage tablecloths.

14. A poem, "Our Lady of Flotsam", that I'd hand-written on the back of a brown envelope, and that stood vigil beside a plastic Virgin Mary holy water bottle on the kitchen windowsill, along with assorted flotsam & jetsam gathered on beach walks. But why only the poem, and not the beach glass, shards of porcelain? Why only mail me the brown envelope? (Because it contained more of me than a bit of broken shell.)

15. Assorted "other", as was specified on the customs declaration. (Exactly what is specific about "other", anyway?) (I can only imagine the postal clerk saying, "What's in the box?" And the Ex-H. replying, "Other.") (I think I know what I want for Christmas this year: other.)

Well. Wasn't sure what to make of all of this. I'd specified in the Final Pleadings just exactly what it was that I wanted returned from the Carrowholly house, and the only things from the list that were in this box were the books & tablecloths. Perhaps I can look forward to yet another sloppily-patched-together package? Filled with broken crystal and pottery? One would not wish to be Held In Contempt Of Court. An agreement is an agreement.

I'm just kicking myself for not specifying that I wanted the pie pan, the cupcake pan, the rolling pin, the salad spinner, the salad bowl, the marble cheese board, the cheese knife and the three small glasses that I bought at a charity shop for 25 cents each.

But tell me, who spends 70 euros to ship two packages of tampons and 5 Q-Tips 6000 miles?

It defies logical thought, and just might have its own chapter in the DSM.

Maybe it's time for a conflagration in the fire-pit out back, time to light up the darkness.

(The last time I conflagrated in the back yard in this manner was several months after my first husband's death, a cold winter Sunday afternoon and ream of cancelled checks that had to burn. In the midst of my not-at-all-sorting, I plucked from the stack a life insurance policy that I hadn't known of -- surprise! -- and submitted to Those In Charge, who rejected it. A brief lawsuit followed, in which a California judge denied me the meager benefit that should have been guaranteed me. My attorney told me that this was so very, very wrong, and that the attorney for the other side was in the back pocket of the insurance company. Inside information. A whole lotta good it did me.)

Otherwise, life is good.